Lately I've been rereading the My Life In Gaming post (which is my favorite post on this blog so far, if a bit self-indulgent). That post often leads me to pondering a lot of things and this post and the one following it are based upon some things I've pondered.
Jeremy digs my campaign material, and Eric does as well. I guess ideally, the whole group digs my material (though I've not asked Fred or John how they feel about Hekinoe). At the very least, they don't complain about the product I am putting out. Eric and Jeremy seem to be fans of Hekinoe and seem to be impressed with the amount of background material I have presented to them, here on the blog and in the campaign itself. That's cool. I like having fans, so to speak. I'd prefer sycophants and cronies, but fans are cool I guess.
In my opinion, it is somewhat amusing that my "success" as a GM is a result of one of my flaws. When I was young, I was diagnosed with ADHD. Now, some people don't think ADHD is real or that adults can't still have it (others think that it is an evolutionary throwback to the hunters of the tribes). Regardless of your opinion on that issue, I get bored and distracted real fucking easy. Getting bored quickly with stuff and having a short ass attention span is why I dropped out of college, it is why I have twenty or so partially written stories, a like number of never run DnD campaigns, and also why I have such a robust background for my Hekinoe world.
Boredom is the secret of my success. Heh.
That seems somewhat counter-intuitive at first glance, but the more I think about it, the more it makes absolutely perfect sense. I have written the heck out of The Known World. There is quite a bit of content there, though there is plenty of room for more information to be added in. Normally I write and write and get bored as fuck in the middle of things and start poking at another campaign idea. Then I get angry because I'm playing something boring and I want to start on a new campaign.
What I'm doing this time around is filling this big fat world with a bunch of neat stuff. The Known World is not super ultra interesting to me. Facets of it are, but overall, it is old hat. I know what is in there and it holds no surprises for me. So as my attention wanders I begin fleshing out Fresgulen or Nethwenta or whatever random line of text I feel like throwing into the ZuluPad document. Then when I get bored with those things I can mosey on back to The Known World and add a few hundred words of text to something related to it into the ZuluPad thing.
It is kind of a haphazard, cyclical process, but it is working out a lot better than stopping mid-campaign and creating something new. It is also a lot more rewarding for me, and hopefully for the players, because now we kind of have something lasting that we can share.
So that is some info on how I keep this thing rolling along.
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