2026 Summer Camp Pledge

That Time of Year Again

It's time for Summer Camp again! To those of you who are new here; welcome! Goodness, but this year has gone by like crazy. Last year's summer camp went fantastically for me; not only did I reach copper but one of my articles, Ohesa, even won a prize! I'm definitely not aiming for prize-worthy articles this year because worldbuilding has been going slow and my spring has been both very stressful due to an injured pet and very busy due to a woodworking project. That being said, I do have plans...

Goal pledge

As every year, I'm pledging to reach the copper badge this summer camp. Let's extend that streak to four badges! Secretly I would love it if I can reach silver but we'll see how it goes and how much the prompts inspire me. Since I've reached copper during the last three years, I feel pretty confident that I can manage it.

Week 1 homework

Theme: Love

One of my principles for Dlynaeth is that it is not particularly light or dark, but just a little kinder than our own world. Hence I think love for each other and our environment actually plays quite a strong role - due to people's inherent magic they tend to have a bit more awareness and empathy.

A strong love of good craftsmanship also plays a big role in several of the cultures of the world. There can be much love between those who share a homecourt, for example, with a sort of extended familial love. I do hope we'll also get some interesting prompts about perhaps a lack of love or a twisted love - I've been feeling lately that I need to add a bit more "fucked up shit" to Dlynaeth to bring it more towards the kind of tone I envision.

Timeline? Or Art?

I rolled a 2 on my hopscotch which I'm pretty happy with since both of the options appeal to me! I've had "create a timeline" on my to-do list for ages but I also really want to create a new world header (which counts as updating CSS and layout, at least to me). I think I will pick the header though and get started right away, hopefully I can show it off in my Summer Camp articles (since art usually takes me a lot of time). The timeline will just have to wait.

Update June 9th: new cover is up! I'm not completely satisfied with it yet but it will do for now and I can continue to improve it when I'm less busy.

Week 2 Homework

Theme: Growth

This week's theme will probably fit well with the area I intend to focus on: the Poervudh Empire on the eastern side of Dlynaeth continent. Growth is an important part of the history of any empire, and I have no idea yet what that history looks like but I do know that this is of massive cultural importance to especially the area around the great eastern bay. It's also an excellent theme for things like species and ecosystems and I hope I'll get to explore some of those.

So why there?

This week I rolled a 1 on the hopscotch so my assignment is to write about what made me choose this particular area of focus. The short answer is that so far I have focused pretty much exclusively on the western half of Dlynaeth and have little idea of what's going on in the east but what I do know is that there is a large empire there which is centred around the eastern bay and it's already pretty old. It's been a big force in shaping the area and it's chock full of the history of the peoples it's absorbed and it's been instrumental in shaping the nations around it as they guard themselves against its expansion. Mostly, I just want to have an old empire that is both beautiful and deeply fucked up and also has to deal with a history of fae in their lands and current fae on the doorstep. I think that would be fun.

The items for row 2 of the hopscotch are making a list of related articles or a list of concepts I'd like to explore. Personally I really like to go through my stubs and get an overview of what I already have so it's fresh in my mind when summer camp arrives so I'm doing that despite not rolling it.

Existing Articles

• Eastern Maelstroms
• The Watchtowers

Stubs

Somewhat unsurprisingly the vast majority of my stubs relate to western Dlynaeth. I have exactly one that concerns a culture of sailors who are found everywhere and one that... actually doesn't have anything to do with eastern Dlynaeth either but it's a cool species/organism/character idea I have so maybe we'll get a prompt for it? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

• Naelasaf
• "Swamp Pando"

Week 3 Homework

Theme: Loss

Oh boy, loss is inherently woven into an old empire, I think. Loss of other cultural practices or identities, loss of lives, but also loss of "empire" history within the empire itself. I find empires, and especially ageing ones, to have an inherent melancholic aspect that I'm very eager to explore within Poervudh. I do hope that the prompts for this theme will be inspiring for both this feeling and introducing more above-mentioned fucked-up shit.

Plan Your Writing Time

Bold of you to assume I plan or that the plan ever works out.

Read, read, read!

I rolled a 3 on the hopscotch so that means it's time to read some stuff written by other Anvilites! In previous year's I've listed many of the worlds that inspire me but this time I'd like to focus on a world I just discovered: Babikiye by Valen's Expeditions. This is world with two magically connected planets with very different cultures/societies and a beautiful, somewhat mysterious feeling.

The primer is really well written, engaging and evocative and with some choices of subscriber groups for extra info at the end. I love that there seems to be a focus on interactions of magic and science, the role of a Creator, and the interplay between different species and cultures. They have a lovely article, that is part story, about who the Creator is.

Week 4 Homework

Theme: Family

I feel like family should be a doable theme in a summer camp focused on an empire. Speaking of which, the empire is indeed renamed to Mörvundh, rather than Poervudh, with the assistance of one of my dear friends who is an absolute gem and will always let me bounce ideas off them. I still think the original name shoved me into slightly more different/original ideas but I just couldn't take it seriously.

That ramble brings me to language families, which I do hope will be a prompt this year! As some people in the discord rightly pointed out, family is a human-made concept which we use to categorise stuff (people, organisms, languages etc.) so it is widely applicable. And since empires are by nature a sort of conglomerate, they seem likely to contain families of all kinds.

Goals

I see you sneaking the meta into the prep, WA, and I say that as someone who finds the meta helpful. This world isn't being created for the purposes of a book or a campaign or anything like that, although I certainly consider those things as possibilities. But the main thing is just the joy of creating a world, of crafting characters that I like to spend time with and a setting they inhabit. Sometimes ideas that were originally completed separate will not leave me alone and insist on being transformed and taking a place in this world instead (see The Immortals, although I'm still working on their articles. Forah, known as Fabia in her original form, is featured in my world cover art).

Playlist

I rolled a 4 for the hopscotch and thank goodness, because preparing my playlist is the only thing I really wanted to do! Having some good music on in the background is one of the main ways I power my writing (or any work).

There are so many songs I love that I hadn't added to my writing/drawing playlist yet that this made a good opportunity to take the time for that. I deeply enjoyed meandering through my youtube history and recommendations (a process not without struggles, but I got to the right sort of page in the end) and adding songs both old and new to my mix playlist.