As I’ve been to busy to really do much active preparation for this tabletop campaign (which isn’t great considering that I’m writing this two days before our next session and I need to be ready to facilitate a game of Sanctuary), I’ve been trying to keep my momentum going by working through whatever plot I might put together for the two discrete chunks of the later campaign that I can foresee. I’ve got the outline of it locked in already, and I won’t be getting TOO specific since I need to leave room for adaptation, player input, and micro-plots, but I really need to start lining up some of the more important details. Especially for the first chunk of the campaign since that’s going to be a bit more locked-in than the second chunk by its very nature. I also need to produce a map for it as well, since that kind of location-based visual will be important for a while. It won’t be unimportant later, but it will be more important earlier to help ground everything we’ve got going on. After that, I need to generate a bunch of names, some proper nouns, work out how to incorporate a few fun little details from our games thus far, and then organize it all in some way that I can reliably use and won’t completely forget about. I’ve made plenty of GM reference documents in the past, but none in quite a while and I’ve never done anything of the sort while this burned out and tired, so I’ve got my work cut out for me.

Unfortunately, all of it is pretty important. I can’t really make it up as I go based on logical rules and the way of things in the world, like I have for most of my games over the last few years. I need this place to have a presence and feel to it that is almost impossible to create if it doesn’t all exist already. And sure, I might be the only one who would know if I’m using long-established details versus things I improvised on the spot, but me knowing might lead to other people knowing since I’d probably be a lot less confident in the substance of my answers and hesitant in the delivery of them. Plus, there’s a certain sort of… comfort, maybe? Confidence, perhaps? That comes from showing up for the first session and finding a nice little world map to look at as our adventures begin. Eventually, though, we will leave that map behind and move to a larger scale that would be incredibly impractical to map to the same degree, but I should still have a map worked out at least roughly since having places and locations and territory designations is actually super important for Armour Astir. I need to be able to lay out the state of things as the players arive because having that knowledge and awareness of the world is crucial for making decisions about how to proceed in that game. As is having all of the organizations required to flesh it out.

Coming up with good names for people, places, and things is also going to be a big task. I need to have those for all the stuff I’ve mentioned above and the important people related to those things, but I also need to refill my list of names for people who didn’t warrant preparation (or that I didn’t anticipate needing) since I want to create some kind of naming conventions for the various factions that will eventually make up the full setting of the Armour Astir game. And one for the micro setting that will be featured while we’re still playing Dungeons and Dragons 5e (2014), of course, but that should be easier since I’ll have the worldbuilding my players and I have already done to draw on. I just, you know, need to sit down and do the work at some point. Eventually. Maybe I should slow the campaign a little bit so it won’t start until after the Final Fantasy 14 roleplaying wrestling league I’m a part of has wrapped for the season (on the Fourth of July, according to the schedule, funnily enough), just so I’ve got a little more time to prepare and maybe a bit less going on all at the same time, you know? The past few weeks have been kicking my ass more than usual (which is saying something, given how much the last decade has already kicked my ass) and I’m struggling to stay with it sometimes. I’d definitely not be putting my best foot forward when it comes to creating things for this game if I pushed myself to do much of it now.

A lot of working on a big campaign is like this. You work at whatever scale and pace you can while you can. Eventually you wind up dedicating a whole day to it for one reason or another, and then it’s back to filling in gaps in your day with creative work as ideas strike you or an idle thought bears fruit. I used to have the time and energy to sit down and start working on something like this, but I also used to have the time and energy to write way more than I do right now so I’m trying to avoid being too critical of myself. I want the fun of running a game. I want the fun of storytelling and watching my players navigate through the Rube Goldberg machine that is my campaign setting, setting things in motion as they blunder through the maze of possibilities that I’ve set up for them to eventually collapse into a single reality. It’s really very rewarding. I just… I just have a lot of work to do still and not as much energy as I used to have. I don’t know that “I’m getting older” covers it, but it’s certainly not helping my systemic burnout, current stress levels, and intermittently worsening depression. So I will do what I can as I can and hope that it’ll be enough. It’s all I can do, really.