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Since there was no convention season this year, I’ve got more vacation time than I can roll over at the end of the year, so I took yesterday and today off. I chose this week in part because it’s before the holidays (when everyone’s asking for time off), but mainly because I was hoping to spend 4 days playing Cyberpunk 2077. With Cyberpunk pushed back, I’ve been using the extra days off to do actual work, starting with getting ready for World Anvil’s WorldEmber event in December.
Update: Click here for my WorldEmber 2020 page, which collects everything I wrote in one place.
WorldEmber is a yearly world world-building challenge where you try to add 10,000 words to your World Anvil world. Since there’s no way I could pull off NaNoWriMo’s 50K words with my current work schedule, I did WorldEmber last year as a substitute. I hit the word count, but forgot to allow for time zones or something and missed out on the badge. Since I’m hoping to actually run a game set in the City of Ten Thousand Daggers starting early next year–if you’ve got access to my works in progress folder, you can see where I am on the game system itself–I’m using this year’s WorldEmber event to figure out some of the things I’ll need to run the game.
World Anvil has been posting “homework” assignments to help world builders prepare for the event. I did the first one last night, which also involved doing a few “assignments” that they posted for their World Building Summer Camp earlier this year. The result is some new posts on the world site that lay some groundwork for the world and plot out what I’ll be writing about during December. Here are the links:
- The World Meta Profile: I actually filled this out a few weeks ago (and some of it was already there on the “Inspirational Materials” page). The meta is just a way of pinning down exactly what the world is about.
- Next I did an Inspiration Board, which is just what it sounds like. I actually spent several hours yesterday looking through pics on Unsplash (there’s a collection there of all the pics I bookmarked for possible inclusion in the inspiration board) and playing around with the Artreeder site (which is really neat).
- Last but certainly not least (especially in terms of word count), I wrote my World Ember 2020 Pledge, which describes what I’m going to be writing next month.
Now I’m ready to start the second homework assignment, which looks to be the world page reorganization that I’m been meaning to do for a while anyway. Hopefully in the next few days the World Anvil page will become easier to navigate.
