WorldEmber 2022

WorldEmber 2022 Pledge

"I, Chrispy_0, Pledge to write 75,000 words of worldbuilding in the World of Vreathe, and 75,000 words of worldbuilding in the Cairn Sector. I make this promise to myself, my followers and readers."

- Chrispy_0

Why 150,000 words?

Well, I wrote 100,377 words last year, and while I did get the badge for the most words written due to others at the top not being eligible, I didn't even make the top five on the leaderboard the entire month of December....okay, yeah, sure, fine, why not, alright then. Guess I have to write a stupidly large number of words this year too.

Why two worlds?

Because avoiding boredom and burnout is easy when I have two vastly different projects to jump between. I have a medieval fantasy setting, and an alien science fiction setting. That's literally my only secret to avoiding burnout and writing 100,000 words last year. If you feel burnout coming on, it's possible that you're just getting bored, in which case, switch it up and do something different. If I get burned out of both worlds, I'll (re)start a third world, which has an urban fantasy theme.

The many things I plan to write about...

I am constantly updating and adding information to Vreathe and Cairn Sector. One is my Fantasy world, and the other is my Science Fiction world. While I did slow down work on my sci fi world in order to restart my fantasy world, I am planning to do more or less equal work on both during World Ember. Neither is more important than the other. My goals involving both is to simply expand the worlds more.

Vreathe

Kingdoms of Cassel

Last year, I was worldbuilding Cassel under a different name: Madora. This is because I was focusing on a different time period, but, without the history of the land before that point or even a starting point for the culture, everything was a mess.

This year, after I completely restarted the world, I chose a different time period to build around, and for Cassel, I have the culture I want to use as a base as well (broadly medieval/ early-modern Spanish, with the land becoming more French or Italian depending on the area). I also have several extensive maps made already.

That said, most of my writing next month will be picking a barony on the map and describing that location (I have 151 to at least describe in some detail, and about six that have to be written about in great detail, soo...I got a way to go). Knowing what cultures I have in mind will help with naming locations on the map and describing other smaller details.

Magic system and related stuff

Last year I was trying to hammer out things like how healing potions work without even figuring out the magic system of this world yet. This year I have that figured out and will be able to quickly make additions to the magic system.

The main goal with this is continue to write about the Chemical Elements and how they interact with mana. I only got to Silicon this year and had a goal of writing all the way to Uranium. Might also go into some details about magic crystals, spellcasting and such.

Weapons

Being a world set with early-modern technology in mind, there's lots of old muskets, and plenty of swords and other weapons. I am hoping to describe at least one legendary weapon, as well as describe how muskets work in this world. Some are your usual flintlocks, but many are also magically powered.

Dragon Lords and their Impact Craters

There were 14 dragon lords that rose in the Golden Age and fell in the Silver Age. Their deaths forever altered the landscape. Two of those dragon lords, Maeos and Xiralgus, were killed within the lands of Cassel. I described them in little detail here and there, I think they should have a full article made at some point next month.

Cairn Sector

Nation of Vefaria

This year I started hammering out Vennek, the Fevarik Religion. I still have a lot of work to do on it. I need to put my research and words down on the rest of the Fevarik culture and write about that. Really, I also need to just start an article about the Nation of Vefaria in general. It is long past time I actually write about the primary location in this setting. As far as the culture goes, I am combining aspects of East Asia and Mesoamerica.

Food

Last year, I wrote around a dozen articles about various prepared foods. I made some changes to the Fevarik culture this year, so I kind of need to start some things over... Just like last year, any new article about a prepared food I make will feature images of actual food that I make during the month of November and December.

Earlier this year, I also made a Glossary article about various food sources that the Regalti use. there are 44 total and each is described in around 50 words. Four of them have an article of their own. I am planning to expand many of them into full species articles and describe the various ways in more detail that the Regalti use them for food, as well as other purposes. Also, since I have an idea of the cultures I want to use, I need to create/edit a few more food sources so it all makes sense.

The Black River creatures

Also earlier this year, I wrote an article about the primary river system that runs through Vefaria. There are over a dozen animals that I have images for and a few dozen words for. I am planning to turn those into full articles sometime next month.

Technology

I did several days worth of research into how various futuristic weapon systems work, as well as how various futurisitic spaceship engines work, life support systems, etc. If I get really bored during Worldember, I can write numerous articles about these weapons, similar in length and format to articles I did in the past. I also generated over a hundred images of various spaceships and space guns in Midjourney.I have several of the weapon images edited and ready to use, but the spaceship images I need to edit still.

