Written by: James S
World Anvil is used by worldbuilders, game masters, and players alike to expound and explore the realms that exist in their games and stories or sometimes just in their heads. It’s probably best known for its Wikipedia-like interface and interactive maps. World Anvil is a supremely expansive tool that has been around for an absolute age, and it’s flexible, too! Let’s take a look at how you can upload maps to World Anvil, and how you could use Czepeku's battlemaps and Scenes in your games.
Let’s take a look at how to upload maps to World Anvil, and how you could use Czepeku’s battlemaps and Scenes in your games
Step 1: Choose The Map You Want!
World Anvil is great for annotating continent-spanning maps and creating a huge, campaign-level overview of what’s going on, but you can use it for smaller-scale things as well. For this example, we’ll use our City Marketplace map and show you how you can annotate it with information to aid your game sessions.
To have a look at our catalogue of over four thousand battlemaps, head on over to the explore page on our website. You can browse them all there! Or if you want to download them in high resolution, you can subscribe to our Patreon. There, you can choose one of our membership tiers and get access to as many maps as you want! Once you’ve chosen the map you want to put on World Anvil, make sure it’s saved to your computer and we can get started.
Step 2: Get Familiar With World Anvil
If you’ve never used World Anvil before, don’t worry. It isn’t difficult to get your head around. It might feel daunting to begin with, but you’ll soon be filling in your world’s details and getting to grips with it. World Anvil is browser-based, so you don’t need to download a client to use it. Just head over to worldanvil.com and you’ll be greeted with this screen. Create an account with an email address, or log in if you’ve already got an account, and you’re away!
Step 3: Find Your World, Or Create A New One
If you haven’t already got a world on the go, the client will helpfully prompt you to create one. We’re going to go ahead and create a new world for this guide by clicking on the button outlined in red.
The browser will then take you here, where you can name your new world and assign it a system from about a thousand different RPGs. We didn’t stop to count them all, but there are A LOT to choose from. Or if you know the one you want, you can type it straight into the box to search for it.
Step 4: Find The Maps Section And Add A New Map
As soon as you create your new world, World Anvil will take you to this screen here, the dashboard. You can click around and explore from here, watch tutorials, and start writing articles and lore about your world, but since this is a guide about maps, we’re going to stay focused and click on the maps tab on the left-hand side of the screen.
Then, a side tab will pop out and you can hit the “+ Map” button to add a new map to your world. Another box will appear on the bottom right of your screen where you can name your new map.
This is where you’ll need to remember where you saved the map you selected earlier. Press Shift+Enter, click “proceed,” and find your map file. You can also drag and drop it into the box. It's super simple!
Step 5: Get Cracking!
The next screen you see will be your map in the World Anvil client. From here, you can annotate your map with pins to give your players some idea of what’s around or refresh your own memory when it comes to presenting the map in-game. You can customise these pins to show text or to link to another page in your world, like details about an NPC, item, or another piece of lore.
The client is definitely worth exploring further. World Anvil has more map-specific features that you can unlock with a subscription, like labels and direct annotation with lines and shapes.
But perhaps you want to use visual resources to enhance your game in a different kind of way. You could use Czepeku Scenes to complement your tactical battlemaps. Scenes work in exactly the same way as maps when you’re uploading them to World Anvil, but they provide a more cinematic way to tell your story. Perfect for when you’ve planned a lot of narrative or your players want to wander around looking at all the nice surroundings. Check them out on our website, or subscribe to our Scenes Patreon page!