Summer camp prep

Week 1

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?

Teshelyn is a world of extremes as its various cultures are coming into their own. The Dirhun balaceti are established aquaculturists, while the hardy settlers of Horizon get by a day at a time on whatever the Balacen decides to provide. The predictability and reliability of food of course influences what the people of Teshelyn can spend the rest of their time doing, which is perhaps why there are more cetalinguists to be found off the lush shores of northern Sauhul than anywhere else. That is not to say that permanent residences are a prerequisite for cultural advancement, as the nomadic orca clans and dolphin superpods built the foundations for balaceti and merfolk culture (and in turn, the human societies as well).

Naturally there are ebbs and flows in abundance of crops, krill, fish, and other food sources, but most Tesheli societies are resilient and adaptable to these changes. However, the Sirulan emergence caused a massive disruption to feeding grounds, migratory routes, water quality, and even air currents, and although there is a massive effort underway to correct this, the full extent of the damage remains to be seen.

Assignment 2

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

This year I want to finish out the summer camp prompts with a focus on Teshelyn's non-humanoid societies, specifically the great whales and how they view the events surrounding New Sirulis.

Assignment 3

If you found any outdated articles in your world, update the most important ones now!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

I want to spin this off and let it stand alone without the Magic specifics, but that's gonna require some deep reconfiguration. Ready for it to not work.

Week 2

Assignment 1

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

One of the defining features of Teshelyn is how young it is, which at first glance seems limiting, but I think there's a lot of depth to be explored there. There isn't a lot of "past" for things to be shaped by, but that sense of unease is what drives a lot of the stories I want to tell.

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 like that the blurb focuses on action across a wide breadth of the world but it doesn't necessarily get the point across. The plot hooks are there, but there's not quite the sense of depth that I want.

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 think I was way too proud of myself for the idea of cetalinguistic scholarship, to the point where I kinda oriented the entire world around it. I think it's a good idea, and it's definitely integral to the story I want to tell, but I need to write for characters who don't care about it.

Some ideas from my earliest worldbuilding project are already present in Teshelyn - Sauhul as a fluid landscape used for geological/biological fieldwork is riffing on the original concept for a world where the people visiting would inadvertently reshape the environment based on the magic they were using.

Week 3

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?

Again this is a mystery even to the people of Teshelyn themselves, and the story I'm telling gets into why. They're all racing to make sense of their limited recorded history and their relatively advanced societies, and the discovery of the Heart of the Giant begins to put everything into place. But there are plenty of people who think that meddling with something in the center of Nulltide Bay is dangerous enough and would rather find their own path forward. After the advent of Sirulis, the Balaceti will discover that although they predate the appearance of humans on Teshelyn, their own origins are a combination of Sirulan humans and orcas, and the silverfin dolphins will work with Sirulan biomancers to take to the skies on their own.

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.

I watched The Abyss recently, knowing that it's a much different take on a similar thematic space to what I'm doing here. And right away that was validated - in that movie the ocean is treated like outer space, both visually and in how it's presented as something alien and threatening. It was a lot different from Cameron's work on Avatar 2, which is closer to playing in the same space here. But it did open me up to thinking about where there might be room for some elements of horror in this world, especially when the story gets into bringing the humans of Sirulis into their new home. My mind went to a newly-awakened Sirulan on the deck of a sinking glyph ship, struggling to get to the surface before they're trapped.

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.