faq

Characters can be anything, but preferably sentient! Feel free to bring a mecha, be a mecha or robot/android, have anthro animals, be a forgotten god, etc. They can be immortal, but they need to be defeat-able. The God Eater will not allow entities into Crossroads that are more powerful than herself.

Keep powers balanced for the sake of keeping rounds challenging for both sides. Have weaknesses that are somewhat readily available and play into the character. (ie. a phoenix that’s afraid of water, a powerful being that keeps to a strict set of rules, a powerful ability that actively reduces the user’s resources so the resources are a limit, etc.)

If the mecha lacks sentience (basic AI function for reporting status is fine) and is used by the pilot to fight with (while inside), the mech & pilot are considered 1 character and filling the fighter role. (Yes this means you can have an additional character as an assist, because here the mecha is simply a tool used in battle.)

If the mecha has sentience and can move on its own, it is considered a separate character.

Sure! Just keep in mind we specifically created the NPC Tenki for this role of creating interesting arena environments & changing weather.

If you wish, your characters can have an ability to alter/change the environment/weather as well.

Haha, good luck with that. You may run a plot like this as long as you adhere to the round format. However to keep our premise & canon somewhat aligned, this effort should result in failure.

Yes! You may partner with one other person as your main teammate. If needed, you can delegate pieces of your entry work through commissions.

Feel free to collaborate with other competitors on story beats, regardless of which league you’re in.

Sure! Just keep in mind that adding additional characters adds to your workload and may take away from the spotlight on your fighter and your opponent. Opponents are not required to include your extras (tagalongs/NPCs) in their round.

If you want to bring back defeated opponent characters in later rounds, please get permission from your past opponent to do so. (Feel free to use judge NPCs as you wish, though!)

If you choose to continue in the tournament after losing, it is considered a split point for reality and anything further is only within your character’s personal canon. You can make up a fighter for the remaining round(s) or work out a way where you become ‘disqualified’ after losing. Spectator entries are just for fun!

They don’t have to make a wish! Do whatever is best for your story; the prospect of getting a wish granted is just the allure the God Eater uses to pull in travelers.

You may create prologues or epilogues that add on to your entry’s story. (You will not have enough time to create an actual intermission, defn. content created between rounds.) These can add context for your rounds and may be useful, but we discourage going over the medium’s duration guideline using prologues and/or epilogues. Prologues and epilogues will not count towards your medium’s duration guideline– but please keep them short and sweet if possible. 

For judging purposes, prologues and epilogues will be considered for context in applicable areas.

Yeah, feel free to create additional content if you have the time! Spectator entries/side stories will not be considered in judging if they relate to your competition work.

Ask your opponent for permission first if you decide to harm or kill their character(s). Otherwise, keep the content guidelines (from our entry page) in mind!

In general, it’s good to talk with your opponent on how to use their character.

Please check out our Premise page ; think of the OCT as each league experiencing an alternate universe of the prompt…. NPCs are static, while the competitors change for each. The only official prompt is the premise of the tournament– each round will be the same style of fighter vs fighter, no gimmicks thrown in the mix (unless your own storyline is tossing things up!).

Obviously this leads to many “canon” endings. It’ll be a lot of fun! (Note that you can cameo teams from other leagues with the artist’s permission, however the intention with this tournament is to have smaller groups that make it easier to tell stories in a limited amount of time, so focusing on characters in your league is highly encouraged.)

Nope, there isn’t. Feel free to personalize the message that the God Eater sends your character(s) and tries to drag them into the tournament with.

No, they won’t. The only prompt in this tournament is the premise. We want you to be in full control of your own story, and having prompts can get in the way of that. (Leagues can also become staggered if some have extensions while others don’t, and it would be unfair for slower leagues to know the prompt ahead of time. If each league had a different prompt per round to avoid this, it would start getting confusing for competitors and be difficult to judge. So we’re just sticking with the one and only!)

The God Eater’s Cross Tournament lasts 3 days in-universe. Each round takes a day to complete. (1 day = 24 hours)

The setting is already split realities so everything and every possibility is technically canon.

The areas present in Crossroads are defined on our wiki. Feel free to expand on the areas, use existing NPCs, and add new characters if you need to!

Things get a tad “shifty” outside of Crossroads in terms of dimensional rifts and how the world connects to other planes. Venture outside of charted territory at your own risk.

Yes– our new rubric tool allows us to generate a highly-detailed feedback document with the judgement scores. (Feel free to look at the feedback document template here. Text represented in curly braces {{}} will be replaced with values when generated. This is not AI generation– this is pulling values from our judge spreadsheet.) This PDF will be emailed to the email you used to submit your entry after judging is completed & announced. Result announcements will include the entry’s overall scores in Storytelling, Execution, and Editing.

