Summer Camp 2025 - Homework

Nourishment

While we are playing our current campaign, I am already preparing an entire continent for the next, as a treat. I want to fill it with life, add some fantastical elements and basically create a biosphere. As such I will take the topic of nourishment quite literally and want to focus on the plants and animals the people interact with and eat daily.

Gondwana

This second continent has recently been discovered and during the next campaign, will have been settled. I am looking forward to discovering more about it. Since nature has been running its course undisturbed for quite some time, the local flora and fauna has had a chance to develop quite uniquely, with a healthy dose of magic to help them along. Why is it named after the ancient super-continent of our history? I just liked the sound of the name.

World Meta

I still had a few outdated terms in there, they are updated now and ready to go. There are some spoilers in there, that is why I cannot make it public - yet.

Roots that still grow...

The roots of my world grow deep. Everything that is happening now has a reason or a cause in the deep past. Especially the things forgotten by even the gods of the world.
I am also capable of forgetting a lot of stuff, so I keep the corner stones strewn around in different notes and articles, some of them even visible to my players already. Although I have thrown in a couple distractions as well. I am looking forward to the day I finally get to compile everything on one timeline.
Things are obviously still changing and keep adding on to the past of the world as I build the present. One question for you: How truthful do you think the creation of the world is retold: Three Betrayals?

A Homepage to Bind them All

I have reworked the homepage recently, a couple months before the start of the competition. I am fairly happy with how it is currently looking / working. But as we say at home "Luft nach oben ist immer" - meaning that there is always room for improvement.
My homepage is tailored less to new readers and much more to new players, supposed to guide them through character creation and handing out small bits of knowledge that every person in the world would know. I would not want to change that, but add to it.
Once I am done writing my custom races, I will add to the character creation part and finally have a great deal of behind the scenes stuff done. What is definitely still missing is a way to collect all campaign-relevant knowledge. I won't make one for this, but future campaigns will have a "sub-homepage" so that everything is organized a bit better.

My Roots

When does worldbuilding start? Did it start when I was playing with my friends as children? When we imagined ourselves in different worlds, inspired by all the books we read, movies we watched and the games we played? In that case I started worldbuilding at around six years old.
Did it start when I was daydreaming on my way to school? Expanding on whatever story got stuck in my mind that day? I started that at around twelve to thirteen years. Or maybe with the first things I actually wrote down? That was when I was fourteen years old, during a mandatory internship in school. There I created a world that was divided into four regions, with a capital at the centre. It was completely circular, I do not remember why I did it this way, but knowing me I probably wanted to make a artificially created world.
Maybe we can start with the first time I did worldbuilding for DnD? That was around 2020, this campaign never really went anywhere, petering out after a couple of sessions with different players. But the bones of this campaign became the roots of my current world. Things I tried to set up there, without a clear idea what would happen were refined and put here. There was a newly discovered continent devoid of people, but filled with strange ruins, the ruins were made entirely from seamless black stone that seemingly carried arcane powers. Secretly the oldest and most ancient cities were built on it, a fact long forgotten by the people of the world.
You can see the things I carry through my worldbuilding quite clearly. With all this, my first proper worldbuilding project started last year in march, when I decided that "Curse of Strahd" was a nice campaign, but the next one should have a little bit more colour.

Changes in the World

Quite a few changes are happening in the world right now. The recently formed Empire in the Northern Realms is already starting to break apart at the edges, individual nobles trying to get away again and so forth...
On a more individual level, the arcane energies that suffuse the world have quite an effect on the people inhabiting it. The best known are the elves, let one live for long enough in one place and see them shifting and changing to adapt to it. Want something more flashy? Once a dragon settles somewhere, its arcane energies suffuse their surroundings, causing dragonborn to be born in the place of regular children. Voices from the deep past whisper something darker about dragons and transformation...
Once this second continent finally gets settled, the people will soon learn that it sometimes is the land that changes the people and not the other way around.

New Inspirations

I feel that I need to work a lot more on my descriptions. While they are ok, I think that there is a lot of room for improvement. Especially when we are playing, they can be livened up a bit. Since I do not live at the coast, I will need a bit more inspiration. A couple months ago I stumbled over the name of a painter and saved it for later, time to dig it up again.

I mean look at that! The colours of the waves and water are just great, if I can manage to find a way to put that into words, without going overboard, that would be lovely. Just imagine sailing through these waters, in the distance you spot a ship going down, a small band of lucky sailors managing to row away, maybe some of them have something worth taking?
Same here, with a hopeful sunrise in the background, the soft light, oranges, yellows, the wonderful green in the waves.
Or how about a view from the countryside? What is it that the common people see when they look out to the sea? These are perspectives I want to focus on more.

Strangers No More

What is happening right now?

The central discovery at the core of the current campaign will cause a great deal of action and confusion. Empires, Alliances and everybody else is competing for a piece of the newly discovered land.
My players don't know it yet, but in the Middlelands an old threat is stirring again, waiting for the proper time to make a full return and a certain group of people should not go unchecked for too long, as they are coming closer to the completion of their goal, not knowing of the danger they are about to unleash at the world.

Prepping Myself

As far as I want to go, everything is set up. The relevant people are informed and will inquire from time to time.

Achieving my Goal

My biggest motivation is to make my players go "you wrote what now?" whenever I tell them about a new article, or bit of lore, that will probably not be relevant at all - or for a few more years.