Robe of Useful Items for Story Creation.
Story creation is a MESS. My creation process is a mess. Your process is also a mess. Don’t lie to me, that is not. I can see from up here one hundred word documents lying at your Google Drive.
World, politics, economics, races, nations, characters, magic, twisted plotlines. It’s not even a full list of what you probably want to consider, when you work on your story or RPG campaign. All of it would be spread through-out dozens then hundreds of articles situated across folders and word documents.
Did I already tell ya that story creation is a mess?
Good.
Because now I will share with you knowledge about a magic item that could help you bring some sense of an order in that kingdom of chaos.
Light up the forge!
World Anvil. Robe of Useful Items for a Story Creation.
Every task requires a fitting tool. As well as a Robe of Useful items, World Anvil can provide some handy things.
I will pay attention only to the two features that I like the most. I mean, I try to write a short story about World Anvil here and not god dammit novel. Those guys are nuts and have way too many features to fit in one short blog post.
Also, I’m a lazy ass and not paid for writing that post. I do it because of appreciation for their work.
Anyway.
Templates is the one of those two features. It doesn’t matter what aspect of your world or story you need to cover by writing an article, World Anvil has a template for it. Each template has numbers of sub topics and questions to answer in respective text areas. It’s especially helpful if you only dive into storytelling and don’t have an idea what you should do.
Next good thing is navigation. It’s just easy. Relation and tag systems create a natural environment for hopping between articles and reading or editing them on the fly. It’s handy for frequent jumping between notes and articles as the project grows. Without it, you probably will feel like Bilbo and Company in Mirkwood. Where are Gandalf and ring damned trail?!
These two functions help to create a nice and smooth story creation process based on the cloud.
Now let’s look on a few examples how those two things with some additional stuff can help you make your story shine.
Worldbuilding
Net. That word came to my mind when I thought about worldbuilding; it’s actually another word, but I’m trying to be polite. All threads in a net are interconnected and create a cohesive, believable world. At least the illusion of it.
It could be not a lot of them, just enough to fit on one page, because the scale or focus of the story doesn’t require a lot of world building (heresy), just a little of smoke and mirrors work.
But if you read that blog, you probably kin to create something BIG. So big in fact that it could get out of hand fast. At that scale, World Anvil will shine.
Imagine yourself creating D&D campaign that heavily relies on political intrigues. Politics means factions. It means their origin, leaders, agenda, goal, resources, political power, relations with other factions. It’s mean… headache. Especially the last one. Especially if you have a googol (it’s ten with a hundred zeros, yes I’m showing off) number of factions.
So, you created a bunch of faction/political organizations using magnificent templates. You can use superior navigation tools to jump in between their respective articles, but what they think about each other, who allied for whom and who wants to kill each other?
New feature — Diplomacy Web will help you. I know that I said that I will go through only two features, but hey, I need examples and they would be about the same thing without extra features!
So, Diplomacy web. Long story short, it’s a relation chart creation feature. It is simple to use. You go to the faction article by using magnificent navigation tools and click add diplomacy relations. Relations could be from -100 which stands for “I will Ceaser you out from existents” and 100 which stands for “I will catch a bullet for you, buddy.”
With this simple feature combination, you can create a complex political situation for your setting and manage not to be entangled in the diplomatic web.
Inhale soul in that fellow!
Each story has a character. The story can not exist without at least one protagonist. For example, “Castaway” it’s a story with a single human being; sorry Wilson but you just a ball, I miss you though.
But what if you have a lot of characters, noble families, several of them?
Insert bloodlines.
It’s a handy feature that helps you keep a track who and how related to whom, who is father, mother, brother, etc. It’s handy both in RPG games and Fictional stories.
Here a situation. You have a character. You feel up a template and TADA you have a protagonist. Goal of that character is to become the next heir of the family. But oh no, she is 13th to inherit the position of family head, boohoo. Guess it’s stubby-stubby time or poison time, I dunno it’s your character.
Here, bloodline would be handy. We don’t want to kill an aunt or uncle that has no chances to inherit the head position. By tracking a bloodline and line of inheritance, we can navigate our characters to the position of the most loved daughter (by murder).
Also, using character articles, we can out there all decisions that our ambitious maniac made. Or relations with people she killed, before she did that. We can track character’s every single step; this sounded wrong, but whatever.
Conclusion
So you have it. The magic item to help you with the creation of your story.
It’s way more there for World Anvil. The World Anvil team recently rolled out their manuscript editor, now you can write an entire book from idea to draft 4 using only their web up, for example.
Give it a try and Light Up the Forge already for story gods sake!