(Yes, even auditions will receive a critique!)

Judging is based on three components– Storytelling, Execution, and Editing. For a further in-depth explanation, our rubric is publicly available to view.

The rubric is explained in detail on Vashle’s Substack, here. It was created in Google Sheets and uses Google’s Apps Script to automate the generation of feedback. 

In 2021 the organizers forgot they no longer have the amount of free time that highschoolers have, and struggled to keep up with providing critiques! Thus they decided to modify the rubric such that each point correlated to a descriptive sentence– now if you earn a point, you also have a sentence that describes your entry.

Add in a script that reads the values from the judgement sheet (point scores & notes) and formats it using a template, and voila– you have a highly detailed, in-depth breakdown of an entry that requires nothing more than a button press to view in a more digestible manner. Enjoy!

Yes, you may! But please credit Vashle with the creation of the original rubric, especially if you do not modify the rubric. The rubric was created using 10+ years of experience participating in OCTs and knowledge from several creative writing classes + Deborah Chester’s “The Fantasy Fiction Formula”. While it is Summer Leagues’ rubric, the content is not specific to Summer Leagues– it is a general-purpose OCT rubric.

If you do modify the rubric, please mention that in your credit.

While we’re not trying to encourage creating creative pieces to a rubric, our rubric is good to keep in mind– as it covers what is expected in general of OCT entries. It’s a highly technical rubric that gives guidance on structuring an entry and what an entry should include, but it does not direct what the content of that entry should be.

Please use the rubric as a tool– it’s a resource available to you for transparency from the judges and as a guide for OCT entry expectations.

Both are judged using our rubric (note that the audition judgement does not include round-specific sections, like dealing with an opponent).

• For Auditions, your overall score is used to determine your ranking within that medium against all other applicants of that medium– this helps determine your group for the tournament.
• For Rounds, your overall score is compared directly with your opponent’s. Unless the content of a round leads to a disqualification (either for not meeting requirements or content that goes against our guidelines), the higher score determines the winner of the match.

The Organizers solely handle judging of the audition period, and are responsible for going through judge applications.

The Organizers and judges share judging of rounds. Who is specifically judging a neo-league will be announced when the bracket of that neo-league is announced (it may be a mix of organizers and helper judges, or just helper judges). We will do our best to have judges overseeing their preferred medium and to reduce conflicts of interest from outside relationships between Organizers, judges, and competitors (ie. if a judge and competitor are dating, that judge will not oversee that competitor’s league).

Please read our Judge tab, in the Judge’s section, on our entry page and submit using the linked form in the Submit tab.

It depends on the number of judge applications we receive. Ideally we want everyone to have 1 league to be responsible for, for their preferred medium. It may be the case that we have to give someone a less-preferred medium depending on the number of judges across mediums. (We’ll ask beforehand if you are comfortable with doing so.)

In the off-chance that a written-medium preferred judge is asked to judge comics or animation and has an NPC without a visual reference, an organizer (likely @Vashle) will help make one.

Depending on the situation and group, an organizer or other league’s judge can step in and help judge rounds. We’ll figure out more of the details over on Discord together when the time comes– please let us know ASAP if you will be unavailable during the judging period so that we can accommodate your temporary absence.

Your scoring will factor into the final decision and be included on the feedback document. The actual writing of notes is included on the judge sheet as well, but that is a combined effort between all 3 judges. Any notes included on the judge sheet will be compiled for the feedback document, and an organizer will email the generated PDFs to their respective competitors.

To clarify, you are expected to write notes that will contribute to the critique.

During rounds we’ll have a judge channel in Discord open for discussion and to answer any questions.

If you have specific questions during auditions/applications, feel free to use our dedicated general question channel in Discord or open a support ticket for specific personal questions.

You will have some moderation powers with the official judge role, but you’re not expected to be super active and read every message that is sent. We appreciate having helper judges that maintain a more professional presence and help keep an eye on things though! (Especially with timezones– the Organizers are both in EST.)

No, you are not expected to contribute art for the tournament outside of your option to have an NPC. Between-rounds art is included in our prizes for competitors, and will be drawn during rounds.

However, feel free to contribute art of competitors’ characters, especially for your league!

Since our support tickets can be seen by judges for moderation/help purposes, use this feedback form. An Organizer will get back to you as soon as possible. 

For urgent matters, you may DM the Organizers on Discord.

