Worldember Prep 2024, Onward for Scarterra

Week One

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Pledge Your Goal

My goal is to exceed 50,000 words. This is a smaller goal than previous years but I want to deliver better quality.

TLDR on my goal setting now and in the past

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In a typical month, I write 30,000 words, so hitting 50,000 words for Worldember is not that much of a stretch. Last year, I wrote 155 articles totaling 70,135 words for Worldember 2023. I got 9th place for word count and 6th place for number of articles. Before that I wrote 164 articles totaling 100,476 words for World Anvil 2022. I got 11th place for word count and 10th place for number of articles. I wrote 261 articles for 80,963 words in World Anvil 2021. I don't remember if I was even of Worldember 2020. I joined World Anvil in November 2020. I had been working on Scarterra for years before I joined World Anvil and I didn't finish converting the last of all my old notes to World Anvil until Worldember 2021. I was sort of obssessed with clinging to the top ten chart. A lot of my articles was unnecessarily filling family trees with long-dead nobles, especially in 2021. It was fun to come up with short interesting vignettes of their lives but it won't help much in the terms of running RPGs or writing stories although we did have an RPG session where the PCs called on some spirits of the dead for information during of day of remembrance holiday. This year, I am slowing down a bit in terms of word count ouput. I'm putting out less output of words but I'm trying to edit my work better and include more dynamic formatting, more flavor quotes and more visual art. As long as I hit 50,000 words, I'll be satisfied. If I get on a roll and claw into the top ten, that's nice but not required.

Choose Your Area of Focus

[h3[Wait Just One? Everytime I have an idea that I think sounds like a fun idea but it is not directly applicable to any of my RPG campaigns, WIP stories, or WIP RPG book, I add to my Idea Bank. I dipped into my Idea Bank a little bit for My Summer Camp 2024 and Spooktober 2024 but surprisingly little of these ideas could be adapted to the prompts given. So I can unleash my madness fully for Worldember 2024. But a large portion of my Idea Bank does fit around a central theme. "Thinking Medieval" The last year (and the year before that, and the year before that) I've been binge watching a lot of Youtube videos on different aspects of real world medieval history. Scarterra, like many fantasy setting, is loosely based on Earth's medieval era, especially medieval Europe. But Scarterra has multiple sapient species, relatively common and reliable magic, and highly active gods and goddesses. I've got three subheading under thinking medieval. 1) Cultural aspects to Scarterra that are near identical to real world Earth history. 2) Cultural aspects to Scarterra that are the same in core concept but with noticeable tweaks 3) Cultural aspects to Scarterra that completely turn historical Earth norms on their head. I have material to easily get 3-5 juicy articles for each of these. That is not going to be the ONLY thing I write about for Worldember, but these will be the articles I put the most effort and polish on. But I have other minigoals.

Mini Areas of Focus

Scarterra is my most important brainbaby but I want to develop my two Warhammer Fantasy inspired worlds a little bit. Warhammer Scaleverse and Westhammer. I plan to write about more magical items. I plan to flesh out more provinces within my larger countries, especially in the land of Swynfaredia and the land of Fumaya because is this is where the vast majority of my RPG adventures take palce in. I also plan to write about more minor noble houses in two nations. I plan to write about more temples to the Nine and maybe a few Tapukeahs. I want to develop a bit more of Scaraqua, not because its useful but because its fun. Because Scaraqua has more virgin unwritten aspects in it than Scarterra, I can adapt many random prompts to fit under the sea. Scarterra needs more monsters, especially non-humanoid monsters. If I can come up with cool monster concepts, I will do so. It is difficult because I want to stay true to the Three Conflicting Imperatives of RPGs. Given how good humans are driving species into extinction, I need to make sure that any monster I create is strong enough not to be able to driven to extinction but not so strong that they make their habitats no-mans land for humans or demihumans. I plan to flesh out the culture of Scarterran gnomes a bit more. It helps that I have some new gnome art in the pipeline that may or may not be done by the end of December but should definitely be ready by the end of January. And maybe I can fill out gratutious family trees of noble houses a little bit..

