Recently, we’ve had some problems with group reliability, so we’re sacrificing every other weekly development session to another game. I recently ran a session that my players absolutely loved (which was good since it was totally off-the-cuff and should’ve been run in some version of D&D) and I’ve re-gained the GMing Bug again. I previously stepped away from that because I got burned out and wanted to spend time with ARPS as a player rather than a GM.

We did some preliminary character concepts and I’m faced with a thief-type, fighter-type, and a mage-type. Nice party balance, so that should work out well. What I was missing was a setting (ARPS is a multi-genre system). We have a house system (soon to be Wikified somewhere) that we use for our fantasy games, but I didn’t want to do that because it’s what we’re using for our other game. Since I’ve been reminiscent recently, I was thinking of going old school for the setting. We’re using Greyhawk (1e materials) for our game that’s currently on hiatus (coming back late-spring/summer; this is good since I don’t especially want to lead a dwarven army to invade the Bone March), so I didn’t want to do that. I started looking at Blackmoor and Mystara with the latter definitely leading the way. In the end, though, I decided to go with a setting I had shelved a ways back.

The setting (which had the working title of Mythgar, but it stuck) was something I originally started working on for a series of books, but I always had it in mind for a potential fantasy setting. After dusting off some old documents and e-mail archives, I realized how much time, effort, and research went into it (bearing in mind that I nearly went to grad school for Medieval Studies and have an English and anthropology background) and I just fell in love with it again. Additionally, the goal for this campaign was something more character-centric rather than our recent trend toward the epic adventure in LotR style.

So, I grabbed important documents from my e-mail archives and added them into version control properly and even grabbed a new copy of AutoREALM and generated a new JPEG map for the thing. All I need to do now is go through my two paper boxes of notes and find my written stuff that’s been collecting dust.

The only problem with all this is finding time to work on the setting, work on the game itself, and do the work to develop a campaign. Oh, and keep my day job.

On the bright side, I have the first of the more-detailed character concepts in: a divested lord who’s now making a living as a knight-errant. The other two are still pending.