Gokrenxia in 2024
Celebrating 2023
Happy 2024 World Anvil! I hope this article finds you healthy, happy, and safe. As I reflect back on the end of my introductory year to this amazing platform and knowing that I came in with few expectations, I couldn't be more pleased with how things turned out. According to Hanhula's amazing brigid tool, I published 94 articles encompassing somewhere around 92k words! That's insane to me. I managed to pull a Silver badge for Summer Camp, completed 10k words in my first WorldEmber, and participated in some great community challenges along the way. Looking back at my post-summer camp goals for the second half of 2023, I made a lot of progress in both the micro and macro-focus targets. Answering the question of "What happened when King Ga'jam died?" is still an ongoing effort, but the single Summer Camp article that sparked the question has now blossomed into a nearly 30k word story that's allowed me to embrace my meta goals of building an interesting world to explore with solo role-playing. WorldEmber '23 was quite the experience. It was great to have nearly 100 article ideas while being able to drill in on a specific theme/target. If I were to do anything different next year, I might look for more variety of articles. Publishing twelve organizational articles for the Great Dwarven Houses added so much rich flavor to Dwarves of Gokrenxia, but by the time I hit about House number eight it was feeling a bit cumbersome and repetitive. The last four were really a struggle to get through. And if it was like that for me to write, I'm guessing it's probably less fun to read. All-in-all though, I am overwhelmingly thankful for having found WorldAnvil and this great community of encouraging creators.New Year's Reading Challenge
In that same spirit of encouragement I received throughout 2023, for this reading challenge I'm looking forward to sharing the love. I want others to feel seen and heard, because that's part of what makes WA great and inspires people to keep building.
What a fun and whimsical magical mystery settlement drunkenpanda951 has created. This is a great reminder to have fun when we create and to instill a childlike wonder of discovery for not just our readers, but for ourselves as worldbuilders, writers, and creators. I imagine cultivating this sense of wonder in ourselves can manifest in our creations as well.
This was the first article I've read by HedonistInk and I have to say I absolutely loved it! The use of imagery kept me captivated and easily able to picture the city. There are a ton of little details spanning culture, music, art, education, food, and tradition, as well as tidbits and hints at the larger world of Hiraeth (about which I knew nothing) to introduce without overwhelming the reader, all packed into a very comfortably-sized article.
I love the foundational truth around how civilization follows the food. The people expanded down the river as they went and beyond the river as technology advanced (specifically advances in irrigation).
For some reason, I can't copy the articleblock for this one. I've reported it via #help in Discord. It's very cool that they have a zoom-able map as the header background. I don't recall seeing this before. It's an interesting take to have a fantasy realm that affects neurodivergent persons different than non-neurodivergent. It challenges me to consider how folks that see the world differently might be both represented and reflected in my own world. I love that the color scheme of this world is similar to mine, but much more subtle. I wonder if I should adopt a similar subtlety in my own world.
Right off the bat, I love that WA is an international community, with support for translating between different languages I love the level of detail Stampi provides for the settlement. It makes me stop and consider that I have a mix of very high level articles (ex - kingdoms & species) as well as much lower lever (ex - rooms and individuals). This article encourages me to fill in details somewhere in the middle.
I always appreciate when folks include representative music that reflects the feel and form of whatever's being discussed in the article. It's great to see all the cross-linking to other articles, if you wanted to learn more about the traditions, characters, or the "five families" associated with the location. That demographics are represented by carnivorous or not is an interesting discriminator; that one's food choices is how things are tracked. It makes me want to dig deeper and understand the history of this world, and what led to this being a discriminating factor.
The cover image for this article is absolutely beautiful! The city's alternate name of "City of Gallows" is immediately attention getting. It's a dark and grim moniker that stands diametrically opposed to the opulent gold and green header. I want to know more! Funny enough, I wrote the above before I even read the article, which presents several of those same concepts! This article inspires me to think about how the "tone" of my graphics reflect my articles.
An out of the way village with a small population. I love the quaint feel and am reminded of the importance of the "little places" in the world. If I want my world to feel real and authentic, I need to remember there have to be places like Vig Daral; because a majority of the world is just that. Specific to this article, it's interesting to me that the village is a combination of Dwarves and "magicians." Assuming "magician" isn't a race unto its own (which is an interesting thought experiment in and of itself) I wonder what race(s) make up the magicians. Does it not include Dwarves, which is why it's considered unusual?
I'm a sucker for structure and organization. The breadcrumbs at the top of this article help me know, even without knowing anything else about Tremanac, where I am in the order of things. I'm intrigued by the opening line and paragraph about "unusual workers," "Lord Starbrow's barrier," and "the spellweavers." I love the feel that there's much more to learn in the depth and history of the larger world. I am particularly moved by the inclusion of a "New to Tremanac" link. For someone like myself who stumbled upon the world by virtue of the challenge articles, it's a great orientation primer. It's also a reminder that I've not yet done this for Gokrenxia!
The Core Caves are a fascinating kind of connected purgatory: Home to the dead (or nearly dead) yet still reachable by the land of the living. It's incredibly curious to ponder on a number of natural laws that must be at play in Aradeia. I am left wondering, if immortals are ending up in this "realm of the nearly-dead," what does immortality mean? Are there limits upon it? From the sidebar, core dwellers include both half-gnomes and halflings. I'm curious what other races represented in the Cave. Perhaps most intriguing to me is why only immortal mines are able to connect to the Cave. It feels like there's a world secret buried here that I'm "dying" to "dig into" (puns 100% intended)!
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