18-12 WORLD EMBER!!

It's finally here!

Since I have seen a few others do this, I decided to jump in on the fun and provide an overview of my world ember articles! (And it's totally not because I myself lost track of what is actually a World Ember article and what was there before x))

So, the end of day 3 has come...

I had originally planned to do a "community day" and just spend all day reading other people's entries and give constructive feedback, but then RL came around and hit hard. Grocery shopping is pretty much the one single most overwhelming thing in my book x_X I still manged to leave some feedback, but instead of finishing my reading list, I managed to keep it somewhat at the same number. That has to count for something, right...? I had planned to give myself a break from my world to get it out of my head and allow me to have a fresh pair of eyes tomorrow, but in the end I did some writing nevertheless and reworked one of my characters. Funny how now that I reached the 10K badge I don't even notice how much I'm writing oO Cirle has by now officially earned her place among the World Ember articles below and it was a blast to write her almost without noticing!

Things I still plan to do this month:

The Council

• Finish all of the regions under The Lands of the Council

You'd think it is all fleshed out in my head already, after I spent all of november being hyped about this. And yet, seeing the least important <Settlement II> of a region, in the furthest corner of the lands, grow to the proud little village of bounty that is Beachfield is an amazing feeling. I didn't even bother thinking of a name for it before World Ember, thats's how unimportant and how much of simple decorum I thought it was, and yet it captured my heart while I wrote it. If I could retire anywhere in my world, I would pick Beachfield! There, I'm playing favorites.

• Populating my capital!

Now this one I spent quite a few time thinking about and I'm really excited about it. Yet, it has proven the toughest one to write so far :( Everything that wanted to come out was bleak, dry description. I hope when I finally get around to the ships and taverns I have planned so far, the city will come alive a bit more.

• More details on the Mage Wars!

Another thing I have been pretty excited about, I'm finding myself having trouble using the military conflict-template. Same goes for The Timber Wars, I really hope I can learn howto make better use of this during the course of World Ember.

• More details on the orders

I was surprised to find myself struggling to make the magical orders come to live, since I had been most excited about that part. But similar to the seat of the Council, all the excitement didn't translate well into words yet. Hopefully when I get to work on the current archmages of the council and the backstories I have for at least two of them, I'll get a better idea on the character of the orders that is not just a cliché.

Utopia

• Flesh out Utopia City!

While the article for the city proper is older then World Ember, I have some ideas for quarters of the town, and of course the inhabitants. I was actually trying to avoid overly popular races (there's just too many variations of Elves in the world, I don't think I could truly make them my own). But whenever I think of anything Utopian, it's gnomes. I don't even like gnomes, but my world resists all attempts to cast it aside and insist gnomes exist and play a vital role in the city. I guess I'll have to cave eventually.

• Show you the beauty of the Utopian Hinterlands and Foothills!

Also, figure out how much of all the trade goods I envision in that area can actually be physically possible to grow. And maybe find other places to put those.

The Shiona

• Introduce the Shiona!

A race I really wanted to include for ages now but just couldn't figure out, some of the nice folks in the discord helped me a lot during november. Now I'm hyped to finally introduce them!

RPG Features

Despite my inexperiencedness, I have been obsessed with turning this into an RPG setting, and so follow my brain I must. If it works out is another question, but hey - if I never try it can't work out! Keep in mind that everything you'll see here is very WIP and most likely more of first draft than anything usable.

• Sketch out the class system
• List the skills and professions
• Figure out details on essence
• Work out the spell details

Misc.

• Resources

This part is probably more of a wiki to facilitate inspiration, but I really like thinking about what grows where and who has access to it.

• Crafting Recipes

What is a world without food? Also, what good are exotic ingredients that are supposed to be valuable but you have no idea what they are used for? I hope this will end up to be a colorful addition to the everyday life of my world.

• Wildlife

This is one point I'm actually struggling with, and I don't know how much I will add to this during World Ember. But I'm definitely going to try!

World Ember articles so far

I'm trying to keep my articles rather short and instead have more single articles and link them - I personally find long articles often intimidating. There's a few more that I started but am really unhappy with, and I'm not sure if the Cirle-article deserves its place here, but this will serve as a start.

Well, well, well...

Would you look at this? So many plans, and most of them have turned out completely different. With the progress page added, I found there was little point in adding all my World Ember articles here (Thank you so much, Dimi, I wrote so many relatively unimpressive articles...), so I decided to change it up to a list of my favorites.

Let's have a look at those goals, too, and see what I achieved, shall we?

In general, I started highly motivated and finished the participation badge after 2.5 days (w00t), and the novella sometime around the 13th, if I recall correctly. That had been my personal goal for World Ember, since I had never written in a focused way, and 50,000 words seemed like a whole lot. Given the writing speed that I had achieved during the first half of the month, I felt very confident to reach the novel badge as well, but then it started to become a drag - up to the point that at 37,000+ I decided to call World Ember off for myself, since I was really feeling bad about not reaching my goal (I believe it was the 27th already).

