Summer Camp 2022 Progress Report

Challenge Status

The World Anvil Summer Camp 2022 challenge is now complete. Thank you for your ongoing readership and support over the course of this challenge! Keep an eye on this ticker for status updates. Onwards! --- 7/1/22: Completed the Starberg, Great Ilmenite Desert, and Lepi Monotheism articles. --- 7/3/22: Completed the Stone River Hollows and Triskelen articles. --- 7/4/22: Completed the Spacer's Flip and Starbell articles. --- 7/5/22: Completed the Crude Oil article. All Bronze prompts are now complete! --- 7/6/22: Made some minor edits, added some images in the body and title bar of some articles, and provided a few blurbs to describe images. The current word count does not yet reflect these changes. --- 7/9/22: Completed the Portreeve article. --- 7/10/22: Completed the Lili Parsens article. --- 7/11/22: Completed the Guild Board of Trustees and The Revelation Intercepts The High Shale articles. --- 7/12/22: Completed the Kinnaville and Gulderry Town Hall articles. --- 7/13/22: Completed the Capsule Test and Player of the Year articles. All silver articles are now complete! --- 7/17/22: Completed the Telfegor Robotics Foundry and Vor Ophor articles. --- 7/18/22: Completed the Triskelen Navigation Charts and Old Obliques Abbey articles. --- 7/19/22: Completed the Rootcode article. --- 7/20/22: Completed the Decade Draught and Flashraven articles. --- 7/21/22: Completed the Sealed Kingdoms Region article. All gold prompts are now complete! --- 7/23/22: Completed the Esotericist Funeral article. --- 7/24/22: Completed the Langostinite and The Canticles of Sephias articles. --- 7/25/22: Completed the Tiberius Djanzer and Iron Talon Mining Concern articles. --- 7/26/22: Completed the Triskelen Water Dragon and Cryostasis Recovery Syndrome articles. All diamond prompts are now complete! --- 7/31/22: Summer Camp 2022 is now complete! I will ideally update the word count over my weekend (next Monday/Tuesday PST). --- 8/23/22: Completed the 2022 After Summer Camp Reading List article. --- Current word count: 23,650 --- Current prompt completion status: 31/31 (Diamond Winner)

Introduction

Howdy all! BCGR_Wurth here with another World Anvil Summer Camp pledge document. Below, you'll find a summary of my expectations for the coming challenge in the form of homework assignments. I will be coming back to this document as preparation homework assigments get dropped over on the World Anvil Blog, so keep an eye on this space for more in the month of June. Below the homework assignments, you will find a spoilered list of the Summer Camp article promts, each of which will be accompanied with article block links as I complete them. Keep an eye on the news ticker at the top of this article for up-to-date news about what I've been up to. With all that said, I'm greatly looking forward to this challenge, and I hope you all are too. Onwards!

Preparation

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Homework 1: The Pledge

The Motivation: Aside from getting more eyes on my work and the pride that comes with overcoming a challenge, I'm motivated by a strong desire to meet the standards I've set for myself in my New Year's Resolutions document. I've never actually managed to complete a set of New Years' resolutions before - even when they were practical - so I think it would do wonders for my morale. The Challenge Goal: I intent to participate in Summer Camp 2022 and, if possible, earn the diamond-level badge. The Creative Goal: As laid out in my New Year's Resolutions (see above), some of my goals for the year include putting down at least 100k words across all my creative projects, winning NaNoWriMo, and getting a piece of writing into a state where I can think about starting the publishing process. WASC will hopefully help me move towards those goal more quickly. More specifically, though, I want to use WASC to focus down on places, characters, and lore that will find themselves into The Fortress of Salt or a novel involving The Garbage Man. This is not to say that I won't expand on my other worlds, but my focus should be on the Manifold Sky and Sealed Kingdoms settings. Barring that, I'd like to get Tales of the Transmuter into a state where I can start running one-shots in that setting, as that would be a great way to get outside feedback on the TTRPG system I've been working on for a few years now.

