World Anvil News: May 2025

Looking for the latest news and upcoming developments on World Anvil? You’re in the right place! This time, we’re talking major dev updates, online Worldbuilding Summer Camp (we’ve got ice cream!), and more. Let’s take a look at everything happening this May (the force be with you)!

As always, our team has been busy improving World Anvil!

🖼️ Upgraded image selector

We implemented a new Image Selector system for articles! The new system makes images more tightly integrated with articles, which in turn makes the whole experience much smoother! Simply edit an article and click on the cover image at the top to get started. This is just the first step for a larger update to the Images system coming later on! Check out the release blog post for more details.

✅ To-do list refinement

You can now edit your to-do list items AND attach articles to them (great for adding context to your items). Check the Guide to the To-Do List to learn more about this feature!

📝 Updates to article edit soon!

The devs have also been hard at work to update the article edit modal with a ton of new features and quality of life improvements. Stay tuned for updates!

Check out the Changelog page on World Anvil for the full changelog.

🗓️ May events

This month is Mental Health May, so we’re taking things slow and calm to give you the chance to worldbuild at your own pace. Still, here are the events happening this month!

🪷 Rituals of Renewal Challenge: The challenge ends on May 3rd, so go submit your entries NOW if you haven’t yet! Or, if you’re from the future, check the challenge page to read the amazing submissions by your fellow Anvilites (and please share the secrets of time travel in the comments!)
✨ Community Day: this month’s World Anvil Community Day will be on May 17th! Here’s the programme:
- 🎓 Sage Roundtable: Fear of Failure and Fear of Success (5pm UK/9am Pacific): Join this roundtable with your fellow Sages to chat about those brain goblins that so often prevent us from finishing (or even starting) our creative projects! Find the link in the Professional Portal (Sages only).
- 🙌 Community Stream (6pm UK/10am Pacific): It’s Mental Health May, so in this month’s community stream, we’ll chat about the benefits of escapism and paracosms with some amazing guests from the community!

🍨 Worldbuilding Summer Camp is coming!

Summer Camp is our yearly online summer event, in which we challenge you to answer a number of worldbuilding prompts focused on four themes (which we’ll be revealing next month). Here’s a quick run-down of how it works!

June is prep month! You’ll be preparing your world, and we’ll be giving tips and tricks on how to make the most out of Summer Camp, as well as revealing the prompt themes.
July is the main month. Every week, we’ll uncover a new wave of prompts; most will be related to the theme, but a couple will be “wild cards”, not related to any of the four themes.
Finally, in August we’ll hold the Reading Challenge! To relax from the worldbuilding marathon, this challenge focuses on reading other Anvilites’ work to learn from them.

Keep an eye on our socials and on the Summer Camp page for updates. And join our Discord community to chat with other Campers!

🌟 Community highlight

What’s the prettiest world on World Anvil? Well, as voted by the community, one of the most beautiful worlds is The Field of Stories – Àyrngáer, by zevchafer—this month’s community highlight! Àyrngáer is a visual art and worldbuilding project blending fiction and non-fiction set in Europe between 1850 and 1950. Here’s what zevchafer had to say about it!

The Field of Stories – Ayrngaer is a visual story and art project set in a semi-fictional world. It draws inspiration from the tri-border area between the Kingdom of the Netherlands and the former Kingdoms of Prussia and Hanover, spanning the years 1850 to 1950. The project’s main goal is to create a visual book featuring artwork, stories, music, and animation.

For me, it’s important to balance life with an (un?)healthy amount of creativity. As someone whose mind never stops (over)thinking, a creative project helps to keep my mind busy with interesting things and prevents me from getting stuck in thought loops with daily life things and struggles. I’ve had such projects for a long time, and my life has always been better with them than without. The Field of Stories is not just a creative project; it’s also a mental one. It blends reflections from life with fiction, art, poetry, and even random thoughts. It makes me a better person.

World Anvil helps me to make sense of all these thoughts and scraps by providing a framework to guide the process. It offers fields, prompts, and tips to build a world that aligns with my storyline and can even be explored by others. It also allows me to be creative, such as incorporating art and creating a (visually) interesting website that matches the art style of my story and the future visual book.

This tool is very helpful, but equally valuable is the World Anvil community. They offer tips, insights, and an environment to improve my world and project. The World Anvil Awards are a great example of staff and community efforts to motivate you to work on your project, improve it, and get feedback (and even win an amazing prize). As a beginner worldbuilder, this gives me the chance to be seen by the community, even when the world or project is in its early stages. A creative project, or any other project at all, is always better if you can share it with someone, and World Anvil, the community, and WAWA help me to achieve that.

Want to see why this project won the Most Beautiful World award? Check out the The Field of Stories – Àyrngáer now!