OUT WITH THE OLD 2014

Not much to say for 2014 as far as my gaming is concerned. This was the year when I didn't run a single D&D session. When this year was new, the Gristaad's Vagabonds, players, not the characters, were no more. The game ended in the Autumn of '12 for all the usual reasons - G/F moved in, I got promoted and a new job fell heavily on my shoulders. The sinkhole that was my dungeon campaign finally ended with a minor disaster and I wasn't up to writing the new material at the time. The disaster with the season finale was as advanced and it was unexpected. I ran the same campaign for two groups of players one after the other. I wrote most of the campaign material as I went with it the first time from 2007 to 2009. The last session was a victory celebration, that was one of the best sessions in that game. It was a culmination of the interaction of the players with the story and with each other. The Agency and the Chemistry was so perfect, that it did not seem like anything at all happened in the game, but it was as eventful as it seemed calm, and the players were totally absorbed in it, and the session was over, the adventure was really over, territory covered, and everyone was ready to start the Chapter 2, except, that there was no more D&D gaming by consensus. It was August 2009 and in the real world people were getting laid off, people were breaking up, and none of those players wanted to play D&D or any other fantasy game any more. September 2009, I was gearing up for getting a new group, I was struggling with logistics of finding a place to run the game, when things broke my way and I easily drifted into the second incarnation of the game. First, I found a pretty sizable game scene, come Christmas I moved on, moved along by an egotistical octopus or two, who were dominating the scene, and which blindsided me completely, because in the group, I found a gaming dynamic, completely different from mine, and I found their gaming unfulfilling. Come January 2010, I easily found a new group of players, and a second incarnation of my Midlands campaign had begun. It was much better running it the second time around, since I could improve my narrative and game mechanics. It was fine until the last game session in September 2012. The final session, the Victory Tournament, introduced the players to the local gentry and set the stage for an expanded sand-box campaign, but alas, it was a different group and the dramatic tension was not there. I should have re-written it for the current player characters in the game, but too much was going on in the real world outside, and I didn't do it. One of my players was getting ready to move on, and the mortal and mundane world outside was intruding on me as well. During that game session I received a text message that ended the friendship with an old buddy of mine in the world outside the game, and then everything else, and I couldn't get back into writing, which is not so say that I stopped writing the D&D stuff, with all the other things going on, I couldn't organize or get it completed. I tried maintaining the group, by running board-game night get-togethers, much as I do with the previous bunch, but the group did not hold, and this fellowship ended in January 2014. This is not to say that I stopped thinking about the game world or resuming the Season TWO of my campaign in it. Not a day goes by, when I don't think about some aspect of it. It would be nice to get a notebook and start writing down the random thoughts and concepts, and so if I concentrate, I might get this game off the ground yet again.