Summer Camp 2022 Reading Challenge, FuriousTribble

Summer Camp Thoughts

This is the first real event I have done on World Anvil, and in general for a very, very long time. It was interesting to engage with these prompts, a lot of the time these sorts of things help tease out the specifics of the very broad strokes ideas I have in my own head. As everyone probably can empathize with, I have the whole world in my head, getting it OUT of my head is the problem.


Articles Read:
Vicitra, the City On The Perch by Qurilion
At first glance, I am struck with the sheer amount of content that is available on the page and the unique way it is communicated. To be frank I think it is a bit over the top but as a whole it is an inspiration and motivation for making my OWN pages more unique. There is a deluge of information for the city, some of it stuff that I would never have thought about for my own work but ultimately would be worth at least exploring. There is a unique flair to the page that I am outright jealous of, I have not had the bandwidth to tackle trying to customize my pages but seeing some of these pieces from the Summer Camp, I feel like I need to.
Qurilion is obviously using the prompts and sections of the articles in such great ways, ways I never considered or explored. This article is the reason why I am going to retool my entire world. As for content, its great. I fell in love with the city and its people in that dark, grungy sort of way that you find yourself loving the best undercity, cyberpunk style settings.
Ashes of Ak'Thakra by MadToxin
The greatest part of this article, other than its clear concise presentation and brief but emotional theme is the careful balance of scale. It is something that I think I miss sometimes, this type of scale in particular. As a rule, big events and problems are just not very easy for humans to grasp properly. Some people can, or we can grasp things in parts but to take in, say, the almost destruction of an entire planet would be hard. To try to encompass the entirety of a tragedy of that magnitude, even as a generation that lived in it, can be very hard. Trying to communicate that to new generations becomes increasingly impossible.
So the visual of showing a wrecked planet that these orbital platforms are floating above shows the big scale, the untenable scale. The human scale, the manageable scale is the urn and its mixture of sand and glass. It is a small thing, easy to imagine and easy to turn into a symbol that people understand. There are more than a few of my articles and just general world building norms that could benefit from a better delineation of this sort of scale.

The Dungeon Crawlers Guide To Disastrous Adventure by A.J. Ponder
Another short read but an enjoyable one. There is a sort of tongue in cheek irreverence that is communicated here, one that makes me want to go look up more about this character and the world. It is an interesting departure from my own writing style for my world, I tend towards a more clinical recitation of facts without much in the way of flavor but paradoxically some of my most enjoyed writing (by others) are the blog posts and articles I write where I put more of "Myself" into the mixture. I am not quite sure where I could put this sort of personality back into the writing with the world building but I think it might be worth a try, in some form at least.

The Primal Princesses by Killer_Korax
This was an interesting concept to think about and start to explore in my own head. Tempering Divinity with Mortality is a cool solution to what is a common trope, that of alien and untenable elemental forces with no concept of life, mortality or anything in between. I also enjoy the sacrifice being a seemingly one time affair that might create an interesting long view to the more human consciousness of the goddesses that may need to be tempered again in the future if they lose touch with that humanity over the eons.
Abysthor, the Last Great Priest by Written Bard
An good way to infer a lot of history without having to commit to explaining every aspect of it. I liked that it was written semi-diegetic in the sense that this could easily be some manuscript or general report on someone's desk as much as it is a worldbuild/ttrpg explainer article. There is a way that this is told as a story that my own articles could benefit from, touching back on the dry and almost toneless voice that I use for my articles vrs some of these far more lively and interesting ones.
Throne of the Fens by The_Betrayer_Titan
I love a good, dark apotheosis story. There are a lot more things I can do to make the gods and spirits of my world a lot more dynamic. Things like this sort of...backdoor apotheosis and fighting, things like expanding interactions between the divinities and powers of the world to be more interwoven and interesting. Lot of cool ideas that can spin off from one little throne in a world, imo.

Crypt Locus by malkuthe
A good example of what a great article can look like even without playing around with theming or CSS or anything like that. Just by exploring the prompts and the different categories built into specific parts of the articles you can have a great layout with a lot of good information. Loved the content of this one, has a pretty neat ramification for the world these Crypt Locus are a part of. Makes me think I need to think about some things in a more granular sense, as long as they are relevant anyway.
Clayfinger by stonebunny
This is an example of a really cool article and idea that was rendered very hard to work through by virtue of formatting. In the same vein as being "Too Much" I mentioned with an article above, this is just not a great mix of formatting and visual elements which is honestly weird to me as the creator has some great artistic choices elsewhere in the world. Their content is great in this article I am just afraid that it might not get the attention it deserves. It presents a valuable lesson for my own articles as I work towards finding my visual language and organization themes that I need to make sure that they do not get ahead of good UX/UI.
Dragonfly Carrier by skairunner
This was a super cool article and very motivating for several reasons. The whole presentation of their page is clean. Easy to read while still being aesthetically pleasing AND aesthetically cohesive to their overall world theme. This is a great template for me to consider when I readjust my worlds look and feel. The organization is also something to consider, they have a very clear idea of what needs to be communicated and how and that is something I can very much stand to emulate to a degree.

Future Plans:

This engagement with the community may have been undertaken as a last minute whim but it has netted me a series of huge positives in terms of motivation and inspiration. I have never felt more invigorated for building my world and tackling some of the real infrastructural problems with my world building and my World Anvil articles.
In the short term my goals are to finish, to a basic level of completion, all articles. After this I will pick one, likely one of my settlements and build it out extensively to explore the style and theme that I want to present before extrapolating that to other settlements before doing the same thing across the board. This will likely take several months, motivation and schedule pending.
In the long term, I plan on increasing my engagement with the community at large to include other social media platforms. I want to learn and diversify my inputs when it comes to creating worlds and cultures and since I ultimately want to develop my own TTRPG modules having those platforms expanded are a necessity these days.