Gamer Brain: Case Study - The Black Fog...

Fishing for game ideas in my brain fog                          Image by John from Pixabay

In recent weeks I have slipped back into the embrace of the black fog, that depressing funk that drains creativity while simultaneously chastising you for not being creative enough.

As I'm sure I've said before, everything in my life, in some way, feeds into my desire to run the "ultimate roleplaying campaign", but my current depression - fuelled also by a run of overlapping illnesses and general poor health (both physical and mental) - has seen me questioning my RPG passion.

My gamer brain has forensically analysed a variety of systems and scenarios, but none have landed for me, none 'tick all the boxes' or feel like they would gel with the particular idiosyncrasies of my gaming group, The Tuesday Knights.

As I've bemoaned before, we only get together once a month and then for just around three hours of gaming, which means - to my mind - the action and adventure needs to be non-stop while the rules mechanics glide into the background to avoid constant breaks to look things up. 

These days, I'm finding myself way more excited about our nascent boardgames group, which is due to meet again soon to do some meddling with Pete's Scooby-Doo Monopoly and my baby-steps into the world of skirmish wargaming via Warlord's cool-looking Judge Dredd miniatures game.

When it comes to roleplaying games, I think part of my choice paralysis - and second-guessing of my choices - comes from the fact that it's years since I've actually run anything for the Tuesday Knights.

My great Heroes & Other Worlds campaign - The Chronicles of Cidri - ended in late 2016, and except for a couple of overprepared aborted attempts to get a Villains & Vigilantes off the ground, I haven't sat behind the screen.

I haven't run a game since we moved to our current home in 2019, not even during the COVID lockdown when we were gaming twice a month over Zoom.

Just to see if I've missed anything, I've been going over old ideas for potential campaigns that I've chronicled on HeroPress as a sad, quixotic quest for the "holy grail", posts full of joy and optimism that turn to dust and ashes within days of being excitably written.

Back when I was "all-in" on a Red Dwarf RPG campaign, I scribbled this:

From my perspective, I reckon I've got one great campaign left in me, if I'm lucky.

I don't want to run a disjointed, couple of sessions and then give up because I'm not selling it to the group.

It needs to be a campaign - and setting - that I believe in one hundred percent and can inspire the members of my gaming group to want to "live in".

And that still all holds true, but the self-inflicted desperation in my brain, coupled with the accelerating realisation that my time in running out, means it feels like I'm locked into a cycle of inflating ideas that grow so fast that they pop before I have a chance to seriously work on them... and a new suggestion takes their place.

It's the pressure of knowing I have "one shot" at getting this right... and I don't want to mess up. Again (as I did with my attempts to get Knight City off the ground).

I also want (need!) to use maps and miniatures for my game as that was a large part of why I asked Rachel for the games table, but I can't even settle on genre at the moment, let alone a rules system.

The two mainstays of my gaming portfolio have been crossed out: I'm tired of fantasy and superheroes were a non-starter, so I'm currently scratching round the edges of science-fiction... which could even see me, eventually, crawling back towards Red Dwarf.

Who knows? Everything is very chaotic in my brain at the moment, with a lot of half-formed ideas running around blindly in the thick, black fog, bumping into each other and falling over.