Update: The dates for the world-building camp have moved from mid-March to late April.
I’ve been hinting about it on Facebook and Twitter for a few weeks while we got the specifics nailed down, but today the time of hinting is over. I’m pleased to announce that I am helping design and facilitate a pair of educational kids’ day camps for Threshold School.
The first of these, World-Building Camp, starts on April 25 and runs for four Saturdays. In the course of creating their own world, the students not only get to pick my brain on world-building (I have a few thoughts on the subject), but get to work with real-world scientists to make sure the ecology, geology, and anthropology makes sense. We’ve even got an artist on hand to help visualize their creations. At the end of the program, we help the kids write up their world in terms of game statistics to turn it into a publishable sourcebook for the Pathfinder RPG.
The second camp, Moons of Zartak, is a day-long live-action game event on Saturday, April 18. In this sci-fi game, players take on the roles of refugees from across the galaxy establishing colonies on the resource-rich planet of Zartak. In order to build up their colonies, players must face the strategic challenges found in many video games—managing resources, crafting new assets, negotiating with other colonies—but in a live, face-to-face environment. The game rewards collaboration, creativity, and problem-solving.
World-building is obviously one of my passions, and I’ve been wanting to run a live-action game like this for years, so I’m very excited about both of these projects.
The camps are being held in the Denver area and are open to kids in grades 5-7. If it sounds cool to you (or your child, who would be the one actually participating), please check out the links above. And if you know someone else who you think might be interested, please feel free to pass the links along.
