Have You Got Any Mountain Dew?
I never really talk about my gaming here on my lj. And by gaming, I mean, playing role-playing games, you know like Dungeons & Dragons, the mom's basement-dwelling mouth-breathing stained black t-shirt stuff. . . I mean aside from the occasional reference to planning on playing some weekend, or having just played - and I never go into much detail. I mean, you never see me writing something like, "This week my character got to the top of the Black Tower of Angharat and placed the Silver Axe of Isis upon her altar to bathe in the full moon light so we might use it to defeat the shadow-wraiths emerging from the Void-Crevasse in Broken Gull Canyon and endangering the peaceful gnomes of Garnosh."
Probably because it would sound as ridiculous as what I wrote above, even if I just made up the details of the example and it does not actually reflect events in any game I am currently running. Currently, I am not playing in any games run by anyone else, mostly because there is hardly time to get a group of people together for one game, and unlike games of Monopoly or a poker night there is some consistency of characters required from session to session to fully enjoy one of the most appealing aspects of the game, which is the progression of a plot that develops over a series of episodes guided by the gamemaster and driven by the collective actions of the player's characters - (Well, some people prefer the progression of character abilities (and that sure is hella lot of fun, too), but that is generally not the style of play I prefer.) - so there is no reasonable chance of success at having more than one going at a time.
One of my favorite aspects of the game is world-building, and I have done a whole lot of it. I mean, I have hundreds of pages of notes and binders full of all sorts of information (some of which I have been transferring over to wiki format) about the world of Aquerra. A lot of that was written in the summer of 1989 when I was 17/18. The summer started out with a few weeks of boredom bed-ridden with mono. I used what little energy I had to write and write and write about Aquerra. The last three weeks of summer I struggled with bronchitis and spent a lot of that time doing world-building as well. Inbetween, I stood out in the rain and cold a whole lot seeing the Grateful Dead in venues all over the eastern and mid-western United States, growing my hair and sleeping in parking lots.
Soon after, I went away to college and discovered I could divorce myself from any previous identity I had in high school, and part of that was giving up on gaming for a long time. It was easy to let my hobby fall by the wayside in that environment when I was getting laid, and DJing parties and making a name for myself in that insular collegiate world as something of a wild person, and first started learning to play guitar and write songs. Also, at my school the kids who were into gaming seemed to be the worse representation of the gamer cliche, traipsing around campus in cloaks, all living in the same dorm basement hall, and being called "the Druids" by everyone else on campus. They would be running all night game marathons over the weekend, when I would rather be high and looking for someone to fuck. It was easy to disasociate myself from that when there seemed to be no inbetween.
But then I dropped out of college and went back to New York, where I felt like I knew no one. All my friends were away at college, and since I had gone to boarding school in Pennsylvania I didn't have any old high school friends around to hang with. I had little to do but work shitty temp jobs and do more world-building as I decided what I wanted to do with my life and whether I'd be going back to school. There was a great deal written in this time as well - as my work schedule was always changing, I had days off in a row where I could stay up all night and write, and as I had no social life to speak of at the time there was nothing else to do.
So I spent my time writing the obscure details of psuedo-medieval cultures, populating towns with unique characters and framing methods of government and religious ritual. I wrote pages and pages of histories for these fictionl nations, inventing heroes to do their great deeds while overcoming the great villians I made up as well. All to set up a historical backdrop and cultural framework for the actual games that would be played there. If I ever got to play again, which I finally did when I met some people at Kingsborough Community College, where I ended up going a year later. Normal people - well, maybe not normal, but some of the players I recruited then had never played before, and those that had were not the type to go traipsing around in a cloak. In fact, one of the people I met through that group was roybatty.
Finally getting to run a long-term game in the world I had been working on for so long (after the one game I ran on-and-off when not sick or following the Dead that summer of 1989, and one aborted campaign with some folks I found who weren't "druids" at my first college in my last few weeks there) was great and let me see a lot of my ideas in action, which led to another creative flowering when it came to world-building (a lot of which was revision at this point) - but as much I was writing then, it still had to compete with my being in a band at the time, going to Kingsboro, writing my first novel, working whatever crappy jobs I was working then on and off and trying my hardest to get laid with some kind of regularity (and failing). However, I did manage to write a 160 page Player's Guide to Aquerra, which I printed and bound for all my players - which had all the house rules pertaining to the setting, and touched on some of the broad setting elements to help them in making and developing characters. I can't believe I am revealing my true and deep geekiness in this manner. I might as well admit that when a new episode of Star Trek the Next Generation was on back then my mom knew to take a message if someone called because I would not come to the phone.
