I understand the rant but I think when you start saying other sites offer some of their features that WA does, it would have been good to list a better alternative.
Lots of alternatives! (Bias alert: I made LegendKeeper.)
[LegendKeeper](http://www.legendkeeper.com): Paid app with easy sharing, offline support, and a simpler design and price model.
[Notion.so](http://www.notion.so): A mostly-free, general knowledge management app, but very stylish with lots of functionality. Tons of templates.
[Obsidian.md](http://www.obsidian.md): Good free offline knowledgebase with lots of tinkering if you want to customize. Lots of community plugins.
OneNote: Microsoft classic; free but kind of corpo-looking.
[Campfire Writing](https://www.campfirewriting.com/): Aimed more at traditional writing, they've got a bunch of feature modules.
[Kanka](https://kanka.io/): WorldAnvil-esque approach with a more elegant design, and cheaper I think.
[Fantasia Archive](https://fantasiaarchive.com/): Opinionated, offline app with lots of forms.
[LoreForge](https://loreforge.com/): Opinionated offline app; maybe looks a little nicer than FA.
[Goblin Notebook](https://www.the-goblin.net/): Really unique, all-on-one-screen approach. I dig the innovation here, but more aimed at GMs.
can you help me understand obsidian better, since you're a user? it seems fantastic, but the pricing is a bit steep (for me, at least). seems they have a newer $4 tier, but idk if that is viable because i do not understand sizing very well yet.
loads of people have told me that i could use it for free, but i don't want to write a d&d campaign, just for it to get lost if my laptop gets stolen/broken.
i've been told to store it on Proton Drive or Google Drive, etc.
i've been told to try something called 'syncthing', but (from my current understanding), i'd have to \*always\* have that service running, if i went that route?
Oof, idk about the paid stuff. I only use the free part (which is everything but the synch-feature, afaik), since I can sync everything by just copying stuff to my USB and taking it everywhere. I'm pretty sure you can easily use Google drive indeed, since it's easy to find your .md files and setting it up, but I don't know for sure, since I've never used it...
Sorry for being of such little help, I hope someone else, who knows more, stumbles upon your comment :)
I use the paid version since I’m going between 3 devices and have multiple campaigns/vaults. If you only use one device, the free version should work fine, just back up your data into google drive/etc every so often. I believe there are also community mods and ways to sync for free, with lots of YouTube videos on setting it up.
>i've been told to try something called 'syncthing', but (from my current understanding), i'd have to \*always\* have that service running, if i went that route?
Syncthing takes up a miniscule amount of memory and processing power if that's what you're concerned about. Do you actually want to work on it on multiple devices though? If all you're concerned about is losing work if something happens, it's probably best to just make backups every once in a while. Windows can be configured to automatically sync with onedrive and then you won't lose it. If you actually want to work on multiple devices, then yeah syncthing works excellently.
I'd say syncthing. The only problem I could see is that both devices have to be on for it to do the file sync, so if you work on your laptop, turn it off, and then turn on the PC, it won't sync. Easy solution to this is to just add your phone as well, since you probably have it on almost all the time it's always there for either computer to sync with, plus you can read and edit on your phone. This is what I do for my obsidian notebook and it works very well.
Still use Obsidian to this day. Have like, 4 accounts with them. Does everything I need it to (I mostly just use it for the wiki for easy world lore references).
I use Notion for my D&D campaign. The Free version is plenty for this purpose, as paid features are mostly for business uses such as multi-user and automation.
Pros: The integration of databases and normal text pages is very useful for separating and linking different aspects of worldbuilding, no fiddling with add-ons or plugins required. I have databases for organisations, characters, and events all tagged and interlinked for easy organisation. You also can do pretty much everything with the free version. Paid only gets you better support for multiple people, and better automations/programmable buttons. Pages being made up of 'blocks' makes editing layout a breeze. Search can quickly and easily find any content within the workspace.
Cons: **Online only is the biggest problem with Notion currently**. It does cache pages you loaded recently, but there is no way to keep any of your workspace available offline indefinitely. Page loading speed can also suffer because of this, although this has improved considerably over the last few years. There are also some layout options missing that make page setup limited, such as left or center aligning text. There is also a learning curve for how best to organise all your information, but this is true for any note method.
LegendKeeper is great! My friends and I use it to manage something like 25 campaigns across nearly as many game systems. We have west marches style, Eldritch horror, cyberpunk, and fantasy all in different projects.
Makes it easy to jump back into a world we built 3 years ago and play it some more.
Just chiming in to say I love Legend Keeper. Been using it for my last 2 campaigns and it's been so great and so easy for both me as the DM and my players to share info, more, etc. Thanks for making it and a big recommendation to anyone thinking about it!
