‹ the reading room
the spine · concept → front door
How a campaign is born
A campaign is built by walking this spine top to bottom. Each stage carries the prior picks forward; owner gates punctuate the walk; the front door at the end is the cover the rest of the game inherits. The reading order is the build order.
● phase
▮ owner gate
▮ element audition
▮ the style audition
▮ visual pass
· · · per-door
pre-step
Author the audience
A new audience = a new row: the wound · the lens dial · the floor. The concept answers to it.
the audience row
concept
The setting
Pick the world (the setting) for a target audience off the slate.
01Slate · Concept
🚪 Gate 1 — concept ratify
pilot
The range
The Catalyst's 5 moments (the dynamic range) + the picked moment-arc.
02Pilot · Range
🚪 Gate 1.5 — range variation
story
The picked range, built
The world's experts, gift/metaphor, cast, palette, and the fellow-traveler mirror.
03Experts
04World & metaphor
05Cast audition
06Palette vet
07Mirror
🚪 Gate 2 — cast & destinations
scenes
The 5 doors (the portfolio)
The hub allocates coverage top-down across the doors; the per-door stages hone inside the slot.
08Range allocator
09Palette matrix
10Palette audition
11Narrative range
11.5Door substrate
12Door arcs
13Progress arcs
14Cast chatbots
15Tone range
16Coverage audit
17Length plan
prequel
The cast before you
Per-door frozen-moment chapters + the open seat. Then the visuals are derived — never embedded in the prose.
18Companion book
🎨Visual Pass → Scene Board
front door
The cover / source
The world's cover crystallizes — including its visual style — and the per-focal source the game inherits.
🎥Style audition (world-level)
19Front-door build
20Enticement audition
21Coverage check
🎥 the style audition — a world-level audition for the ASCII style that draws the world's Catalyst on the Hub. It branches: establish the style if this is the world's first story (incl. a sudden pitch), inherit it if the story joins an existing world. Catalog of styles → keeper → the Gemini polish gate. (Kanto → Dense detail; the fog-coast test → Shaded blocks — it discriminates.)
🚪 Gate 3 — pre-ship ratify
Riding every stage: the three lenses (age · culture · genre) · the constitution · the Glossary (render the in-fiction effect, never the build label) · the Second-Opinion-Gate — every audition & gate carries a gemini-2.5-pro verdict, and every ASCII style is Gemini-polished before it ships. Element auditions (structure · narrator · names · locations · cast · style) each run a hard-ceiling catalog + a keeper.