Summer Camp 2026: Prep

What's this? Han's back here with last-minute prep once again?

— you, probably

Whoops. In my defence, it's been a busy 2026. Look, you should know the deal by now. Month of summer camp, 40 prompts, I'll do my best to juggle the vagaries of daily life and also punch out probably a good forty thousand words or so. I don't have any particular aims this year - just vibes and lore setup for my campaign going forward!
I'm currently planning a wedding, gearing up to go on a ski holiday in late July, and preparing my CV as my work keeps going through rounds of layoffs and it's unnerving, to say the least. If you know a team looking to hire a senior software engineer based in Australia, do give me a shout ;) Oh, and the game jam! The organisation I volunteer with is running a six month long game jam with game dev industry professionals leading the way, and I've been part of the coordination efforts behind the scenes. Are you an artist, writer, designer, etc wanting a bit of a side project later this year? Signups close on the ~15th of July, come join us here.
But yes, I'm sure getting back into writing will go swimmingly atop all that. My party have been somewhat stuck in their tracks lately due to the blistering heatwaves across Europe and general adult busy-ness, so they're trapped in a bit of a volcanic nightmare - so I have simultaneously more (enemies, maths, balance, etc) to do for their shenanigans, but also less (since they're not going to be doing much more exploration in what's left of the campaign). So - it's going to be an interesting Summer Camp!
Also, to note, I'm continuing to use Midjourney as a picture generator for my articles. While I still heavily disagree with the current training datasets and environmental impact of most generative AI, I'm not using this commercially, and as stated many times prior, I'm making up for it to some degree by putting at minimum double the cost of MJ back into the art community. I think currently, my annual Midjourney subscription is about the same cost as my monthly Patreon subscription fee.
I've also been doing a lot of advocacy against it in my personal and professional lives, so please - don't debate me on this! I'm doing what I can to balance a small negative impact with, hopefully, a much more significant positive impact. Celebrate our artists all across the community!

Did you know all of my articles use the same formatting?

Want to write like I do? Or, well, format like me? If you're a grandmaster, try using this:
[row] [container:col-md-8] TEXT HERE [/container] [container:col-md-4] [container:art-pic] IMAGE HERE [/container] [/container] [/row]
[row] [container:col-md-4] [container:art-pic] IMAGE HERE [/container] [/container] [container:col-md-8] TEXT HERE [/container] [/row]

You'll want some custom CSS on the art-pic container, but otherwise - that's it. WA won't let it format too nicely while it's in a noparse block, so you'll have to sort that yourself.
I try to keep each bracketed container, be it a row or column etc, on its own line - it makes debugging issues a lot easier.

Here's the iFrame for this year's progress document:

Now! Onto the prep homework.... fair warning, I'm not formatting this nicely because fuck it, why not?

Summer Camp Prep Homework

Week 1: Love

Look, I'm really sleepy and don't want to go through the shenanigans of uploading the pledge document again. You already know the goal is 40/40, let's not fuck around - let's leave that to the inevitable character articles in this theme. The rest of this week's homework seems to largely centre on updating things across my world. Sorry, I don't have time! That, and WorldAnvil's interface has become so unintuitive and frustrating to use that I've been doing most of my writing these days on my phone, or on Obsidian on PC for things like campaign notes. It's just gotten to the point where I open WA, try to write, and immediately hit roadblock after roadblock.
I'm hoping that I get time to fix up Brigid in the future so that I can continue working on an interface that flows more like what I expect, but man... life.
Naturally, I won't be doing the warmup prompts! We've gotta save that energy for SC.

Week 2: Growth

So, hilariously, this year's prep says to choose an area of focus, and - to quote it directly - says: "If you don't set boundaries for your Summer Camp worldbuilding now, you'll be jumping all around your world, which will keep you distracted and unfocused. "
Yeah, that's actually what I prefer! I have a lot of areas to focus on in Istralar, being that I'm gradually building up facets of the world for my next campaign in the setting. Frustratingly, I can't actually build the original setting for the next campaign yet, as Kudara's state of being will only be determined in the current campaign. My players could end up doing something devastating, for all they and I know. So instead, I'm laying down seeds across the world and expanding lore that already exists. Perhaps we'll visit some of the smaller countries once again.

Week 3: Loss

I do hope I can share some of the emotion I've been going through with the rest of you via this theme. Death has shadowed my steps throughout the year, from the loss of my mum's best friend and my pseudo-aunt Judy in November to the loss of my soul-kitty Cookie exceptionally recently. Some of my closest and dearest have walked the tightrope, narrowly surviving surgeries, receiving tragic diagnoses, and suffering far more than is reasonably fair. And with the bullshit of the world ever rising, I've also seen friends lose jobs in unfair firings and disgusting layoffs using vague excuses as a cover to cut costs or rid themselves of those they don't like.
Writing has always been an excellent way for me to work through these emotions. I've certainly been given a lot of fuel.
Also, the prep for this week suggests making a list of times we can write! I usually write in the evenings, but if I get downtime at work between compilations, that's also a good time for me to write. I find my brain is most alive when most people are heading to bed, so I do the majority of my writing between 9pm - 2am. I'm writing this at 11pm as we speak!

Week 4: Family

I swear to whatever gods exist, if there's a prompt that's just "write a family that exists in your world", I'm throwing a pie at someone. We might get to see some of the more obscure gods of Istralar for this one! There's been a lot of very sudden new understandings about Istralar's deities recently, and it might just be time to pull back the veil a little...
Now the fun thing about prep for this week is that it's asking me why I'm a worldbuilder and what I get out of Summer Camp. Summer Camp, for me, is a time to really just lock in and focus on writing for a month. It's a bit stressful, yes, but it's also just fun. My players look forward to it, and they're the real reason I worldbuild these days - they're always coming up with delightful (and also cursed) things whenever they get to run around in Istralar. We haven't been able to play as frequently lately, so there's been a little less chaos, and yet I still want to give them so much more.
Plus, this year, I don't have dark clouds over my campaign! These past few years, I'd been dealing with someone pretty toxic in my life who'd been a much larger weight over me than I'd realised - to the extent of nightmares and massive shifts in my behaviour. This year, not only are they now forever out of my life, but I'm also on an SNRI that's made things so much easier to live with. So I've got a lot more reason to write, and a lot more positivity in me to put towards it. Not to mention - I hope to be able to read works from some of my favourite people in the community, like our dearest Mochi, Emy, and Cato. Basically, I'm saying that community is family and family are what drive me to write.

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Final thoughts before I go add some pretty pictures to this: hey, can we promise to be kinder to each other this year? Being a mod on the Discord means I often get to see the darker sides of our community, and even if I'm not directly involved in moderating certain cases, it does weigh on you to see some of the negativity around. I've seen some of the people I really care about end up hurt because of careless words or active harassment, and that's just... not acceptable behaviour. I've seen people hurt because they feel excluded, and I've seen people hurt because they're included too much to the point where their energy is expected instead of being welcomed.
Kindness and patience are virtues rarely seen. When you finish an article, take the time to read someone else's, maybe leave a comment. When you're stuck for inspiration, come throw ideas around in Discord with us. If you have a problem with someone else, resolve it in a way that hurts both sides the least - muting them, speaking to mods, etc. Be kind, be respectful, and have fun! We're all here to enjoy ourselves, after all.