My brain is clogged...

I feel the need to do something creative--write some fiction, maybe, or work on my game(s)--but I can't muster the energy or the enthusiasm to actually do it.  So I drift around the house picking up and trying to read one book or another, or watching television, or (easiest of all) netsurfing.  And all the while a host of half-formed ideas percolate in the back of my brain.  It's annoying.

I could continue the round robin story on the Eyrie, either alone or with one or two other people.  But it seems like way too much effort.  Or I could write something else.  If I could figure out what I want to write.

Or I could work on my game.  I've been running a weekly (well, mostly) GURPS Mage/Werewolf game for a long while.  A couple of months ago I put it on hiatus, as they say in the tv biz.  I was getting a little bored with it, and wasn't sure where I wanted to go with it.  I toyed with starting a Swashbucklers game (pirates and voodoo in the Caribbean a la On Stranger Tides by Time Powers).  But, as always happens when I contemplate that, I ultimately conclude that there simply isn't enough there to keep a campaign going for any length of time.  At least, not enough to interest me for the long term, though no doubt most of my players would be relatively happy with plenty of opportunity for combat.

I also briefly considered a Call of Cthulhu game.  That could be entertaining, though it would almost certainly have to be a short-lived "mini-series" or even a one-shot adventure.

For a few weeks now I've been working on GURPS Traveller.  I have fond memories of playing Traveller in college, though it was a very strange campaign and bore increasingly less resemblance to the standard Traveller game.  Now I'm not sure that that's what I want to do either.  A couple of my players have expressed interest in this; they miss playing a high-tech game with lots of gunplay and combat (we've mostly been doing classic fantasy or "hidden magic" contemporary games for quite a while).  But I'm not at all sure that my Lovely & Talented Wife or Fawn (the fourth player in these games) would enjoy it all that much.

I'm not sure I'd enjoy it all that much, frankly.  I've also been contemplating a Deadlands game (weird magic and monsters in the Old West) again.  Or a time-traveling, trouble-shooting game in the style of Feng Shui or even the possibility of resurrecting my Expendables game (think Stargate, only they're exploring parallel worlds instead of distant planets).

Aaaaaargh!  I don't know what I want to do!  Well, that's not strictly true.  I'd like to play in a long-running campaign of the sort I tend to run.  Unfortunately, nobody else in my gaming group runs games like that if they run games at all.  And none of the games I run have quite the flavor I'm looking for because the players aren't on the same wavelength.  Which is no reflection on them; games never run quite the way you anticipate even under the best of conditions.  The military axiom that "no battleplan ever survives contact with the enemy" applies equally well to game plots subjected to the tender mercies of players.

So maybe I need to write the stories I want to run or play in instead of trying to do it in the shape of a role-playing game.  That might be the best way.  But then I get back to finding it difficult to sit down and write the stuff.

Posted with Livelizard