To the Island of Madness…

Summer is nearly here, and I’ve been longing for that great mass of super-heated air to roll in off the Pacific and turn this whole island into a sauna, because since April I’ve had few chances to blog, role-play or really do anything except work, work work. I’ve been teaching to what the Japanese would call a “hard schedule” and finding it hard to keep work out of my private life, so blogging, role-playing and in fact pretty much everything else have fallen by the wayside. This Thursday my students sit their stats exam, and I get to cast off the restraints of my course and (hopefully) get my weekends back, which means – after 3 months in Tokyo – that I can finally start role-playing. This time around I’m going to give the Japanese-language gaming a miss (it’s hard work and I don’t have the time!) but I’m thinking of two campaigns that I really want to run:

For the latter, I think I might set it up as a semi-sandbox, with all the adventure ideas I wrote about in the post on Svalbard, plus a fair number of open possibilities. I’ve never done a Compromise and Conceit sandbox, but in my experience small islands are perfect for it. I will use Warhammer 3 (unadjusted) for Svalbard, because I think that Warhammer 3 is quite suited to the Compromise and Conceit world. It has dark gods, madness, chaos, and character classes quite suited to the setting. I may need to make some small changes but I reckon I can just fit it all together without much trouble.  Make You Kingdom will be easy because the rules are simple and it’s quite easy to read (comparatively speaking!) so I think I will start on that first (once I have a group!) I’m going to start translating bits over the next few weeks, and will put some up here (I hope).

I’m going to London in September for a course, so I hope to meet the previous group who played Compromise and Conceit with me (except Paul, who buggered off to Oz) and run a one-shot Make You Kingdom session with them… laughs! So practice in Japan would be good. But first I need to reduce my workload, and in the meantime I have to return to Beppu for a week to collect my stupid cat, which probably means not much posting for at least another two weeks. But it will be nice to be able to return to the RPG world after a 5 month break.

I don’t know if this happens to other people, but I find that I go through phases with RPGs. I spend a long time on an intense project, then kind of take a break after it finishes/ everyone goes overseas[1]. For the first few months of the break I don’t miss it; I find myself wondering “will I decide this time never to go back to it; to put up these childish things?” but then after a few months more I just naturally gravitate back to it, with new ideas and focus, and another round of crazy satanism begins. And so I find it happening again. For 3 months of my new Tokyo life I didn’t miss it, but now that things are settled and the craziness is about to subside, I’m itching to throw a polar bear at a priest.

What can you do, but go with your natural desires?

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fn1: When I was younger, this would commonly happen in my friendship groups in Australia.