Monday, November 20, 2017

World Anvil (World Building Resources)

Hey Game Fans, we’re back with a look at another gaming resource for your world building needs.  World Anvil is a new resource for World builders and authors.  It features a variety of tools and functions for the world builder and gives you a place to collate all of your resources in one easy to find reference spot.  It’s system agnostic, which means you can create the specific entry for a critter or a location, and then in the same entry put in stats for whatever system you’re planning on using.  Let’s take a closer look, and we’ll show you the world anvil approach to our Lakeport setting.  


World Anvil

So the first thing you’ll need to do is go to www.worldanvil.com and sign up.  They are currently beta testing everything, so you’re going to help them build their system while getting a place to host your campaign setting.  Once you’ve gotten your login data and hop into the site, you’ve got the Opportunity to create your first world.  Starting with a name and a short description (3 to 5 paragraphs) you are off and running with the world building process.  World Anvil offers a host of tools and resources that you can use for your worldbuilding project.  Let’s take a closer look at the categories, and we’ll see if we can’t inspire some world builders.

World Dashboard

The World Dashboard is an easy reference tab that lets you examine the content you’ve created and add more.  This is where most of the work you do with the World Anvil site starts and finishes.  Let’s take a look at the tabs you can use and then the extra features you can also take advantage of.

Person

This lets you add important people to the world you are designing and goes into a lot of depth about that specific person.  You can add as much detail as you like, or leave open spots for players and readers to try and figure out the mysteries themselves.

Item

This tab focuses on the unique physical items you can find in your world, from weapons to armor, to methods of transportation to food and coins.  The level of detail is quite deep and you can even include details on how to make the given item including the components needed.

Species

This tab focuses on unique plants and animals (and the occasional hybrid) for your setting.  Again, these tools are designed for you to be as detailed as you want to be for descriptions. If you want your players to be able to identify a fish or a plant from the description alone, you can lay those details in right here. (This also includes the unusual sentient creatures that are unique to your setting)

Geography

From soaring mountains to primeval forests, you can describe the major geographical features of your campaign setting.  For those of you using this tool set for science fiction settings, you can lay in the basics of specific planets here, and then work off of them from here.  

Building

Whether they are built or found and put to use, these are structures that are used for habitation by people of any stripe.  From great vaults deep beneath the earth to soaring cloud fortresses, these are all covered under this tab.

Settlement

From the starting village of your first adventure to the capital of interstellar empires, these are the cities and gathering places of the myriad sentient creatures that fill your setting.  Again, like all the other tabs, you can cover as much detail as you like.

Tradition

From customs of marriage to rites of observance, this tab features the unique cultural traits that are common to your world.  You can also cover the specifics of a given species and how they differ from the normal operations of the world at large

Technology

This tab covers the scientific and technological advances of the setting.  If you have a unique tech that changes how the entire setting works, this is where you’ll want to put it, and you can go into great detail about how it works for your readers.

Vehicle

If you have a unique conveyance, it belongs here.  Starships, skycutters, mobile cities, and other wonderful ways of moving from one place to another.  You can put in details involving cost, material composition, and a host of other unique features that separate your vehicles from other worlds.

Organization

The governments of the setting, organized crime families, the churches of the settings gods all belong in this tab.  You can have a lot of fun detailing every aspect of these organizations and how they interact with each other.  

Ethnicity

For population groups that are different from the normal representations of their species, you can create separate articles that allow you to detail how these groups differ, and what those differences can mean for people who want to make characters of that type.

(Meta) Physical Law

If the laws of the universe work differently, here’s a spot for that.  If your world runs on a reincarnation based afterlife, this is where you can find the details of that, it would also be the place to describe any changes in how the laws of nature work, like cold fire, or lightning that hunts for adulterers.

Language

If you have specific languages that are native to your world, this is where they belong.  You can include alphabets, writing examples, and other key details of your world.  You can also detail how that language has been used and changed over time.  If you are budding linguists, you can easily spend a chunk of time working out all the niceties of your languages

Generic

Now there’s a generic tab that lets you filter in articles that may not fit in any other category.  Ideally suited for the Rules for a given Roleplaying Game, you can create several different versions so you keep your setting working for multiple game systems (keeping your Savage Worlds out of your GURPS for example).  

From these tabs on the Dashboard, you can fill in a host of useful information for your world building project, but there are some more features we should talk about before we go any further.  

Notes

For the writer on the go, you can leave yourself notes about specific topics or ideas you want to expand into articles later

Maps

Integrated mapping options always intrigue me and i will be spending some more time with this feature when i have the chance.

Categories

You can create your own categories and tag articles appropriate to it.  If for example you created an organization with specific vehicles, technology and customs, you could create an all encompassing tag for other people to follow easily.  

Timeline

You can also create a world history with a timeline that covers events with as much detail as you want to.  So far there is only one Timeline, but i could see a lot of fun with this if you could create separate timelines for specific cultures and then integrate them into the main timeline (it’s possible that feature already exists, i just haven’t gotten a chance to tinker much with it).  

Image Gallery

Finally, if you have pictures and images for your campaign setting, you can upload them here.  (you’ve got a limit on the amount of storage space you can use, but i think you can get in a lot of art for your setting

Conclusions (for Now)

So what does World Anvil do?  A lot, honestly.  For the budding worldbuilder, you have an extraordinary toolkit for building your world.  One of the better aspects is that you can build it piece by, region by region if you want to.  It’s got a lot of potential, and honestly i need to take a closer look at it before i can give you a better sense of it.  That’s our first looks at World Anvil, and we’ll be tinkering with the system for a while.    

You can find the World Anvil treatment for Lakeport here.  Game On, Game Fans

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