If you’re trying to figure out how to use World Anvil as a Dungeon Master, or which World Anvil subscription you need, then this is the blog post for you!
If you’re a writer or author, check out our post on Which World Anvil Subscription You Need – Writers’ Edition!
World Anvil is the best place to create, organize, and store your RPG campaign setting, and to manage your campaign. It works for any system or setting, whether you’re homebrewing or creating from scratch. But which World Anvil subscription do you need as a Dungeon Master/ Game Master or Tabletop RPG writer? And how exactly are DMs and RPG creators using their World Anvil memberships?
Which World Anvil Subscription tiers are there?
First of all, here are the different World Anvil subscription tiers at a glance:
Freeman
Yes, you can make an account and try the basic World Anvil features for free! The features and file space are limited, but there’s a tonne of functionality even for free members.
Journeyman – for the first-time GM
Our starter subscription offers comprehensive privacy settings for your world, and you can give up to 5 players exclusive access to otherwise private information (so they can keep secrets from each other, too!). You can work with a co-DM or allow players to submit content to your world, and make your campaign setting look beautiful!
Master – for the learned GM
The Master tier unlocks some of our most popular features, like family trees and diplomacy webs, and a tonne more options for maps, like labels, journey lines and extra layers. You also have extra storage and a host of useful add-ons to make your world even more enticing. You can give exclusive access to up to 10 players at a time!
Grandmaster – for the true Master behind the Screen
Grandmaster is the ultimate tier to configure and make your world truly your own. You’ll be able to create your own sheets, make use of some of the most advanced design and navigation features of World Anvil. It also gives access to ALL our incredible interactive map features!
Also, with 100 subscriber/player slots, Grandmaster is perfect for West Marches campaigns, LARP groups, or even just GMs who run a lot of campaigns! If you’re looking to go pro as a GM, this will be the subscription to start with. You’ll also need this tier if you’re creating your own RPG system.
Sage – for the Professional
Sage is our professional tier, designed for both indie creatives and small RPG publishing houses. It’s the perfect place to give Patreon and Kickstarter rewards, run premium games, tease new releases, foster your community, and advertise new products.
You can also use your own URL (e.g. www.YourWorld.com) and strip the World Anvil branding, so it looks like your own personal website, but runs with all the power of World Anvil! We also offer our Sages promotional opportunities not available to others, and monthly seminars on monetization and the RPG space.
For bigger RPG publishing houses
Do you represent an RPG publishing house? Get in touch with us directly at hello@worldanvil.com, and we can set up a tailored package that makes sense for you!
You can check out all the World Anvil RPG features here, and our pricing page here.
The World Anvil Subscription levels at a glance!
How can you use World Anvil for tabletop RPGs?
World Anvil is a community of a million worldbuilders and Game Masters… that’s a lot of dice! Whether you’re looking to keep your notes safe and wow your players with your lore, or gain new customers and publish your work, World Anvil has your covered! So how are Dungeon Masters and RPG creators using World Anvil?
1. To run your Tabletop RPG Campaign
Imagine the ultimate Campaign Notebook for all your homebrew. Rollable stat blocks, interactive maps, timelines, NPCs, your homebrewed bestiary and everything else you need to keep track of your world! Now imagine you had a DM’s screen tailored to your world. Of course, you could see your player’s character sheets, keep track of plots and ideas, write notes on the fly and play music. That’s what World Anvil can do for Game Masters.
During the planning and prep phase, you can create whatever you’ll need for your session. From interactive maps and timelines, to locations, spells, magic items, NPCs and plot lines, you can create everything in World Anvil, and search it all. You can share what you like with your players to get them hyped for the campaign, and keep the rest secret. You can even show different information to different players, useful for class-based or racial knowledge!
Then, play the campaign with everything you need at your fingertips in the Digital DM’s Screen! Write notes, play music, roll dice, create NPCs on the fly all in the same place. You can even search the SRD and community statblocks – perfect for surprise encounters or NPCs. Your players can manage their own characters, equipment and stats. Once your session is over, players can write journals, and you can write session reports – then on to the next!
