2025 Summer Camp Pledge

Heading out into the sunrise

As usual, I look forward to Summer Camp with a strong mix of heady anticipation and palpable dread. I love the event (though I secretly love WorldEmber more) but it also takes a lot of energy, which is generally in short supply. Whereas last year I had quite a lot of spare time, this spring I switched jobs and it's been taking more energy than I anticipated. But worldbuilding can often bring a lot of energy too, so I'll try and catch a good wave. I'll be aiming for copper again, here's hoping I can turn it into a 3-year streak! By the by, big shoutout to WA for letting people set achievable goals and still feel like full participants in events. It means a lot to me.

Week 2 - Roots

I'll admit my first thought was plants, but it quickly turned out they don't mean those kinds of roots. Nevertheless I do hope that some kind of plant prompt is included, as I have a magical swamp Pando that still needs an article. Getting back to the actual topic at hand, that is to say: history, beginnings and foundations!

• Discovering more about the founding and early development of the country of Tyldamin, where my main characters are from, would be great. I know it started with a large group of survivors of the Kynfesan Exodus who had reached the western shore of Dlynaeth, but how? When was the Verdant Tree really planted - or is that going to remain a mystery?
• Strongly tied to this - how did the cultures of the Falsaf and Taesaf arise, and the Taesaf subcultures? What about the herding folk of northeast Tyldamin? They consider themselves to be more true to the "old ways" of the Taesaf but how did that come about and what is really going with that narrative?
• I have no idea whose this is going to be yet, but I would love an excuse to create a family tree. I adore them.
• Someone else mentioned this in the stream chat, it would be super fun if there was a language prompt about the etymology of something. I look a fair bit at etymology sources for inspiration for worldbuilding and make basic use of it when coming up with names, so that would be right up my alley.

Week 2

Review my primer and homepage

I set these up for the first time before Worldember, if I recall so they don't need edits content-wise. I'm not thrilled with the layout of the last section of my primer however, so I will go and fix that.
 

Back to your roots

I most certainly recall my first "real" worldbuilding project, which I first created when I was eleven years old and proceeded to spend much of my teenagehood in and still occasionally visited and tweaked it throughout my twenties. Heck, I made a WA world for it to try WA out. I actually still have the original map I drew and lots of my old notes (most of which are falling apart). As most early work tends to be, it was highly derivative and largely a blatant mashup of Middle-Earth and Narnia and magical schools.
  Nevertheless, I still have a great fondness for it, partly because it had some very fun and loveable characters and partly because I poured my heart and soul into it and found such comfort there. It was a formative experience and still drives my love of worldbuilding today. One of the things that strikes me looking back at my notes is how little was actually written down compared to what was in my head. Based on the notes, you'd think I barely thought about it at all. That's definitely something I don't want nowadays, I want a record (however imperfect) of the images and experiences in my head. I also certainly hope I've become a little more original. The thing I'm most eager to strive for in my world now is greater complexity, especially in a moral sense. My earliest world was largely black-and-white; definitely not something I'm aiming for now even as I often catch myself stumbling into the trap of narrative ease.