Challenges to hitting 150K words

The challenges are many....

I need to type roughly 4800 words a day... Last year, the number was closer to 3200. There were only 4 days last year I typed more than 4800 words.

I work for a living... And there is always an end of the year crunch. I managed to spit out 100,000 words last year despite working 50-60 hour weeks. This year is going to be about the same.

Burnout... I definitely experienced it at the end of last year. There were several days around Christmas that I didn't get anything written. Hopefully that doesn't happen this year, but it is a possibility.

writing pitfalls... I've deleted/hid over half of the World Ember articles I made last year. The writing quality just wasn't that good, or it ended up being way too similar to (insert well-known book series here). While I am hoping to change that for this year, we'll see. Writing 150,000 words in a month is sure to turn out a Gem or two, but also many, many examples of poor worldbuilding.

Things to do before December...

Create template images for article headers. Preferably in a way that readers know what kind of article it is going to be by looking at the image, but also an image that can be reused constantly.

Edit my Blueprint Articles. Already completed articles that I use as blueprints when writing others. Also, all my blueprint/template articles are in the Cairn Sector. I have none on Vreathe.

The look of my Species articles I am happy with (Skyshells and Cloud Flowers).

Need to make a proper template for my element articles.

The Roilen M21 weapon article is a good starting point for any weapon article I create, but it could use more work.

Going to use an entirely different blueprint article for my fantasy weapons. ((11/21/2022 Fixed two weapon articles, Silverfish, and Kren Aurdel. All my fantasy weapons will now use these articles as a general template/style guide.))

I don't have a good template article for food.

I don't have a good template article for Locations. Best I got is Shattered Plains

I do have a good article to use as a template for characters and have used it several times, though it needs some work before it is useable in the World of Vreathe:: Elya Sarai

Gather more images. I will never have enough...

Update Character portraits on other pages.

Tidy up the CSS. I made the theme for this world even darker for better contrast, but that did mess with some of my formatting and images. Need to fix that before next month...

Tidy up old articles. Should set me up nicely to expand these aspects of my worlds.

Need to edit some things in my Fevarik Religion Article, as well as my Regalti Food Sources article

I need to finish the Kingdoms of Cassel article, and need to redo some things in my Magic article.

Write a proper world intro for the main pages. This goes for both world. I don't even have more than two sentences for either of them and there is no hook for people to know what to expect. I need to work on that this month too.

Images

The rest of this article are just a collection of images I am planning to use next month. I do wish I could have made more art on my own this year, but I will admit that Midjourney has made me very...lazy. There are the maps that are mostly made by me (I use Wonderdraft to place the mountains, oherwise it's all in GIMP), and there are the images of several animals that I drew myself earlier in the year. I hope to do better next year because many of these things I have the skill to do myself.

Maps

I have many more maps than this of my two worlds, but I will be using these two sets the most during World Ember

Cassel Political Divisions

5 Kingdoms within the larger country. 3 Human, 2 elven.

21 Counties within the Human kingdoms.

151 Baronies between the human and elven kingdoms.

The original resolution of the full base map is 8150x5000. This allows me to go to 100% zoom on any individual barony I want and still be able to make a decently detailed map image when I label it with cities and other locations. Also, I do not have it fully made yet and I am not sure if I will succeed before December starts but I am going to try to make a satellite view like I did to my science fiction world, which you can see to the right.

An example of a zoomed in map section is below. Still debating two things: Make map full color; draw in borders.

Map of Vefaria

These maps are made from a continent scale map I already made in 2021. Last year, I added to my Worldember word count by zooming in on a location and then writing about the location. I also made several articles about cities in the area. The Same thing will happen this year but the focus will only be on this specific country instead of anywhere else on the continent.

Also, the land area in this map is more than twice that in the maps to the left but is half the resolution, so it unfortunately only has 25% of the detail. I need to remake the map at the country level but I don't have time to do it this year.

An example of a zoomed in location is shown below. There are two versions that are usually shown, a satellite view, and an elevation map.

Satellite

Elevation

Creatures

Mostly images I made for the river Challenge. Many were made in Midjourney. These are all for the Cairn Sector. While Vreathe is a fantasy world, it for the most part has regular animals. There are magically powered ones, corrupted by Aether and Dragon Magic, but I am unsure how I want them to look for now.

