Whew – be careful what you wish for! After last year’s multiple traumas for many facets of my life, I vowed to lean into more gaming, both running and playing. Well, as of June 2024 my dance card is full, and I thought I’d take a brief moment to write about the four games I’m playing and what I’m hoping to get from each of them.
See, my time is my rarest resource, and it would be very easy for me to wander off into a crappy or even mediocre game. So I really need to be diligent about why I’m playing a game – what do I hope to get out of it?
I don’t like to sound so sticky about this – they are games, and isn’t it enough to just have fun? Mmmm… Maybe. But again I hold my time very tightly and if I’m going to get the most out of my gaming time, I would like to move past just having fun and be thoughtful about the people and games that I’m gaming with.
So yeah – I’m playing and running four games now. Crazy! But for the moment they have seem to moved into equilibrium, and I seem to be sustaining all of them. So here’s to having a full dance card of amazing games!
Game 1 – Masks of Nyarlathotep
I talk about this a lot on my podcast. I am running one of the greatest ttrpg campaigns of all time for MUP Professor backers. We have a full table of six, which is really one too many than ideal, but the greater table does allow for the game to go on even with absences. More importantly, the table is STRONG. Everyone in the table is fully engaged in telling the best possible story and leans into both the investigation and the world building with great fervor.
I would like to keep a journal and share it here, but that seems like a heavy load at this point to go back and write all of that up. 18 years ago I wrote a journal tracking my first playthrough of Masks (which you can find here if you are a member of YSDC), and I definitely would like to at least capture some thoughts for each of the chapters. Hm. (We have also been recording our sessions with an eye toward sharing with MUP Patreon backers – I will let you know if that happens.)
My goal for running Masks is twofold: one was to run the entire game, with all seven chapters, as I’ve never run Australia or China before, and Peru was new in the updated book. And, as I mentioned on MUP Ep 299, the sooner I started it, the sooner it would be done. But am also running it for MUP top tier backers, and all of my players are wonderful supporters and community members. It’s also a massive challenge to GMing skills to manage a game at this level – I learn something new every session.
Masks is amazing but so, so large. It’s June now, and so we’ve been playing for almost 1.5 years. There’s no way we’ll be done in 2024 – so now looking at EOY 2025 to complete. Wow.
Game 2 – Arkham Antiquities and Appraisals
This week I ran our third session of Call of Cthulhu with my new in-person group, comprised of strangers I met entirely at cons and discord. It was way easier to create a group from scratch than I thought – pretty much I said I wanted to make it happen and suddenly we were gaming together.
It’s a good group of friendly and engaged players, though we are still working out how best to navigate everyone’s personalities. Everyone engaged with the safety tools quickly, and that made table safety for a group of strangers feel easy and welcoming.
We just completed playing The Haunting – I’ve run this a few times in the last 30 years and it’s always fun to start a group new to CoC with it. (I think it was the second scenario I ran for CoC, after trying my hand unsuccessfully to run a Dreamlands game in college.) I’ll be tying some of the findings around the Chapel of Contemplation into the overall campaign, and there is enough mystery and questions to easily seed future scenarios.
I really dig the new Arkham book – I’ve read it cover to cover and it really paints a full picture of a living, breathing town. I learned a lot from running Bookhounds in San Francisco – a city I love and am familiar with. It’s so easy to breathe life into a place you know well, so there’s a challenge with bringing a fictional town to life.
So that’s one of the reasons I want to run a long-term campaign in Arkham – I want to lean into the town and create a version of my own. I want to run a number of scenarios set there, some of which I’ve run before, others I haven’t. And I want to create NPCs, factions, and events with my table that give life to this very Lovecraftian town.
Most importantly – I started this game to start playing with people in person. I have a set of friends and we play boardgames together every month or so. But I need consistent in-person gaming to fill my soul. I’ve been really struggling this year with feeling connected to people, and this game is doing a great job so far of meeting that need. Here’s to more of that.
Game Three – Blessed and Blasphemous
Running two bi-weekly games is enough. Really, I just needed to stop craving games so much that I would stack new games to run back-to-back. It’s just not sustainable. But playing games is!
An MUP community member approached me about playing in the pre-WW2 CoC campaign The Blessed and the Blasphemous, which I had heard of but not backed or read anything specific on. He wanted to run a more serious, in-period focused game and wondered if I was interested in joining. The short answer was HELL YES.
So we recruited a couple players from my Masks game (other community members, which is so awesome), and carved out a small slice for a weekly 2-hour game. The idea is that a smaller ongoing game is better than nothing, and everyone jumped in creating a very brainy party that has found itself in Morocco circa 1938. We have played one session so far and it was great right off the ground.
It’s really important for me to play more games on the player side. As a forever-GM I spend so much time not only with all the organizational efforts, but also knowing all the secrets. It’s super helpful both as a GM and ttrpg writer to play in a game and know nothing about the book or mystery. I love that I know absolutely nothing about this campaign and can just focus on living in the moment, showing up with my best player capacities and leaning into every scene.
We’ve just committed to playing the first two scenarios (of six) for now, which I think is a great way to keep everyone engaged with a longer campaign. We don’t have to worry about committing to two years – though it would be amazing to still be playing this when I finish Masks in ’25. I feel very blessed to make this work out. See what I did there?
Game 4 – Dragonlance of Youth
Finally, I’m playing in the latest Dragonlance campaign for 5th edition of D&D. As mentioned above, this spring I was feeling that I really needed to play in more games. Literally the next day my friend Ian texted me and asked me if I wanted to join our group of high school friends in playing through the new Dragonlance campaign. It’s a monthly-ish game on Sunday evenings, and is just infrequent enough for me to make it work as my fourth game. I was in.
Frankly, I’ve played enough 5e for my life, and there are so many more interesting and engaging games that I don’t feel I need to ever play it again. Going back to my original point – it’s not enough just to play a game. Why play a game that I don’t even like?
This is the same group that I ran Goodman Games’ Expedition to the Barrier Peaks for way back in Covid times. They are at the opposite end of my CoC games – they are old friends who take the roleplaying less seriously than my MUP community. But they love each other deeply, and use the D&D game as an opportunity to hang out and go on adventures together.
This less-serious take on ttrping is really important for me to remember. They play 5e because now they’ve been playing it off and on since it came out, so it’s easy for them to jump into and get a game going, trying out new classes and feats, and just using it as an excuse to hang out (the five of us live in four different states).
In the end, it’s really good for me to identify the reasons and expectations I have for playing and running a game. But it’s just as important for me to see where I’m having fun and lean into that.
But What About
Of course, part of my brain is clamoring about all the games I’m not running. I tried unsuccessfully to get a group of new gamers playing some Mothership, and have decided not to pursue that further. And of course there are always cons and playtests…
This year promises a whole new set of RL challenges that are just around the corner. Honestly. It’s not enough to just have our kid head off to college. It’s just change after change.
So I will keep this pace as long as I can. It’s sustainable now, and it’s easy enough for me to skip a game and not have the whole thing fall down. I had to cancel a Masks game last week and was not able to schedule a replacement. It is what it is.
I’ll give an update on these games later in the summer and see if I can get some sort of journal up and running. More soon.