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World Anvil has character sheets for most popular RPG systems (and then some), but if you're playing an unsupported system or are designing your own, you can create your own statblock templates! You can then use the template to create statblocks and character sheets as usual.
Important: this is a technical advanced feature that involves coding and requires HTML, CSS, and TWIG skills in order to give you total freedom with the block's design and structure. This guide will only explain how the feature is integrated into World Anvil.
1. Set up your world
To design a custom statblock template, go to the Sheets Studio:
- On the top menu bar, select "Studio".
- Then, select the "Sheets & Blocks" option.
The interface will look like this:
Choosing an RPG system
On the right area of that page you'll see a button for every RPG system that's been set up on your world. To add a new system:
- On the left sidebar, click the gear icon and then the double gears to access the world configuration.
- In the basic settings tab, find the Role Playing System drop-down and select the one you want to create a template for.
- Save changes.
If you're designing your own system, click here to request its addition to the drop-down.
2. Create the template
After clicking the create button in the Sheets Studio, you'll see this interface:
Use it to define the basic details of the sheet (name and, optionally, description). You'll be able to change this later.
3. Edit the template
The interface to edit a statblock template has two modes:
- Parts Configuration Mode: in this mode, you can add new user-fillable fields to the template.
- Display Mode: here you can define how statblocks created with this template will look, using HTML for structure, CSS for style, and TWIG for logic.
When you edit a template, it opens in Parts Configuration Mode by default. To switch to Display Mode, use the button at the top right:
Parts configuration mode
These are the options available in this interface:
- Add part widget: This is a form where you can set up a new field. Just fill in the fields as desired, and click the "Add Template Part" button. Under the right panels you'll find a "Need help?" button with an explanation of what each field does.
- YAML driver import: If you're familiar with the YAML file format, you can set up the template parts in YAML format and import it here. Download the YAML driver example to see an example and more detailed instructions.
- Update description: You can update the block template's description here.
- Duplicate block template: Clicking this button will create an identical template in your Sheets Studio.
- Share template with players: Click this button if you want your players to create character sheets on World Anvil using your template. Your players need to be invited into a campaign.
Display mode
Display mode is divided into different tabs, each with its own purpose:
- Basic sheet: this is the full version of the sheet and you must use it if you want your template to be usable! To get started, use the auto-generated code in the "Sheet Structure Boilerplate" text box at the bottom. This code will generate a usable sheetm, but it won't be pretty.
- Tracking sheet (optional): if you design a tracking sheet, you'll be able to embed your sheet in a special format that will let anyone with access to that article to edit it. It's also used automatically used in the Digital Storyteller Screen.
- Badge sheet (optional): the badge sheet is an abbreviated version of the full block. For example, in D&D, the badge sheet could include the character's race, class, and basic attributes. This is used in RPG character profiles but can also be embedded anywhere with BBCode.
- CSS: this is where you can write the CSS for all three sheet formats.
- Edit form (optional): use this tab to change what the edit form for statblocks looks like. This is unnecessary in most cases, so we recommend you skip it. If you want to do it anyway, you can get started with the auto-generated boilerplate code at the bottom.
On the right side, you can click the "Need help?" button to get some basic TWIG help.
Help & Resources
We can't help with questions involving HTML, CSS, TWIG, or YAML; but here are some useful resources to get you started:
- Official TWIG documentation
- World Anvil Discord server, which has a #twig-help channel.
- Community Codex guide, with a step-by-step sheet creation process.
- Tillerz' sheet creation checklist, which includes a very useful script that will save you time.
