WorldEmber 2025 Pledge: 50K!

Actually, let's just do 10K.

UPDATE: A couple weeks after posting my pledge, a call went out to the members of the theater production my wife is a part of. They were looking for people to fill a few spots on the crew, and I volunteered! This is going to be a LOT of fun for me and I'm excited to take part in it. Unfortunately, being a part of the crew is going to completely eat up my weekends for the month of December. With that, I am going to drop my pledge to the base 10,000.
  I will leave the original post below to share my thought process before my December got taken away by theater.

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The time is upon us! I've done WorldEmber twice before, in 2020 and 2023, though this will be the first time I do a significant amount of planning for it beforehand. This is for a very good reason as I am actually committing to a major goal: 50,000 Words! In my previous WE runs, I had set an initial goal of 10,000 and then decided to extend to 25K after reaching 10,000 fairly quickly. This time, I've decided that I'm going to just go hard for the top badge.
  View my article list: WE2025 Tracker
 

Why 50K?

There are a number of positive things that I believe will be encouraging for me to reach this fairly extreme goal.

1. I am currently running an active Daggerheart campaign in my world, which means I'm spending a fair amount of time actively thinking about my setting
2. My spouse is in a musical in December, which means I'll be having a lot of evenings on my own and writing is a much more constructive way to spend that time than playing video gamesand I discovered I like macha lattes so I actually have something to drink there now
3. We've got a housemate helping with evening chores, which makes it a lot easier for me to transition from Work Brain into Writing Brain.
4. There's a neat coffee shop in town with a really nice vibe, and I discovered I like macha lattes so I actually have something to drink there now

 

What Might Work Against Me?

1. In the last few years' of writing I feel like I've covered a lot of the low-hanging fruit so I'll have to dig a bit deeper
2. I stopped using AI artwork and stripped it from my site earlier this year. That's unequivocally a good thing but I did really like using it as a pseudo writing prompt (get an image for a page, use that to inspire). It might have been a crutch for me in 2023.
3. It's just SO MUCH WRITING!

 

What Will I Write About?

There are three main areas that I believe I will be able to focus on that will enable me to meet the writing goal.

1. Earlier this year, I wrote a Campaign Frame for Daggerheart. That helped me establish a lot of lore surrounding the Korth'an Forest in my setting, a place I hadn't really done much work in yet. I established a number of organizations, expanded the details on the map, and planted a lot of seeds. I'm also running a campaign set there right now. So I will have a lot of fresh ground to cover in this region, which means a lot of articles!
2. I would like to write one or two more campaign frames in my setting. One will definitely be set in the Savage Lands, another area that is largely a skeleton. The total word count on the articles in the first frame was around 10,000. Doing that again will be 20% of the goal, which is a nice chunk! If I write two of them - not an insumountable task as there's an established format for these documents - that's over a third of the way to the goal.
3. I've done so much writing about the character of the world itself but I haven't done anything about the actual characters that make up this world. While my worldbuilding focus is often about creating a playground for players (geogaphy and generalities are easy for my mind to create) I should definitely spend a bit of effort on populating the world with people that can make appearances in games and stories!

 

What About Your Homework?

WorldEmber Prep for this year has a "bingo card" of homework assignments! Here is the row that I've chosen to work on. I'll go through these over the next couple of weeks and link to the resulting notes from here.