My Fantasy RPG World, Feedback and Ideas appreciated

I have much art in the pipeline.

Diana Rathfoth is working on a grootslang illustration right now.

Harper James is working on elemental themed trolls.

Zeta Gardner is working on some gnomes when it gets done with his vacation.

I just need to get over some indecision with the trolls and gnomes. I'm going for an air troll with flying squirrel-like arms, a firebreathing fire troll, a thick skinned earth troll and an amphibious water troll but I need to make up my mind on facial features.

All I got so far is big, ugly, pointy teeth, clawed hands.

Tusks, yes or no? Big ears or little ears? What shape of ears? What style of noses? How hairy should they be? How scaly should they be?

The grootslang, I have a pretty good idea what I want, and I already got some preliminary sketches. Scaly snake body patterned off of zebra cobra. Elephant head with tusk/fang hybrids.

I am probably going with the general snake pose in sketch 8 and the people position in sketch 7

 

The finished troll art should be done in a week or two and Worldember 2024 has begun. Four articles so far and half of them involve hats.

Gnomes and Phrygian Hats





Scarterran Hat Culture in General

 

According to the ranking I'm in 8th place by Word Count but this hasn't been updated in 2 days. I'm 4000 words above this


Based on previous Worldember, 7th through 10th place is usually where I hover, so nothing new there.

My daily viewership is up from previous years but not by a crazy amount.

I'm trying to have more visuals and tighter editing than previous years.

Anyway, here is the main Worldember 2024 page

Here is my personal Worldember 2024 page.

And here is the cornerstone of my Worldember 2024, my overview article for comparing Medieval Earth to Scarterra, which currently has six new satellite articles: hats, privacy, attitudes towards strangers, banking and usury, effects of magic on crop yields.

And two old articles I wrote long ago and added to the index in, messengers and farmers.

I guess I can't not make indexes...

 

They finally updated the leader board, I guess I slipped down a bit ranking wise.



Here are some links to articles I have recently written for Worldember include but are not limited to. You check out all my Worldember 2024 entries here.

Why humans are the dominant race in Scarterra

It took me a lot of retries and rephrasing to get a good AI image of an ice sculpture of a duck. For some reason, most pictures had an icy body but an orange living bill.


Blueduck Ice Garden

It also took me a while to approximate what Scarterran ice cream would look like. Note is a very large serving of "Fumayan Apple Snow"


I invented a concept for Scarterra called "Blue Rain Houses" which are sort of like medieval fantasy Air BNBs. For the moment I have given up on on getting Midjourney to create a medieval peasants house with a blue door or a blue rainbow.

Thinking Medieval Series, things that are very similar between Scarterra and Medieval Europe

Scarterrans and privacy

Market days

Market fairs

Scarterrans' love/hate relationship with strangers

Expectations for rich people to stay "respectable"

 

I didn't go as crazy as I usually do for Worldember. My final word count was 84,040 and I ended up in 11th place by word count.

Number ten had 99,406 words and number twelve had 80,040 words.

Most of my efforts was comparing and contrasting real Earth medieval history and cultural versus Scarterra's fictional history and culture. I wouldn't be Scalenex without a grand index of links that is still ongoing and here it is.

Overview of Scarterra versus Medieval Earth

It's possible that I have bots on scarterra.com. It's scary how many bots Lustria-Online has. Bot cleaning was the main reason wise and mighty Red Devil moved the server recently. But let's assume that World Anvil and Scarterra are not bot-ridden.

My website is steadily increasing in daily views. I'm over 1000 views/day now.

I have three artists I provide business too now.

I got some commissioned troll art recently, I just haven't updated all my troll articles to incorporate them. I have a really awesome grootslang commission in the pipeline that should be ready in a week or two.

I got some gnome portraits in the pipeline as well.

I am commissioning the art because I guess my mom liked to patronize artists and that rubbed off on me, but I figure I might as well as get art customized to my specifications, but most of the art is something I can hypothetically use in an RPG book of some sort.

At the start of 2025, my goal is to have my ducks in a row in order to peddle Scarterra in early 2026.

Progress is slow, there aren't a lot of intellectual property lawyers in "flyover country" where I live, and they are slow to get back to me.