Summer Camp 2025 Progress Report

The theme for Week 1 is "Nourishment". The homework for Week 1 was broken up into three sub-assignments. These were as follows:   Assignment 1: Think about ways the theme of Nourishment affects your world. Do people generally have what they need? What happens when they don’t?
  Land and resource scarcity, particularly involving sources of fuel and food, is an ongoing source of conflict in the Manifold Sky setting. What might have started as an internicene war between the New Voxelian and Elovisian peoples has, in the fullness of centuries, become motivated as much by the need to feed and accommodate burgeoning populations as it ever was about antediluvian tribal differences. Though not involved themselves, wise observers in the Rostran Archipelago Confederacy and Petalcap Vale look in on the War of Reunification from without and see a chilling vision of the conflict that might befall them should any one faction win and, seizing what remains of the Medial Tesseract, turn their sights further afield in the never-ending quest for national sustenance.   In the Sealed Kingdoms setting, the opposite is true: all major spacefaring polities are not so much post-scarcity as highly adept at prizing rare resources from even marginal star systems in the name of survival. Even so, habitable worlds are rare and powers strong and advanced enough to seize them eye the rest with a sort of simmering suspicion. Lines of communications are long and lines of supply and reinforcement even longer; strategic minds must take into account not just eventualities which might occur within their own lifespans, but possibilities for conflict that might take centuries or even millennia to germinate into actual conflicts. Even so, there are a few individuals and groups making plans to sustain sentience far beyond even the lives of stars themselves.   Assignment 2: Download the pledge document and fill it out with your goal for Summer Camp!
    Assignment 3: If you found any outdated articles in your world, update the most important ones now! Do the same with your worldbuilding meta.
  At least in the Manifold Sky world, this has been an ongoing project consisting mostly of adding reference links, clearing up ambiguities, and adding content related to articles which have come out in the intervening years. The part of this world I am updating most rapidly as of the time of this writing is the Rostran and Ovinex cultures, with the language of Iuxat providing a convenient jumping-off point for me to address these articles as they come up in the reference grammar.  
 

The theme for Week 2 is "Roots". The homework for Week 1 was broken up into three sub-assignments. These were as follows:   Assignment 1: Look at the cultures and areas you’ll focus on for Summer Camp, and think about how their past shaped them.   For the Sealed Kingdoms, the narrative perspective is mostly centered on the Cobalt Protectorate because that's where the greatest population of (mostly) humans live. Some of their founders, including characters like Wurth Harkin and Shank Moswen, remember a time before the human debut on the interstellar stage and represent important links to the history of the broader setting. Conflicts between the founding generation and their interstellar neighbors, including a period of slavery under the alien Iron Talon Mining Concern and exposure to relics from the Upper Late Arcopel precursor civilization has had a profound impact on Protectorate culture and helps inform their vigorous engagement with space exploration and colonization despite the various reasons a civilization might choose not to pursue those things.   The cultures of the Manifold Sky setting are only recently (within the last century) in conversation with one another, developing separately for ten millennia before the discovery of technologies like lighter-than-air flight capable of traversing micro-gravity environments. Even as different as they are now, though, each culture was also once connected through the shared monomyth of the Curved Time, an antediluvian period where the concave Manifold Sky didn't encapsulate all of the known world and people lived on convex surfaces called 'planets.' A shared terrestrial connection between all sentient species also suggests that life in the Manifold may be connected on some more fundamental level, but, without some way to escape the bounds of the tesseracts to explore the Celestial System, these will remain the subject of speculation for the foreseeable future. For the purposes of Summer Camp, though, most of the focus will be placed on the major powers of the setting, particularly the Rostran Archipelago Confederacy, the Coalition of Breakaway Colonies, Voxelia, and Petalcap Vale, as these provide the majority of characters and situations likely to appear in future written works.   Assignment 2: Go to your world’s homepage and imagine you’re a new reader discovering the setting for the first time. What should you change to make the experience more engaging?   Other than the phrasing of the 'elevator pitch' on the home page, I feel like the layout is pretty intuitive as it is. I'd love to polish up the homepage with better aesthetics - perhaps some custom CSS or better art assets - but these are beyond my level of skill for the time being. It might also be worthwhile for me to tune up the The Manifold Sky Primer at some point.   Assignment 3: Find your earliest worldbuilding project. What mistakes did you make that you want to avoid? What good ideas from those early days can you integrate into your current project? Remember to take a moment to be proud of how far you've come!   I believe that my first article on Worldanvil was either the The Geometries of the Manifold Sky - A History or Voxelia. Technically, the Sealed Kingdoms setting was the first I ever deeply dug into, but that worldbuilding project was standardized here much later. When I wrote the Voxelia article, I hadn't yet developed the writing voice that would later go on to define articles in Manifold Sky. The history section is especially awkward in terms of tone because it adopts the conversational styling of articles like Geometries, rather than the more encyclopedic tone that I like to strike when worldbuilding.  
 

