World Anvil

I have been playing with World Anvil this weekend. I like it very much. World Anvil is a world building site - a database for world building for games or fiction, that allows you to create and track information about your world, and then present it in various ways to others. you can get a lot of use out of it without paying a penny - though the paid versions offer some very appealing features, and aren't all that expensive. I am likely to ante up for at least the first level of it.

There are plenty of places to find reviews (that one is on Nerdarchy): I want to write more about how I use it and what I wish it could do. Which might be best read as, what I haven't figured out how to do yet - it is fairly extensive, with lots of interrelated pieces and templates, that are sometimes hard to fit together (at least in the 4 days I've been using it.) I think it is a very useful resource, though, and am probably going to start digging into it hard.

It works very well at what it does, I think. It is a fine way to organize material and present it. The templates for different pieces of the world, types of information - people, places, organizations, etc - are full of options, collecting what you need to describe those pieces. Some of it is obvious - some of it works as a spark, to think about the elements you need. Ticks and quirks and tone of voice and date and conditions of birth for people; coinage of the realm, founding date, judicial systems and so on for countries or organizations. A lot of these are sparks to think through story elements - they are very useful. There are lots of options, but they are easy enough to figure out. It is possible to put down a pretty basic record, too, and come back to add what you need.

Where things get complicated is in how the different types of records relate to one another, and how they display. The software publishes its information in a Wiki-like format - but doesn't always quite seem to follow the flow I would like. The best example I can see is with a country or city. You can enter a place as a physical place, a "location" - Lenay, say; and you can enter it as a country, which is called and "organization" - The Kingdom of Lenay, for instance. Both types of record collect a lot of good and useful information - but as nearly as I can tell, they are both published as separate pages. What I would want would be one page that could present at least an outline of all of it - the land and people, weather and conditions, the history and politics and cultural factors, the people associated with it, all one one page. (At least outlined on one page, like Wikipedia itself.) To be fair - this strikes me as something that is probably possible with some advanced settings. I might have not figured it out yet. But it's odd, and so far creates some complication, I think.

There is also the question of what I want to do with it. The problem there is that I have way too much information to do anything simple with it. Getting what I want in there (assuming I can decide what I want and don't want) is a daunting task. There's also the problem of how to split information up. I have been doing this for 35 years, both for D&D and for writing. There's a lot of material, and it falls into both categories - fiction and game material. There is a lot that is only really applicable to writing; other that is applicable to games but not fiction; some that is different. Pieces can get moved around, characters and situations reused or changed. I want to be able to put the game material out where others can use it - but I also want to organize the fictional material. This is a good way to keep it all straight - but using it for both games and stories might just make it more complicated.

That's my problem, I suppose. And it's a problem created by the fact that this is a very useful piece of software, something I am eager to use to organize both D&D campaigns and fiction writing. So - I am very happy to have finally gone on the site and started playing with it.