May’s here (already!), and while Adventure April ended, a new worldbuilding competition has begun! Plus, check the Worldbuilding Awards winners for an incredible dose of worldbuilding inspiration.
🗓️ May events
Here’s everything going on this month!
- 🎒 Hitchhiker’s Guide to Your World: We challenge to write an in-world travel guide: if someone was to visit your world (or an area in your world), what should they visit and do? Winners will be selected by authors David Green and Mur Lafferty, and there are prizes to be won! The challenge runs from May 2nd to May 30th. Check out the challenge page!
- 🏆 Adventure April Winners Reveal: The winners of Adventure April will be announced on May 23rd on stream! Tune in to celebrate with us and find the next awesome adventure to run!
- 🎓 Sage Seminar: Power User Surgery. On May 16th, we’ll dive deep into how to use World Anvil as a power user. So bring your questions and show off your creations! You’ll find the link in the Professional Portal.
🔜 Upcoming Events on World Anvil!
Here’s a list of our upcoming challenges and community events, to help you get ready:
- May: Hitchhiker’s Guide to Your World: write an in-world travel guide!
- June: Summer Camp prep challenge (see last year’s for an example)
- July: Summer Camp! Answer anywhere between 8 and 42 worldbuilding prompts around four themes. Check this for more info.
All our challenges launch first on community live stream, so follow us on Twitch to get the news first!
📹 YouTube video round-up
Need a little push to improve your worldbuilding? Or want some advice from a professional worldbuilder? Here are our latest YouTube videos:
- The secret behind believable fantasy worlds: Biomes shape your world, but they don’t have to be dry geographical descriptions! This is a step-by-step guide to building biomes that help you tell great stories.
- Do you have a Planet of Hats problem? If you introduce a dwarf to me and I can tell you what he’s like (grumpy miner with a love for ale)… you have a Planet of Hats! This turns your cultures into predictable cliches, so here’s how to fix this without having to rebuild your world!
- Power up your patrons: Games often treat their DnD patrons like a free pass to magical shenanigans… but this can easily kill party cohesion. Here’s how to get all the fun out of your patrons without derailing the campaign!
- Chesteron’s Fence Paradox: If you remove something without understanding why it was there in the first place, you risk causing chaos! What catastrophe will befall the characters, when someone (inevitably) gets rid of the “useless” barrier, object, or tradition?
Subscribe to our YouTube channel to stay on top of all our latest videos.
🌟 Community highlight: wow that’s a lot of stars
Get inspired by a universe that managed to rebuild itself after an apocalyptic catastrophe that led to an era of peace that is now being threatened. “wow that’s a lot of stars”, created by Those2Nerds, was selected as the Best World in this year’s Worldbuilding Awards, judged by Tracy & Laura Hickman. Check out wow that’s a lot of stars!
Here’s what Those2Nerds had to say about this:
From its start in 2020, the Talos Sector has been my way to use tabletop to cope with the state of the real world. Through RPGs, we can live out the fantasy of saving lives and stopping wars. As the real world has continued to be terrible, the Talos Sector has evolved into a setting about standing up for what matters, creating joy in hardship, and making connections across space and time.
My closest friends are baked into the setting, with their decisions informing worldbuilding and directing campaigns. My articles are links to memories of sitting around a table rolling dice and acting out the results. Now anyone on World Anvil can make their own character to start their own revolutions.
While the real world tries to isolate us and deny our humanity, we build community through human art. After all, no one saves the galaxy alone.
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