The theme for Week 3 is Metamorphosis. The homework for Week 1 was broken up into three sub-assignments. These were as follows:
  Assignment 1: What transformations and adaptations have the people in your world gone through? What changes are going on right now… and who is trying to stop them?   The peoples of the Manifold Sky setting have reached an inflection point in their respective technological developments have the power to destroy or radically reshape the entire world. The emergence of the 125 Hands with The Garbage Man at their head doesn't just represent a destructive force towards the sociopolitical status quo, but also represents a direct threat to the underpinnings of ontological reality. In contrast, the cultures of the Sealed Kingdoms setting have reached or are approaching a plateau in terms of their scientific and technological development, so the next step for many of them is to act on a large scale to secure their future against forces of entropy from without.   Assignment 2: Choose a new genre, style, or author, and take a look at their art! Write what you learned from them and what inspired you. (Coming soon!)   Assignment 3: Read a couple of articles from the community, give them a like (and why not a sticker!), and write about what inspired you. (Coming soon!)  
 

The theme of Week 4 is Tomorrow. The homework for Week 1 was broken up into three sub-assignments. These were as follows:
  Assignment 1: Think about current events that will impact the future. Who is working to create a specific kind of future? Ironically, the much smaller Manifold Sky setting is a much more multi-polar world than the Sealed Kingdoms setting when it comes to different visions for the future. Factions like the Cobalt Protectorate in the Sealed Kingdoms are striving more for survival and homeostasis in the face of universal entropy, but the enclosure of the Manifold means that, unlike in the Sealed Kingdoms, nation-states and organizations with radically different outlooks can't easily just coexist by willfully expanding in different directions. This is, of course, the intention - both textually as a result of The Curved Time and meta-textually as way of justifying more grounded conflicts than the sort of macro-life, man vs. nature struggles inherent to hard space operas.   Assignment 2: Make sure everything’s ready—from your writing space to your writing schedule—before Summer Camp begins!   As before, I will likely be utilizing lunch breaks and a little time after work to get my allotted articles done. One of the hard things about doing worldbuilding online is that 'online' is also a hub for myriad distractions, but that is somewhat mitigated by the fact that the computer I use for writing at lunch breaks is old and slow, making random surfing impractical. Thankfully, most of my worldbuilding resources are either to-hand or I have been applying them for so long that I have memorized them, so research should be less of an issue than it might have been at the beginning of my creative career.   Assignment 3: Who or what will help you achieve your goal? What will your sharing strategy be during Summer Camp?   Several of my friends are also participating in creative challenges, whether organized or self-imposed, during the next month, so I do have people in my life who will push me to get things done. I have Discord and social links associated with my WA account as well and have conditioned myself to hit the notification buttons whenever an article makes it to a published state, so you, my readers, will be able to watch what I'm working on in real time.