Consolidating

Readers of this blog will know that I'm into heavily homebrewing my campaign. If I were running games right now, I'd be running a weird cross between S&W and ACKS with some LotFP and DCC RPG thrown in for good measure, along with plenty of stuff I've taken from the OSR blogosphere and some of my own contributions.

Homebrewing is fun, and, especially when I do it in consultation with my players, results in a game that is more fun to play for us than running a game straight would usually be. Over time the game is shaped to fit us like a glove.

I've noticed a cycle, though, in homebrewing. I find my homebrewing getting out of hand, the complexities and ramifications needing to be resolved and enumerated. For example, I've decided to include something like a Carcosan sorcerer in my games, as well as various academies of magic, and to have the clerics tied intimately with the setting… all of that requires a good deal of either figuring out the execution, a good amount of time sitting down and generating/writing it all out, or both. In the meantime, if I'm going to start running my old game again, I need to write some more dungeon. It's all pretty exhausting and I find myself taking a step back sometimes until I get another burst of energy to finish the current cycle of changes I want to make and it makes sense to run games again.

I don't like this.

I want to be running and playing games all the time. I don't want for it to be a chore. Here's my solution.

On the one hand, I'm breaking the homebrewing I need to do up into manageable chunks in the form of a 'zine. I'm trying to decide whether I'll make it available to others, and if I do I'll probably get a few issues done first so I create a time buffer and know I can deliver, but just breaking everything into one or two pages of a digest-sized 8-page 'zine, I think, will help me to take it bit by bit, not all at once.

On the other hand, in order to get playing again I think I'm going to start running DCC RPG straight, and use written modules instead of my own dungeon. I'm funding the Peril on the Purple Planet Kickstarter, which is on track to reach all of its stretch goals if it brings in about $600 each of the remaining eleven days. As part of my funding, I'm buying four modules that should level my players up from 0 level to 4th level, ready for the Peril on the Purple Planet. There's a FLGS that opened up recently and, along with asking about buying Zocchi dice, I want to see about setting up a face-to-face game and maybe creating a gaming group there.

The things I like about DCC RPG is that it's different enough from the directions I'm going in my own homebrewing that I think it will diminish my temptation to homebrew it, and yet it also is committed to OSR gaming… and is all sorts of zany, dice-whimsical fun.

So, anyway, that's where I am with my gaming right now. Hopefully I'll be checking in more in the future, but no guarantees right now.