My Fantasy RPG World, Feedback and Ideas appreciated

One of the lesser known events of World Anvil, is Duckuary 2024.

Here is my entry.

Ducks of Scarterra

In the process of writing this I decided that duck keeping is a part of gnome culture and to a lesser extant Mera culture.

And also, there is a minor gnomish noble in Fumaya named Baron Salryn Blueduck. Here is his family's mighty and impressive standard.



I guess I also decided that gnomish nobles have a tendency to pick disarmingly cute family crests.

And then I did 15 minutes of editing because the above banner had an extra toe on the right foot.

 

I have recently expanded my list of Scarterran idioms by three entries. I haven't added anything to it in a long while.

"demon dust": Salt. Salt does sometimes actually does come from Void demons though not often.

"goblin twin": Two children who are siblings who are not twins but their mother had two children in a row with a very short gap in between pregnancies.

"spark thrower": Derogatory term for a weak or ineffectual mage, especially an invoker.

 

Here are the preliminary sketches for the portraits of the Nine. Full colored and filled portraits should be trickling in soon, starting with Greymoria.



The three evil deities (bottom row) are all holding weapons

The three good deities (top row) all have an open palm

It's not visible yet, but the three neutral (middle row) are going to have contrasting light and dark colors.

It's not visible yet but the Lawful trio (left column) are going to have gold eyes.

It's not visible yet but the Chaotic trio (right column) are going to have cocked eyebrows.

The Neutral trio (middle column) all have symmetrical poses.

Everyone is pictured with their symbol of power. Hallisan's axe, Mera's comb, Zarthus' rapier, Khemra's shield, Korus' flail, Nami's bag of weather, Phidas' mask, Greymoria's helmet of darkness, and Maylar's spear.

 

I semi-randomly fell down a rabbit hole exploring the implications of multicolored sheep.

Sheep of Scarterra

Wool and wool trading

 

I ran a demo, and it went well. Enough that they wanted to play more.

I now have a new gaming group of people I barely know to play ScarterraD10 twice a month. We just had our "Session Zero".

Since I'm running the game with people I barely know rather than running for my oldest friends, this should help me figure out if Scarterra and the ScarterraD10 system has mass appeal or not. And they can help me iron out small wrinkles.

Already it is has been pointed out that some of my Conjuration spells are ambiguously worded. It just so happens that my oldest friends aren't particularly fond of conjuration magic and one of the new guys is playing a Conjurer.

 

Adventure April 2024 is an informal contest for submitting an RPG adventure or short story.

I opted to do both. It's same adventure though packaged in different ways. The Lustria-Online norm is for short stories to be 500 to 2500 words but technically a a short story is 1000 to 7500 words. My short story is about 4000 words.

I kind of want to write more. Thought it based on an RPG campaign I actually ran and it's on the Fantasy Author Checklist to NOT do that. I may try to novelize my friend and I's campaign anyway.

Here is the RPG Adventure

Here is the "Short" Story.

 

I haven't written much on this thread in a while.

My wool article is now my most liked article of all time. Go figure. It helps that I submitted it to two events. World Anvil events don't really have big prizes, but the more events and contests I participate in, the more eyeballs Scarterra gets.

Scheduling issues are difficult with my new group but the sessions we have are good so far and it's helping me iron out some wrinkles in my game system.

Speaking of scheduling issues, my first RPG campaign with my friends has ended due to changing scheduling issues. I'm thinking of starting a new campaign with half veterans, half newbies, if I can get over the scheduling hurdles. Along those lines, I'm renewing my prior offer if anyone on Lustria-Online wants to try to get involved in a Discord RPG.

The portraits of the Nine are shaping up well.

I'm taking exploratory steps towards getting my game system published. Rules wise, I need to flesh out the equipment/shopping prices a little bit more, revamp the upper levels of divine Divination, and revamp all of divine Hexing, and make golems a bit more reasonably priced. Then I'll have the material for a full RPG book. I just need to work on introductory fluff pieces, art, graphic design, publishing, and marketing....easy right?

