Summer Camp 2025 Retrospective

This year's Summer Camp was tough for me. I have depression, and it's been kicking me around a fair bit this year. And for the first couple of weeks, it looked like it was gonna rob me of my Summer Camp diamond streak. (So far, the only one I've missed is 2019's, and I wasn't even active on World Anvil that year. But it didn't! After completing a total of 4 all the way up to the 22nd, I finally found my muse and did pretty much 3 a day from then on all the way to finishing #32 with about 12 hours left of Summer Camp. And, furthermore, it's helped me find my motivation in general: I'm more focused and attentive than I've been for a while, which is helping out in a lot of ways beyond just writing. (I'm not sure how "you're already overwhelmed, here, write 15 000 words of worldbuilding on top of everything" is a positive influence on my mental health, but hey, it's working consistently.)  

Goals

My first goal, as always, is to actually stick with the writing habit. I'm terrible at consistency - I'll do Summer Camp, then take August off, and then forget about World Anvil and suddenly it's midway through June and time for the next Summer Camp. But that's broad and vague, more of a rough intention than a specific goal. So let's break things down into tasks

1. Updating old articles: I still haven't touched the articles from Summer Camp 2024, and I've made some major changes to my plans during the break. (In large part, this is centred around a particular incompetent leader who doesn't seem like as enjoyable an idea now. I have a much more interesting idea, anyway: the BBEG is giving people warlock powers and getting to puppet them around in their sleep to assassinate competent leaders. Which derails everything about this leader figure and his underlings.)
2. Stubbing: I have a bunch of stuff that needs stub articles so I can collect lore mentioned across various articles. Some very broad, like the significance of the number 8 in Asurian culture (8 gods, 8 heroes who survived fighting the BBEG and sealed him with 8 artifacts used as foci for the seals...8 goals in this list) to some incredibly specific stuff like the rules of dueling
3. Ideas in my head: Similarly, I have some ideas I want to include that I've not found a way to work in at all yet. Like oquorak, a left handed knife duel wherein duelists are tied together with a fathom of rope by their right hand. (Lifting the idea from a Magic the Gathering book called Arena, by William R. Forstchen, and making a TTRPG minigame out of it. Highly recommend the book, if you can find it, it's definitely one of the best franchise tie-in books I've read.)
4. Editing Summer Camp 2025 articles: Has to wait until after the awards ceremony, of course, but there's stuff in this year's set that is particularly unfinished.
5. Campaign Planning: I also need to actually put in the work to turn broad ideas into a campaign. That means fleshing out adventure concepts into a sequence of events, devising rules for custom mechanics like the Rising Sickness And getting a setting primer together for my prospective players would be a good idea too.
6. Presentation Style: I keep meaning to get more into the art of making articles that actually look good. Content is all well and good, but I definitely prefer reading articles where the writer has put the effort into making it look good. And currently, I really don't put that effort in, I very rarely have more than a few paragraphs, sometimes separated by headers.
7. Other Tools: So far, pretty much everything I've done on World Anvil is an article. There's a lot more features than that, and I want to try them out. Some of them seem extremely useful!
8. Community Engagement: Along with the consistency issue about writing, I tend to just mute the community discord in between Summer Camps, because it's big and overwhelming and I'm weird about wanting to read everything on Discords I'm active in. Which means I lose touch with folks in the community, and thus lose the social connection to writing that might help keep me going.

 

10 articles I've read so far

One for each of the 8 prompts I didn't complete:

And two from my notifications:

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If you're looking for my Summer Camp articles: