Summer Camp 2025

The 2025 edition of World Anvil’s annual worldbuilding Summer Camp begins on June 28, and the ever-loving ECC (that’s me!) is excited as can be!

Summer Camp, in case you’re not familiar, is a community event which challenges writers, gamemasters, and other creative types to respond to a series of prompts released throughout the month. It’s like my favorite thing ever, as I loves me a great writing exercise and have done since grad school (if not earlier).

This here page—the one you’re reading right now!—is my hub for all things related to the event. And it all starts with a pledge and some homework.

First, the pledge: I, the ever-loving E. Christopher Clark, pledge to complete every prompt that World Anvil releases—just as I’ve done for the past several years.

Prep Month

Week One

In announcing that the first theme of Summer Camp will be “nourishment,” the World Anvil folks threw me for a loop. I was not expecting that. And in fact, I’ve found that I’m actually pretty uncomfortable thinking about nourishment right now. I’ve been so busy with work—both for my jobby job and for my comic book—that taking time for sustenance is hard enough, let alone taking time to do or consume things that actually nourish me.

But that just means that this theme is coming along for me at exactly the right time. I already knew that I needed to focus more on taking care of myself this summer. Knowing now that I’ll be spending a whole week in July writing about nourishment in my fiction will perhaps inspire me to focus more on that subject out here in my reality.

Homework 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?

The world of Eden, where The Blood of Seven Queens is set, is best described as a post-apocalyptic paradise. It’s a beautiful place, teeming with life, but much of that life was brought here by a Calamity which destroyed “the world before.” So, while the people in Eden typically have plenty to eat, they sometimes struggle to nourish the less physical parts of their being: their minds, their emotions, their souls.

Though the main story of The Blood of Seven Queens is set about two hundred years after the end of “the world before,” the world that our characters inhabit has been profoundly shaped by struggles for nourishment in the past. For example: Frieda Jacobs, the titular “blood of seven queens,” is attempting to unify the seven distinct kingdoms of Wonderland, all in an attempt to fend off the encroachments of their neighbors in Oz. And though she has an easy go of it in some places, the places where she struggles to win hearts and minds are often those places where scarcity of resources—scarcity of nourishment—has shaped the people more harshly.

Homework Assignment 2

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

Done! See above.

Homework Assignment 3

Find any outdated articles in your world and update the most important ones now! Do the same with your worldbuilding meta.

Well, as luck would have it, the power went out here at home as I was doing this homework. And so, I can’t access my world right now. I promise to do this assigment later, though. I think it’ll be fun. It’s been too long since I went on a deep dive through the world to check out all the nitty and the gritty of what I’ve built over the past few years.

Week 2

The second theme of Summer Camp 2025 will be “roots,” and to say that I’m excited for this one would be an understatement.

I was live on stream with Janet from World Anvil when this one was revealed, so those of you who were watching got my instant reaction. Now, nearly a week later, my thoughts haven’t changed much. While I think the Twitch chat’s gravitation towards plant life was an understandable initial reaction, my first thoughts were of Alex Haley’s 1976 book Roots and how it sparked a renewed interest in genealogy.

In case you didn’t know, I love, love, love the Family Trees feature on World Anvil. I used it extensively to keep track of The Silver Family when I was writing the The Stains of Time series and “The Family Tree of Frieda Jacobs” was one of the first bits of worldbuilding I put together for my current project: The Blood of Seven Queens.

Homework Assignment 1

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

A couple years back, World Anvil ran a challenge called “On the Shoulders of Giants” and the article I wrote for it has been foundational to my worldbuilding ever since. The Bekiskapan, which started out as a silly excuse to explore what kind of culture would legitimately have worn so-called “chainmail bikinis,” have ended up informing nearly every aspect of Eden’s history. And I look forward to maybe having the chance to do something similar this summer.

In terms of cultures and areas ripe for exploration during Roots Week, I have a few ideas:

• Elven cultures, which I have thusfar kinda-sorta ignored in favor of my halfling, human, and demonic-looking shapeshifter cultures
• The human culture of Earth-666, which in The Blood of Seven Queens is the most recent iteration of reality to collapse
• Any of the cultures who call The Realm home—since that’s the next country Frieda Jacobs and company will be traveling through in BSQ

Homework 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 actually really pleased with my homepage and how welcoming I think it is. And that’s saying something, given my predilection for tinkering! A big, dynamic image from the most recent issue of the comic lets the reader know what kind of thing they’re in for. That’s followed by an either/or call to action (“read a free preview” or “buy the issue”) and a one-sentence elevator pitch, each of which is designed to grab the reader at whatever stage of the “I’m interested” journey they might be at after seeing the image.

Below that, if folks are not yet ready to dive into story and are looking for worldbuilding, there are visual links to the two sides of my Clarkwoods Literary Universe which link to foundational articles. And below that, if the new reader is a World Anvil user, are the standard World Codex and Recent Articles blocks.