Which World Anvil Subscription do I need for this?
To run your tabletop RPG campaign, we recommend at least a Journeyman tier World Anvil subscription. That allows you to keep your secret plans and spoilers away from players’ eyes! If you want more advanced search functionality, or if you have lots of players (or you’re running more than 2 campaigns at once!), choose the Master tier World Anvil subscription. If you’re playing a LARP or West Marches-style campaign, a Grandmaster tier subscription lets you have 100 players!
2. To share your Lore with the World
Homebrewing lore and worldbuilding is a major component of modern Tabletop RPG games for a reason – it’s satisfying, creative and fun! And it’s even more fun to share your lore with others, and get their comments too! Of course, if you’re running a streamed game, a podcast or another public game, it’s vital to share the public part of your campaign setting with the world. With World Anvil, you can share part or all of your campaign setting and lore.
Whether it’s interactive maps to show off your geography, a bestiary of monsters and animals with their statblocks, or everyone’s favourite NPCs and their family trees, World Anvil is the best place to showcase your lore. Even better, you can customize the way it looks, either by choosing a pre-prepared visual theme or by making your own. Then add images, video and music to utterly immerse your players and readers in your world.
Which World Anvil Subscription do I need for this?
To share your lore with the world, go for at least a Master tier subscription, which gives you access to family trees, diplomacy webs and a host of extra features that showcase your worldbuilding at its best, and really improve the look and feel of your world. A Grandmaster tier membership gives even more customizability, to truly wow your players and readers, and will give you ALL the features you’ll need for a truly epic experience.
If you’re going for the most professional finish, the Sage tier allows you to use your own URL and strip all traces of World Anvil from your pages. It’ll look like your very own website, but powered by all the functionality and interactivity of World Anvil! Here’s an example of that, the World of Askadia by Davina.
3. To homebrew your own RPG system
Once you’ve tried a few different RPG systems, it’s natural to want to make your own! World Anvil is the perfect place to create your character sheets and stat blocks, notate your rules and cross-reference everything. You can keep it to yourself, try it with your players, or release it for playtesting to a select, trusted few. The comments feature is perfect for gathering feedback, and users can make private comments too. This is the perfect way to make sure no one’s comment influences another tester’s opinion! Then, when you’re ready, share your RPG system with the world!
Which World Anvil Subscription do I need for this?
You’ll need a Grandmaster tier World Anvil subscription to create your own stat block templates and character sheet templates, and to allow private comments on your world. Here’s an example of a brand new RPG system hosted on World Anvil – the Celenia CD10 RPG System.
4. To become a professional GM / DM
With more and more GMs and DMs going professional, you need to make the experience the best it can be for your players. After all, they’re your paying customers!
World Anvil allows you to advertise your services and campaigns to the world. You can create attractive pages about your campaigns, add videos to them showcasing your play style or introducing different concepts to potential customers, and give them a taste of your campaign settings showcased at their very best.
It’s also an excellent place to give any preparatory material to your players, or show off pre-gen characters for them to choose from. If you want to give players guidelines to create their own characters, you can do that on World Anvil too, with everything connected together. Or just invite them to explore your lore and get them hyped for their upcoming session, so they arrive at your table primed to enjoy your storytelling… and to come back again!
For longer campaigns, World Anvil keeps everything organized and professional, so you’re never caught unprepared. The ultra-fast full-text search and full SRD means you can pull up information from your system or setting in seconds, in case (or rather, WHEN!) the players do something unexpected. This means you never need to break immersion by cracking open a paper notebook or bestiary – just 3 letters in the search bar and you’ll have the information you need! Some professional GMs also share session reports, to help players remember what happened in the last session. Some GMs publish these as in-world narrative or styled as newspaper articles, for that extra customer experience!
Which World Anvil Subscription do I need for this?
For the most professional finish, and full customizability of everything, we recommend the Sage tier membership on World Anvil. This also gives you access to 1000 player/subscriber slots! If you’re just starting out as a professional GM and want something a bit lighter, the Grandmaster tier membership will be a good place to begin!
