I was on the plane the other day, looking through setting materials for the Forgotten Realms (pdfs of the box sets of the original Forgotten Realms and the Lands of Intrigue box), and it got me thinking about RPG projects that I have underway, and what I’m trying to get out of the hobby.

Anne Helen Peterson has an essay out today about Millennial Hobby Energy, and it’s a striking contrast to my hobbies. I like having a hobby or two– and I can get preoccupied with one, for a time, as I am currently preoccupied with M:TG– but a big part of having a hobby for me is having something to do that I don’t treat like a job. I’m a serious fan of RPGs, I think, but I don’t feel some burning need to pick up every game that comes out, or to play all of the modules recommended by Questing Beast. It’s something I do when my time and energy allow, not something that I’m forgoing sleep to pursue. In the interest of getting on to the main point of this post, I’m going to skip more ruminations in this vein, but my thoughts are almost exactly captured by Burkeman’s discussion of hobbies in Four Thousand Weeks.

In that spirit, here are the RPG projects that I have underway. I’m going to divide them up into a couple of different categories. The first category is active RPG projects, ones for which I have some unresolved things to do; the second is back pocket games, games which I’ve run and played enough that I feel like I could pick up or play them on short notice. I’ve also added someday/maybe games as a category, which are the games that I’d like to run at some point, but that I don’t feel any sense of urgency about.

Active RPG projects

  • Outposts of the Undying. I should probably be more aggressive at getting sessions of this campaign together, but I feel pretty happy where I’m at with this. I wanted a setting and a set of rules and procedures that I could use to run arbitrary OSR modules that look good, and on that front, I feel pretty happy with where things are. I need to go through my notes and make sure that I have both my setting notes, my houserules, and my DM-facing procedures documented well enough to be able to pick up and play, but I’m pretty happy with this. I feel like I can start adding in various modules and bits and bobs about the setting any time I want.
  • Schoolcraft, MI. Faute de mieux, Monster of the Week is probably my go-to PbtA game, up there with Brindlewood Bay (even though I haven’t played it a ton in the last year). The genre it’s trying to emulate is accessible to almost everyone (including me), the system is pretty easy to pick up and play, and I have a setting for it and a few mysteries that I know pretty well. Why is this an active project and not just a back pocket game? There are two big outstanding items for Schoolcraft/MotW. First, it’d be good if I incorporated some of the new MotW material into the game: I’d really like to have my players to have a static base that they can upgrade over time, a la Blades in the Dark. I think there’s good material for this in the newer MotW supplements, but I should go through it and make some choices. Second, I probably need to do some work on my setting. I’ve just hand waved a lot of it in the past, but I was distracted by the vagueness of the geography of the town in the last mystery I ran. I may actually need a slightly larger town; it probably makes sense to just steal from Kalamazoo to make a more fleshed out town. (It occurs to me as well that you could probably do a lot of great vintage Call of Cthulhu stuff in historic SW Michigan.)

Back Pocket Games

  • Brindlewood Bay. I’ve run enough sessions of Brindlewood Bay to feel like I have a pretty good handle on the system and what it’s trying to do, to a point where I can run it without a ton of preparation or provocation. I’d like to get some more books about small town New England– either tourist books or coffee table books– to use as inspo at some point, but that’s a minor to-do.
  • Dungeon Crawl Classics. For all of its lumpy bits and weirdnesses, I really like DCC. It’s a great system that does a lot of fun stuff and (mostly) gets out of the way the rest of the time. Warriors hit hard, wizards do cool wizard stuff, and so on. What’s more, its modules do a great job of getting players into the fun, cool stuff with a minimum of fuss. I’m probably going to run some DCC for some local friends in the near future, and I’m surprisingly excited about it.

Someday/maybe

  • 13th Age 2e. I’m not sure the game is totally my thing, but I like a lot of things about it. For one, something about the default setting just rubs me the wrong way; I like Midgard as a setting, but it’s a setting I find it hard to get excited about. Honestly, if I really wanted to run 13th Age, I think you could very profitably build the Birthright setting (which I do like quite a lot, and have messed around with in the past) into a campaign setting that would work for 13A (just need to make a list of the icons), with Reign for the high level political stuff. Also, imo it needs a very particular kind of group that is into both the expressive RP side of it and the crunchy mechanical bits. All of this is pretty tantalizing, honestly, but it’s not on my short list, somehow.
  • 5e/5e hacks/heroic fantasy/Shadow of the Weird Wizard. A part of me wishes I had some 5e / heroic fantasy thing in my back pocket, for those friends of mine who really enjoy that sort of thing. I’m intrigued by Nimble 5e (among others) and would certainly like to give Shadow of the Weird Wizard a fair shake. But I don’t enjoy 5e enough to try to get into a game of it, and heroic fantasy isn’t really my thing, which makes the effort to get a 5e variant or SotWW to the table kind of a stretch.

There are other games that are vaguely on my agenda, but these are the ones I’m actively thinking about.