Summer Camp Prep 2025!

Hiya guys! I know I'm super late to the party but it's been a very busy June! Today I'm grabbing a coffee and powering through my Summer Camp Homework!

Week 1: Nourishment

.

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?

Nourishment! One of my favourite themes to write about!

Due to my setting's developing time period and nature, not everyone has everything they need. While I focus on Sedia a lot, a country with a vast supply of natural food sources, other locations in my world like Virias and Osmen have less widespread resources. Class divides and war also play large parts in my storytelling, which both naturally lead to food shortages.

During this assignment, I took out my notepad and made some physical notes of what each major, listed country's highest producing crops and food resources are, and it was a lot of fun to think through! I'm looking forward to potentially diving into this more for Summer Camp!

.

Assignment 2: Assignment 2 Download the pledge document and fill it out with your goal for Summer Camp!

I'll be settling for Copper again this year! I reached Copper last year, and while I was hoping to bump that up to Silver this year, I've dedicated a bunch of my time this July to Art Fight , a personal goal I've had for many years . If I find I have more time and motiviation than I'm expecting, I'll reach for a higher badge, but for now I think this is a more realistic goal to shoot for!

Assignment 3: If you found any outdated articles in your world, update the most important ones now! Do the same with your worldbuilding meta.

This is always my least favourite part of the Summer Camp prep, but is admittedly the most important!

• Update Meta ✓
• Update major continent / country articles IN PROGRESS
• Update important organisation articles IN PROGRESS

.

Week 2: Roots

.

Assignment 1: Look at the cultures and areas you’ll focus on for Summer Camp, and think about how their past shaped them.

I love how culture-based this Summer Camps seems to be shaping up! I love writing about cultures, and I'm hoping that this year's SC will give me lots of opportunities to expand on mine!

For this assignment I went back and cleaned up some of my old culture and species based articles, making sure terminology was up to date and that nothing was incorrect based on changes I've made over the year. There was more to clean up than I originally expected, and this was a bit more work than I thought it would be!

.

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?

I'm thankfully pretty happy with my home page still. I would like to potentially commission some customs styling down the track, and I know that would definitely improve my setting visually. However, for now I enjoy the simplicity of the basic editor and not having to worry about code, so outside of that I think some more artwork would really make things a little prettier. That's another thing I'm hoping to have time to work on through Summer Camp!

.

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!

Oh man looking at my old work? I'd actually rather visit the dentist.

Still, I did it! I had to think quite hard about what my earliest worldbuilding project was (that I still have some evidence of, I'm unfortunately a chronic deleter), and settled on my old Fallout AU. Reading through my notes was painful to say the least, and it was a challenge not to just delete it all on the spot. Still, once I got past the initial cringe it was good to see how far I've improved. There wasn't a lot that I could take to integrate, though a few of the custom species I'd come up with might work if tweaks! A few of the food ideas I had could be recycled as well.

.

Week 3: Metamorphosis

.

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 first thought I had in regards to this prompt was naturally technology! My setting has had a couple of important technological revolutions which changed the world. Then, I thought about even bigger changes, like The Ruination; a biblical-scale disaster that changed the world permenantly.

Currently, the biggest changes my world is going through is the integration of Flux Energy as it becomes a mainstream power source, and the tension of the potential of the first large-scale war in many centuries.

.

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.

WELL, this is convenient!
I've just been working through a playthrough of Disco Elysium after my partner insisted for many months that I would enjoy it. I didn't think it was going to be my kinda thing, but he was right: not only have I been having a great time, I've been thoroughly inspired! From the art style to the risk-taking narrative and character driven delivery of worldbuilding, I found myself taking out my worldbuilding notebook every few minutes! I love how the game delivers its worldbuilding. There aren't big huge swaths of information to read, pieces are fed to you bit by bit by characters living their ordinary lives. While I understand that sort of angle doesn't mesh with my wiki-style worldbuilding on World Anvil, I've tried to internalise it so I can carry that style through to my fictional writing.

.

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.

YAY I love this part of Summer Camp prep! For this, I went through the Discord showcase a little and the recent article highlights and found a few that jumped out at me!

I found that the articles that I enjoyed the most tended to be short, well broken-up by images or dividers, quotes; anything really. I may be a toddler with no attention span, or maybe this is a sign to me not to ramble so damn much and keep my articles a bit shorter!
.

Week 4: Tomorrow

.

Assignment 1: Think about current events that will impact the future. Who is working to create a specific kind of future?

I'm working on worldbuilding towards my second large D&D campaign currently, so this was a fun topic to explore. The current geopolitical climate in my setting is leading towards an inevitable large-scale war, made potentially much more globalised by the recent widespread nature and accessibility of flux power and airships. There are people and organisations working on securing peace of course, but it seems their luck is running out.

.

Assignment 2: Make sure everything’s ready—from your writing space to your writing schedule—before Summer Camp begins!

Writing Schedule:

My schedule is going to be tricky this year; with Art Fight set during the same time frame as Summer Camp, I'm going to be sat at my desk for an entire month straight. I'm hoping to start each day off with writing, since I find drawing comes to me easier after I've been awake a good few hours. Outside of that, I want to set myself a few target days of JUST writing / drawing, so that I can take a break from each here and there. And, of course, I'll be taking one day a week where I take time off from both to (hopefully) make sure I don't fall into burnout straight away!

.

Writing Space:

I've spent about an hour today not just cleaning my desk but improving the general vibes of my writing space. I've added some nice candles, cleaned the window behind my desk and changed the batteries in my fairy lights to make sure that my desk has good ambience, as well as collected some good writing playlists! Time to ruin my Spotify Wrapped for the year with dark academia classical!

.

Assignment 3: Who or what will help you achieve your goal? What will your sharing strategy be during Summer Camp?

My strategy this year:

• Take a few minutes to visit the World Anvil discord at least once a day during Summer Camp. Read a fellow article, or comment on something in the Discord/try to help someone out when they ask a question
• I'll be taking this challenge with a few World Anvil friends, and I think being able to touch base/chat with them this year will be super helpful! My sibling is taking part for the first time this year, and I'm very excited to have writing companions!
• Grind for those badges!