Summer Camp 2025 Prep - Roots

One culture I'm excited to work on has to be dwarves. There are three distinct factions of dwarves, the magma dwarves who stayed living near the Flaming Maw and using the trickle of hellfire left over from the Undoing. The mountain dwarves who spread out to inhabit the mountain ranges, sticking primarily to one continent initially then eventually moving outwards. They stick to the old, traditional ways, and are the founders of the Guardians and tamers of Tunnelers. Lastly, and possibly my favorite are the wandering dwarves. This dwarven culture, much like the moon elves and their staunch self-relegation to the dark, were traumatized by the events of the Undoing and now refuse to remain in one place for longer than a month. They are skilled traders and sailors, as such they've played a key role in the rebuilding of the world.

It's kind of cliche, maybe even a little cringey? It reads like a generic fantasy world intro. I think part of it is that I'm still figuring out the direction my world is heading in and building it out. I need to figure out what I'm doing with my world, how long the history is, how everything is laid out. I'm enjoying creating everything but I haven't really settled on what it's all gonna lead into.

This actually is my earliest worldbuilding project! There may have been a couple half-dreamed things when I was younger but it is all lost to time. It was mostly self-insert characters to explore my identity and who I was. Mostly I'm just continually reinventing this little world I created. Sepha—my original goddess of thievery, trickery, and general mischief—may not even be created this time. Caramip never even existed in the first place. But I still have Kandetreath, my goddess of death and decay. Hevolux was reinvited from a self-obsessed narcissistic god to one who inspires and creates. I still have Miasys Urizana and her rival Sylvester Filiam, and many characters and buildings are still planned to exist even if I haven't written articles for them yet. One I'm excited to eventually flesh out is a dragonborn innkeeper, the idea for him was that he's a former soldier who made it to the rank of general is some war or another, and now in his retirement runs a comfortable—if rough around the edges—inn. One thing I'm enjoying in my writing is that as I continue to develop my world, I'm moving away from it being set in Dungeons & Dragons 5e. Inspiration is still pulled of course, but rather than writing my world for D&D, I'm writing my world for myself with the option of using it for D&D. It's a small difference, but an important one to me.