Homework 2: Themes

Expanse (Copper Prompts): My 'Expanse' prompts will most likely be set in the Sealed Kingdoms setting. That's a space opera setting with a lot of potential lore around it, as it has been developed over literal decades of homebrew tabletop roleplay among my friends and me. Star systems, planets, unusual phenomena, and megastructures are all fair game. This might also be where I integrate Calculiopolis (my successful NaNoWriMo project circa 2018) into the broader Sealed Kingdoms setting. Leadership (Silver Prompts): My 'Leadership' prompts will most likely be applied to my Sealed Kingdoms setting, though they may also come up in the Manifold Sky setting as I try to add enough major figures to flesh out the factions that I haven't touched upon as much so far. I've decided that I'm going to shift perspectives between the crew of the Revelation and the crew of the Dewhollow in The Fortress of Salt story. This is both because I want to improve the pacing of the story (a 14 year interstellar journey from a single perspective would prove boring at points) and because I like the idea of setting up the antagonist as a more sympathetic villain that serves as the foil for the protagonist (sort of a 'there but for the grace of God go I' scenario). Discovery (Gold Prompts): As with the Expanse prompts, my 'Discovery' prompts will most likely be set in the Sealed Kingdoms setting. I might also use this opportunity to flesh out the Tales of the Transmuter setting, though, because the whole idea behind that one is that the characters on Gulderry Island are relatively new to the world and rarely set foot outside of the Transmuter's estate; for them, the village itself is a whole new world to explore. This might also be a good opportunity to put more into the otherwise little-explored Northern and Southern Tesseracts of the Manifold Sky setting. Monstrous (Diamond Prompts): My 'Monstrous' prompts will most likely be centered around monsters (in both senses of the term) in the Manifold Sky setting. As mentioned in the Discovery prompts section above, the Northern and Southern Tesseracts need to be developed more, including the unique hazards - such as wildlife - created by the fast evolution of an irradiated ecosystem. Furthermore, in the interest of providing new and unique antagonists for roleplayers in the Manifold Sky setting to deal with, I should really be creating more villainous (or at least morally complex) characters in general.

Homework 3: Resources

Most of my image and music inspirations for the Manifold Sky setting are alreasy present in my world meta, but for the sake of the homework assignment for this week, I'll post some examples below. Obviously, 1940's/50's jazz is a big influence on the Manifold Sky setting, as the setting features widespread mechanized warfare between pre-semiconductor societies. Because it's a non-Euclidean setting, though, there's also some influence from more surrealist sources like Autechre, Chuck Salamone, and the sorts of vistas that come from AI generation like Artbreeder.

Autechre - Medrey Kay Kyser & Sully Mason - Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition

Mason Lindroth & Chuck Salamone - Singing Sands Sungazer - DRUNK

Autechre - Doctrine Judy Garland - Get Happy

As a science fiction setting, the Sealed Kingdoms is more influenced by retro wave, vaporwave, and space rock. The setting can be dark at times, but I wouldn't fully classify it as cyberpunk. The Fortress of Salt's soundtrack would probably include a lot of Gunship, Perturbator, Makeup & Vanity Set, and Stone Rebel.

Homework 4: Plans for Success

This Summer Camp, I'm going to do things a little differently and try to get most of my writing done during the daylight hours. I will be working during my lunch breaks and spending up to an hour at home on each night of the challenge, ideally right after I get home from work. This way, I will have a better time achieving a good work-leisure-creative time balance in my life, whereas before I had a little bit of an obsession with getting it all done in a single, marathon session. I recently acquired a cheap, basic laptop for use specifically for creative work during breaks in the work day. While I really need to invest in a stronger PC for 3D work and the like, the fact that this laptop is cheap and week is actually a benefit: if I don't have a way to play games on it, It'll be that much easier to focus on getting my writing work out! As for support systems, I know my brother SpaceSuitIan will be following along with his own WASC entries - or, barring that, participating in a parallel art challenge. The other people in my personal friends/playtesing group will also likely help keep me to task. Other than them, I have people here on WA and on the Discord who regularly look in on my work, and I appreciate that feedback from my fellow writers greatly. Thank you all, and see you in June!

Prompts

Looking for the original challenge description, rules, and a lists of entries? Looking to try your hand at the challenge prompts yourself? Click here to get started! Prefer WorldAnvil's native user challenge page format instead of this one? You can find that version by clicking here!