New Year's Resolutions 2024

I've been in and out of the World Anvil community over the years for various reasons. I'd like to be more involved starting this year, and what better way to begin than to participate in the first community-building event in 2024.
My goals:

1. Complete a language article. I have several proto-languages, but I want to complete a conlang for Mutania as I've dreamed for months.
2. Create more mammile creatures. I have a lot of species ideas in my head, but writing about them in articles has proven very challenging. I never know exactly which facts are interesting and which ones can be cut, and I often find myself a little lazy when drafting them. I'd like to have several that have illustrations, too.
3. Participate in another challenge besides Worldember and Summer Camp. There are community-led challenges all the time, and I'd like to participate in one. That requires me to be more involved in the community just to discover them, but I think I'm up to the task. :)

Reading the following articles helped me establish these goals by being thought-provoking, interesting to read, beautiful, and detailed.

articles

norrith sign language by notahumanhand for etherai

I was wowwed by this article when it first came out. As someone fascinated by linguistics, conlangs and language articles are super interesting, and I hope to create my own in a more robust fashion. I've used Vulgarlang in the past, and plan to use those as proto-languages for my actual languages. Spleen's Norrith sign language article describes a manual language rather than a spoken one, already making it unique, but I'm also impressed with the attention to detail and the d/Deaf advocacy. I'd like to create my own manual language, and the structure of the article is something I will definitely be inspired by.

crkija by elizabread for valtena

My favorite parts of linguistics are the nitty-gritty phonetics, phonology, morphology, and syntax. I would love to be able to write a textbook for my own conlang, but this article reminds me that there's a lot more to language than just the specific quirks of the language. With its focus on dialects and history, this article dives deep into the other aspects of language that tie it into the greater culture that it's a part of. In 2021, I won the Language special category in Worldember and part of its success was incorporating the history of its development. The languages that I created for Worldember this year do not have that amount of detail, and it's something I'd like to go back and fix.

slimy sickness by myth cross for arc sagas

I don't feature quotations in nearly any of my articles, and this article on slimy sickness makes great use of them. They tell a story that naturally progresses throughout the article: the more details about the condition are uncovered, the more they manifest within the characters. I've started to experiment with more prose in my articles, and I'd love to use quotations as a way to achieve that in a stylistic way that breaks up what might otherwise be dry blocks of information.

fish and shrimp by Tillerz for alana

What a charming article! The CSS is amazing, and I love the drop cap styling on the initial letter. But more importantly, the article does a fantastic job of giving a game master a lot of flexibility to tell their own stories. Including the types of events that happen there can be plot hooks on their own, but the article also has additional plot hooks to recommend. The inclusion of the menu makes it seem like a real place with real items. I don't have very many building articles, and I'd like to create one with as much charm and detail.

swathia by jandis for resai

I love the storytelling inside this article. It's framed like narration, with quotes making up the text itself, and it communicates both the incredible power of the land over the character and characterizes the speaker with what they choose to remember and discuss with someone new. The most powerful aspect of the article is the hover effects. The "A Nameless Place" section uses the hover effects to hint at a greater story that draws the reader in to learning more about the finer details.

those that may vanish for totania

Communication across large distances is an important problem to solve in any society, and the Vanisher profession is a great example of how to combine magic, history, and culture together to solve such an important problem. The inclusion of the details about the way that different peoples react to the existence of Vanishers is a great way to make the world feel more real. It's also a great way to include bits of magic, exploring the positives and negatives that are in effect.

burrowbugs by rin garnett for the talos sector

I want to write more species articles, but I get caught up in the amount of details. I always end up writing things that are too useless to be interesting and skip over relevant details that would make a species more exciting. Burrowbugs are an interesting species, and I appreciate the way that Rin has detailed the life stages of the bugs. Framed around their potential to harm humans, the life stages are detailed thoroughly in a way that's still appealing and interesting for the article.

spaces by revyera for when darkness craves

The idea of layered worlds, or subworlds, or realms within worlds, is something that I want to explore with Mutania. Mutania is one universe that has a binary existence with another, but I want to expand upon that binary universe. The other universe is one that I want to create in World Anvil, too, but I want Mutania to be more complete before I move onto the other side. I love the idea of the Dark Halls consuming abstract and physical things that belong to people, and I love the idea that Spaces are an even more mundane and yet more horrible place. It's also mysterious and cool that Archivists disappear, prompting me to go and learn what an archivist is. It has great hooks for drawing the reader into reading more of the story, and that's something that I know Mutania currently lacks.

sisterhood of sex workers by e. christopher clark for the clarkwoods literary universe

Being grounded in the real world is something that can be hard to accomplish in a fantasy world. Eden takes a lot of inspiration from the real world, but the care and attention given to the real world politics behind sex work is really inspiring on its own. I want to write about realistic cultures, and taking note of real political collective action in the real world and how that affects a profession whose place in culture varies significantly across time and space. Sex work is work, like any other, and the place of sex work in my own world is something I want to give an appropriate amount of weight and respect.

vosra, the new dawn by line arteev for malkora

I have created several deities during Worldember, but few have the same level of detail given to the organization of the worship of a specific god. The tenets of the faith of Vosra are well-detailed and thematically consistent with the deity, and they're articulated nicely. I also think that the symbol is well-designed, and it inspires me to go the effort of creating more symbols and images for my own work.