Worldember 2026 Prep

How magic can help make money (besides adventuring)
  What do magic guilds actually do?
  How the god Phidas prevents currency debasement
  What do Scarterran clerics wear?
  What are the Nine Hells of Scartera like?
  What happens if a soul of the dead is marked for divine punishment AND divine reward simultaneously?
  Padding the monster roster
  Padding the Scarquan mortal roster
  Coming up with new localized mortal fantasy races
  Fleshing out the details of the Divine Rebellion

Prepare your art

Tidy upy our image gallery

  I'm always working on this. especially this type of year.
  I have four broad categories of art.
  Public domain/creative commons (predominantly from Pexels)
  Professional art comissions (predominantly from Zeta Gardner)
  AI art (predominantly from Midjourney).
  Hero Forge portraits, a lot of them made by my friend and honorary editor.
 
  I joined World Anvil in later 2021. Worldember 2021 it was mostly a matter of taking my copious piles of notes into articles, but they were walls of text.
  By Worldember 2022, I wanted to break up my walls of text with pictures...any pictures. I dipped my toes in the water on using Hero Forge's character design feature to make character portraits.
  By Worldember 2023, I painstakingly removed any and all pictures that I didn't have explicit legal permission to use. I started comissioning a couple professional artists, Me and my friend made a LOT of Hero Forge portraits.
  For 2024, I started playing around with different AI art programs and found I liked Midjourney best. I had established a good working relationship with Zeta Gardner. She she helped bring the Nine to life made me very happy. I upgraded to World Anvil's sage program and registered www.scarterra.com as a domain name.
  For 2025 I continued comissioning to Zeta to do a few pictures when her schedule permitted it. I put a lot more mileage on Midjourney and upgraded to their premium packaged. I made hundreds of MJ images
  For 2026, Zeta Gardner is still doing good work. Midjourney is on version 8 now and my skills at wording prompts is getting bit. My recent articles have a lot more pictures in them than my older aritcles, though I've been revamping my old articles often.
 
  I had a DeviantArt for a long time account but I didn't use it a whole lot until recently. DeviantArt is mostly AI images now. So I looked at the sea of AI images and thought, why not put my AI pictures on it. At least my better ones. And each and every image has a hyperlink to my World Anvil website.
  I understand that "AI" is kind of a dirty word in some circles. I think an AI picture is better than no picture at all and I don't have enough money to comission a human artist to illustrate every article, only the most important articles. And none of my non-AI art is on DeviantArt. If you want the good stuff, you have to come here.
  It was brought to my attention that image heavy articles on my websites are slow to load. Basic internet research determined that a webp image file takes up a tiny fraction of the memory that a PNG image file requires. The last couple of weeks, I have finished converting all my Midjourney pictures from PNG to webp, and there were hundreds of them. While I was doing so, I tidyed them up just in the process of going over all of them.
  Some of the older pictures kind of sucked, so I retired them and made new Midjourney V8 pictures to replace them. Pictures created with V8 are really high definition, so I really have to convert them to webp to not bog down my pages, but it's easier to do that going forward than to go through an old archive.
  Most of my non-Midjourney art is in JPEG form. Condensing a JPEG to a webp makes a much smaller difference than converting a PNG, so I'm not going to bother with unless a particularly unusually dense picture is causing a problem.
  I started phasing out some of my Hero Forge portraits with comissioned art or AI art. at least for the more important characters. I only dipped my toe in the water on that. That's probably going to be a 2027 task.
 

Expand on a draft from the past

  Well I kind of already did this. When I get new art, I tend to go over any and all article that could use the art. Zeta recently made a bunch of dwarf art, so I revamped my main dwarves article not long ago. To a lesser extent I revamped by spirit loas article.
  I've been experimenting with Midjourney prompts and image seeds to see if I could make more consistent AI characters, Brigid the adventurer was my test subject so I also revamped Brigid's article.
  Early on, I got carried away with the hyperlink function and a lot of my oldest articles have way too many hyperlinks in them. I went back to a lot of them and did some pruning.

Tidy up your categories: Been there, done that. Organizations, icons, header images. Recently I updated the The Purple Cow of Death who acts as a place holder for missing images. She is Chaotic Mootral.
 
  I suppose I should make a portrait style version of her, the current version is below
 
 

Write a 300 word intro to your world

  I finetuned my world's elevator pitch and my world primer in 2024. It seemed to be well received. Don't need to fix what isn't broke.
 

Plan your writing schedule

  Every spare moment, that's when I work on Scarterra always.
 

Get yourfavorite beverage in stock

  I work in a grocery store. I can buy any food or drink I need while leaving work, so I don't have to stock up on anything.
 
 

Prepare your playlist

  I'm pretty much always listening to music or reruns of my favorite animes in the background. My big three favorite Animes are Frieren, Apothecary Diaries, and Spy X Family.
 

Find an accountability buddy

  I got a friend who tell me if there are glaring typos or plot contradictions in my articles. That's good enough.
 

Review your world inspirations

  Not every day, but certainly every week I rewatch some episode, clip, or analysis of LOTR or Frieren or Harry Potter or some other beloved fantasy genre. I also watch a lot of video about real world classical and medieval history.
 