A couple of years later when I was playing and running in games with ragularity and having no problem balancing all sorts of things in my life I had another short burst of creative energy on this project, which by this time I had been working on in one form or another for about eight years. This was up in New Paltz. My friend Sean was running games in Aquerra, too, by this time, so we had lots of brain-storming sessions and I was always detailing areas of the world for his use, and incorporating his notes into my own. Part of the work at this point was revising some of the sillier aspects and details I had come up with when I was 17 or 18. I made a lot of silly naming choices and had some very bizarre characters running around, so whenever I could I used an in-game explanation for why names or places were changing in order to maintain my own obsessive sense of verisimilitude. Other things which had been made, but never interacted with "in-game" could just be changed wholecloth. However, I do still keep some of those silly things, or have made up other subtler ones as kind of an homage to those days, and also as a way to remind myself not to take it all too seriously. So, if a certain port town is famous for its delicacy, a marbled cheese made from the milk of domesticated monkeys - I let it stand. Or if a small southern island has three villages named Clapton, Joplin and Hendricks because I needed quick names one day when the player characters ended up there unexpectedly - eh, I let it stand.
In a way this was the high point or "golden age" of Aquerra-creation. I had a handful of people writing stories that took place there, helping detail areas where their characters were from, or where Sean (and for a bit, our friend Chris) was running a game. Hell, we even printed a quarterly newsletter for keeping abreast of everything going on in the world, in the different campaigns and also in "the rest of the world" as determined by the gamemasters. It was our Tlön, our Uqbar, our Orbis Tertius.
So anyway, in the process of moving a lot of the info (both setting and game-rule-wise) to the Aquerra wiki, I started to really get a grasp of how much I had really written, and how more exists in the form of pages and pages of long legal paper with arrows and diagrams and my crude representations of coats of arms of fictional nations like the Kingdom of Neergaard or El Reino Unido de Familias Superiores - but I also started to get a grasp of all the holes. . . all the gaps that still need to be filled, all the inconsistancies that need to fixed or explained. And at times I have been filled with an urge to start plugging some of those up, and fleshing out the reams of notes about the Sino-Meso-American based culture of the Empire of Oolam, and finishing up my revision of Derome-Delem (the land of Dwarves) which was the last project I was working on when I stopped doing any kind of regular world-building and only got about two-fifths (and 30 pages) of the way through. . . Not to mention the new ideas some it inspires. . .
But the truth is I am never gonna have that kind of time again to work on that thing - there will always be other things that are more immediate or more important that should be done instead until. . . well, I guess until I retire. I can just imagine myself, a little crazy old man scribbling notes about a fictional world and talking about it as if it were real.
So in the meantime, I run my game whenever we can actually all get together - which is supposed to be every two weeks, but lately it has been more like every month or two - though for the majority of the five years we have been running this particular campaign (entitled "Out of the Frying Pan") we were pretty good at meeting regularly - However, when this game ends, whether it be because we actually completed the overall story arc (as I hope to do - something that has never been done before in any game I have run or played in) or because it just fizzles out because of lack of interest, focus or time (which is the more common result) - it is going to be a long time before I am ready to run another game. The amount and kind of prep I would need for any of the back-burner game ideas I have (a superhero horror genre game set in 1977 New York City, and another Aquerra game, this one starting off in the Empire of Oolam) would amount to more world-building, more detailing until I got to a point where I would have a base I was comfortable enough with to start a game. And when would I have the time for that?
Probably because it would sound as ridiculous as what I wrote above, even if I just made up the details of the example and it does not actually reflect events in any game I am currently running. Currently, I am not playing in any games run by anyone else, mostly because there is hardly time to get a group of people together for one game, and unlike games of Monopoly or a poker night there is some consistency of characters required from session to session to fully enjoy one of the most appealing aspects of the game, which is the progression of a plot that develops over a series of episodes guided by the gamemaster and driven by the collective actions of the player's characters - (Well, some people prefer the progression of character abilities (and that sure is hella lot of fun, too), but that is generally not the style of play I prefer.) - so there is no reasonable chance of success at having more than one going at a time.
One of my favorite aspects of the game is world-building, and I have done a whole lot of it. I mean, I have hundreds of pages of notes and binders full of all sorts of information (some of which I have been transferring over to wiki format) about the world of Aquerra. A lot of that was written in the summer of 1989 when I was 17/18. The summer started out with a few weeks of boredom bed-ridden with mono. I used what little energy I had to write and write and write about Aquerra. The last three weeks of summer I struggled with bronchitis and spent a lot of that time doing world-building as well. Inbetween, I stood out in the rain and cold a whole lot seeing the Grateful Dead in venues all over the eastern and mid-western United States, growing my hair and sleeping in parking lots.
Soon after, I went away to college and discovered I could divorce myself from any previous identity I had in high school, and part of that was giving up on gaming for a long time. It was easy to let my hobby fall by the wayside in that environment when I was getting laid, and DJing parties and making a name for myself in that insular collegiate world as something of a wild person, and first started learning to play guitar and write songs. Also, at my school the kids who were into gaming seemed to be the worse representation of the gamer cliche, traipsing around campus in cloaks, all living in the same dorm basement hall, and being called "the Druids" by everyone else on campus. They would be running all night game marathons over the weekend, when I would rather be high and looking for someone to fuck. It was easy to disasociate myself from that when there seemed to be no inbetween.
But then I dropped out of college and went back to New York, where I felt like I knew no one. All my friends were away at college, and since I had gone to boarding school in Pennsylvania I didn't have any old high school friends around to hang with. I had little to do but work shitty temp jobs and do more world-building as I decided what I wanted to do with my life and whether I'd be going back to school. There was a great deal written in this time as well - as my work schedule was always changing, I had days off in a row where I could stay up all night and write, and as I had no social life to speak of at the time there was nothing else to do.