Create or Update Your Meta

I kind of already did that last year. But I a lot of stuff along those lines already. Over the last couple of months, I have made a bunch of micro-changes to my table of contents and main page interface. I got professional protraits of all the the Nine and a new kickass logo. I create a subsection of my Table of Contents just to accomodate my growing collection of artwork and visuals, Putting the art in ScARTerra. I upgraded my Worldanvil to Sage, and I registered scarterra.com.

Composite Display of the Nine's portraits by Zeta Gardner

I tinkered with my mainpage and replaced my old 287 world primer with a 48 word elevator pitch. Nine deities work to shore up the battered world of Scarterra while simultaneously undermining each other to advance their own personal agendas. Great mortals can try to rise above the strife to create a better world, or they can exploit the various conflicts to better their own position. I reached out to someone who can help me with the CSS and graphic design of Scarterra's site though that probably won't be ready until after Worldember 2024. I was given the constructive criticism that I should separate the RPG aspects from the lore aspects in my articles better. I haven't got ALL my articles separated out thus far, but I got most of them separated out. Once I debut my new graphic design I plan to have a big box that says "For Scaterra lore, go here!" and one that says "For Scarterra D10 RPG system, go here!" In the meantime I'm punting all my RPG stuff into the bottom of my Table of Contents. I created a Basic Scarterra Primer article replacing the primer that used to be on my homepage. It can probably still use a bit of polish, but I'm reasonably satisfied with it. It has many links to articles covering major tent poles of Scarterra's lore.

Week Two

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Review Your Homepage

As mentioned above, I have crafted a new elevator pitch in mid October. I made some microchanges to the mainpage around this time including swtiching from a two column homepage to a three column headpage per a guideline I saw in another Anvilite's "workshop" video where his page was critiqued by the WA staff. I think it helps, but it only makes a different on computer screens, not smart phones. I removed an old RPG campaign that has fizzled out. I added a new art header to my active RPG campaign. I removed a rough draft map I was not proud of from the main page. Less than a week ago, I added a new category to the table of contents just for art and reorganized my art articles and galleries so Scarterra's art is easier to find. I have been making efforts to improve my overall visualization for my most important articles continuously for roughly two years.

Create or Reveiw your world primer

I wrote a Basic Scarterra Primer not long ago, I think it covers the major bases. Except for theme and mood. Scarterra is a kitchen sink fantasy so that makes it difficult for me to establish a clear theme and mood for Scarterra's meta because I deliberately made Scarterra a sandbox where a very wide array of types of stories can be told. But Scarterra has many smaller regions with localized stories that do have a clear theme and mood. So I took an article from Worldember 2023 and revised and polished it up a lot to serve as a primer for the assorted conflicts and stories in the the Fumaya/Swynfaredia region which is the geographic region of Scarterra that I have developed the most so far for my fiction and RPG adventures.

Set up Community Tools

I reviewed this, I'm not sure what I can do that I haven't done already. I"m open to constructive suggestions if someone has an idea, but I otherwise have no plans here.

CSS Wizardry

I'm working on outsourcing this. If I can get some new graphic designed implented before December, that's great. If it takes longer, I'm not going to shed any tears.

by me with Midjourney

Week 3 and 4

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I skimmed over the official prep suggestions. Unlike the Week 1 and Week 2 suggestion, I don't believe they have much value for me personally. But I have assigned myself some week 3 an week 4 homework. Worldember is about worldbuilding, articles about gameplay violate the spirit of Worldember, but I have some game play ideas rattling around my head that I want to write articles about, so I'm getting them done before November ends. Noble NPC Generator Roleplaying versus Roll-playing, social interactions Optimization of PC Stats Reduce, Reuse, Recycle for Game Masters