It is done. After quite a while of trying to make this one every-other-week game stick around, I have brought it to an end. The campaign/group that included both The Demigods of Daelen and The Magical Millennium has come to an end. Between my time off this past summer, general scheduling woes, and the slow withdrawal of half the players I’d tried to include in the campaign, there just wasn’t much left to keep alive. Especially considering how much we were probably going to struggle with getting the remaining folks together to play, a thing we wouldn’t be able to do if even one of them was missing. With only three players and the GM left, any single person missing makes it impossible to continue. We talked it over this past weekend, ironically with one of the remaining players arriving very late, and conluded that this was for the best right now. We might get the group back together in the future, when everyone’s schedule is more dependable and we’ve got more players to join us, but for now we are bringing it to an end. I’ll still have my The Rotten Labyrinth game on its every-other-weekend schedule, but now I am without one of my staple campaigns for the time being. We might yet get together for one-shots or to play games or hang out or whatever, but it won’t be on the structured, three-to-seven-Sunday-afternoon schedule we’ve been trying to maintain up to this point. It’ll be more ad hoc. Impulsive, even. Less regular. Which feels silly to say given how little this group has met. We couldn’t even get more than two people together on our play-Stardew-Valley-instead-of-D&D days.

Still, I’m sad to see it go. This was the group that had kind of… inherited, I guess, the mantle of the Weekly Sunday game I started running three apartments and almost nine years ago. Only one player still remains from those days, throughout it all. Even one of the players I thought would be a permanent fixture when I brought them in has withdrawn due to how busy they are. Sure, this group has had its pauses and I’ve fully ended it before, back when things were worse with my roommates and I didn’t feel like dealing with them at my table anymore (it was still a literal table back in those days, early 2020, and only my still-remaining player appeared digitally rather than all of us these days), but this feels different. Now… I’m not sure I want to put it together again, at some point in the future. Abstractly, sure, I like the idea of having a game again. Practically, though… I’m still struggling with the ennui of being a storyteller and writer in this day and age, where both of those things continue to be devalued by my society, and I’m not sure I’ve got it in me to keep that particular format of storytelling going given how much heartbreak it, specifically, has given me over the years. This is the group, several players and now a couple years ago, that was so uncommitted to getting together that I just gave up entirely (and that led to me eventually giving up on trying to schedule things with some of those friends entirely since I was just so worn out from putting in all that effort for it to only go unrewarded). This was the same group with the TPK even more players ago. All my best and worst tabletop stories–save the time I had to kick a player out–came from this group, in one of its many forms.

I don’t know that it’s forever dead. I don’t know that I won’t eventually revive it. I just… I feel like something needs to change and that I can’t keep going back to this old heartbreak again and again. Maybe I need to find a group I can physically get in front of. Maybe I need to find a group willing to play non-D&D games. Maybe I need to find a group where I’m not the GM. Maybe I need to find a different venue or format for storytelling entirely. I just don’t know. Or maybe I need to focus on spending time with my friends doing something fun and cooperative that doesn’t wind up feeling as transactional as most D&D games feel these days (which I tried to solve by playing collaborative storytelling games and ran into more than a few problems). I’m going to take some time to think about it. In the meantime, I’ve still got my other game. I’ve still got Final Fantasy 14 and the potential to get into some of the roleplaying available in that game. Assuming I can find a good community to roleplay with, anyway. Some of them are into stuff that I’m not looking for from this venue or format. Which is fine, so long as they’re all consenting adults, but it’s not really the sort of thing I want out of my roleplaying experience right now.

It feels kind of funny to be taking this break from a D&D campaign/group the same day that I started playing Final Fantasy 14 more again. I felt a lot less emotional turmoil about taking a break from FF14 and I’ve probably spent more hours playing that in the last year than I’ve spent running TTRPGs ever (the line gets muddled if you included preparation hours as part of “running TTRPGS,” but I’d still bet I’ve spent more time on FF14). Maybe it’s because there’s a certain finality I’m feeling from this campaign ending that I didn’t feel from my FF14 break. Or maybe it’s because I’m a more passive participant in FF14 and it doesn’t really function as a creative outlit like my TTRPGs did. Or maybe because playing FF14 doesn’t take as much FROM me to in order for me to interact with it. Putting so much time and energy into my tabletop games every week has the side-effect of keeping me incredibly emotionally invested in them, so changes to them hit me in a way that even FF14 at its most powerful has never quite managed. It is exhausting to be that invested and see it come to naught due to scheduling concerns, so maybe the emotional weight of this break, be it permanent or temporary, is impacted by that as a result. I expect I’ll slowly sort through these tangled feelins and figure it out once I’m clear of the other stuff I’ve got going on right now, that’s taking up most of my time and emotional energy. For now, though, I feel sad and unsure of what the future will bring. Which feels like the anthem of 2025…