WorldEmber 2018 challenge

At the end of last month, after realizing that all my worldbuilding notes were (and still are) scattered about several Homebrewery and Google Docs documents, I finally decided to stop being lazy and migrate (at least some) of my content to WorldAnvil so I can keep everything organized in one place.

And turns out this month, they're hosting the WorldEmber 2018 challenge. For those familiar with the concept, WorldAmber pretty much works like the D&D version of NanoWrimo, that happens every year in November. You are challenged to write 10,000 words of new content for your worldbuilding notes.

The meter will only count the words of new articles you created specifically during this month though, any older articles you already had won't be counted, even if you write more stuff in them. On the same note, any articles from the separate section before the D&D Beyond area (timelines, maps, secrets, historical events...) also don't count. However, you can use this for more than just building your world; if your world is already done, you can use it to draw your campaign, by writing plots and adventures for example.

I wasn't aware of the WorldEmber challenge until the 2nd week of December, so I've already arrived late to this party. Also, I've seen some people from the community literally write all the 10,000 words in one day, which can be quite intimidating. English not being my first language, I don't really know all the fancy words and adjectives that you can use to embellish and expand on your text and turn a 10-word sentence into a 15-20 word sentence like I can do in my own language. When I try using WorldAnvil's templates to try guiding me on my worldbuilding process, I mostly end up with cryptic messages and bullet points.

With that being said, I currently have 6397 words (63.97% completed) of progress. And that makes me simultaneously proud and nervous. I am proud because I never thought I'd even get past the 1k words mark and I'm already over halfway there. On the other hand, I am really running out of things to write about.

WorldAnvil has all these amazing templates on different things you might need to build your world... but I still hadn't come up with any of those for my world and I am just terrible at improvising. Also, some of the things I had already come up with (such as my Pantheon of Deities) they don't have a template for yet. Ergo, what I ended up doing, was creating a couple Generic Articles and simply dumping all my random unsorted unorganized notes in there. That's pretty much how I went from the 3k mark to the 6k mark.

But now I am also running out of notes as well! I feel like the rest of my notes will probably put me somewhere between the 7k and the 8k mark. Which means I have no idea how the heck I'm going to come up with something to reach the final 2000 words. Will I be able to ever finish this challenge on time, especially since it's the Holidays and my computer time might get cut down when I'm supposed to just hang around with family? I guess we'll find out.

Edit: Only a few days after I posted this article, I managed to finish writing the 10k words.

What about you? Have you ever joined the NanoWrimo challenge? Did you join the WoldEmber challenge this year? Let me know in the comments bellow.