I spend a lot of time playing the guitar lately. Since I’ve been in the cleaning phase I’ve backed off of the music studies a bit, though I’ll return to them soon enough. Primarily I practice songs and improvisation, which I’ve always loved. I contemplate things a lot. There’s been a lot to do with the game (Cycle of Existence) lately. It’s sitting in limbo for more reason than the fact that I can’t promote it. Aside from tabletop role-playing dying a slow death to the world of the MMORPG, I found not too long after I returned from the original tour that I secretly was beginning to come apart from the game. After nearly fifteen years of living with it I didn’t know what to do. I had (still have, actually) a wealth of material that could be written for the game, but no particular motivation to write it. I had to deal with the realization that even if I were to sell the rest of the books I had I would never turn enough of a profit to pull off another book of the quality of the first and hope to actually market it, nor would I have the capital to market the first without actually sinking a lot of money I don’t have into it. More than this, however, the motivation lay as the greatest issue. I fought a few months attempting to run the game – I even had one amazing session. But, for the most part, I found that my interests had shifted more to literature and music. Will it come back? I can’t say – there is a lot in my life right now that seems alien, different and uncertain, which is probably a good thing. This isn’t actually a lament – it’s simply a contemplation.
There are a few fans out there of my book who follow it that I may sadden at this, but I cannot say for certain that I’m done with writing role-playing games. The first or second guys’ night that Felix and I had – the one where it turned out just the two of us, I mentioned to him, for the first time directly, that I didn’t know if I wanted to write games anymore. He looked at me a moment and said he understood. There was a point before Cassie left that I talked to her about where I wanted to go after the computer thing, and that I didn’t think I had room for school and the game, time-wise, while trying to take care of the kids. I chose school in the end – to move a different direction. The idea that would become Cycle of Existence consumed more than half my life and, in the end, I would not call it a wasted endeavor, but nonetheless without sadness in my cleaning I packed up my gaming materials, dice, character sheets and books. For a lot of people the game seems synonymous with me and I get asked about it all the time, but the reason the game was so well done was because it held the reflection of life – one actually lived and melded into fables. I always said that I could be happy just knowing the book was there and I think I can now. It’s not necessarily the end, but it is a transition, a part of the pattern of my life that has to shift.
The gaming books on my shelf have been replaced with music theory, Conrad, Eliot, Yeats, Matheson, Miller, Shakespeare and leave room for what more will come. My room is about as Spartan as I can get it and it feels calm. I never would have even begun to consider the idea of shelving the game a year or so ago, indeed, I even fought tooth and nail to defend its need even last year in a sort of defensive grasping defiance, but all-in-all I think I first started to feel it at Gen-Con SoCal in 2006 . If I had to fight for one thing to remain in our culture between literature and role-playing games I would choose reading and lit every time – RPGs would never have been without it. The cause of reading strikes me as more important. There are steps I plan to take to eventually get my book out to the distributor so that people can still get it, and I will eventually publish an electronic version of it as well and probably maintain the site when I can, but at least for the time being, everything is moving in preparation to go forward.
If it’s a shock it shouldn’t be – the time spent with the game was important, but what the game came from was more life, reading and such than anything and I have all those things, so there is little that I’m giving up here. I worked for some fifteen or so years to achieve a dream of publishing a role-playing a game, of telling its story, and I did just that; I succeeded. This is a thing many people will never do, so I’m a step ahead. Whatever happens beyond, in that I always will have succeeded. For now I’ll sit back and read – The Descent is still owed reading after being put off more than any book in a while.
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