5. To publish your own RPG system or campaign setting – and create community
If you’re looking to publish your own RPG system or Campaign setting, you can’t do better than World Anvil! You can build everything on World Anvil and integrate it together. Work with your team as co-authors, give secret access to alpha testers, get comments from your editors and keep track of your lore as it grows! You can even build character sheets, stat block templates and the like, and make them automatically rollable! Or if you’re releasing a campaign setting for an existing system, like DnD5e or Pathfinder, you can alter the pre-existing sheets and blocks to suit your needs.
Once you’re ready to go public, whether it’s with Kickstarter or traditional publication, World Anvil is the perfect place to get your audience hooked on your content. When it comes to presentation, there’s no better place to showcase your campaign setting or system with everything linked together! World Anvil is infinitely customisable and boasts interactive elements which give extra production value, and allow your readers to explore your world in a dynamic way. World Anvil can even look like your very own website – your own URL (e.g. www.YourCampaignSetting.com) and stripped of any World Anvil branding – but still powered by World Anvil.
Tiered access allows you to decide who can see what. Give limited access to the public to get them excited, then extend immediate, exclusive access to customers, Patrons or Kickstarter backers. All whilst keeping your secret notes private!
And finally, your community is the key to successful projects like this! World Anvil’s community features allow you to build a community around your IP. Hear what your fans think, give limited-time access to material, and show content exclusively to those who follow your world or are subscribed to it. We have more community features coming soon, like polls, forums and the ability to award achievement badges!
Which World Anvil Subscription do I need for this?
To make use of all the publishing features, we recommend a Sage tier World Anvil subscription. This comes with all the publishing features you’ll need, plus promotional opportunities on the World Anvil platform itself and monetization classes, which are only available to this tier.
6. To deliver Kickstarter and Patreon rewards
With World Anvil, you can give your supporters exclusive supplementary content, like fully interactive maps for dungeons or regions, monsters, spells, magic items, stat blocks, etc in a fully interactive and connected way. Content access can easily be tiered to match your Patreon or Kickstarter backer tiers. You can even create adventure modules with interactive dungeon maps that roll dice, or choose-your-own-adventure stories! World Anvil allows you to audience-test, tease or retract content, should you need to, and to publish errata! It also really helps guard against Patreon-Scalping.
Patreon scalping is a common practice in which fans back for a month on Patreon, download all available PDFs, and then drop their support immediately. By using World Anvil as your rewards platform, it’s easy to remove those who no longer pay, and they’ll no longer have access to your extra content! The access management system is quick and easy, and it works with any monetization platform you want.
A lot of successful Kickstarters use World Anvil, too! It’s a great way to build hype before your campaign starts, and get people interested in your project! During the campaign, it’s an excellent way to show potential backers your content, presented in the best way possible! You can link to pages to give more information without over-filling your main KS page. Once you’re successfully funded, you can also issue digital Kickstarter rewards, share project updates and run early access and beta-testing through World Anvil. It’s a great place to focus and maintain your community long after your KS campaign is over, and get them primed for the next installment!
Which World Anvil Subscription do I need for this?
We recommend the Sage tier for Patreon rewards – you can get the most professional finish and it starts out with 1000 customer slots available (more on request). If you’re just starting out, the Grandmaster tier, with 100 customer slots, should be enough.
Can I upgrade my World Anvil subscription?
Yes! All of our upgrades are pro-rated, which means you’re only paying for what you use. You can upgrade at any time during the duration of your membership. Oh, and if your subscription lapses, all your work is safe and secure, and private if you’ve set it as such! The Sage tier subscription also offers promotional opportunities on the World Anvil platform itself, which are not available to other tiers, as well as monthly monetization classes on how to use World Anvil to make money in your field.
Still wondering which World Anvil subscription is for you? Make sure you check out our pricing page to get the skinny on which membership tiers get which features! You can view all our features by membership-level – and we’re introducing new features all the time.
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This guide is great! What about the players? Is the Freeman license enough for them to join the game?