Summer Leagues is an OCT. OCT stands for “Original Character Tournament”.

Please see our About page for further explanation.

It’s referred to as an OCT because the experience of joining Summer Leagues is fairly aligned with other OCT experiences– a tournament with auditions that exists for a short duration of time (usually between 1-2 years).

Technically, Summer Leagues is an OCL that runs mini OCTs. It runs at a scalable level, like other OCLs, but constrains the experience to be that of a small OCT. It shares the persistent traits of other OCLs with an established, consistent premise and character interactions that can easily expand beyond the scope of an OCT– this is best seen in our need to host a wiki to actually contain & organize information relevant to the setting & characters that exist within the setting. The world of Crossroads was setup by us, the Organizers, but has been expanded upon by you, the competitors & participants. Having the infrastructure of the main & wiki sites allows us the ability to provide a better information hub– which results in a more user-friendly experience for participants. It is easier to look up relevant Summer Leagues information, both for use in & the reading of competitions, RPs, and spectator entries.

Ideally we’re looking for competitors that feel like the normal OCT circuit runs too long or like they can’t break into the usual ‘bubble’ of OCT competitors. (Or you’re completely new and want to try out a “smaller” tournament!) This set up harkens back to the origins of OCTs, in being art practice for professionals/amateurs. (You will find that many of the format decisions were made with streamlining both the entry creation & judging process.) We’re not trying to take up your life (or a year to year-and-a-half) of commitment with this tournament.

Please see our About page for further details.

The technical answer? Our main site is hosted on Dreamhost, and runs the WordPress software. Our wiki site is a subdomain that runs the BookStack software. Our wiki uses an Amazon S3 bucket to host uploaded images.

You’ll find the actual community of Summer Leagues currently resides on our Discord server (100+ members!) and the wiki acts as our gallery & information hub. The main site (this site you’re currently looking at!) is our main information hub for learning about Summer Leagues. We currently use Twitter/X to help advertise the tournament, however the best advertisement for OCTs is word of mouth!

Depending on the medium and give-or-take extensions, between 4~7 months after auditions end. Expect judging for each round is to take between 1-2 weeks at most.

Round length minimums vary by medium;

• Written rounds are at minimum 4 weeks long
• Comic rounds are at minimum 5 weeks long
• Animation rounds are at minimum 6 weeks long

Each round is eligible for at least 1 extension of a week, dependent on competitors’ statuses; further flexibility is possible if needed. If emergencies arise, contact an Organizer or Judge ASAP.

For competitors, grace periods are 12 hours after a deadline, and intended to cover any technical or other last-minute issues that may delay submissions. You do not have to apply to receive the grace period.

We’re trying to keep the OCT to fall mostly on summer months, as per our name. Spring will be auditions, and finals can run into fall.

For 2023-2024 season, we’re expecting auditions to take about 3 months. Audition judging 1-3 weeks dependent on the number of auditioners.

We are planning on running Summer Leagues every other year (odd numbered years) as long as possible.

For our off-season, we will be starting up a short story challenge that takes place over 3 months– each month, participants will create a short story based off of one of several prompts. It will be called “Parallel Challenge”; please look forward to it! 

We want to help OCTs continue as a regular community event! The Organizers grew up on OCTs, and found OCTs incredibly important to their development as creators. We want to help other creators (regardless of skill level or experience) have positive experiences with OCTs. We also hope to be a good example of an OCT, which is partially why we are transparent and offer our rubric for free for others to use, and invite others to help judge Summer Leagues.

In the future, we hope to partner with independent publishers to help our network of community members take their work to the next level. OCTs are great practice grounds for upcoming creators to flex their skills, get feedback, build a network, and learn the creative pipeline! We believe that creators, especially comic creators, should have more “official” options than Webtoons or Tapas to get published and possibly monetize their work.

We are not (and never will) looking to monetize the work of competitors for the benefit of Summer Leagues. We may advertise with your characters for related content and matchups, but that is solely for promoting your work.

However, Summer Leagues is not free (currently our hosting costs altogether come to about $400/annually), so we are looking into making merchandise and main NPC-featured content (God Eater, Chiifu, Miss X, Tenki, Saki, Crossguards, & Fox Familiar) available for purchase at a later time to help cover infrastructure costs, as they will only grow with time. An actual (plush) fox familiar with an invite showing up at your door would be cute, right?

If you’re intent on competing, you should try to have some fun! Take care of yourself & try to avoid burning out. While you can absolutely use OCT work in your own portfolio, feel free to use your time here purely for practice. Nothing is ever perfect, so try to perfect your skill of learning when enough is enough.