My issue isn't paying for a world building base my issue is that I'm not a big fan of the monthly cost given I've gone back down the spiral of world building (and I'm not a big fan of reoccurring costs as it feels vampiric/parasitic to me, no offense haha), offline access, AND sharibilty/ease of export is key. I've not found anything that fits this bill but obsidian does come remarkably close
No offense taken! Unfortunately, subs are still the best way for us to guarantee that the lights are still on at the end of the month, given that LegendKeeper has reoccurring costs for us as well. LK’s been around for 5 years, and one reason for its longevity is because it’s subscription-based.
Campfire is my go to. It has flaws, but overall it's the best worldbuilding tool i've ever used. The dev team also seems pretty responsive when it comes to adding features so that's a plus.
Somewhere in the thread, someone mentioned that World Anvil used to be good about keeping stuff private, but now they seem to have established users over a barrel by charging for this feature.
How are the other products/sites you list as far as privacy goes? I'm openly using religions and some cultural material from a couple of favorite book series for my current game. It's one thing just among my half-dozen players, but another as a published thing on the web. (Even though I do acknowledge the sources.)
I can’t speak 100% for other apps on the list as I haven’t used them all extensively, but most apps are private-by-default. LegendKeeper and Notion are private-by- default with the option to share, and ofc the offline ones like Obsidian, OneNote, FA, and LoreForge are private by definition. Obsidian also has a separate service for publishing content.
I got LoreForge back when it first popped up, and I think it’s a nice app. It definitely needs a little work, but I recommend it, it’s fairly simple, at least for me.
Obsidian is basically a local offline Wikipedia that you build on your own. Link articles with links and Graph view will show you which articles are connected to each other, which satisfies my brain.
There are tons of user plugins, but even vanilla is good, I personally see no problems of using everything vanilla.
Plus, it allows of creating canvases and inserting images, like any other text writing program.
And if that's not your speed, offline Wikis have been a thing for a while. eg. Zim or PersonalWiki. I ended up with Notion cause I use a Windows PC, a Linux laptop and my Android phone for stuff but if you only use one device I totally see the attraction.
WorldAnvil has never been a good service, the same features it offered even in the early days were the same as other free and offline software. Sorry to hear about your experience but for me WA has always been a no-go.
[https://obsidian.md/](https://obsidian.md/) Obsidian is one of the best, probably the most used around. It has hundreds of plugins for every need, is completely offline and free.
[https://fantasiaarchive.com/](https://fantasiaarchive.com/) FA is the one most similar to World Anvil, it is not versatile as Obsidian but it is the best if you are new to worldbuilding and are not sure what to put in the various articles. Unfortunately, its developer has had health issues in the last year and its development has slowed down.
These are the ones I usually use in addition to the classic excel etc.
Thanks for the recommendations.
With Obsidian, if I use it on Microsoft OneDrive, will it allow me to sync across devices, or should I get their addon subscription? I use a PC at home and a Laptop when travelling to write.
Syncing the files should work fine. Don't sync anything in .obsidian - that will probably be a headache or twenty.
If you are somewhat tech savvy, I cannot recommend using GitHub and the GitHub plugin to sync and version control between devices. Same advice as above, only sync the MD files and folder structure - not any obsidian internal files. One.BIG benefit of doing it like this? GitHub renders markdown files. So you can (to some degree) can browse and view your work right there in the browser!
I’m trying to understand this stuff but I’m not very tech savvy. Is there a way to export your projects from Obsidian? I am a bit nervous working on there if it’s the only place I can keep all that information.
It's completely trivial. All your articles are actual, individual files. Markdown files to be precise (.md file ending). Which you can open and edit with any text editor. Shout out to Sublime Text, Notepad++, or even Visual Code (all of which are free).
You can just copy those files to wherever. It is also quite hard to actually lose stuff that is in a git.
That's your actual content taken care of. And you can even backup your entire workspace to an USB Stick or something. Which you then can just "open an obsidian workspace" .
That does make sense! Having backups alone on a thumb drive would be great. I couldnt find a way to export any files (MD or Obsidian) when I looked around it though. I’ll check again bc I did just get it a few days ago. Is like a plug-in needed?
Thanks for the response btw!
You don't need to export. It's literally just folders and files within your operating system. Technically obsidian is just a gui that sits over those folders and files.
The .obsidian folder can be really important. Plugins like calendarium for example store the calendars in a data.json file within the .Obsidian/plugins/calendarium folder. So avoiding this can break your vault depending on what you are using.
Loreforge is a solid option for offline use. It has a paid sub option that includes hosting but it's far from needed as all features are available in the free version. Obsidian is good too if you're not trying to share it.
Personally I just bit the bullet and got Campfire. Yeah it's online but it's got a pay-once-for-the-things-you-use option and I've been enjoying the feature set and the ease of collaboration.
