World Anvil

Writing and sharing your Work has never been this easy or accessible.

I have been a steady user of this application for about two years after looking into the market as a whole and seeing what I can find. After trying most of the mature ones, I stuck here.

The features are almost overwhelmingly plentiful and despite there being an obvious direction on how you should approach your world building (not in what but how) it is a fine change of pace and actually lead me to more actual writing and less thinking about organization.

Working with the company was a breeze, even going so far as to sorting a botched order for a gift subscription out after I failed to read everything the check-out page told me.

I have been steadily upgrading my subscription to get access to the new features they include and can't say I regret it, but the Application is perfectly serviceable with a free account. The base assumption is that you actually want to share what you create.

The development cycle is bonkers, there are upgrades and even new features at least weekly, some of which are requested by the users through the built-in suggestion board.
This leads me to the only major downside of the overall experience, the documentation can be thin or completely missing. If you weren't there when the feature was added, chances are high you misinterpret how to use it or know it's there.

This is a known issue and joining the Discord Community addresses the Problem, as support is plentiful and friendly there (and the company is also present for any major problems).
Overall, this App/Company provide a useful service with passion and a profound understanding of the requirements.

I think an automatic subscription charge for a full year without a warning or ability to refund is bad consumer practice. It has the earmarks of a scam. Even Amazon subscriptions for $5 items give you a warning before they charge your account. The world building had some interesting features, but the usability was not intuitive. It also did not allow free subscribers in my writing group to look at my Timeline, so trying to use the paid version to share my work with others was not possible. Since that was the point of me getting the subscription, I found the app unhelpful.

Hyped by plentiful of Youtube channels and many sponsorships the WorldAnvil promises a lot but is underwhelming at best. The text editor feels stuck in the 2000s while all other features has been greatly limited to convince user of purchasing the premium plans, which there are two of. Overall feels like there could have been a much better alternative to the site or that some proper changes are necessary from my experience.

A waste of time and money. I purchased the membership to use all the features.
Extremely frustrating to use. In essence, it's a complicated word processor with the capabilities of an old-school myspace page. It's archaic in design, execution, and productivity.
To make things worse, the customer service was subpar. You've been warned.

Even if you do not use the software, they refuse to refund you after immediately contacting them following an autorenew. The way they run their business is totally unethical and everyone should stay away from them.

I use world anvil for both writing and keeping my world building for DND organised. It's an extremely useful tool with a nice nerdy community built around it.

Today I woke up to a $110 USD charge for a full year's subscription to World Anvil. I had previously subscribed a year ago, and while the service itself was great, I was shocked when I was hit with the charge, as I had previously cancelled my subscription with the company on the same day I did my one-year subscription. I always do this as a best practice with all services specifically to avoid situations like this, and have not had an issue with any other service I used along side it (D&D Beyond, Roll20, etc).

I hadn't used the service in several months so I immediately contacted World Anvil and told them about the issue. I didn't think this would be a large deal as I had already cancelled previously and contacted them within an hour or two of the charge. I was told that unless I can produce an email they had allegedly previously sent to me showing that I had cancelled the services a year ago, they would not reimburse the charge, even though their website clearly shows my account in the cancelled status.

I checked my emails and did not have a cancellation email from them from a year ago. Apparently the email is the only thing they will accept, regardless of account status.

Because I brought up this issue with them, as punishment in retaliation they have now disabled my subscription and are telling me to delete my account, but they are not reimbursing the money they charged today. I've lost access to all of the content I had previously created as well with my group. I've now paid $110 USD for service I cannot even use for the year I just "paid" for, lost hundreds of hours of content created, and World Anvil still holds my payment information (they allegedly cannot delete my card info), and for all I know will do the same thing to me again a year from now.

I brought up that they do not provide any warning about the significant charges and had I gotten a warning about the upcoming charge this would (or should) not have been a problem as I could have contacted them earlier about the error in their system. Their response was "we don't have to provide a warning as we're in the EU and so we don't". This is convenient for them, since they can now say that they've "not gotten written notification" about a cancellation and will charge users anyways, without recourse.

This is apparently a fairly common issue with the company. You can check their responses to similar issues on their Reddit account, where they openly admit to deleting user's accounts that have run into this issue. Had I known about it ahead of time I would have only subscribed on a month-to-month basis to begin with (or not subscribed at all).

If you're a writer or other type of storyteller and are looking for a place to keep track of your worldbuilding, I cannot recommend World Anvil enough. They're all I use now. They have a free tier, and templates for everything from locations to spells. And they're always adding more things. They seem to currently be focusing on adding more features for writers as they started out focused on DND, and I am really excited to see where the site goes. Highly recommend.

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.