Never On Sunday

Studying game systems and searching for campaign inspiration has taken on a sudden urgency. Ella, our current GM, has announced that she’ll be traveling: to the Philippines for a couple months, maybe elsewhere for longer, while she tries to work out where to go next after some major life events. Her intention is to return from the trip to continue the current campaign; maybe the rest of us can entertain ourselves with a mini-campaign (6-8 episodes) in the meantime. The plan looks good on paper, but long experience, both with games generally and with this group in particular, suggests otherwise.

Indeed, we tried something very like this before, when Jude got a ministerial job just as he was set to start a campaign of his devising, and found he couldn’t manage the commute from his new location. As it happened, I had two campaign concepts nearly ready, but needed some time to polish either one up, so we decided to fill the gap with a brief, very episodic steampunk-y horror-y sort of thing with GM-ship rotating among us. This was to be a quick-and-dirty filler, so little or no effort was to be spent on concerns like enforcing continuity or tying up threads or arranging a proper climax.

Well, it didn’t work. Because the filler campaign was also my idea, I spent time on that which could have been used to prepare the next campaign properly—and it was still ready before everyone was willing to drop the steampunk-y- horror-y sort of thing. Fun ideas are tenacious, and the players I know are loathe to put them down before finding out What Happened Next, regardless of what they may have agreed…until you set them down. Dropping a campaign in progress is nearly impossible, except by utter necessity, and then only to substantial disappointment. (“I’ve been called up for duty. Sorry guys.”)

Returning to a campaign once the players get excited about their next set of characters, however, is even more nearly impossible. Jude is back with us, though sometimes by webcam. His aborted campaign? Aborted for good. If too much time passes between conception and implementation, you lose the driving excitement of trying on new characters for size. The players get a chance to imagine what they might do in the campaign, construct and complete that story, however vaguely, in their heads, and be done with it before dice ever hit the table.

We’re just not going to see the end of Ella’s campaign. I feel it in my bones. It won’t be the first aborted; we have a long list of campaigns that collapsed with changing membership. It won’t be the last. But it will fade from view in the glittering promise of whatever comes next.