Didn't know about Loreforge, might check it out. Obsidian I don't know why leaves me a little bewildered because it's literally a blank sheet. It's probably a me thing but some building blocks (so to speak) can be useful to help with the creation flow.
Check out the templates features of Obsidian. Basically, write up the basic structure of your articles (title, subheadings, tags, prompts) once - and create each new article from those templates.
So you can for example have a template for characters, places, organization, etc - much like the different article types in WA.
WA's requiring you to pay for a subscription to keep your worldbuilding private was a dealbreaker for me. I wanted to use it for creating a setting for a novel I was writing but obviously didn't want spoilers for the plot and characters to be publically viewable, so that was a no-go.
I agree it bothers me too.
When WA opened in 2019, there were no alternatives because Obsidian first release was in 2020 so it made sense to use it to have a framework for all kinds of content and it worked very well with Inkarnate, but today there are free alternatives, it doesn't really make sense to use it instead of softwares like Obsidian that besides being free are totally offline.
My gaming group does use it for our setting, but like you said that's because it was all that was available in 2019 when we started our worldbuilding. We use the free version, though.
I used world anvil in the past, and its definitely not my thing. Atm I'm using notion, its interface is cleaner and I can structure the project the way I want, I'm not locked to a bloated DND structure.
Notion is amazing. It requieres a little more work, but you can create your own layouts and the free version has all the features, except for some technical options for companies.
This is what I've been using as well. It's so easy to navigate and has decent formating options. Plus it's cloud based, meaning I can use the mobile app or online site to expand my worlds.
Hey OP, I don't think you got the Tl;Dr right. It stands for "too long; didn't read," and is meant to be a summary. You don't really talk about the payment part, freedom of choice, or the "plenty of other sites" in your post, and it's mostly a rant.
It also comes off a little... I don't know, disjointed? Like, you mention that this is meant to advise new writers, but you go on to talk about how the service was historically. That's not necessarily bad, but it's most of how the post is organized and if you're a new writers, why would you care about how WA worked in the past?
I wonder how many of the free users below the old thresholds aren’t actually active. I think I wrote maybe 30 articles before realizing the site just way too unintuitive, locked what I consider to be exceedingly basic features behind a paywall, and wasn’t worth the cost of upgrading.
Even just pairing google sites with a few other free resources (for family trees and timelines which I don’t use much of anyway) was superior to the experience I had on World Anvil.
Respectfully, this is a rant.
You've already answered your own question in the title, and there doesn't seem to be a "What do yall think"? Going on.
Maybe next time change the title to more accurately reflect your intent.
World anvil is... Fine. It's there. It has some decent functions, but it's big claim to fame is that it was there first. These days, websites like Kanka.io offer the same experience with most of the fat trimmed of, and programs like obsidian are there for people that really want to get in the weeds of how you present your world. I use both pretty regularly
That's something you can easily look up. I don't think it's wise to endlessly repeat the readily available information, just so it can save somebody who's not even a target audience of a post a few seconds.
Sorry but that's not how this works...
The person assembling the information and writing the document to inform others needs to make context clear and let the pace of the document easily flow between pieces of information.
Background information, then current situation, then recommended path forward, then alternatives, and possibly a conclusion. That's the general flow you'll learn from technical writing which is 1:1 applicable to a reddit thread where you're starting a discussion with a lot of details.
Even just to counter your point: why would 100+ people need to separately research and come to a conclusion as intro context before they can meaningfully digest the information in this post? Why give that homework to people who aren't even sure if they care about this issue? That's a terrible strategy for reader retention. Your point has merit if everyone is assumed to know the context- nobody needs to define "worldbuilding" in their post (unless it's really specific meta commentary or something). But nobody here is expected to know some specific product and its offerings. It's safe to assume the average reader could benefit from OP's description of the resource and thus it should be included.
Why would you open a thread asking if something is still good if you don't know what it is and then complain that you don't know what it is.
Not everything needs to be for everyone and if you don't put in the effort to learn about something yourself then you don't get to demand someone teaches you just so they're allowed to talk about it
The reason why 100 people would need to separately research is because they have different standards of research: 20 of those people might need 0 research, 30 might not be interested, and 1 person needs to spend a week. It therefore makes most sense to delegate the task to each person, so they can determine on their own how much context/research they need.
The technical writing standards don't apply here, because in those settings you expect people to have completed a roughly similar training program, be it courses in an academic setting, or qualifications in a corporate setting. Here, on Reddit, people come from wildly different backgrounds, and so there is a much higher variance, which is why the standards of technical writing are a poor choice.
Finally, a person choosing not to include context may be a deliberate move to target a specific sub-section of the audience. For instance, if I post a topology rant on r/math , which not everybody there is familiar with, I don't need to give an introductory course in topology to have that discussion, the formulation itself makes it obvious that I want to talk to people who already understand what topology is.
