Summer Camp Prep 2025

Assignment One

Think about ways the theme of Nourishment affects your world. Do people generally have what they need? What happens when they don’t?

Nourishment is such a fun theme! The longer you think about it, the more directions it can go. Nourishment is a huge part of the greater idea behind Oabos and the many other worlds it shares a universe with. The very worlds grown and develop in different ways based on the beings who live on them. Every choice and action nourishes the world and guides its growth. In return the essence of the world nourishes its denizens. The thoughts and actions which grew t he world provide a direction for power to develop.

Narrowing in the focus, I plan to spend most of summer camp this year in t he capital city of Chronwhorl. Specifically the Fog Zone lower city and hidden regions beneath even that. The citizens in these areas of the city are lacking for many things, but are also nourished in other ways. Stories, songs, hidden plots, and world-light smuggled into a city de signed to corrupt and destroy it.

Assignment Three

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!

One of my earliest worldbuilding projects was back in my freshman year of undergrad. The story, Dawning Darkness, was a fantastical take on reality with a magical past and a present day with just a touch of that old magic sticking around. It was a fun world and fun story that was beginning to develop, but there were a few flaws which contributed to how quickly the project fell off.

Dawning Darkness started as story bits with a weak foundation and no plan. While this can certainly work for some writers and some stories, it really doesn't work for me. What the project really turned out to be was a collection of fanciful ideas loosely held together in a story without enough structure. The lack of foundation made it hard to ground the project and each new idea was less connected than the last. It certainly made the project fun, but the world and story were never able to develop.

That is why I have leaned more heavily into the worldbuilding itself with Oabos. Before Oabos itself started, this universe started as an idea of a story tied to three worlds. A world of literal growing levels of detail, and world where technology functioned like magic, and an old world of rituals. Those three worlds suffered from the same issue as Dawning Darkness. This made for a fun story with a few more plot points built out than Dawning Darkness, but the worlds didn't have a strong enough foundation to hold shape as the story started to develop. The world based around growing detail got caught up in problems with the purpose looping back on itself, so it could not progress. That same looping issue broke the purpose behind the ritual world, and cut off access to the technological world.

The solution was to pause and really dig deeper into the how and why of the way the worlds in this universe function. What I found were flaws and contradictions that would have broken the worldbuilding if left as they were. So I picked it a part. Kept the main focus but changed direction enough to make it work. The three worlds for that story are still there, and partially planned out. They may well become their own worldbuilding projects later on. A fourth world, of massive creatures feeding off storms, was also added in the development process and will show up connected to a few worlds later on.

Oabos was the last world to join the list, as a consequence of creating the Radiant home world that the humans on Oabos originally come from. So, it is also where I chose to build the first full foundation before working in reverse order back through the other worlds. My plan is to build carefully, with the story and world design working together from day one. No rushing past, and no fanciful flurries that can't fit in this world without breaking it. There are other worlds which can accommodate those when they pop up.

Assignment One

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 current state of Oabos is that of a world about to go through major change. The capital city of Chronwhorl has been training generations of its citizens to trust only the light, to be guided by faith, and to push out or destroy anything that is other. Now the Order of the Discerning Gaze has pushed too far, and that carefully built faith is starting to crack. The Order’s methods have gotten too brutal. The same brutal faith which kept humans safe from the darkness when they first arrived on Oabos is turning against the very people it used to protect.

The righteous are blissfully unaware. They have never seen the harsh side of the Order turned against them and instead remain comfortable in their spaces. Their only fear is that darkness will find a way in. It is a distant fear. The Order of the Discerning Gaze protects them.

Students in the Academia Spire watch as more of their classmates disappear each year. First it was myth-touched humans who had snuck into the academy. Then it was friends whose families were found to be connected to elementals outside the city. Now kids are disappearing after disagreements with teachers. The students were dismissed from the academy, but no one has seen or heard from their families since the dismissal.

The undercity is roiling, with the desperate poor and the angry outcast. The darkest reaches of the city are starting to overflow with myth-touched humans. Their natural elemental abilities weakened by the blazing disk of pure Radiance over the city. Despite the danger, they do not leave. They were born here. Their families have lived here for generations. They will not just hand the city over to holy murderers.

Assignment Two

Choose a new genre, style, or author, and take a look at their art! Write what you learned from them and what inspired you.

Parts of the main story within Oabos will be centered around investigation and mystery. While I do enjoy a good mystery, it isn’t really a genre that I have spent much time with or given deep consideration. This week I spent some time looking at different mystery shows and considered what mysteries I had read in the past. I wanted to take some time to focus on balancing the right amount of information to provide an audience. How much information helps to move the story forward without giving everything away too early.

What I found is that my personal favorite mysteries had all the information available to the audience, but in a way they would not notice. These stories were fun to watch or read for the first time, but because they were even better when going back through. Having the experience of being able to go back and see everything laid out if you just knew what to look at was wonderful in all these stories.

I will continue to explore this further, to find that balance that keeps the story interesting for first and future readthroughs.

Assignment Three

Read a couple of articles from the community, give them a like (and why not a sticker!), and write about what inspired you.

Since I am planning to focus heavily on characters and factions this Summer Camp, I decided to poke around and find some character articles I had never seen before:

Assignment One

Think about current events that will impact the future. Who is working to create a specific kind of future?

There is a lot about to happen in Oabos. Many different factions are starting to move. Two factions I will focus on during Summer Camp are the Order of the Discerning Gaze and the Lightless. The Order of the Discerning Gaze is the holy order which runs the city and rules over the leaders of the other cities and villages in the Daylight Regions. The worship and follow a forgotten goddess from the human home world, and the fragment of her light which traveled to Oabos with them. Recent advancements in technology have changed the way the Order wages war with the elemental beings that call Oabos home. Now they can push their influence further into the darker reaches of the world. This is their moment of triumph against the dark.

The Lightless are a guild of thieves and assassins within the lower city and hanging tunnels beneath Chronwhorl. While there are some fully human Lightless, most of the guild is comprised of myth-touched humans and full Elementine. The Order may have gotten stronger but so have they. The number of myth-touched and Elementine citizens in the lower city have been growing by the day. Now that the Order’s attention is elsewhere, it is the perfect time to strike and break the power of the six holy spires of Chronwhorl.