So I spent my time writing the obscure details of psuedo-medieval cultures, populating towns with unique characters and framing methods of government and religious ritual. I wrote pages and pages of histories for these fictionl nations, inventing heroes to do their great deeds while overcoming the great villians I made up as well. All to set up a historical backdrop and cultural framework for the actual games that would be played there. If I ever got to play again, which I finally did when I met some people at Kingsborough Community College, where I ended up going a year later. Normal people - well, maybe not normal, but some of the players I recruited then had never played before, and those that had were not the type to go traipsing around in a cloak. In fact, one of the people I met through that group was roybatty.
Finally getting to run a long-term game in the world I had been working on for so long (after the one game I ran on-and-off when not sick or following the Dead that summer of 1989, and one aborted campaign with some folks I found who weren't "druids" at my first college in my last few weeks there) was great and let me see a lot of my ideas in action, which led to another creative flowering when it came to world-building (a lot of which was revision at this point) - but as much I was writing then, it still had to compete with my being in a band at the time, going to Kingsboro, writing my first novel, working whatever crappy jobs I was working then on and off and trying my hardest to get laid with some kind of regularity (and failing). However, I did manage to write a 160 page Player's Guide to Aquerra, which I printed and bound for all my players - which had all the house rules pertaining to the setting, and touched on some of the broad setting elements to help them in making and developing characters. I can't believe I am revealing my true and deep geekiness in this manner. I might as well admit that when a new episode of Star Trek the Next Generation was on back then my mom knew to take a message if someone called because I would not come to the phone.
A couple of years later when I was playing and running in games with ragularity and having no problem balancing all sorts of things in my life I had another short burst of creative energy on this project, which by this time I had been working on in one form or another for about eight years. This was up in New Paltz. My friend Sean was running games in Aquerra, too, by this time, so we had lots of brain-storming sessions and I was always detailing areas of the world for his use, and incorporating his notes into my own. Part of the work at this point was revising some of the sillier aspects and details I had come up with when I was 17 or 18. I made a lot of silly naming choices and had some very bizarre characters running around, so whenever I could I used an in-game explanation for why names or places were changing in order to maintain my own obsessive sense of verisimilitude. Other things which had been made, but never interacted with "in-game" could just be changed wholecloth. However, I do still keep some of those silly things, or have made up other subtler ones as kind of an homage to those days, and also as a way to remind myself not to take it all too seriously. So, if a certain port town is famous for its delicacy, a marbled cheese made from the milk of domesticated monkeys - I let it stand. Or if a small southern island has three villages named Clapton, Joplin and Hendricks because I needed quick names one day when the player characters ended up there unexpectedly - eh, I let it stand.
In a way this was the high point or "golden age" of Aquerra-creation. I had a handful of people writing stories that took place there, helping detail areas where their characters were from, or where Sean (and for a bit, our friend Chris) was running a game. Hell, we even printed a quarterly newsletter for keeping abreast of everything going on in the world, in the different campaigns and also in "the rest of the world" as determined by the gamemasters. It was our Tlön, our Uqbar, our Orbis Tertius.
So anyway, in the process of moving a lot of the info (both setting and game-rule-wise) to the Aquerra wiki, I started to really get a grasp of how much I had really written, and how more exists in the form of pages and pages of long legal paper with arrows and diagrams and my crude representations of coats of arms of fictional nations like the Kingdom of Neergaard or El Reino Unido de Familias Superiores - but I also started to get a grasp of all the holes. . . all the gaps that still need to be filled, all the inconsistancies that need to fixed or explained. And at times I have been filled with an urge to start plugging some of those up, and fleshing out the reams of notes about the Sino-Meso-American based culture of the Empire of Oolam, and finishing up my revision of Derome-Delem (the land of Dwarves) which was the last project I was working on when I stopped doing any kind of regular world-building and only got about two-fifths (and 30 pages) of the way through. . . Not to mention the new ideas some it inspires. . .
But the truth is I am never gonna have that kind of time again to work on that thing - there will always be other things that are more immediate or more important that should be done instead until. . . well, I guess until I retire. I can just imagine myself, a little crazy old man scribbling notes about a fictional world and talking about it as if it were real.
So in the meantime, I run my game whenever we can actually all get together - which is supposed to be every two weeks, but lately it has been more like every month or two - though for the majority of the five years we have been running this particular campaign (entitled "Out of the Frying Pan") we were pretty good at meeting regularly - However, when this game ends, whether it be because we actually completed the overall story arc (as I hope to do - something that has never been done before in any game I have run or played in) or because it just fizzles out because of lack of interest, focus or time (which is the more common result) - it is going to be a long time before I am ready to run another game. The amount and kind of prep I would need for any of the back-burner game ideas I have (a superhero horror genre game set in 1977 New York City, and another Aquerra game, this one starting off in the Empire of Oolam) would amount to more world-building, more detailing until I got to a point where I would have a base I was comfortable enough with to start a game. And when would I have the time for that?