bookwormburrows campaign · cmp-003

Studio Qibla⛩
the Ghibli World

Pick a film. Pick a place. Pick a year. The films are sealed worlds you can walk but never rewrite. Real Japan, five centuries deep, is open in every direction. Somewhere in the hills west of Tokyo stands the maker's real forest, and the door there leads out of the movies entirely.

TABLE-READY · HOMEWORK ARCHITECTURE IN DEVELOPMENT

How entry works

Every campaign begins with a choice the players make, not the teacher: which film, where, and when. All five eras are alive at once, a library of eras rather than a single timeline, and travel is free. You go wherever you want. The built locations below are anchors, the deeply furnished starting points, never walls.

Inside a film, the story is canon and cannot be broken. The seal holds until the bookworms find the maker's real home ground, the Sayama Hills forest he fought to preserve, where a portal opens onto real historical Japan.

the tunnelthe wellthe towerthe marshthe shrine gatethe door-dialthe bamboo stalkthe camphor hollow

One rule under everything

Trace what anything is built from. If its chain of sources ends in the commons, in folklore, documented history, thousand-year tales, it can be built, spawned, and played. If the chain ends at a living maker, it can be named, studied, and discussed at the table, never copied. Pointing is always legal. Copying is the only sin. The map itself enforces this: sealed films, open Japan, and the maker's forest as the crossing between them.

The five eras

Iron countrySengoku, c. 1500s
The tatara furnace burns three days and nights without stopping. The iron goddess is jealous, the war is everywhere, and the forest pays for every blade.
The shining capitalHeian, c. 900–1100
An avenue eighty-four metres wide, poetry as power, rice as money, and a ruined southern gate where the city leaves its dead.
The modern girl's Tokyo1912–1937
Cafés, department stores, new trains to new suburbs, engineers dreaming of flight, and a cough everyone fears to name.
The home front1945
Ration books, neighborhood watch cells, tunnel shelters cut into a cliff above a pond, and fireflies over the east bank.
Olympic city1963–64
Expressways poured over rivers, a bridge entombed under a road, the bathhouse at twilight, and the whole street watching one torch go by.

For teachers and the curious

Teacher notes include film dossiers, public-domain creature sources, period economies, biography work, era guides, maps, rosters, clocks, and curriculum links.

Start with the pregame arena. The broader campaign archive is available for deeper planning.