After a hiatus following the departure of a player (though not caused by the departure of said player), four of the remaining five of us met up to play and quickly discovered we did not have it in us to play our usual game. Live’s been a chaotic mess for all of us and we lost quite a bit of momentum because of when our break arrived. It cut us off from any opportunity to build energy or establish story because we spent the previous full session going through a time skip and our last partial session doing some maintenance and upkeep, so there weren’t any existing strands of story or character to use to pull us into the game again. Additionally, due to some decisions I made while creating this game and building out the world, I’ve been struggling to feel excited about this part of the game we’re in. Some of the NPCs I’d made had begun to take up too much space in my mind because their real-world analogues have become dramatically more prominent in my mind as a result of how the world has changed in the year or so since I spun the bones of this story up. It stopped being fun for me to explore the ideas associated with them and while there was still space for me to shift things and make changes in order to avoid building the association any more than I already had, I was also struggling with how close the world was to our own. Which, it turns out, was also a bit of a struggle for some of my players as well. It’s difficult to enjoy fantasy escapism when we’re not actually departing from the world we are already familiar with. So, as our chatter peetered out and it looked like we’d be just departing rather than pushing ourselves to play a game we weren’t in the mood to play, I pitched an idea for a game I’d had just the day before.