I’m certainly open to suggestions if you, dear reader, have them. But for now, I’m going to call this assignment done.

Homework 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!

Ooh, how I love this assignment! I think it’s invaluable to look back at our previous work, both to learn from it and to appreciate the person we were when we made it.

The first worldbuilding project that I can think of would be my mid-90s comic book Blood Red, about a team of superheroes who come together to fight the evil genetics company that experimented on them. It was a big world for just five issues of comic, and that was the trouble. I tried to cram everything into those pages. I left loose ends everywhere, setting up plots that never paid off, and confusing my small but loyal readership at every turn.

Trying to fit too much into too little space is something I’ve continued to struggle with throughout my career, but I’m going to keep working on it. World Anvil certainly helps with that. With WA, I can collect all the ideas I have. Then I can pick and choose what makes sense for any given story, novel, or comic—without fear of forgetting something.

Week 3

It’s Friday, June 20 as I write this, and it has been a rough week since the Week 3 Homework for Summer Camp dropped. I spent several hours in an emergency room with my youngest (she’s fine now), I struggled through the latest pages of The Blood of Seven Queens, and a fraudster ruined the launch of my latest Kickstarter campaign for me.

I am hoping for an honest-to-goodness transformation of my luck over the last bit of June. A metamorphosis, you might say. And, as luck would have it, “metamorphosis” is the next Summer Camp 2025 theme that’s coming our way.

Homework 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 people in my world were brought there by a Calamity which ended the universe as they knew it. They’ve survived countless wars, the creation of dangerous hybrid species, and the forced expulsion of halflings from most of the world. The United Countries of Ostké is gone and an Empire stands in its place. The once-pure Council of Five, an international governing body, is being corrupted from within. And the prophesied descendant of the Seven Queens seeks to unite the countries of Wonderland under one banner.

But in order to succeed, she’ll have to face the might of the great and terrible Wizard of Oz!

Homework 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’m going to have to take a zero on this one. I wish that I had the time to check out some new stuff, but I just don’t. I barely have enough time to write the words of this bad excuse.

Homework 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.

I’ve been reading Summer Camp prep articles whenever I have a spare moment, and commenting on them as best I can. As for how these articles have inspired me, reading about how each author plans to approach Summer Camp just a little bit differently has inspired me to embrace my own quirky ways of doing things.

Week 4

The fourth and final theme of Summer Camp 2025 will be “tomorrow.”

Homework Assignment 1

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

The time that the peoples of Eden spend in Eden is highly variable. The First Age last 77 years, but the current age (the Second) for nearly 150 years now. Debate rages as to whether this age will ever end, and whether the universe beyond these shores will ever return. This leads to differing philosophies about living in this liminal place. The people ask, “Should we settle down, as if we’re never leaving? Or should we hold out hope that we’ll go back to our ‘real’ lives eventually?”

The truth is that this age of Eden will end, but even the folks who believe that can’t be 100% right about how that will happen. That wouldn’t be any fun, now would it?

Frieda Jacobs’ creation of a United Kingdom will inevitably lead to greater feelings of belonging in much of the seven kingdoms of Wonderland, but maybe there are factions that aren’t so happy about her making everyone more comfortable with the current state of things? I think so.

Homework Assignment 2

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

I am boring, at least when it comes to my schedule and space. The space ain’t changing, mostly because there’s no room for it to change, and the schedule will remain the same as last year. I plan to write on my lunch breaks from work, during the time I get back from not having to commute on Wednesdays and Fridays, and on weekends.

The extended description of this assignment asks us to also take a look at our stubs for things we might expand during this Summer Camp. I always do this anyway, so I’m glad to have it as an official part of the homework. Here are some ideas for stubs that might fit into each category:

Nourishment

• Newest Orleans
• Oona’s Obelisk
• The Gush

Roots

• Deadly Poppy Field
• Forest of Fangs
• Jack's Beanstalk
• Lof Jabla

Metamorphosis

• Aria Anderson — my version of the Little Mermaid
• Blue Caterpillar of Wonderland
• Hermey’s Folly
• Pinocchio

Tomorrow

• Dorothy Gale
• Wendy Darling

Homework Assignment 3

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

Regular contributors to my comments section—folks like Kitoypoy, Hunter Christmas, Make Lore Not War, Strixxline, Serukis, Dazzlinkat, and others—are the folks who make my worldbuilding rewarding. I also love and get recharged from reading their work and the work of others who post on Discord. And it’s super-fun to go through the list of responses to a given prompt and just click around randomly. That activity also just plain-old gives me life!

As for my sharing strategy, I will hit Notify Followers on almost every article that I have even a little bit of fun writing. Other than that, I post in the Summer Camp channel in Discord when it makes sense to the conversation. And if I feel like I’ve got something with a lot of crossover potential, I’ll share it to BlueSky.