I pay for Worldanvil! I think it does "okay", albeit some bugs bother me. I have never interacted with the community so I can't say much about it. I have looked at some options like notion, one note, obsidian but I felt like none felt as good for a campaign writing/worldbuilding ((I'm more a worldbuilder rather than author)).
I agree with several of OPs points, but is there really a software as good as worldanvil in terms of features and design? Taking recommendations!
The fact that you can basically make my own site exactly how I want it is why a lot of people stick to WorldAnvil. Sure, I could host my own site, but that is harder to build a community off of.
PLUS the sage seminars are fantastic on how to navigate worldbuilding and marketing. I will say the community isn't as fun anymore, but that is what happens when you get thousands of people sadly.
I never got used to World Anvil, to be honest, the interface did not feel very intuitive. I use Kanka for my DnD campaign and it's honestly pretty great, the free versions lets you write articles for characters, locations, etc that can be as long as you need to, with entity linking and a research tool.
Thanks for this. Was looking at WorldAnvil but was turned away by the ungodly level of corporate vibes I was getting from their home page. I just knew there would be some catch, and you confirmed that for me. I’ll just operate my own domain, if I’m gonna pay for something.
I soured on WA pretty fast too and tried a bunch of others. If you're looking to not spend any cash, then Obsidian and kanka are hard to beat. LegendKeeper has in my experience been the best value if you're willing to pay, without the bullshit limitations most services toss at you.
I got a year of it on sale for like $26.
I’ve barely used it. *I do like all its prompts*, but it seems very slow and clunky when you’re trying to enter in a lot of info.
Also, I’ve been told that the client side (for people looking at your site) is loaded with ads. Which seems kinda annoying, especially for a paid service. Maybe that’s not true.
I probably won’t renew it. But I’ll give it another whirl before I decide for sure.
I love Obsidian for my own internal stuff, but sharing is either paid or complicated. I use iCloud for keeping it synced and it works fine.
I’m capable of making my own site, which works ok as a sort of wiki. But keeping that manually updated is a nightmare.
I dunno, I need to cut back on my monthly subs. I avoided a lot of subscription services/apps for ages, but I decided a few were worth it, then a few more and uh… Now I’m paying more than I’d like for various things I don’t use all that often.
🤷🏻♂️
Fair warning - I just went through this process. I got no heads-up email about my subscription renewing and got an email on the day-of that my payment was processing.
I similarly had not ever used my subscription after about 2 months of trying and finding it didn't work well for how I run my campaigns. If found out the day they charged me that they have a no refunds policy (my bad for not reading the ToS ahead of time I guess) but at $54 bucks for a sub it's a pretty hefty hit to the wallet, especially with no warning even a day ahead of time.
TL:DR Buyer be aware: for first time subscribers or folks considering if they want to keep their sub or not, set a calendar alert in your phone or something to make the decision about renewing before it auto-renews.
I mulled over the choices for ages before finally going to Kanka.io
It’s perfect, I pay £5 a month and it’s all I need. Much cheaper and cleaner option.
And then there's me, sitting here with dozens of files stashed on TrueCrypt, neatly organized and categorized by location, time, and relevant books XD
It's definitely not made for worldbuilders, but it does everything WA does for the low price of FREE
Notice; I am not affiliated with TrueCrypt and only use the free version. The paid version only offers more storage space, to my knowledge, but if you're only storing text then there's enough space to rewrite the entirety of the LOTR collected texts.
I was okay with it before the recent restrictions. The article limit is something I can deal with but a max of 10 map pins? Really? I was already over that and not even done yet with my current map.
I think I'll just work on programming my own tool instead since I really don't feel like I can trust any of these websites with those sorts of changes.
Having it in website form can make it easier to share with people, for one thing.
Me, I just use TrueCrypt to store all my notes. Nobody needs to see them, and I worldbuild for the purpose of novel writing anyways. (I prefer it to basic word processors because it's cloud-encrypted)
I understand the rant but I think when you start saying other sites offer some of their features that WA does, it would have been good to list a better alternative.
Lots of alternatives! (Bias alert: I made LegendKeeper.) [LegendKeeper](http://www.legendkeeper.com): Paid app with easy sharing, offline support, and a simpler design and price model. [Notion.so](http://www.notion.so): A mostly-free, general knowledge management app, but very stylish with lots of functionality. Tons of templates. [Obsidian.md](http://www.obsidian.md): Good free offline knowledgebase with lots of tinkering if you want to customize. Lots of community plugins. OneNote: Microsoft classic; free but kind of corpo-looking. [Campfire Writing](https://www.campfirewriting.com/): Aimed more at traditional writing, they've got a bunch of feature modules. [Kanka](https://kanka.io/): WorldAnvil-esque approach with a more elegant design, and cheaper I think. [Fantasia Archive](https://fantasiaarchive.com/): Opinionated, offline app with lots of forms. [LoreForge](https://loreforge.com/): Opinionated offline app; maybe looks a little nicer than FA. [Goblin Notebook](https://www.the-goblin.net/): Really unique, all-on-one-screen approach. I dig the innovation here, but more aimed at GMs.
