Summer Camp 2025
So my last summer camp was met with an unexpected resounding success. I pledged for the silver award last time but actually went for gold but ended up achieving diamond so that was an experience...
but yeah lets get into it once again yes?
Week 1: Nourishment
The week 1 theme is nourishment. I might be bad at writing food, but by the sounds of it that's not really an issue because its a surprisingly broad topic by the looks of it
Think about ways the theme of Nourishment affects your world. Do people generally have what they need? What happens when they don’t?
They probably do? Or they will die of starvation? Or maybe they are missing stuff like houses or fancy clothes or something. Here it depends on your faction once again, in the HF they will find a use for you but with like the GAE they would probably just kill anyone who cant work.
In other terms, we have the obvious fact where reactors require fuel to work, stuff like Planck-Dismantlement Beams that require matter to disassemble and all that. I guess my Magic system consumes thoughts and runes in a way? Stars provide energy for life, things can be thrown into Penrose spheres for a very efficient mass-energy converter, and even stuff like the Great Paragon Collider can take in objects to destroy them and gain an extremely deep understanding of that object, very likely enough so to instantly create a techprint.
Download the pledge document and fill it out with your goal for Summer Camp!
If you found any outdated articles in your world, update the most important ones now! Do the same with your worldbuilding meta.
I always update old articles, in fact this has been my main focus for a while. I dont think anything with the meta changed recently other than adding a few new (MORE!!!) inspiration sources which i have already done but again ill double check
...
Okay yeah i was mostly right but i added "aliens" to the recurring themes section
Week 2: Roots
... i did not expect that. Anyway,
Look at the cultures and areas you’ll focus on for Summer Camp, and think about how their past shaped them.
History is one of those things that im always trying to expand. Currently the United Nations of Tebburus has by far the deepest history of any star nation but I try to develop every nations histories. The UNT was influenced significantly by the Tebburus Unification War which saw them develop very advanced technology. The Unification War probably even effected how the suon species evolved even if just slightly, and they also created the various special genes during the war (read Suon Genetic Engineering). One nation that I quite like the history of is the Zikrat Scientific Citizenry (ZSC) which is not a HF star nation. Originally an organic species, the zikrat placed their personalities in huge supercomputer megastructures after they faced the sudden calamity of losing any way to reproduce. Most elements of the organic zikrat species are even present in the post-Ascension zikrat; they are designed for aquatic environments and have a similar anatomy. Most of the inspiration for this faction came from stellaris and rain world.
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 think my new reader experience is pretty decent already, we have art, a good elevator pitch and many links to important places around the world. I know I mostly do worldbuilding for myself, but showing my lore to like friends and stuff is fun. The Introductory Article is probably a pretty good introduction, but it does leave a lot of the mysteries explained, those mysteries that shouldnt really be explained until much later. (Read How I do Worldbuilding)
To me, the new reader experience isnt as important as my own experience. Maybe I can put the Fortrais Galaxy Cluster map on the homepage... Maybe I should do that now...
Dang I broke my homepage again
ok, ok, fixed it... you saw nothing!!!
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!
Now fun fact, the modern THF universe already has quite a lot of inspiration from that earlier project. I'll let you in on a little secret, you can get a role from the Singularity prose article to obtain access to my first world ever concieved, but i didnt put a lot of information on world anvil (it would be a lot of work). The THF universe is larger and deeper at this point, but my older world was started somewhere around the years 2005 - 2007. It is impossible to say exactly when sadly... and it could even be outside of those years
My first world has a power scale immensely higher than the THF universe as well, so there's that. To give you an idea, they would often use bullets with a similar mass as a galaxy in assault rifle rounds. It is very hard and rare to come across a more powerful world and it took me most of my life to find anything that could rival it.
Anyway, we have stuff like zero-point energy which I integrated into the THF lore as well as like, the Suppressor Assault Rifle (which originally existed in my older universe (which was in turn inspired closely by the Suppressor from halo 4, i loved the forerunner guns)).
It would be hard to integrate a lot of that stuff into the THF universe and balance it and make it believable to be honest. It was absolutely nuts
Week 3: Metamorphosis
Sorry for starting this week fairly late but I always have to write more lore!! I should be able to get these at least a bit done though, ill do my best
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?
First thing that comes to my mind is S.R.I.A and their transition from a more... 'regular' Sentient Robot. The HF itself is probably trying to recover from the recent, Fortrais - shattering Hyperquasar Annihilator War which destroyed 2 of their galaxies, among other factions. Other factions would probably be trying to stop them but... they would also have their own internal problems, even the Cypher Dominion which started the whole thing in the first place
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 guess you could say i do this quite often already? The most recent one was a game called rain world, which has inspired a few things for my lore already
Read a couple of articles from the community, give them a like (and why not a sticker!), and write about what inspired you.
I went looking at the #showcase channel on discord for some cool sci fi things to look at, finding 2 articles late on Saturday:
and
Quickly writing some notes, the many-hands article could be neat for some alien culture or leader. I wouldnt steal an idea exactly, but perhaps they could have some other attribute other than having, well, many hands? The battle of earth article also seems important to my lore, for inspiration anyway (of course there is no earth in Fortrais so yeah). MadToxin has went quite deep into this, maybe I can scavenge this for questions to ask myself for my own battles...
But yeah ill try and get this done tomorrow, its getting quite late now.......
And tomorrow came.. I gave a pretty good outline yesterday actually, but perhaps i could include like quotes and stuff for my battle articles? The battle of earth article above has some and I just realised i dont.
Week 4: Tomorrow
A strange topic to put now, since we have already been doing a bit of that in the previous topic. Anyway lets put the assignments up
Think about current events that will impact the future. Who is working to create a specific kind of future?
At the moment, everyone is pretty much trying to recover from the Hyperquasar Annihilator war, so no faction has any real aspirations other than fixing themselves at the moment... that said, there is the Suon Prophesy and all that so the HF wants to take over Fortrais
Make sure everything’s ready—from your writing space to your writing schedule—before Summer Camp begins!
So I already write lore every day, so I guess you could say im always ready. Still, I have a notes file that i can use to help me decide what i want to write.
Who or what will help you achieve your goal? What will your sharing strategy be during Summer Camp?
This isn't my first summer camp and stuff... and i know full well that i havent really shared much, like ever, even during summer camp so yeah. For accountability, I have everyone that looks at this article! All those favourites, the comments, the stickers... They all encourage me! (Thanks again to everyone who puts those on my article)
Best of luck with your goals- how know, maybe you'll manage another diamond this year! Have fun :)
I probably will.. I hope you have a lot of fun too!!!! good luck
https://www.worldanvil.com/w/thf-universe-tankium