Gone Quiet But Still Here
I know I’ve gone quiet since my last post about leaving the Academy. Since then I’ve been giving some thought to a challenge I gave myself nearly a decade back, but hadn’t been able to fully realize … until now. The challenge revolved around the development of a rules system, the specifics I’ll share later. Over the past few months since leaving the Academy I’ve been working on that challenge. The prior attempts I’ve made in earlier years (somewhere around a half-a-dozen) have ended in me halting work and putting the system aside until I learned more, had an ah-ha! moment, or an idea I wanted to explore that I felt could go somewhere. This most recent time it’s like a bunch of pieces have fallen into place, my understanding of key concepts is far deeper and so I better know how to apply them, and several things are settling right where they need to. The initial draft of the player’s side of the rules was my NaNoWriMo project. December was spent doing a bit of clean-up there and getting the Game Master side of the system written up. Now I have a rough draft of both portions and I’m starting to red pen and edit it all for clarity and consistency.
The return to this project has shown me a few things:
- I’ve missed working with rules development. For me this is my creative process and my form of art (yes, I see a beautifully, smooth functioning rules set as a work of art).
- After the end of LARP Lab I needed several years away from stuff as I was burned out. I needed the break away from anything organizationally and rules related. The break has lasted the better part of the 2010’s, but I feel much better for it.
- Getting back to one’s roots has a way of helping to center a person. Crafting this system (and successfully overcoming this challenge) has done just that for me.