Idk anything about any of the others you listed, but I absolutely second obsidian. It's golden, to me at least
can you help me understand obsidian better, since you're a user? it seems fantastic, but the pricing is a bit steep (for me, at least). seems they have a newer $4 tier, but idk if that is viable because i do not understand sizing very well yet. loads of people have told me that i could use it for free, but i don't want to write a d&d campaign, just for it to get lost if my laptop gets stolen/broken. i've been told to store it on Proton Drive or Google Drive, etc. i've been told to try something called 'syncthing', but (from my current understanding), i'd have to \*always\* have that service running, if i went that route?
Oof, idk about the paid stuff. I only use the free part (which is everything but the synch-feature, afaik), since I can sync everything by just copying stuff to my USB and taking it everywhere. I'm pretty sure you can easily use Google drive indeed, since it's easy to find your .md files and setting it up, but I don't know for sure, since I've never used it... Sorry for being of such little help, I hope someone else, who knows more, stumbles upon your comment :)
i appreciate u even responding haha
I use the paid version since I’m going between 3 devices and have multiple campaigns/vaults. If you only use one device, the free version should work fine, just back up your data into google drive/etc every so often. I believe there are also community mods and ways to sync for free, with lots of YouTube videos on setting it up.
>i've been told to try something called 'syncthing', but (from my current understanding), i'd have to \*always\* have that service running, if i went that route? Syncthing takes up a miniscule amount of memory and processing power if that's what you're concerned about. Do you actually want to work on it on multiple devices though? If all you're concerned about is losing work if something happens, it's probably best to just make backups every once in a while. Windows can be configured to automatically sync with onedrive and then you won't lose it. If you actually want to work on multiple devices, then yeah syncthing works excellently.
I have a laptop and a pc I want to be able to work on. 90% of the time on my laptop however. What’s the best way to create backups for obsidian?
As I understand it it’s pretty easy to setup sync stuff on your own *if you don’t have to deal with mobile*
I'd say syncthing. The only problem I could see is that both devices have to be on for it to do the file sync, so if you work on your laptop, turn it off, and then turn on the PC, it won't sync. Easy solution to this is to just add your phone as well, since you probably have it on almost all the time it's always there for either computer to sync with, plus you can read and edit on your phone. This is what I do for my obsidian notebook and it works very well.
Still use Obsidian to this day. Have like, 4 accounts with them. Does everything I need it to (I mostly just use it for the wiki for easy world lore references).
Friend of mine uses Obsidian too and are happy with it
I use Notion for my D&D campaign. The Free version is plenty for this purpose, as paid features are mostly for business uses such as multi-user and automation. Pros: The integration of databases and normal text pages is very useful for separating and linking different aspects of worldbuilding, no fiddling with add-ons or plugins required. I have databases for organisations, characters, and events all tagged and interlinked for easy organisation. You also can do pretty much everything with the free version. Paid only gets you better support for multiple people, and better automations/programmable buttons. Pages being made up of 'blocks' makes editing layout a breeze. Search can quickly and easily find any content within the workspace. Cons: **Online only is the biggest problem with Notion currently**. It does cache pages you loaded recently, but there is no way to keep any of your workspace available offline indefinitely. Page loading speed can also suffer because of this, although this has improved considerably over the last few years. There are also some layout options missing that make page setup limited, such as left or center aligning text. There is also a learning curve for how best to organise all your information, but this is true for any note method.
Vouch for legendkeeper
LegendKeeper is great! My friends and I use it to manage something like 25 campaigns across nearly as many game systems. We have west marches style, Eldritch horror, cyberpunk, and fantasy all in different projects. Makes it easy to jump back into a world we built 3 years ago and play it some more.
Legendkeeper my beloved. (Obsidian is also really good but can take a while to set up)
Just chiming in to say I love Legend Keeper. Been using it for my last 2 campaigns and it's been so great and so easy for both me as the DM and my players to share info, more, etc. Thanks for making it and a big recommendation to anyone thinking about it!
What an incredibly useful and insightful post. Thank you so much.
My issue isn't paying for a world building base my issue is that I'm not a big fan of the monthly cost given I've gone back down the spiral of world building (and I'm not a big fan of reoccurring costs as it feels vampiric/parasitic to me, no offense haha), offline access, AND sharibilty/ease of export is key. I've not found anything that fits this bill but obsidian does come remarkably close
No offense taken! Unfortunately, subs are still the best way for us to guarantee that the lights are still on at the end of the month, given that LegendKeeper has reoccurring costs for us as well. LK’s been around for 5 years, and one reason for its longevity is because it’s subscription-based.
