Jo B.

Disclaimer: I am not an employee or sponsored by the World Anvil Team. I am a regular guy who runs RPG games, and landed on getting into World Anvil after a long time considering what to use as a forum when getting deep into world building. I wanted the best, and after a long period of investigation I ended up with World Anvil. No regrets there. And the software just keep impressing me of how much you can do, but yet how little you "have" to do to world build, write articles, or upload maps and pictures.

You decide how much work and effort you want to pour into your world building. World Anvil is perfect for regular authors and creators, and excellent for perfectionists with all of the tools at your disposal.

World Anvil has existed for several years now, and they´ve grown a lot as a software provider since 2017.

What I like about World Anvil is what seems like an unlimited number of ways and tools to create your world. Be it as an author to write books, or to utilize as a forum to provide for yourself as a GM (articles, wikis to search, and ways to organize your work and world, maps, images, family trees, diplomacy trees, organisation trees) or as a Virtual Tabletop manager for your games supported by Foundry. WA and Foundry has gone into a collaboration and teamwork, so anything you have made in WA will be fully syncronisable in Foundry Virtual Tabletop (virtual map software like Roll20). Great for running combat or to showcase anything from World Anvil like pictures, articles or the manipulatable world maps etc.

So far they have about 1,5 million subscribers and a living and breathing community on Discord who are happy to help new comers and old veterans with any questions they may have. Even the Devs and owners of World Anvil are suddenly in direct contact with you when for instance reporting a bug or a problem. I got help from Dimitri (the man himself) directly with an issue I had with, where we found out I had just done a mistype. But he helped me nonetheless.

They even run streams quite often, to talk and listen to us users and the community. Providing forums to discuss topics for world building, provide people who teach us watching how to create fictional main characters, a villian, how geography functions, how to make more realistic maps, plus much much more. They even arrange competitions and grant rewards for the worlds that are voted as top products etc.

The best part is that the Devs at WA listen to us users, and they even have a request function where we can suggest changes, upgrades or new futures we want. People can see these threads and vote them up. If enough users vote yes for this or Dimitri thinks the suggestions are good, World Anvil will implement the change or create whatever was requested.

There are some other types of software products out there for world building or authoring, but you will not be disappointed by World Anvil. It takes some time to learn ALL the ropes (which is not required to start to effectively world build), but youtube is overflowing with video tutorials to guide you the whole way, and like I wrote earlier; full of users happy to answer your questions on discord or to even help you directly over chat, video chat, voice chat and guide you through whatever you needed help with.