Worldember Pledge 2022

I hereby pledge to participate in WorldEmber 2022. I will try to write at least 10'000 words, and focus my worldbuilding efforts on Eastern Thurásin and its history.

— Isaac Thompson

Week 1 - Pledge

For this year's WorldEmber, I'm going to return to a familiar setting - Tiyu Amara. After a long and messy year, going back to a setting I enjoy will hopefully be a good place to find some words and creativity, especially after burning out on an unrelated Nanowrimo project.
I will ideally be focusing on the east coast of the continent of Thurásin, which has received less development to date. However, I won't restrict myself to that area if I get ideas for other parts of the continent that have more written down.

Week 2 - Mini-Meta

While Thurásin's east is a diverse place, the uniting thread is the legacy of the continent-spanning Urisoril Empire. Though it left scars across Thurásin, it originated in the east, and its old heartland struggles with its ruins. It also grapples with the effects of the Collision, which brought elves to the continent as well as many strange locations. And, in more recent years, the arrival of merfolk off the east coast - something almost unique to the region, as the merfolk have yet to expand to the frigid north or into more dangerous western waters.
Within this area, there will be a lot of different things I can explore. I will likely focus on individuals, organisations, and conflicts, as those interest me more than things like creatures or buildings.

Eastern Thurásin Moodboard by Denis Degioanni, Giga Khurtsilava, Johannes Plenio, Collins Lesulie, and Tijs van Leur

Week 3 - Organisation

Since I've been working on Tiyu Amara for around 4 years, it has a lot of articles and a decent amount of bloat. This was especially visible in the way I had chosen to categorise the various regions of Thurásin, with individual categories for each country within broader regional categories. While this made sense early on, when I had big plans to flesh out each country in great depth, it seems a little silly now, and looked awful in the TOC.
With the prep as inspiration, I tweaked the organisation to have a 'countries' category in each of those regions, and nestled things like capital cities and major historical figures directly under the relevant country articles. Just that small tweak has made the TOC look way better, at least to me.
I also made an index page, which lists every (published) article in alphabetical order, as well as a character index page for tracking characters. I can't remember who gave me the tagging system, but I think it was Satrium (or certainly someone just as clever with technology!). I might make more indices in the future as a way of keeping track of types of article in a somewhat easier-to-digest format than the back-end article view.
A happy byproduct of going through and tagging all articles, and categorising a few, is I have found a lot more articles set in eastern Thurásin than I had thought. It seems that I had the exact same idea last year for WorldEmber, and I'd completely forgotten! I still think it will be good to focus on that region due to its rich history and some parts of it still being unexplored, but it might be good to designate a 'back-up' region. Perhaps the north? Who knows!

Tiyu Amara TOC before Reorganisation

Tiyu Amara TOC after Reorganisation

Week 4 - Presentation

Underwater by Daniel Newman

Snowy Mountain Lake by fynn

Tiyu Amara has had its CSS theme for the last two years, and it's something I'd love to change. However, due to work, I haven't had time to complete an overhaul before WorldEmber, and so will have to postpone a rework until January, or at least late December. Similarly, work has meant I can't pre-draw any article banners for relevant topics.
As such, the bulk of my preparation on this front will be tracking down some new royalty free images and editing them to my usual dimensions (1920x750), so I will have some suitable atmospheric and representative images for banners and sidebar inserts. I've included 2 of them here, but I'll be tracking a few more down in the leadup to WorldEmber, as well as figuring out what articles I'll work on out the gate!
One of my criteria for images like these is whether they can be used for multiple locations as a representation of an idea - if they're too specific to an article, then that might be better served with something hand-made. For instance, the underwater image can be used for many merfolk articles, the snowy mountains for many areas of the far north as well as the highest peaks throughout the setting, etc.