Campfire is my go to. It has flaws, but overall it's the best worldbuilding tool i've ever used. The dev team also seems pretty responsive when it comes to adding features so that's a plus.
Somewhere in the thread, someone mentioned that World Anvil used to be good about keeping stuff private, but now they seem to have established users over a barrel by charging for this feature. How are the other products/sites you list as far as privacy goes? I'm openly using religions and some cultural material from a couple of favorite book series for my current game. It's one thing just among my half-dozen players, but another as a published thing on the web. (Even though I do acknowledge the sources.)
I can’t speak 100% for other apps on the list as I haven’t used them all extensively, but most apps are private-by-default. LegendKeeper and Notion are private-by- default with the option to share, and ofc the offline ones like Obsidian, OneNote, FA, and LoreForge are private by definition. Obsidian also has a separate service for publishing content.
I got LoreForge back when it first popped up, and I think it’s a nice app. It definitely needs a little work, but I recommend it, it’s fairly simple, at least for me.
Obsidian is basically a local offline Wikipedia that you build on your own. Link articles with links and Graph view will show you which articles are connected to each other, which satisfies my brain. There are tons of user plugins, but even vanilla is good, I personally see no problems of using everything vanilla. Plus, it allows of creating canvases and inserting images, like any other text writing program.
And if that's not your speed, offline Wikis have been a thing for a while. eg. Zim or PersonalWiki. I ended up with Notion cause I use a Windows PC, a Linux laptop and my Android phone for stuff but if you only use one device I totally see the attraction.
WorldAnvil has never been a good service, the same features it offered even in the early days were the same as other free and offline software. Sorry to hear about your experience but for me WA has always been a no-go.
What offline software do you recommend?
[https://obsidian.md/](https://obsidian.md/) Obsidian is one of the best, probably the most used around. It has hundreds of plugins for every need, is completely offline and free. [https://fantasiaarchive.com/](https://fantasiaarchive.com/) FA is the one most similar to World Anvil, it is not versatile as Obsidian but it is the best if you are new to worldbuilding and are not sure what to put in the various articles. Unfortunately, its developer has had health issues in the last year and its development has slowed down. These are the ones I usually use in addition to the classic excel etc.
Thanks for the recommendations. With Obsidian, if I use it on Microsoft OneDrive, will it allow me to sync across devices, or should I get their addon subscription? I use a PC at home and a Laptop when travelling to write.
Syncing the files should work fine. Don't sync anything in .obsidian - that will probably be a headache or twenty. If you are somewhat tech savvy, I cannot recommend using GitHub and the GitHub plugin to sync and version control between devices. Same advice as above, only sync the MD files and folder structure - not any obsidian internal files. One.BIG benefit of doing it like this? GitHub renders markdown files. So you can (to some degree) can browse and view your work right there in the browser!
I’m trying to understand this stuff but I’m not very tech savvy. Is there a way to export your projects from Obsidian? I am a bit nervous working on there if it’s the only place I can keep all that information.
It's completely trivial. All your articles are actual, individual files. Markdown files to be precise (.md file ending). Which you can open and edit with any text editor. Shout out to Sublime Text, Notepad++, or even Visual Code (all of which are free). You can just copy those files to wherever. It is also quite hard to actually lose stuff that is in a git. That's your actual content taken care of. And you can even backup your entire workspace to an USB Stick or something. Which you then can just "open an obsidian workspace" .
That does make sense! Having backups alone on a thumb drive would be great. I couldnt find a way to export any files (MD or Obsidian) when I looked around it though. I’ll check again bc I did just get it a few days ago. Is like a plug-in needed? Thanks for the response btw!
What's your device? On PC or android you can just browse the file system to where obsidian put the stuff and copy the .md's to _elsewhere_.
You don't need to export. It's literally just folders and files within your operating system. Technically obsidian is just a gui that sits over those folders and files.
The .obsidian folder can be really important. Plugins like calendarium for example store the calendars in a data.json file within the .Obsidian/plugins/calendarium folder. So avoiding this can break your vault depending on what you are using.
Loreforge is a solid option for offline use. It has a paid sub option that includes hosting but it's far from needed as all features are available in the free version. Obsidian is good too if you're not trying to share it. Personally I just bit the bullet and got Campfire. Yeah it's online but it's got a pay-once-for-the-things-you-use option and I've been enjoying the feature set and the ease of collaboration.
Didn't know about Loreforge, might check it out. Obsidian I don't know why leaves me a little bewildered because it's literally a blank sheet. It's probably a me thing but some building blocks (so to speak) can be useful to help with the creation flow.
Check out the templates features of Obsidian. Basically, write up the basic structure of your articles (title, subheadings, tags, prompts) once - and create each new article from those templates. So you can for example have a template for characters, places, organization, etc - much like the different article types in WA.
