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| A portion of the Bay of Cayerva, on the west of the Uther Pentwegern Sea. |
Well, a lot has gone down. Years of successful oldschool campaigns, first in Greyhawk, then in the sandbox I designed to plonk Rappan Athuk inside of, were followed by a series of wonky & often ill-advised campaign abortions, most of which seemed, initially at least, to have a fair degree of potential. Mental illness intervening, as it usually does in my little world, my various experiments with other systems have ended with either a sigh , a groan, or a crash. I have produced stunted, half-formed manifestations of Barbarians of the Aftermath, Call of Cthulhu, Thieves' World, Mutant Epoch, Bulldogs, Warhammer Fantasy 1st Ed, Traveller, plus several others which never saw the light of day. I've pretty much always had a game of some sort going. But lately, moments of at table brilliance aside, my mojo has fricking fled the coop.
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| Some of my recent campaigns. |
So yeah, a problem, especially considering that this is kind of my vocation now- making games to entertain my friends, who by and large serve some other social purpose, and deserve a game in the evening. Now, personality disorders, major depression, bipolar etc, whatever my confused doctors currently feel is my major malfunction- all these amount to for me is a series of data bombardments- relentless bursts of energy and ideas, plans, schemes, theoretical positions, manifestos, rants and plots. Distractions, red-herrings, false trails and unfortunate diversions abound. The only purpose major depression serves, as far as I can tell, is time out from the shelling. In all of that rampant processing, campaigns often get jagged in , pulled into the grinder, mulched up with everything else. Especially when they're those kind of floaty, momentary diversion games, the ones which might reflect a passing interest in a setting or a system, or, worse, an awkward attempt in a moment of self-loathing to make my game more like someone else's.
To get my mojo back, I need to go to the foundation, my foundation, the holy of holy's of my own fantastical imagination, right? The place wherein nothing needs to be shoe-horned in to fit, where systems never seem not quite right. Like riding a bicycle or playing a G-chord, D&D,
primordial D&D, has that automatic non-higher-process utility. I can run those games in my sleep (kind of literally have, now and then), and so their lack of interference seems kind of indispensible to me, now that I'm DESPERATE to get back to my old form, to where the game takes on a life of it's own, to at- table moments of spontaneous group realization, to where story and character and landscape and motif coalesce in a magic soup, the cauldron of which is the tense improvisation of
everyone at the table. Those moments in-game that everyone talks about years later. You have had them too.
And for me, the setting I need to do that in is the Wilderlands. I'll explain why next time...