Prepare your research

  This sort of blends in to the inspirations. Research is something I do all the time, Worldember or no. The Grainbound and Just in Time Worldbuilding are two Youtubers I only discovered recently. It's mostly stuff I knew already, but the repetition and succinct presentation styles are handy guides.
 

Make a quick map

 
  I got a couple crude maps already, but I'd like to make better maps. A year or two ago, I changed my goal from creating a Scarterra world map to creating a map of central West Colasia, where the vast majority of my stories are centered.
  I got a crude map of Fumayan and Swynfaredia on notebook paper. I plan to expand on this eventually. I'm not good at making maps, but I'm really meticulous and picky about geography, so I can't outsource this to a comissioned artist or AI.
  If I get a crude map with distances clearly markeed, I can THEN outsource it. "like this but prettier." That's a 2027 thing...or maybe a 2028 or 2029 thing.
 

Create a myth in your world

  I kind of do this all the time. Scarterra is rooted in my love of medieval fantasy and my love of Classical Greek mythology.
 

Review your stubs

  I got most of my stubs cleared for Worldember 2025, but I got three or four left. I might as well give them a look. I also slowly collecting random WA prompts that might be worth writing about.
 

Refresh your author signature

  I hadn't considered that. I'll give it a look.
 
 

Create your pledge document!

  I'm a Badge Goblin, so I got to write 50,000 words to get the badge.
  It is not difficult for me to write 50,000 words. I probably hit at least 20,000 words in a slow month with no contest or special event..
  Worldember 2021: 80,963 words
  Worldember 2022: 100,476 words
  Worldember 2023: 70,135 words
  Worldember 2024: 84,759 words
  Worldember 2025: 61,464 words
  In some years I was overly fixated on climbing the leadership boards. A part of me still wants to do that, but at this point I'm more interested in writing things that people want to read. That's why I put a lot of effort into having more images, and reformatting my images to not bog things down.
  If I just wanted word count, it'd probably be easier if I created a new world and started from scratch, but I'm pretty "Ride or Die" on Scarterra. If I can climb the leaderboards, that's great, if not no biggie.
  I have less direct control over it because it depends on other people's actions, but I'm more interesting in views, likes, and comments than I am in simple word count. I guess i can make a pledge, but that's almost like a dog saying "I pledge to bark at people near my door!"
 
 
 

Set a goal to motivate you

  Setting a word count is not really a meaningful goal. The last couple World Anvils (and Summer Camps) I set a goal to develop 4 or 6 aspects of my lore, and I'm lucky to develop two of them, but I usually come up with a branch of lore I didn't see coming.
  In 2025, I found articles about fashion and clothing in Scarterra were very well received so I can ran with it in Worldember 2025. Along those lines, I'm working with Zeta Gardner to flesh out what Scarterran clerical vestments look like. That project may or may not be completed before Worldember 2026 concludes.
  For Spooktober 2026, I had an initial goal of fleshing out Scarterra's afterlife realms, but I had trouble wrapping them around the Spooktober prompts, so I am likely to kick that can down the road to Worldember 2026. For Spooktober I ended up writing a lot of spell descriptions. I don't know if that's what my loyal fans wanted to read, but I'm currently polishing my RPG system's magic system so it's always on my mind. That's likely to spill over into Worldember. More spell template articles. More articles about magic fits into society. More character bios of spell-casters.
  I frequently say "I want to develop Scaraqua more"...and then I don't. In my wildest dreams, Scarterra is a widely beloved franchise and Scaraqua is a beloved spinoff but I guess realistically I need to get Scarterra devoloped before I worry about spin-offs.
  Another semi-related thing on my "Maybe List" is magic ships. Long ago, my friends and I played the West End Star Wars RPG a lot. The difference between campaigns that were okay and campaigns that we loved to talk about it usually hinged on "did the player characters have a ship they loved." I don't have anything solid yet, but I'm brainstorming ways to add some high fantasy to ships...without going all the way to flying ships. That's a little too epic for Scarterra. But I'm thinking of creating some kind of system where merchant and fishing vessels are historically accurate but the warships are all magically enhanced in some fashion.
  I think Scarterra needs more cool monsters. Cool monsters are hard to think of on the fly, but if I come up with something, I'll do it. Another thing for the "Maybe List" The hard part is a monster needs to be strong enough to be a threat, weak enough to be defeated by PCs adventurers. And I need some explanation for why this dangerous creature wasn't deliberately hunted into extinction. Sometimes I get a good monster in on Worldember, sometimes I don't.
 
 

Read someone else's prep & leave a nice comment

  I'm not opposed to this. I would PREFER to give feedback to actual articles rather than meta articles about making future articles (because that's what I want). I realize that it's ironic or hypocrtical that I'm making a large meta article about making future articles here.
 

Announce your goal on social media

Announce your goal on the community stream

  Not my usual, but I guess I should consider how to promote Scarterra on social media.
 

Create a species in your world

  I usually add a plant or animal every Worldember. I kind of want to add another fantasy mortal race, but Scarterra is getting awfully crowded now, so it's getting harder and harder to squeeze more mortals in.
 

Tidy up your writing space

  Something I should be doing anyway, but am not very fastidious on. As long as I have space for my laptop and exterior keyeboard, I'm fine.
 

Tidy up your author profile

Reread your world introduction or meta

  Sure, why not.