Using World Anvil for Campaign Management

Yesterday I posted about using Fantasy Grounds (read it here), which is a pretty cool piece of software, but I'm also using World Anvil for campaign management in my upcoming game set in the World of Othe. My plan is to also write fairly diligently for the setting, then turn that writing into content for the Othenar game that'll be based on the Hammercalled ruleset.

The number one reason why I'm using World Anvil is because it's always online, which is one downside of Fantasy Grounds versus Roll20: if my players want to check reference material, it's off-limits for them because of the fact that it's offline.

As far as world creation interface goes, World Anvil is relatively user-friendly; it uses its own form of BBCode, which is pretty simple but also means that you get stuck with a non-WYSIWYG editor. There is a preview function, but it requires pages to be saved first–not a big deal because you could probably fix any issues fairly quickly–which is slightly annoying and means you can accidentally expose unfinished work to the world.

You can search for pretty much any article while you're typing by inserting an @ and then adding a few letters from the title of that article, which works pretty well (though it's sometimes a little spotty) and lets you make links (these links are set in stone; if you edit the page name later it links to an identifier rather than the title, which is something that Mediawiki doesn't do).

A big selling point is that there are article types, which allow you to quickly create relationships between articles to aid in navigation, a feature that's a really big deal for roleplayers and GMs who want to be able to look up information that's relevant to other things. Tags allow you to make searching for content easier, if you reach such a point that it's difficult to begin with.

I have a fancy-pants subscription to World Anvil, which allows me to upload images for my campaigns; the maximum size of individual images and the maximum image limit is pretty generous and I have had a good experience with it, though it is something that requires an out-of-editor step to upload the content. World Anvil also lets any subscriber customize the themes of their worlds, which includes some really cool themes right out of the box, including the one shown below.

Preview of what your reader would see on World Anvil

Another nice thing is that it has Google Maps style interactive maps, which can be used to link to pages just as easily as any other article can. That's a good touch

Very WIP map of part of a continent for the Othenar setting, shown on World Anvil. Notice the pin over one of the villages: this is a link that takes you to the page. I need to figure out a good Wonderdraft->World Anvil workflow, though I'm not unhappy with this as it stands.

I'm thinking that I'm going to use World Anvil for my upcoming campaign set in the Othenar universe and for other Othenar stuff. I'm thinking about starting another Steem account to use for just setting-related stuff, and posting stuff three times a week (e.g. actual play, setting dumps, and the like). For now, you can check out my World Anvil setup for Othenar directly.

It's $10/month for the tier I'm at for new members, but there are two lower subscription tiers and free accounts have a pretty generous setup. You can use World Anvil for free without having any significant encumbrances: 100 MB worth of images (with some fairly stringent size restrictions, but nothing being smart about image size and format won't fix), unlimited articles across two worlds, the ability to add timelines and maps, and more. There are ads for the free version, but not for any subscriber (and Grandmasters like myself remove all ads from their worlds, even for non-members).

All-in-all, I think it's a pretty good system, especially if you want to make content available very easily. I've used alternatives like Obsidian Portal, Scabard, and just running my own MediaWiki setup, and World Anvil definitely beats both of those by quite a margin. At Grandmaster tier, it can be significantly pricier than the alternatives, but even at the free tier it offers some options that you'd be hard-pressed to find elsewhere and the lower paid tiers still offer a lot of improvements over similarly priced alternatives.

One thing I will confess, however, is that I haven't used it very much for the actual RPG side of things, since I'm using Fantasy Grounds to handle the game mechanics. For a rulebook-style presentation, it works fairly well, which I've actually done with some of the Unsung Gods content up on my World Anvil page right now, but I haven't used the explicit campaign management features at all.