Summer Camp 2026 - Prep

For Summer Camp this year, I'm pledging Diamond. I have a lot to add to the world anyway and this will keep me at my one article per day pace, if I can stay focused. Below is June's prep work for Summer Camp.

The Thirteen Realms has a lot of work coming, and this will be a great way to get a lot of it down on paper (so to speak).

Cross the threshold at Jack's, share a tale to buy a drink and see the cosmos for what it is. Hell and the The Fallen have a strong place in the cosmos, not as agents of fear or torment or damnation, but as civilization, honor, conviction, and principle. Pitchforks and flames are the things of Heaven's propaganda, and the Realms know it even if humanity does not.

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The cosmos is vast and the universe that humanity knows is but one Realm of Thirteen. Stop into Jack's Tavern, share a tale to pay for your drink, and stay to learn.

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For Summer Camp specifically, I'll be fleshing out parts of games or shorts of Hell and the Fallenthat only got a passing mention, and that really deserve a bit more attention, history, and care.

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Week 1 Theme: Love

Assignment - Hopscotch

This week, I'm spending a bit of time creating new articles to tie into the Settlement of Love prompt below. The Long War carries a lot of ancient tension, heavy propaganda, and consequences that ring through humanity. Too many have forgotten the love that began beside a river, when gods found humanity for the first time.



and a short, as well Yahweh Meets Man in Tales From Jack's

working on the timeline Mortal Timeline

updated the meta World Meta

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Spring - Settlement of Love

I decided to focus on the love that the gods initially had after forming relationships with mankind after they discovered them. Specifically, Yahweh meeting Adam and then choosing to build the Garden of Eden for Adam and his family to give them a place to meet and wonder at the world around them.

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Week 2 Theme: Growth

Assignment - Hopscotch

This week I'm choosing to focus on developing Hell, most ancient and civilized Realm in the modern cosmos; Hell is a place of testing not torture, tempering not punishment. I chose this because Hell tends to be very one-note in most fiction. It gets cast as the place of evil, suffering, and torment. There is no nuance and nothing to make any version stand out from any other version. Hell in the Thirteen Realms is neither good nor bad, the same as any other ontology. There might be good or bad beings within it, but the place serves a purpose in the cosmos, and is far more than just "the place bad people go."

As for how this area of focus interacts with the rest of the cosmos, Hell is the first of the modern Realms to develop civilization, and its civilization has defined what the Realms interacting even means. Developing out Hell provides a framework for keeping the cosmos from being anthropocentric and avoiding having human history be the most important story in the cosmos. Hell is more than the Fallen and more than the Long War. Fleshing out Hell involves adding to the Hell article itself, expanding the cities around the outer ring, articles for several important characters, and delineating major contributions to the greater cosmos, such as Hell-wrought Nexus Steel.

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Summer - Geography with Various Ecosystems

I decided to flesh out the Outer Ring of Hell, where the Realm of Testing stands Liminal with the other Realms, and the various ecosystems that arise with the crossing of ontologies.

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Week 3 Theme: Loss

Assignment - Hopscotch

My typical creative process revolves around events that have played out in tabletop games mostly. I occasionally sit down to write formally, but most inspiration comes in the form of taking notes based on player activity during a game, or rulings I have made during play. The foundations of the logic underpinning the setting is strong enough that most of the time, as I state in my Scene 1 in Storyteller Manifesto: A Storytelling Guide , I can simply make a ruling and move on with play. This usually pushes me to formalize afterward however, thus turning play into a sort of writing prompt :) I enjoy the process of extrapolating the logic itself, so I end up writing several thousand words at a time, laying out why something must work the way that it played out.


I went on a fantastic 10-mile hike with my husband on Saturday, during which we talked about the Thirteen Realms and the new prompt, so the walk did double duty. :D


I've found a trip through Demongrey's Threshold to be very thought-provoking and a lot of fun all the way around. I'm definitely looking forward to reading more, for sure.


I spent a lot of Sunday evening reviewing World of Darkness manuals (dunno if that exactly counts for inspirational Hopscotch reading lol), and just settling back into a TTRPG setting that inspired me to start my own.

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Fall - A Language Lost

In continuing to flesh out Hell's contributions to the cosmos, the Cities at its outer edges hold loss that has passed testing. Hell hosts the last vestiges of a lost Realm, Sheol, that fell into That Which Ends, in the form of the small rivulets of Alchemical Fire that still course through the City of Brass. So I decided to explore the lost language of that Realm, what it means to communicate without time, matter, or reproducibility.

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Week 4 Theme: Family

Assignment - Hopscotch

My primary purposes in participating in Summer Camp this year are, one, to get to know the community since I've not really had a chance to meet with other world builders before, and two, to get my world off my hard drive and into a canonized version in World Anvil. Currently, most of my writing is either in small short stories, or session notes from games I've run with players. Turning all this information into a coherent world with canonized events and characters is a big lift but one I'm excited to do.

As far as articles that I'll need to create, there are a number of characters I will need to still add, I need to finalize the mortal timeline, and I need to flesh out a couple of the newer Realms. I'm looking forward to the writing prompts helping me get ideas for that.

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Winter - A Myth of Family

I decided to write an in-world document comparing and contrasting the myth of Jack O'Lantern with the reality of what he has built with the tavern. The idea that there is a genuine seed of truth to the folktale, with some of the details clearly tying to events, but clearly the folktale has evolved from those seeds and been flattened into to a simple tale, I found genuinely compelling.

What The Thirteen Realms Is

There is a tavern between the worlds. The contract on its door is simple: you're welcome to rest and eat, just tell me a tale. What comes through to honor it is anything but simple: gods in mortal clothes, fey whose words rewrite the room, refugees from Realms that no longer exist, scholars from places where information is the only substance.


The Thirteen Realms is a setting where physics is plural. Each Realm operates by its own irreducible logic, and what mortals call magic is only one set of rules being spoken aloud inside another's territory. There is no magic; only the way things are, wherever you happen to be standing.


And at Jack's hearth, every tale told is recorded in brass that does not forget.