I officially gave up on it, because my plan for World Ember had always been to see how far I can push myself if I really decide to focus on worldbuilding without burning myself out. I did not want this to become a burden, I wanted to worldbuild because I enjoy it thoroughly. And sitting at 37k, I realized the pressure, the feeling of not being good enough, or too lazy had started to sour world building for me. Because I had shown I can churn out the words in the first half, and I still had a long list of stubs and an even longer list of concepts in my Google Sheet, but yet again I failed at doing something I really wanted to do - it must mean I will never achieve anything, right? The inner demons, they will never leave you alone.

I'm very proud, though, because this time I made the decision to not believe it, and reminded myself of how I had started writing as an experiment. I wasn't trying to prove anything. I was trying to see how it felt to write in a focused way. I couldn't loose! Even with the 37k, my world had grown exponentially, and thanks to the community, a lot of open questions had been resolved, and new ideas had come up all the time.

The Tarassyr are a prime example of this. They started out in my head as gnomes, which made me very unhappy - I didn't want the WoW gnomes in my world! It felt cheap and also dangerously close to copyright infringement. Also, those bastards are hella annoying in WoW. Fight me :P

Again, the community came to the rescue. Revyera prodded me into the direction of monkeys, and KyoAkashi helped me a great deal in figuring their overall nature out. Nevermind the Shiona are still waiting to be introduced.... But I will get to them, too! I promise!

The Capital of the Council did get a few buildings, but is still far from being populated. Also, I still don't have a clear picture of what the feel of it is, which is why the Seat's article is still woefully short. Hopefully without the urge of writing for a wordcount, but instead of writing as a habit as I'm envisioning it for the future, I'm sure there will be more time again for sketching things, taking notes or just daydreaming without a guilty conscience again. Sooner or later, I will be able to tell you more about the Seat fo the Council proper! Until then, I'll link the political center of it as well as two of its most famous taverns for your reading pleasure.

The Mage Wars are still more a rough overview than anything, but I've slowly started to figure out things about it - the Forgotten Battle has started to take shape in my head, but I'm not yet sure how to introduce it to the world. Few people alive today know about its existence, and any account of it or evidence for it has been kept closely guarded by the few who have been chosen to be the keepers of its secret. Instead, I turned my focus on characters a lot more in the second half of the month and found an interesting character needs a whole lot more time and preparation than I had anticipated. (Don't judge me - I told you this is the first time I'm writing in a focused way!) With Yerefiah and his Pillar of Rest I have a character and an item that I really love - but there's so much more to them than I have written down yet, and again, I'm not sure how much to reveal. Yerefiah is definitely someone who will get a story one day.

In general, I found writing and imagining characters really drove my worldbuilding and the development of places. Hillswatch, for example, was nothing more but a bleak outpost that existed because something had to be there and someone had to take care of the border area. It felt right for an explorer like Irim to be born and raised in an area like this, and when I thought about her parents, Tarisal started growing and both making Hillswatch a real place to be as well as helping me bring the concept of a witch, that I had wanted to incorporate for a while, to life. Aldaeus Vertiglobuli, his first wife Tiphaine and their daughter Anaïs are some more characters that really captured my heart and helped me learn more about the world, although I'm not happy yet with Tiphaines article - there's more to hear than what I jotted down so far.

Smartassery was another fun thing to write, also inspired by someone from the Discord-community (shoutout to Koray Birenheide!) All in all, it was a fun ride and it went so much different than I had planned for it to become - but I do believe it was in a good way! I never expected to go as in-depth into the family of one of my NPCs as I did with the Vertiglobuli family, not did I expect to already get to diseases - I was mainly planning to lay down the foundations and built up on them with details later on. In the end, things decided to come on their own time, and the Vast Sea as well as the Eziliari were complete new ideas that randomly popped up during writing and demanded to be written. Last but not least, the Eziliari also brought me my first attempt at the myth-template, and while I did not make use of the template as much, I'm still quite happy with how it turned out.

So yeah, World Ember 2018 has been a wild yet exciting ride for me! It has kept me motivated and sane in one of the most difficult months of 2018, it helped me worldbuild in a very focused manner and helped me build a habit and hopefully improve my writing and worldbuilding tons. It also taught me a lot about my own state of mind and how to deal with my inner demons. All in all, and amazing experience, and one I look forward to repeating next year! Here's to 2019 and a whole lot of worldbuilding!

Other people doing WE diaries

Little Miss Hummingbird

Qurilion

Ademal

TJ

Oneriwien

Dhelian

Ninne

Vertixico