If you’re looking to get serious about world building, whether that be for your next book, a video game, your next DND campaign, or just because you plain feel like world building, then you’ve likely heard about the many world building tools that exist out there for people to use. I’ve actually done a post on my blog before about ten of the best world building tools, with paid and free options on there, but today, I’ll actually be going in-depth with one of the most popular options on the list to give you my honest review and opinions on World Anvil.
What is World Anvil?
World Anvil is a world building tool that allows you to create a page for your world where you organize information about things like the countries in your world, the religions, the magic systems, and more.
World Anvil takes the wiki-style idea and lets you interlink pages, create in-depth articles, and let your world grow over the course of you building it. It was one of the first tools I used when I first started getting more serious about world building and it has a lot going for it.
World Anvil is a really popular tool among authors, RPG designers, game masters, and more. As an author myself, I find that World Anvil has a lot of benefits to it and I find that it’s a really nice tool.
World Anvil Pricing and Plans
World Anvil does include a free plan, but to access more unlimited features, you do need to pay a sum of money. I’ll go through each plan as well as the different billing periods you can choose.
Freeman
The Freeman is the free version of World Anvil and it’s a great way to sort of play around with the system and learn how to use it before you commit to the subscription system.
Here’s what you get access to in the Freeman version:
- 2 worlds/universes
- 5/42 Articles
- Article Templates
- 2 Maps
- 2 Timelines
- 20 Statblocks
- World data exporting
- 100 MB of storage (1 MB Max Uploads / 3.5 MB for maps)
Under the Freeman plan though, your work is all available publicly so you can’t set your world to private. Anyone can find it searching online.
It’s also quite limited in what it includes from an overall sense, as most of the neat features, novel writing tools and similar advanced tools.
Master
Master is the next tier up and it includes everything in the free tier with higher limits and some extra features:
- 2 GB of storage
- 4 co-authors
- 10 subscribers
- 10 RPG Campaigns
- 10 worlds
- Unlimited articles, maps, timelines, manuscripts, notebooks, TODO items, whiteboards, variables, discussion boards, manuscripts, chronicles, and calendars
- Content privacy
- No ads
- 25+ visual themes and CSS styling
- Advanced maps
- Novel writing software
- Family trees & diplomacy webs
The Master tier would be good for someone who wants more features but doesn’t really want to pay too much. However, it’s still relatively limited compared to the other tiers.
Grandmaster
The Grandmaster tier includes everything from the Master tier with higher limits and more features:
- 5 GB of storage
- 9 co-authors
- 100 subscribers
- 20 RPG campaigns
- Infinite worlds
- Unlimited articles, maps, timelines, manuscripts, notebooks, TODO items, whiteboards, variables, discussion boards, manuscripts, chronicles, and calendars
- All map features
- Content trees
- Advanced styling
- Custom templates
- Custom statblocks
- Random generators
- API access for applications
Sage
The final and largest tier available is the Sage and this one is recommended more for professional and published authors as it includes a very large amount of extra features, but it’s nearly double the price of the Grandmaster tier:
- 15 GB Storage
- 20 co-authors
- 1000 subscribers
- Unlimited RPG campaigns
- Unlimited worlds
- Unlimited articles, maps, timelines, manuscripts, notebooks, TODO items, whiteboards, variables, discussion boards, manuscripts, chronicles, and calendars
- White labeled worlds
- Custom domain for your world
- Mass-access management
- Advanced access sharing
- Professional seminars
- Freelance program
How to World Build with World Anvil
Step 1: Create a World
The first thing you’ll need to do when you create an account is create a new world. I’ve got a screenshot below of what that will look like. Depending on what tier you’re using, you may have a limited number of worlds to create or you may not.
Once you’ve created the world, you will land on this dashboard where you can see the articles you can create as well as all the other tools and features available to you.
Step 2: Add Articles to Your World
There are many different kinds of article templates that are included in World Anvil. You can also create your own, but the templates are great for getting started if you want some ideas on what to add to your world.
Below is a screenshot of what it looks like when you’re filling information out in an article. For reference, I used the “country” article type.
Step 3: Organize Your Content
The next thing you’ll want to do after you’ve created so many articles is to organize the articles into categories so you can keep things clear to you when you’re working on your world building.
As you can see, I showed what it looks like when you organize and don’t organize. It’s obvious that organizing the articles into folders is much better for keeping track of your world.
World Anvil Extra Features
There are quite a lot of extra features in World Anvil if you’re willing to upgrade.
Maps
World Anvil allows you to insert a premade map and then add interactive icons that connect to your world building. So, World Anvil isn’t for map-making, but it does help for making your maps interactive with your articles.
Manuscript
One of the more interesting features in World Anvil has to be the manuscript writing addition. I’ve talked before about writing tools like Scrivener, which I am a huge fan of. The novel writing tool in World Anvil follows relatively the same idea as Scrivener with its novel writing system as well.
A neat thing about World Anvil’s novel writing system is that you can reference your world building articles as you’re writing your manuscript, which is really helpful so you don’t need to flip to another page or app just to write your manuscript and world build.
Timelines
Timelines are another available feature where you can put events into context and see how they look in an overall sense. It’s a great way to keep track of the different things happening in your world as well as a way to keep track of how events impact other events.
Chronicles
Chronicles are another recent addition to World Anvil that allows for you to create a sort of interactive record of events and locations that happen in your world. You can sort of combine the timeline with your map, linking the timeline’s events to areas in your map to help you put things into even more context.
Family Trees and Bloodlines
Family trees and bloodlines allow you to organize your characters and their families, connecting the different relations in one tree to make it easier for you from a visual standpoint.
Is World Anvil Good for World Building?
World Anvil is overall a really robust service and it has a lot of great features that really help with the overall world building process.
There are a lot of tutorials, explanations, and help articles available from the World Anvil team that can help you if you’re feeling a little lost or just aren’t sure about certain things in the world building process.
I think what’s nice about World Anvil is that if you’re not really sure where to get started in the world building journey, then the articles really help give you a headstart. You’ll be able to get a lot of basic elements down with a template at your disposal, meaning that you don’t need to think of all the elements yourself. There’s also the ability to create your own articles and customize your world as you want.
As far as a service, World Anvil is a really comprehensive one but there is something that I wasn’t a huge fan of when it came to World Anvil: The learning curve.
I think when it comes to world building, it can already feel complicated enough to figure everything out. The problem with World Anvil is that even though there are lots of articles, it can be a bit hard to follow along and then figure out all the systems.
There are also a lot of features in World Anvil that are more tailored for DND and RPGs than just books, so there may be some things that you won’t have to use at all.
At the end of the day though, World Anvil is great. If you find that the free version works really well for your story, then you should consider upgrading, as the free version is honestly limited.
If you want to check out some World Anvil alternatives, then you can read this article on the best world building tools. You can also read my article on Scrivener where I talk about how to world build and write your novel in the same app. It’ll just require some more customization on your point.
Before you head on out, you should check out my series, The Fallen Age Saga and sign up for my newsletter to get updates on my latest WIPs, books, posts, and more.