My players and I, minus one who was not feeling well, have met for the last worldbuiling session. We played a quick game of Sentinel (the second half of Sanctuary and Sentinel), that I ended without showing the full conclusion because I wanted to save that for the right moment in the upcoming Dungeons and Dragons 5e portion of this non-traditional campaign. We had a good few rounds of play before the end, thanks to there being four of us, but we still ended earlier than most of us expected. We were still building up to something bigger when the end arrived in the form of one of the deck’s joker cards, but it was just one pull before the random number I’d produced anyway, so we didn’t lose out on much potential build anyway. It just means the then-status quo will have to be significantly escalated in order for things to happen the way I envision. Which is possible! The danger of escalation was the constant backdrop of our game, so even if it never quite got there while we played, the idea was never far from anyone’s mind, so there are all kinds of crumbs and kernels that can be built into something larger. Plenty of ammunition, so to speak. I just need to take the time to sit down, work through everything we’ve built, and figure out how it all plays out. And how many years have passed. I did my best to draw out the time, to create a significant separation between the outside world and the life inside the dome that they characters will know, but we wound up less than three centuries separated and with some degree of contact for much of that. I will probably need to run the clock a while longer to really get the effect I want, but I’m also planning to toss a “long-lived peoples are rare” element into this world just to keep things a little less historically grounded. I want things to pass into myth and legend faster than they would if some poeple lived to be five hundred or whatever.

At this point, we’ve got one or two pre-sessions left for the group. The first one is happening in a week (from when this posts) and it will begin with a review of the Armour Astir characters everyone has been charged with making. After everyone has settled that, we’ll begin the real work of regressing them into their earlier D&D counterparts. After all, this world is starting in a mostly typical high-fantasty setting that will be disrupted by the introduction of a science-fantasy setting at an appropriate time. So we need to design our characters for the game we will be playing for most of the campaign (Armour Astir) and then walk them back into being Level 1 D&D 5e (2014) characters. Then we’ll go back, run those characters for a bit, and use custom moves or whatever to adjust for whatever pecularities the characters picked up between their conception and their actualization in Armour Astir. All characters change, after all, so I would be surprised if they all ended up where they originally intended to be. Close enough is good enough for me. We’re doing an experiment, after all, so why not try something wild and see what happens?

Any additional sessions after that will likely need to wait a month as half the players are in a Final Fantasy 14 raid group that will be meeting during most of the times that we’ve been able to play in the past. Given how cramped said players’ calenders look and the fact that they will likely look that way for at least a month, I’m just not going to try to schedule any sessions. Half the players have picked a different priority for their time and I am not subjecting myself and the other players to the stress of trying to make game time fit in around other committments like that. As much as I can make use of a long pause and will not be taking issue with my players who chose this as a result, I am still rather frustrated by this turn of events. I was very clear at the outset that, in recruiting my current players, I was looking for people willing to commit to this game as being a priority. I do not think I could have been any more clear or explicit about that than I was without literally bludgeoning my players over the head with the text. Yet here we are, a scant few months later. I get it. The new Ultimate in FF14 is only new for so much time and scheduling anything with a group of 8 is difficult, let alone a group of 8 that wants to meet as often as possible. A lot of groups will just replace you if you’re the reason they can’t meet often enough, from what I’ve heard. That might not be true, but I’m willing to give my players the benefit of the doubt on this, at least for now. I don’t have to like it to accept it. And just because I’ve accepted it today doesn’t mean I have to accept it in the future. If this becomes a habit, or it winds up stretching on for longer then a month, I will have a conversation with my players about it. Until then, I’m just trying to process it until it stops stinging.

Plus, like I said, I could use the time. I’ve got a lot of worldbuilding, map-making, faction producing, and digital game deployment work to do. I have done almost none of it so far, what with how busy I’ve been, so taking this month of not meeting to schedule myself some weekly time to work on the campaign would probably be for the best. I work pretty well when I’ve got time and space, so I should be able to get most of it done with a session or two a week that last a few hours each. And I won’t drown myself in overwork, too, so long as I manage to stick to those weekly allotments and don’t wind up cramming it all in during the last couple weeks. I need to be careful with my time, energy, and emotions this time around. I’m doing better than I was over the winter, but I can stell I’m still more fragile than usual. It would do me no good to start running a game only to break down quickly and need to take time off at the start. I want to pace this, to pace myself, and that means actively caring for myself in a way I’m not typically inclined towards. I tend to spare myself the least when I’m in a creative mode but I can’t do this this time. I shouldn’t be doing it any time, but I very much cannot let myself burn out even further this time. I don’t know how I’d recover from that, after all. I can barely stay even-keeled nowadays. So time will be good, even if part of the reason I have that time is because my players have chosen to prioritize something else when scheduling their time.