Looking for a place to capture your ideas without limits? Whiteboards, our newest major feature, gives you a blank slate where you can pour all of your creativity! Now you can create mind maps, plot and character arc boards, and even free drawing—all while being fully integrated with your world. So let’s look at what it is and how it works!
The information on this blog post might be outdated! Check the documentation for the most up-to-date information about this feature.
What is Whiteboards?
Whiteboards, as the name implies, is a blank page in which you can put anything in any position. And by “anything” I mean article embeds (or any other content from your world, like maps and timelines), freehand lines, boxes, images, arrows, text, and sticky notes—anything! Features like the content trees and diplomacy webs already let you organize your content in a pre-structured way, but if you’re looking for total freedom, Whiteboards is for you. Here are some ideas of how you could use it:
- Structure your worldbuilding: show the relationship between different parts of your world. How do factions, characters, and locations relate to each other?
- Plot your story: thanks to its freedom, you can use it to represent your plot or character arc in any way you want!
- Quest board: if you like to create quest boards for your players, it can do that too!
- Free drawing: ok, you won’t become a world-famous painter with this, but it’s great for simple line art and doodles! Sometimes, drawing is the best way to represent your world. Or just get your ideas out of your head!
- Free-style family trees: go beyond the limits of traditional family trees and represent relationships however you want.
- Hierarchies: writing about an organization or a family with a complex hierarchy? Whiteboards makes representing it super easy!
- Technology trees: display how a piece of technology has developed during the history of your world.
- Magic systems: are you the type who enjoys hard magic systems? Well, now you can visually represent the different types of magic and its rules, and how they interact with each other.
Want to see how it looks in action? Here’s a quick Whiteboard I put together:
Outlining a story is only one of the many uses you can give to this feature!
How to use Whiteboards
Getting started with Whiteboards is very simple—just follow these steps:
- On the left sidebar, find the option called “Whiteboards”.
- There, you’ll see a list of all your whiteboards or, if you haven’t created one, an empty page with a “New Whiteboard” button.
- After giving it a name, the Whiteboards interface will open! It will look like a blank page with menus on the top left, top right, and bottom center.
- The top left menu has settings, the top right is a styling menu, and the bottom bar is where you can add objects to the whiteboard.
And that’s it! To embed articles or other kinds of World Anvil content, use the green plus button and search in your world. The whiteboard is infinite in all directions, so go wild!
Check out the full video tutorial for Whiteboards below! Or read our full help documentation for whiteboards!
Ready to get your creative juices flowing? Create an account and join the Guild to start using Whiteboards today!
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I like to think this was at least partially inspired by my suggestion, but this is way better than I thought. I love it!
I am so glad you like it! How are you using Whiteboards in your world(s)?