Ah, summertime! The season where one can relax a bit, spend
time with long-neglected friends, go to concerts, attend barbeques, and enjoy a
momentary escape from the workaday chores of modern life—that is, unless you’re
a handsome, gregarious, freelance designer and writer struggling to keep the
bills paid and the wolves away from the door for another month. Then summer is
pretty much like any other time of year, except more humid and mosquito-filled.
As many of you know, I came back into gaming after a
prolonged absence, returning to the role-playing fold about the same time the
OSR started gaining momentum in the back alleys of the internet. I was lucky
enough to return with a minor splash, one that swiftly moved me from hobbyist to
professional, and, before I knew it, I was working as a freelancer as a second
job. While the upswing of that development is that people actually pay me to
use my imagination and I get to share my creations with a wider audience than I
ever imaged possible, the downside is that there’s no longer a dividing line
between recreation and vocation for me when it comes to role-playing games. I
know: cry me a river.
Still, it remains a fact that what I once did for fun and
personal enjoyment is now labor and there are many times when I wish—if just
for a little while—I could treat RPGs as a pleasant pastime. I’ve been running
a lot of DCC RPG on the convention trail, which is just play-testing in the
guise of fun, and even my semi-regular home Pathfinder campaign is more of an
exercise to familiarize myself with the mechanics and design needs of the
industry’s current 800 lbs. gorilla in hopes that it’ll pay off with more work
down the line.
At the end of April, one of the players in the Pathfinder
campaign informed us he received a summer scholarship to study out of state for
the summer. The Pathfinder campaign I’m running is the Kingmaker adventure path, which if you know Paizo’s APs, is
designed for four players. The campaign had also reached a pivotal point and I
(and the rest of the group) thought it be best if we put the campaign on hiatus
until the departing player returned, and then pick things up from there.
That left us with the summer to play something else. I
originally proposed that we’d spend the summer months doing a playtest of my Shiverwhen game and anticipated giving
it a thorough shakedown and chronicling it over on the Shiverwhen blog. We got as far as
the players generating characters and me doing the initial prep work when cold
reality hit: this was going to be more work than I felt like doing. The problem
with running a game you’re currently developing means there’s always something
that need attention, sometimes even built from scratch to fill gaps. It quickly
dawned on me that the last thing I wanted to do was spend the summer with an
even greater workload. I’ve already got a lot on my plate between crafting new DCC RPG material and sewing the final
parts of Stonehell 2 together. I didn’t need more work masquerading as
recreation.
I told my players of my revelation and my desire to scrap Shiverwhen before it began, but that
meant we had to find a replacement game for the summer. I gave them four
options of what we could do: 1) DCC RPG (a
chance for me to playtest and develop material); 2) OD&D (beer & pretzels dungeon crawling that’d be easy for
me to write and keep everyone entertained through the summer); 3) Pathfinder (a non-adventure path to keep
us in fighting shape for fall and allow me to further try my hand at designing
for the system); and 4) 2nd
Edition AD&D set in the Forgotten Realms (just because it had
absolutely nothing to do with my paying design work).
To my surprise and delight, option #4 carried the day.
So for the last three weeks, I’ve found myself back in Ed
Greenwood’s world running a game using a system I’ve not really touched since
1990 or thereabouts. And I must say I’m having a wonderful time. Long time
readers know that I
remain a fan of the Realms, despite everything that’s been done to the poor
place over the last (can you believe it?) twenty-five years. Returning there
has been a joy, like falling back in with old flame or seeing someone from your
youth and reminiscing about days gone by.
In the weeks ahead I’ll be posting more about the Realms
campaign, sharing the work I’ve done with it, displaying maps, and boring you
with the occasional actual play reports. For the first time in a long while,
I’m having fun as a DM and designer again, and not viewing my time in front of
the computer as work, but an engaging and entertaining process. This blog’s
been too much of a marketing venue and it is past time to utilize it as a means
to disseminate “fun stuff” and frolic in the shared happiness of these strange
games we play.
More to come.
