WorldEmber 2022
My WorldEmber Pledge
It's my fourth WorldEmber, but only my third intentional one! I have the badge for 2019, but that year I wasn't part of the community and didn't actually know what I was doing. Since I started joining World Anvil events in the plague year of 2020, my world building and writing has grown by leaps and bounds. I'm so grateful to World Anvil and the community for encouraging and enabling the creative parts of myself that I thought were long dead.
The Plan and the Project
This year, I'm intending to use World Ember to fill out stub articles that are lingering around. Some of them are as old as my site here, and some are fresh from brand new writing I've done as recently as this week! In addition, I want to challenge myself to write some fiction. I pledge to write short stories set in my world from the point of view of those living in it. I want to include everyone from the most powerful down to children and common people.
Mini-Meta
I'll be writing short stories and articles from the points of view of the people of my world. I'm thinking of writing "Day in the Life" stories about the following topics.
- Create a cast of characters, dramatis personae, who live around the Zone and center them in the stories.
- What do the Days of the Week feel like for the Personae?
- How do they feel about the big celebrations? Anamas, Celebration of Children, the Benediction of the Heavenly Council.
- Theme: Day in the Life, POV
- Inspiration: Greek choruses, the ordinary people in the recent A.X.E.: Judgment Day event from Marvel Comics.
Organization & Clean Up
This is a good opportunity to do some maintenance on my site! Lots of uncategorized articles to arrange and a good time to think about my tagging. In general, I'm very happy with the categorization system I've cobbled together over the past few years!
Organizing Characters
As I'm going through my articles, I'm finding lots and lots of character articles and I'm not quite sure how to arrange them! We'll see where I land. Possibilities include:
- Putting all of them in the Personæ category and then adding sub-categories
- Alphabetical Tagging
- Putting characters under location/organization as relevant.
- Creating an index and then making that the Personae category page
After I wrote that, I definitely went in and took the entire afternoon/evening to categorize all my uncategorized articles. I also went through and tagged/indexed all my characters! Check them out on the Personae page!
Making Things Pretty
Playing Around with CSS
I am defintely not lacking in ideas for using CSS to spruce up my page. I just need the brain space to think about how I want to employ them.
In the past I've definitely gone "CSS First/Content Last" and I need to watch that. But you can do so many cool things with a bit of CSS!
Days of the Week
Elemental
Shadow
Prime
Bifrost
Faerie
Heaven
Shatter
Fully Utilizing Image Resources
Days of the Week in the Kirinal Pit
Map art by: Cartographer Ellysium. Days art by: grandfailure
Days of the Week in the Kirinal Pit
Map art by: Cartographer Ellysium https://www.worldanvil.com/w/the-cartographer-ellysium Days art by: grandfailure https://depositphotos.com/portfolio-3584689.html
Eldritch Knight at Chagroth Tower
Chris L - Heroforge figure. Gillian Galang - Chagroth's Tower Art
Elenwe Paladin of Chaos
Kirinal Pit Header
Map art by: Cartographer Ellysium. Days art by: grandfailure
Laela's Organic Bowls
Lance Uppercut and the Triple Eclipse
Legion of Light Units at Bulwark of Light.jpg
Nia and the Blackjack
Ratcatcher Yum's Hot Rats
Spark and the Reliquary Drive
I've put a lot of time and resources into developing a library of images from a variety of sources that I can use. I'd prefer to commssion artists for everything I use, but until Wizard's Peak is paying for itself, I'm only one person! So I use a combination of commissions, stock images, character/dungeon generators, and AI image generators.
My favorite new thing to do is to composite them all together. I've been loving the results!
I've been generating images in Midjourney and editing them in Photoshop. MJ eyes can get wonky, so I use neural filters in PS to fix them.
I've been making full use of the ability to import HeroForge figures into Dungeon Alchemist dungeons.
Good luck, my friend! And hey, if you need any help with short stories and advice or inspiration or whatever, let me know. Short stories are my speciality.
I'll take you up on that! Thanks for the offer!
For your consideration, my submissions for the WorldAnvil Worldbuilding Awards 2024. (I've also included some of my favorites other worldbuilders.)