Dear mods,

**Who we are**

I represent World Anvil as its community manager. WA is an upcoming world builder tool, and is envisioned as an alternative to established software like City of Brass and Obsidian Portal which focus on RPG campaign-oriented worldbuilding, whereas World Anvil takes the approach of World first, campaign second and focuses on writers as much as RPG worldbuilders.

We have been released for less than a month and during this month we are featuring a #mapvember competition on our discord, wherein the goal is to produce one map a day in November on a pre-set theme. Due to the small size of our community, and the inherent artistic talent required we have had limited participation in this competition (although we have had a few users who do submit on a regular basis). However, during this time, we have had our userbase grow to more than 2000 members, with more than 400 members engaged in our discord community, discussing many aspects of worldbuilding.

We are also engaged with #WyattNPC #Play4Wyatt and we are promoting worldbuilding as a way to contribute to charity. Please note that this is personally funded by us.

**Monetization**

World Anvil will always be a free product. Our monetization policy is similar to the one that services like Obsidian Portal use, in which users can have a public world and share it with the community for no cost.

Paying users, which in our case are our Patreon supporters, gain access to some additional features and private worlds. For more information regarding those features, please read here: https://www.worldanvil.com/worldbuilders-guild-membership

The Patrons help us as creators to cover the expenses of our servers, storage space, and ancillary services used for the support of the website (email operator, domain registrars, 3rd party applications used for development, subscriptions for 3rd party applications etc.). Due to its recent success, we are also able to be provided with some small financial return on our incredibly long hours of development. We are a team of two, husband and wife, that spend over 12 hours a day working on World Anvil. We never thought the website would become so popular so quickly, but we now hope that since the tool is really appreciated by the worldbuilding community, that we could dedicate our working days to it at some point.

All features provided to our Patrons are not essential for the typical worldbuilder and would only serve a specific audience of professionals or semi-professional writers/world builders/game makers

**Worldember 2017**

For the month of December, we are planning to host a worldbuilding competition as explained below:

The summary being “Worldember 2017: 1 world, 31 days, 6000 words”; the concept is similar to NaNoWriMo, but for worldbuilding, with tangible physical rewards.

We personally feel that the target of 6000 words is a very achievable target and will foster many discussions on both the subreddit and World Anvil in the following respects:

**Feedback requests:** We envision this would be the primary mode of interaction, as worldbuilders would use all tools available at their disposal to interact and gain feedback on their work

**Inspiration:** We feel that with the achievable target and the prospect of earning rewards, Worldember will encourage a higher than usual number of participants to take part in our competition, thereby forming a pool of worlds from which other worldbuilders can draw inspiration.

**Long-term worldbuilding:** Ultimately, we hope that this project would foster and encourage long term worldbuilding, as it will demonstrate worldbuilding is fun to do when done collectively, and worldbuilders will have a world to come back to and develop further.

**Encouraging worldbuilding** With prizes over £100 to be won, we hope that this competition would also encourage new worldbuliders alike to take their first step in worldbuilidng.

***To that end, we would like to run the following message through your reddit community, if it is okay with you?***

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**MESSAGE BEGINS**
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**What is World Anvil?**
World Anvil is a free, upcoming world building toolset that will help you structure and organise your world as you create it.

Built from the ground it helps you construct worlds, manage characters, organisations and the relationships connecting all of them. You can create timelines to link every battle, disaster and event across all your eras in one fluid continuity. Upload your maps, from the largest galaxy to the smallest tavern, pin your locations and link to all the articles you’ve just written. Have an idea but don’t know all the details yet? Doesn’t matter! With World Anvil you can link to articles you’ve not even written yet to help your writing flow.

**What is the Worldember competition?**
With more upcoming features, we are currently opening our beta to everyone who registers till the 15th of December. Why? Because we are about to host the inaugural #WorldEmber2017 - a challenge for all in our friendly and creative community to write 6000 World Building words in December.

With badges, physical prizes and a little bit of kudos to be won, there’s never a better time to come and join World Anvil and forge a world of your creation. Check out the video below (https://youtu.be/6YI9IYEiG-o) and our interview with Nerdarchy (https://youtu.be/eJHDsOw6hHc) for more details!

**Register using this link!: http://bit.ly/Worldember**
**Join our Discord community using this link!: http://bit.ly/WADiscord**

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6YI9IYEiG-o
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJHDsOw6hHc

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**MESSAGE ENDS**
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We hope that we can count on your support when we roll out the Worldember challenge, as the involvement of the reddit community would mean a great deal to us. We believe that working together can really benefit the both communities, create engagement and inspire worldbuilders and potential worldbuilders alike.

You can catch me by PM, or on discord Raka#9844 in the server link above

Thanks!

Pradeep