I'm having productive writing days of fiction, it remains much easier for me to write world building than fiction.

I recently made a gratuitous article on how ale houses work and how spell-casting can be used to clean things and made a potion shopping page to help new players in my world.

I've made a lot of minor art changes and graphic design layout changes to older articles to improve the curb appeal of my Scarterra site.

Also, a tree fell on my roof and caused a bunch of damage. My insurance is going to cover most of this, but this is certainly eating my time that could otherwise be used for Scarterra.

 

July is Summer Camp 2024 on World Anvil. Essentially we get Pokemon Gym Badges for writing responses to the 31 prompts.

Each of the 31 prompts has a mini-contest with a small prize for the "best". The "best" is based on the subjective judgement on the person who sponsored the prize, but for me the prize is more eyeballs on Scarterra. Active participation in this event usually nets me a few new followers.

July is "Summer Camp", so June is June is "Summer Camp Prep Month" Prep month is optional and my prep article is here if you are interested, but for me personally, the most interesting part of prep is to see if I can improve the aesthetics and navigability of my website and articles.

I have not had any complaints about the navigability of my website, the Table of Contents seems to work. Admittedly I don't update my glossary as much as I should but I don't believe anyone uses it.

Anyway aesthetics. I thought I'd check out the most popular World Anvil sites in terms of followers. The most obvious commonality between most of the most-popular World Anvil sites are cool maps with pins that link to related to articles. I have two adequate maps but I can do better.

I can dabble with the CSS code. That's a good long-term goal, but I doubt I'll make much headway on that before July.

Here are the top five World Anvil Worlds in terms of subscribers.

Spoiler: Links and my half-assed first impressions

#1 Dark-Fall

I guess if I copied him I want to update Scarterra's logo to make it more professional. Dark-Fall's art is all fairly simple but elegant and it blends in seamlessly with the background.

It's not about quantity. Scarterra has far more articles than Dark-Fall and Dark-Fall doesn't put new stuff out every week like I do.

#2 Cathedris

I was already following this world because it's a cool premise. All the gods are dead but the corpses of the god are effectively colossal zombies repeating whatever their last conscious action was making them giant permanent natural disasters.

Like Scarterra, Cathedris uses a lot of pictures, but Cathedris uses more dynamic formatting and mixes the use of landscape and portrait orientation pictures better than I do.

Cathedris just has an awesome general aesthetic that I'm not sure I could steal if I wanted to.

#3 Pekkola, I didn't think his World Anvil site was that special, but then I found out that he quit World Anvil a year ago and left his site up. He is in third place just from historical inertia!

And the guy is doing exactly what I want to do. He is marketing an independent RPG system, based on d10s none the less. I subscribed to his Discord server but I don't know if there is anything I can learn from his zombie World Anvil page.

#4 Melior

As far as I can tell, Melior is either an employee of World Anvil or is friends with one of the creators. But he is not coasting on nepotism, he provides a lot resources and tools for new World Anvil members, which he sells, but for fairly low prices.

His fantasy world is well thought out. He tends to write very little except for Summer Camp and Worldember where he goes all out, then he rests until the next major event and he uses the interim to edit and revise the stuff he wrote during contest. For Worldember I think he pretty much also cinches first place for highest word count.

He has a small amount of art but it's good and he makes it all himself.

He certainly wields CSS code well

#5 Ethnis, it's sci-fi, not fantasy, but this site is doing what I want to do and serving as the base for an independent RPG system.

The pictures are nice but the layout is a bit of an eye-sore to me. Maybe it's a personal preference for fantasy over sci-fi.

Any way, I am planning to respond to all 31 prompts. I'm not going to put all 31 prompts on this thread. I'm going to post a link to my contest index page and post the articles I am submitting for contests.

 

All the cool kids are customizing their own backgrounds but here are the backgrounds I can choose from World Anvil if I don't want to put time or money into a custom background. I kind of do want to make a custom background but I have not made up my mind of what that background would look like.

