A little over a year ago, I wrote a single throwaway line in my Evenshade world: "The Quiet Stew has a reputation that precedes it into the next village." I had no idea what the Quiet Stew was. I still haven't fully decided! But something about that line--the particular pleasure of building a little piece in a world idea-by-idea--set the tone for everything that followed.
When the Hitchhiker's competition arrived, the Sensible Visitor's Guide to Evenshade felt like the natural answer. What a lot of fun that was!! The writing was the obvious pleasure, but the project also became my most serious experiment with World Anvil's CSS tools, and that turned out to be its own wonderful rabbit hole entirely. I wanted the Guide to look like a document with a history — something typeset with care, aged at the edges, formatted the way a real in-world pamphlet might be if the village in question happened to have a Temple-Library and unusually high standards. Getting the columns, the drop caps, the pull quotes, and the section dividers to behave the way I wanted provided its own fantastic challenge.
What I'm most pleased with, looking back, is the way the Guide and the underlying world articles started to inform each other. Writing a cheeky three-sentence description of the River Harbor's ballista harpoons sent me back to the Harbor article to remind myself exactly how those harpoons work. That got me back to revising stat blocks, the signal codes, and a rumor about something pale-scaled that follows loaded barges after dark. Writing the lamp-lighting custom sent me digging into the Night of Silent Flames. The Sensible Visitor's Guide became a lens that kept me finding new (and old) things to focus on, and thankfully May kept obligingly producing more days to focus with!
I really hope you all have as much fun with these competitions as I do!