Magic Rings

Due to how the chemical elements work on Vreathe (Copper, Silver, Gold are the best magic conductors) and how magic storage works (crystals store large amounts of mana and aether), it makes sense for many magic items in the world to be made in the form of rings, amulets, armlets, bangles, etc. The five above are the ones I want to write about, but there are potentially dozens...

Guns, Glorious Guns! (and some blades too)

I do like my guns, and I like having them in my worlds regardless of time period or genre. The Cairn Sector has various Alien races so I can go crazy with the weapons I want to use, though the main Alien Race, the Regalti, have a tendency to use coil guns and rail guns. Vreathe takes place in the Early-Modern period, equivelant to 1500-1600's Europe, so think of muskets. Since magic is also a thing, many guns are powered by that instead of gunpowder.

Vreathe Guns (and Blades]

Cairn Sector Guns

Character art

Vreathe Only. Midjourney is seriously powerful and I'm able to, with the right prompts, generate full body concept drawings of just about any character I can imagine. There are issues though. The AI is as bad at drawing hands as I am, and it can't seem to do a consistent style for the face (even when I specify). Also, version 4 maxes out at 1024 by 1024 resolution, so images may be a little blurry. with some editing on my part, it will work as a very temporary solution for World Ember. I still need to do a little more editing and cleanup on the images.

11/16/2022 - turns out that Midjourney v4 is pretty good (as in utterly amazing) as upscaling images to full portraits, even from the blurry messes it generated for the full body images below. Using them, I managed to generate high(er) resolution portrait images. The art styles are even more unified, well, sort of. Also, Xana is the only character where I made her art style different on purpose.

11/22/2022 - Yeah, I can't stop screwing with Midjourney..Added even more portraits. Changed Renelle's portrait to look closer in style to everyone elses. Slightly edited Isaac to reflect that he is a half-elf.

Sayd (Vyerin)

Cida

Sera

Thames

Renelle

Isaac

Ithonida

Isolde

Xana

Aerynn

Cassel Kings and Queens

((No full body images))

King Vernador XX

Former High King of all Cassel

Aria Kiyran

Elven Royalty from Ledo

King Vernador XX

King of the South

King Brenon

King of the North

Queen Marya

Irellith Noble and Brenon's Wife

Queen Larielle

Queen of the West

Misc Cairn Sector Stuff

Skirmish For Terra Logo

Video game created by Regalti and Vusinor developers. Being aliens, there are details about this version of Earth that are...off. Also, one of my alien characters is a big fan of the game, and three of my human character play it with her.

Regalti flying Car

These vehicles hover off the road using rapidly rotating iron bearings, and use 4 electric turbofan engines to fly in the air when flight is required.

Elya's Car

My main alien character has one of these flying cars of her own. It's been sitting in her parent's garage for the last two years since she's been in the military.

I have a several year old article explaining how these cars work, but none of it was very good. Might need a rewrite before WorldEmber starts so details in these newer articles make sense...

Shrine of the Moon Veil

Elya Sarai's family shrine.

Shrine of the Forest Dog

Kaline Serna's family shrine. ((yeah the two look similar. I might change this one a little...))

Various Corporate Logos

Because what kind of post-modern/futuristic society would it be if there weren't various unimaginably greedy corporations floating about, even in an alien society?

Art of Rain

Cleaned up Midjourney image (had to fix hand and face among other things) showing a Regalti woman in traditional clothing and holding a staff, one of the weapons used in the Kedon Art of Rain. Not sure if I'll get around to explaining this martial art in detail next month, but I am working on gathering images for the articles of each of the four arts (rain, fire, air, earth) incase I do.

On a side note, expect most Regalti art to be much more anime centric than the rest, just, you know, with sharp ears and different colored skin and hair.

Art of Ash (Fire)

Cleaned up Midjourney image (hands, face, legs, hair, image was strangely cut off at the bottom, etc.) of a Regalti woman in traditional clothing and holding two short clubs, one of the weapons used in the Art of Ash.

On another side note, I kind of enjoy generating midjourney images, then spending the hour or two (in this case, almost four hours) to clean them up to make them look proper, way quicker than trying to draw/color a detailed image like this with my limited art skills....I need to get back into the practice of drawing daily or I'll never improve....