Spoiler: Screenshots of my website with different styles

Elven Forest


These are the Voyages


Wild West Steam


Modern Spaceships


Area 51



Cyberpunk 2020


Eldritch Horror

 

Spoiler: More Potential Themes

Worldember theme (what I normally use)



Stranger Worlds





Summer Camp 2019





White Out



Sirens


Saltmarsh



The Great Game Master


Dungeons and Dragons


Deven Rue


Dead House Sonata

 

Spoiler: Last one I swear

Galaxy Anvil



Bright Fantasy



Rust


Spirel


Opulent


Your world, darkly



Zen


Stars


Notebook


Scripture

 

I bought the rights to the domain scarterra.com, I am converting my website so one doesn't need "https://www.worldanvil.com/w/scarterra-scalenex" (though the original link will also link)

I was told my World Anvil page will be a little buggy for a couple days during the transition.

 

I tried Scarterra.com from another server and...



The next presentation step is to re-work my logo and introduction. I'm also looking into alternate color schemes and fonts and potentially different layouts for the table of contents.

 

Summer Camp 2024 has begun, 10 prompts have revealed thus far. They are eventually going to release 40 prompts. I need 32 prompts by August 3rd to get the diamond badge. At the time of this writing, I have three prompts completed.

I got a small chance of winning a few small prizes but I'm mostly participating to get extra eyeballs on Scarterra and hopefully get a few new subscribers.

Here is the main Summer Camp 2024 challenge page

Here is my Summer Camp 2024 page

There is a prompt I'm especially interested in "A Myth About Food"

Ancient Chinese folklore has a lot of interesting myths about food.

One story I like is Ox was sent by the gods to promise a struggling humanity one meal every three days but Ox got his lines wrong and promised three meals every day.

In order to keep his promise, Ox had to pull plows to help their agriculture.

There is another Ancient Chinese story I like involving a boy tricking a dragon who was extorting a village for their food. If Garfield and Friends can steal the story, so can I.

I'm pondering adding some pizzazz to the story by making it a mermaid or merlad tricking a dragon.

I just need to figure out what kind of food an agrarian mer-village would produce.

 

Thoughts on Scaraquan Meal Prep

So I was thinking about a food based story for Scaraqua and I got on a tangent. What do Scaraquans eat?

Seafood, duh.

But more than that, just looking at starchy foods: we humans have various kinds of bread, noodles, tortillas, and then you have potatoes.



Obviously Scaraquans can eat fish, mollusks, and crustaceans for protein and various kinds of aquatic plants. I assume they have sea starches that are analogous to potatoes, rice, wheat, barley, etc. I assume they have tastier but less filling sea produce akin to fruits and vegetables.

But Scaraquans cooking food is a bit weird.



EDIT: Here is the link to finished project

I have an idea. It's basically very similar to sushi, but I need to tweak the concept to make it different and give it a cool fantasy name. Maybe something Latin-esque or "dinner pearls".

Basically, you start with with a dead edible sea creature and remove the bones or shell, then pack it with sea starches and sea produce. Wrap it in edible sea weed or a hardening paste and treat the wrapper with spices. Specifically spices that Scaraquans like the taste of, but wild animals do not like the taste of.

This both flavors the food, allows it for long-term storage, and it gives Scaraquans access to meals in portable "to-go" containers.

There would be hundreds of variants on this type of meal depending on what ingredients are available and what the personal preference of the Scaraquan chef. Also, they might have to adjust the spices they used based on what repels the local wildlife and what does not. May sea pepper will keep eels away from your food stores but it won't keep crabs from it, crabs are repelled by sea ginger.

I figured merfolk, astalakians, and ojiongo all claim that they invented the concept first or else that the concept was taught by whoever their favorite deity is.

Karakhai generally prefer to chomp their food the "natural way" but they will eat these Not-Sushi rolls if convenient.

 

I got five Summer Camp prompts thus far, putting me on pace.

Here are my favorite two.

"The Mermaid and the Dragon"

The Storm House Eatery