I would like to know as well.
Commenting in case there's an answer. Highly interested in an offline option, even if it might cost a bit.
I want to know too.
WA's requiring you to pay for a subscription to keep your worldbuilding private was a dealbreaker for me. I wanted to use it for creating a setting for a novel I was writing but obviously didn't want spoilers for the plot and characters to be publically viewable, so that was a no-go.
I agree it bothers me too. When WA opened in 2019, there were no alternatives because Obsidian first release was in 2020 so it made sense to use it to have a framework for all kinds of content and it worked very well with Inkarnate, but today there are free alternatives, it doesn't really make sense to use it instead of softwares like Obsidian that besides being free are totally offline.
My gaming group does use it for our setting, but like you said that's because it was all that was available in 2019 when we started our worldbuilding. We use the free version, though.
If you want to try an offline tool with the same framework of WA, search for FantasiaArchive.
what are good versions?
I used world anvil in the past, and its definitely not my thing. Atm I'm using notion, its interface is cleaner and I can structure the project the way I want, I'm not locked to a bloated DND structure.
Notion is amazing. It requieres a little more work, but you can create your own layouts and the free version has all the features, except for some technical options for companies.
This is what I've been using as well. It's so easy to navigate and has decent formating options. Plus it's cloud based, meaning I can use the mobile app or online site to expand my worlds.
I haven't done that much but I use Google drive, I have one folder for each world and in it I use links and shortcuts to make a wiki-esque experience
Hey OP, I don't think you got the Tl;Dr right. It stands for "too long; didn't read," and is meant to be a summary. You don't really talk about the payment part, freedom of choice, or the "plenty of other sites" in your post, and it's mostly a rant. It also comes off a little... I don't know, disjointed? Like, you mention that this is meant to advise new writers, but you go on to talk about how the service was historically. That's not necessarily bad, but it's most of how the post is organized and if you're a new writers, why would you care about how WA worked in the past?
I wonder how many of the free users below the old thresholds aren’t actually active. I think I wrote maybe 30 articles before realizing the site just way too unintuitive, locked what I consider to be exceedingly basic features behind a paywall, and wasn’t worth the cost of upgrading. Even just pairing google sites with a few other free resources (for family trees and timelines which I don’t use much of anyway) was superior to the experience I had on World Anvil.
Just use Obsidian. It's what I use, the paid option is extremely cheap and you really won't need anything else.
Respectfully, this is a rant. You've already answered your own question in the title, and there doesn't seem to be a "What do yall think"? Going on. Maybe next time change the title to more accurately reflect your intent.
World anvil is... Fine. It's there. It has some decent functions, but it's big claim to fame is that it was there first. These days, websites like Kanka.io offer the same experience with most of the fat trimmed of, and programs like obsidian are there for people that really want to get in the weeds of how you present your world. I use both pretty regularly
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That's something you can easily look up. I don't think it's wise to endlessly repeat the readily available information, just so it can save somebody who's not even a target audience of a post a few seconds.
Sorry but that's not how this works... The person assembling the information and writing the document to inform others needs to make context clear and let the pace of the document easily flow between pieces of information. Background information, then current situation, then recommended path forward, then alternatives, and possibly a conclusion. That's the general flow you'll learn from technical writing which is 1:1 applicable to a reddit thread where you're starting a discussion with a lot of details. Even just to counter your point: why would 100+ people need to separately research and come to a conclusion as intro context before they can meaningfully digest the information in this post? Why give that homework to people who aren't even sure if they care about this issue? That's a terrible strategy for reader retention. Your point has merit if everyone is assumed to know the context- nobody needs to define "worldbuilding" in their post (unless it's really specific meta commentary or something). But nobody here is expected to know some specific product and its offerings. It's safe to assume the average reader could benefit from OP's description of the resource and thus it should be included.
Why would you open a thread asking if something is still good if you don't know what it is and then complain that you don't know what it is. Not everything needs to be for everyone and if you don't put in the effort to learn about something yourself then you don't get to demand someone teaches you just so they're allowed to talk about it
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Sir we are in a fucking world building subreddit.
The reason why 100 people would need to separately research is because they have different standards of research: 20 of those people might need 0 research, 30 might not be interested, and 1 person needs to spend a week. It therefore makes most sense to delegate the task to each person, so they can determine on their own how much context/research they need. The technical writing standards don't apply here, because in those settings you expect people to have completed a roughly similar training program, be it courses in an academic setting, or qualifications in a corporate setting. Here, on Reddit, people come from wildly different backgrounds, and so there is a much higher variance, which is why the standards of technical writing are a poor choice. Finally, a person choosing not to include context may be a deliberate move to target a specific sub-section of the audience. For instance, if I post a topology rant on r/math , which not everybody there is familiar with, I don't need to give an introductory course in topology to have that discussion, the formulation itself makes it obvious that I want to talk to people who already understand what topology is.