If you’re intent on judging, you’ll see our process for handling rounds and making decisions on rounds– as well as any moderation concerns that crop up when running a community. While you won’t see our process of setting up the tournament, hopefully your time as a judge gives you a perspective on the work it takes to run an OCT if you haven’t before. And if you don’t plan on hosting your own OCT after Summer Leagues, but do plan on judging for another, we hope you’re able to use what you learned from here!

Yes! You can donate a prize to a specific league (after the audition period) or a general one across all leagues (regardless, we recommend waiting until after the audition period to see how large of a commitment this is). Please message the organizers over Discord via a support ticket if you wish to contribute.

We’re accepting writing, comics, and animation (this includes animatics). We’re not accepting mixed media, and require that competitors consistently use the same medium throughout the current season.

To see our medium expectations, we have guidelines on our entry page. The longest entries are rarely the strongest entries, and no one has unlimited time to work on or judge entries. The given guidelines should be enough room for all entries participating in the Cross Tournament.

For 2021, we had 24 competitors & 3 helper judges– 2 comic leagues and 1 writer’s league.

We’d love to have at least 60 competitors in 2023-2024 and run an animation league.

The organizers are comfortable managing about 100 competitors without additional help. With helper judges, we can accommodate more competitors. If you don’t have time to participate as a competitor but would still like to participate– please apply to help judge! (You can find helper judge information at the bottom of our entry page.)

Please read our Audition tab, in the Competitor’s section, on our entry page and submit using the linked form in the Submit tab.

Potentially; it would likely be 1-2 weeks of extra time. We’ll put out a poll a week before the deadline to gauge where people are, before auditions are over. However, the best practice with working on creative pieces is to finish before a deadline if you can! You never truly know what your availability close to a deadline will be– illnesses, technical issues, accidents, etc. are especially stressful on top of a deadline.

Yes! A useful quality of the setting’s dimension & reality-twisting nature allows previous characters to re-appear again in another time or as a new iteration. Your character may re-appear in little time or years after their previous competition. Your character may even re-appear as a different iteration of themselves, say with a different origin or important event that occurred in their life.

Experienced non-Summer Leagues OCT characters are welcome as well.

Regardless of connections to Summer Leagues or other OCTs, only the given information within this season of Summer Leagues is considered in judgements. Judges may appreciate cameos and other references to past work, but those details are not factors in judging. 

Technically yes, you may re-use past audition content for Summer Leagues (since the premise does not change) regardless if it was entered or not. However we recommend creating a new or reworked audition for each season to give yourself a chance to practice, introduce a new or revised character, and showcase your current content creation skills.

As with entering prior characters, we will judge all current season auditions with only the content and context given for the current season’s submitted work.

We reserve the right to adjust groupings of competitors as we see fit. Regardless of adjustments, each group will be around the same skill level. Rank is not the ultimate factor in determining your group– but it is the first.

No, we are intentionally keeping the tournament short and sweet. Our reasonings is described in detail on our About page.

It depends on the situation– in 2021, we had 1 animatic entry and 15 comic entries. To avoid cuts, we included the animatic entry with comics to have 2 comic leagues.

We’re not keen on running a tournament with less than 8 competitor teams, but again it does depend on the situation. We’ll do our best to allow as many people to compete as fairly as possible.

After auditions and leagues are determined, we will use a random number generator to decide the placement within a tournament bracket per league. So round 1 will be random, but the next two won’t be as secretive.

This is to allow for pre-writing during a round, since you’ll be aware of your next two possible opponents. With how short the length of the tournament is, you’ll want to be able to plan ahead for your story. Knowing what competitors you can get in the next round makes this much easier.

Please read our Round tab, in the Competitor’s section, on our entry page and submit using the linked form in the Submit tab.

Yup! That is one of the blessings of running concurrent mini-tournaments rather than one large one. Groups that finish on time can speed right to the end, while groups that need more breathing room can have it.

Each round will allow for at least one 1 week extension– please let your league judges know if you’ll need an extension. Judges will privately contact individual contestants a week before the round’s deadline in order to gauge how much extra time everyone needs, and give extensions accordingly.

No, we want everyone to pick a medium and stick with it. You won’t have enough time to do 2 separate entries and work with 16 total characters (or more), we promise. Although we can’t stop you from joining a different OCT and competing in both at one time, we don’t recommend it.

We appreciate the enthusiasm in wanting to get extra involved, but we prefer everyone to focus on one role. Thank you!

If you start having technical problems, please open a support ticket in our Discord server immediately so that the organizers and judges are aware of it! If you upload late and/or miss the deadline with no explanation, you will unfortunately be disqualified.

