Nareah in the Time of WorldEmber

An Ever-Evolving Worldbuilding Design Document for WorldEmber 2020

Goals for WorldEmber 2020

After a recent revisit to the world of Nareah in the form of my now ongoing Fungeons & Flagons campaign, I felt it was time to significantly update the world and - 'lo and behold - there was WorldEmber on the horizon. What better chance to move the setting forward and finally codify everything somewhere it could be easily referenced when I needed to (outside of my, frankly, horribly scribbled personal world bible).

Wordcount Goals

Article Goals

10,000 Words! - Hit on December 14th! This is the bare minimum for WorldEmber and I'm fully expecting to hit this without any particular challenge. Even just converting my world bible essentially word for word should easily reach this goal. 25,000 Words! Truthfully, this is my realistic goal for the month. With holidays coming up I'll be less able to be near the computer for some days of the month and so find this goal - approx. 782 words a day - extremely reasonable. 50,000 Words! Oh My. I am truly unsure if I have the time this month to reach this count. At around 1563 words a day, this would be a real challenge for me - especially as there will be days where my time at the computer will be more limited and I'd likely have to play catch up a fair bit. However, no matter what I'll be pushing out as many words as I can this month; while I'm not stressing to hit this count, I'm not going to purposefully stop myself if I find the creative words properly flowing.

Sevaria, Sweet Sevaria! With the new campaign focusing most heavily on (at least initially) the nation of Sevaria, this is where I need to focus most of my attention. Particularly, I intend to focus effort on the regions of The Silver Vale and Westereach as they are the areas I'm projecting for the most play in the near future.

In preparation for accomplishing this, I've created a number of stub articles and a rather extensive to-do list based on my existing notes.

Organization

While not yet fully implemented as a number of articles have yet to be created, I have a fairly robust hierarchy of categories with a system of nesting articles to provide some organization to the entire project - both for my own sanity and for easing readers through the content.

Artwork

My solution for artwork this year will be simple - using the amazing tool that is Artbreeder, I intend to create images to help as placeholders for characters and locations until I can manage to get better images made (and, even then, the wonderful images from Artbreeder will let me have base references to work from - so it's doubly good!).
While it would make sense to have a backlog of art to work from, I intend to generate or find art on the fly as necessary; although it diverts from the writing flow, it's also a good chance to give my brain a bit of a rest and recharge inspiration. Of course I'm not going to break away from writing something that's just streaming out because I need a piece of art - but when those words're done, I'll likely go and find what I need.

Maps

Mapping is something of a weak point of mine - even with amazing tools, I can rarely get the map that comes out to match close enough to what is in my head to be satisfied. However, I've finally gotten a number of maps to (grid) paper to use as rough initial guides and plan to use the tools presented at Inkarnate to eventually transform those into much nicer looking versions. There's no timeline on those but, like the artwork, I'll be taking chances to have downtime from writing to work on these maps.
After all, mapping isn't getting any word count down!

Any Progress is Good Progress

I'll be honest, this number will likely (very) quickly fall behind as I'll keep forgetting to check back on it. Take this number with a grain of salt!
Note: averages assume 32 days with the event running from November 30 to December 31st.
Progress
10000 words as of 11:59 PM EST, December 14th
Average
666.66 words per day, actual
Targets
10k Words: 312.5 words per day
25k Words: 782 words per days
50k Words: 1563 words per day

Favourite Article

So far, this has been my favourite thing to come of all this; in search of an attempt to find an in-universe quote to lead with on the Deepbranch page, I ended up brainstorming, of all things, a travel guide. The article isn't the fanciest yet but it's random stuff like this coming up that makes me enjoy the concept of worldbuilding.

A Space To Write

I do most of my own writing in my own office at home. It's away from the rest of the house and, once I put on my headphones, it's like I'm in a world of my own.
(Picture to come, I don't have my camera on hand at the moment.)

My Writing Schedule

Hahahahaha... schedule... right, nice joke.
Wait, you're serious? All right, all right - while it's not exactly how the homework says to calculate it, I have several hours every night after the little one's in bed to focus on writing. This has to be shared with time prepping for and responding to people in the campaigns I'm running and, of course, any other pressing matters that might require attention.
In general, this amounts to about five hours a night - approx. 9PM until 2AM given the horrendous time I have getting tired - which gives me plenty of time to easily reach about 1000 words a night.