Ahead of open-sourcing the guts of my world-building Codex, I've made a lot of changes to the design, and standardised the widgets to remove some of the hackery. I've created a skeleton project that I hope other authors or dungeon masters can use to roll their own solution. I've refactored my existing project to use this skeleton. This means I can 'eat my own dog food' while developing and testing against bunch of living world-building documents.

The screenshot below shows my latest update, as pushed live today (6th of May). I've customised the site with just a few lines of CSS and a couple of images for things like the banner and textures. It means that very little work is needed to change up the style you to create worlds for classic fantasy, grimdark or space opera, or even moden fiction.

Members of Scriptorium can login and visit it here.

So why am I doing thing?

Well, simply put I want there to be a credible open-source alternative to proprietary world-building softare such as WorldAnvil. That's not to say I don't respect WorldAnvil; what I'm building is not a product, nor is it a turn-key solution, at least not for everyone. Deploying the Codex requires technical knowledge – or the willingness to learn a little. If that's not you, then give WorldAnvil a go, they're a great bunch of people and they've created a great product.

Yet, for those who demand control, or privacy, or a solution that stay with you for years or decades, this might apeal. WIth open source, you have complete control over your creative content – no cost, no third-party services, no proprietary databases or file systems. Run it locally in complete privacy, run it on the web for your readers or players, put it behind a membership or payment wall – your content, your way, your choice.

I don't have a concrete date for a release candidate, but I'm confident that I'll be able to do it after a few more iterations. I'll follow this article with updates as I make them, and tutorials when I'm closer to releasing something. So, if you are interested, reach out or follow along as you see fit