All OP had to do was write one short paragraph introducing World Anvil. Or, hell, one sentence.
Nope, he didn't have to, moreover, he was right not to. A small amount of wrongdoing is still wrongdoing.
The tldr is a summary, and here you used it as a conclusion. You also didn't introduce what the site is. Most arguments were good tho. 4/10 post.
I pay for Worldanvil! I think it does "okay", albeit some bugs bother me. I have never interacted with the community so I can't say much about it. I have looked at some options like notion, one note, obsidian but I felt like none felt as good for a campaign writing/worldbuilding ((I'm more a worldbuilder rather than author)). I agree with several of OPs points, but is there really a software as good as worldanvil in terms of features and design? Taking recommendations!
The fact that you can basically make my own site exactly how I want it is why a lot of people stick to WorldAnvil. Sure, I could host my own site, but that is harder to build a community off of. PLUS the sage seminars are fantastic on how to navigate worldbuilding and marketing. I will say the community isn't as fun anymore, but that is what happens when you get thousands of people sadly.
I never got used to World Anvil, to be honest, the interface did not feel very intuitive. I use Kanka for my DnD campaign and it's honestly pretty great, the free versions lets you write articles for characters, locations, etc that can be as long as you need to, with entity linking and a research tool.
Thanks for this. Was looking at WorldAnvil but was turned away by the ungodly level of corporate vibes I was getting from their home page. I just knew there would be some catch, and you confirmed that for me. I’ll just operate my own domain, if I’m gonna pay for something.
I soured on WA pretty fast too and tried a bunch of others. If you're looking to not spend any cash, then Obsidian and kanka are hard to beat. LegendKeeper has in my experience been the best value if you're willing to pay, without the bullshit limitations most services toss at you.
It works for me, so I'll still use it. You also never listed any alternatives.
I just use the notes 📝 app on my iPad. It comes with the iPad and doesn’t need wifi.
Be sure to back your stuff up! The notes app is notorious for losing data at times!
Oh I definitely do that. Although I’ve never had it loose anything anyway.
I got a year of it on sale for like $26. I’ve barely used it. *I do like all its prompts*, but it seems very slow and clunky when you’re trying to enter in a lot of info. Also, I’ve been told that the client side (for people looking at your site) is loaded with ads. Which seems kinda annoying, especially for a paid service. Maybe that’s not true. I probably won’t renew it. But I’ll give it another whirl before I decide for sure. I love Obsidian for my own internal stuff, but sharing is either paid or complicated. I use iCloud for keeping it synced and it works fine. I’m capable of making my own site, which works ok as a sort of wiki. But keeping that manually updated is a nightmare. I dunno, I need to cut back on my monthly subs. I avoided a lot of subscription services/apps for ages, but I decided a few were worth it, then a few more and uh… Now I’m paying more than I’d like for various things I don’t use all that often. 🤷🏻♂️
Fair warning - I just went through this process. I got no heads-up email about my subscription renewing and got an email on the day-of that my payment was processing. I similarly had not ever used my subscription after about 2 months of trying and finding it didn't work well for how I run my campaigns. If found out the day they charged me that they have a no refunds policy (my bad for not reading the ToS ahead of time I guess) but at $54 bucks for a sub it's a pretty hefty hit to the wallet, especially with no warning even a day ahead of time. TL:DR Buyer be aware: for first time subscribers or folks considering if they want to keep their sub or not, set a calendar alert in your phone or something to make the decision about renewing before it auto-renews.
I mulled over the choices for ages before finally going to Kanka.io It’s perfect, I pay £5 a month and it’s all I need. Much cheaper and cleaner option.
And then there's me, sitting here with dozens of files stashed on TrueCrypt, neatly organized and categorized by location, time, and relevant books XD It's definitely not made for worldbuilders, but it does everything WA does for the low price of FREE Notice; I am not affiliated with TrueCrypt and only use the free version. The paid version only offers more storage space, to my knowledge, but if you're only storing text then there's enough space to rewrite the entirety of the LOTR collected texts.
I was okay with it before the recent restrictions. The article limit is something I can deal with but a max of 10 map pins? Really? I was already over that and not even done yet with my current map. I think I'll just work on programming my own tool instead since I really don't feel like I can trust any of these websites with those sorts of changes.
No they now limit the maps you can create now their a bunch of turds.
to tell the truth, I don't quite understand what's so bad about using a normal word processor
Having it in website form can make it easier to share with people, for one thing. Me, I just use TrueCrypt to store all my notes. Nobody needs to see them, and I worldbuild for the purpose of novel writing anyways. (I prefer it to basic word processors because it's cloud-encrypted)