If your opponent forfeits within the 1 week drop period, we’ll “second wind” their past opponent, who will become your new opponent for the round. If your opponent forfeits after this period, please complete an entry with their characters. Your round still needs to get from beginning to end visually and narratively with some amount of effort, even if it’s rough. Don’t just submit a few panels or concept sketches with an outline and expect to pass because your opponent forfeited – it is not a guaranteed auto-pass!

If you need to drop out, that’s okay! Just let us know ASAP. If you let us know during the judging period or within 1 week of the round results being posted, we will give a losing competitor a “second wind”. (Second wind-eligible competitors must be within their own league and lost to the dropping competitor in the previous round– this is to keep the integrity of the tournament-bracket style intact and not negate any forward planning by other competitors.)

Due to the shorter time frame and tournament-bracket style, this gets a little strange. If a double forfeit occurs in round 1, we’ll pull a losing competitor from the other half of the bracket to be your next opponent in round 2. If a double forfeit occurs in round 2, round 2 becomes “finals” for the other side of the bracket. (If round 2 suddenly becomes the finals, you won’t be expected to tie off your story, but we’d love to see some sort of epilogue with your wish!)

Yes, anyone is free to create content within the Summer Leagues setting of Crossroads and use its main NPC characters. However if that content goes against our guidelines, we will not host it and ask that it be taken down from web services.

Our only canon limitation is the God Eater losing control of the space Crossroads resides in. There can be turmoil and conflict, but at the end of the day it’s best if she remain in control (for all our sakes). Due to her omniscience of the space, she would be aware of most plots. But she is a mischievous goddess, so perhaps she’ll let some things slide to keep life entertaining.

Technically you do have the freedom to do whatever you wish, so long as it doesn’t break our content guidelines. You’re not constrained by the tournament– take the opportunity to create something more unique with the setting.

Create a page for each of your Spectator Entries within this book on our wiki for 2023.

You are free to post Spectator Entry content on social media and tag our official account as well.

When we have audition & judge applications open, anyone will be able to register an account with that season’s participant role. That role will allow you to add to the applicable books (medium auditions, 20XX judge NPCs, spectator entries, etc.).

Outside of audition & judge applications, account registration will be closed. The wiki is publicly viewable anytime, by anyone, anywhere. If you must contribute to the wiki and were unable to register an account, open a ticket in our Discord’s #wiki-support channel and an admin will manually add an account for you.

You must have a registered account with the applicable permissions to add pages and contribute to the wiki. See the question above for participant information.

If you remember your email, you can reset your password from the login screen.

Please reach out to an admin for support; we can manually reset passwords and emails.

Please open a ticket in our Discord’s #wiki-support channel and an admin will get back to you.

150 MBs. However, please note that images above 15 MBs will not process in our system. Keep images under 15 MB; if you must include larger images you can add them as a file attachment.

You may upload PDFs and other file types to the wiki as attachments. Please embed videos from other hosting platforms (like YouTube).

Please note that images above 15 MBs will not process in our system, even though the upload limit is 150 MB. Keep images under 15 MB; if you must include larger images you can add them as a file attachment.

Our webserver for hosting our websites does not have enough storage for whatever images may be uploaded by our contestants, so we are using an Amazon S3 Bucket. If the AWS cloud is currently unavailable, the images on our wiki will not load.

Our wiki requires an email and account name. Admins are able to see your email and can manually change passwords or alter account information to provide support.

If you delete your account, your email and account name will be automatically deleted from our system.

Click on your user icon, go to “Edit Profile”. There is a section for enabling multi-factor authentication methods there.

Our permissions are set to only allow the owner of a chapter/page to edit their own pages, with the sole exception of Editors/Admins. (In testing we found that sometimes others are able to edit pages, however.) Only a handful of trusted individuals have Editor permissions, and that can be revoked if needed. We also have a full audit log that logs who changes what pages, and each page saves 10 prior revisions.

Accounts that vandalize other pages will be locked out of all editing permissions. We have a full audit log, we see everything.

If comments are abused, we will not hesitate to disable commenting across the wiki.

All competitors, spectators, and judges reserve the right to take down their own character pages and related OCT work.

However, for the purposes of preserving some history, we ask that creator pages remain on the wiki. (Links to social media may be removed.) Thank you.

Deleting a Chapter on our wiki will also delete its pages. At this time we do not have an easy way of recovering deleted pages; proceed with caution.

Deleting a page will remove it from the wiki permanently. At this time we do not have an easy way of recovering deleted pages; proceed with caution.