As some of you already know, the bulk of my gaming is with an online group that first formed when most of us met in college. As we graduated, grew up, and figured out life, we all ended up in different places in terms of geography, careers, and general arrangement. Some are married, some are not; some have kids, some don’t. One of our most steadfast regulars is an officer in the Navy and last week he got called on a temporary assignment, heading overseas for nearly six months. Incidentally, he was also going to be our next GM for an upcoming game, so everything has been thrown into disarray.

It is one thing to deal with a single absence, to have someone return in a couple weeks and need to be caught up on what’s happening. We all do it; hell, my group runs two games at a time at least in part to mitigate if one of the GMs needs to miss a week for whatever reason. It is another thing entirely to have your entire schedule for literally the rest of the year go up in smoke. Now, we’ve already switched things around and will start a completely different new game come July. When the current Cyberpunk game Seamus is running reaches its conclusion (which may happen very soon if the results of last session are any indication), I’ll run a shorter campaign so we can have consistency at least into 2027. Nothing is unmanageable, but at the same time everything has changed completely. We’re also in a situation where our already inconsistent summer attendance is now strained by the absence of someone who, besides having to disappear for months at a time due to work, is one of our most consistent attendees.

This does of course mean that I’m thrown back into the GMing chair a bit sooner than I was anticipating; one of the reasons I was planning to take some time off from GMing was that I wanted to focus on writing my big fantasy campaign which I’ve alluded to in previous posts. Said campaign is still not ready and won’t be ready by August; in addition to more setting writing (which wouldn’t technically need to be completely done by the time we start) I need to level set my rules selections and modifications for my chosen system, GURPS (these would definitely need to be done by the time we start). I’m fine not rushing that, though; while putting writing on either pause or slowed cadence is a little annoying, it’s survivable, and I do have other games I could run.

These other games run the gamut. I’m a little biased towards new stuff, relatively speaking, but even considering that the options I’ve offered up my players are all over the place setting-wise even as they’re fairly similar mechanics-wise. I’m not completely locked in on PbtA, but knowing this may be a shorter game and also knowing that I don’t want to spend too much time prepping a traditional campaign, PbtA (and FitD) are highly workable rulesets that my group also likes. First on the list is Stonetop. I was a Kickstarter backer for this one and it looks like my books will finally arrive around the time this game is projected to start. Beyond that, I’ve wanted to get back into fantasy and the more low fantasy, even paleolithic setting of Stonetop is a nice distance from the other fantasy game I’m writing. Second up is Blades ‘68. We’ve played a bit of Blades in the Dark and I’ve thought about running it, though it never really climbed high enough up my personal priority list to win out over other games. The Blades ‘68 crowdfunding campaign, though, hit just around the time I beat Deathloop and was thinking about ‘60s retro (and maybe even replaying another retrotech game I own, We Happy Few). The timing was fantastic, the Austin Powers parody video caught my attention, and now Blades in the Dark is much higher on my personal list. The one wrinkle, though, is that the other person who really wants to play Blades ‘68 is the one who will be missing most of this campaign.

Finally on my list is Urban Shadows. My group has a bit of a love-hate relationship with PvP intrigue; a game of The Sword, The Crown, and The Unspeakable Power fell apart on session 3 because I tried to push it a bit too hard in the Game of Thrones direction. Urban Shadows definitely has some of that intrigue, though it doesn’t depend on it the same way that SCUP does and it also has more fleshed out rules (especially in the second edition which gives more Faction mechanics and better advancement). I think my group, a few schemers in particular, could have a ton of fun with Urban Shadows; I also think they’re a little better primed for how it’s going to work than my friends who I ran an in-person game of Urban Shadows for (which fell apart around session 8).

Any of these could be a lot of fun. I am polling my group, though not enough people have participated for any concrete preferences to be discovered. I’m also considering my own thoughts in a vacuum, for if I need a tiebreaker. Our other campaign, kicking off next month, will be run in Wildsea, and I’m looking forward to that both because of the setting and for another chance to play the game, which I haven’t done in a while (last time we played I GMed). While I’m relatively comfortable that all three of my choices will provide contrast to Wildsea, I think Urban Shadows will be the most contrasted of the three. I also kind of want to see how far my group pushes things; that’s definitely the game that will ‘give em enough rope’, so to speak. At the same time, I’ve wanted to run Stonetop pretty much since I saw the alpha, and hearing Quinns compare it so favorably to Dungeon World makes me want to run it more. If I don’t end up running Stonetop for this group, there’s a chance that if I reform my in-person group, Stonetop will be the game I use.

I’m pretty happy with the choices I’ve given myself for this next game, but I’m also calibrating my GMing a bit for the bigger fantasy game that’s over the horizon. The choice to use GURPS is in part because GURPS is a pretty intensive game but also in part because it’s a pretty grounded game. After playing Cyberpunk Red for three years, I’m fairly fatigued by its D&D-style combat rules; I realize that I told everyone to give them a chance back when I reviewed the game, and I do still mean that considering how well they’ll align both for former D&D players as well as fans of the video game. That said, there’s a sense of danger I miss that we haven’t really gotten out of any of the recent games we’ve played. In other cases it was very intentional; Apocalypse World isn’t about down-and-out combat and the DIE RPG makes characters very powerful very intentionally. I’m not exactly trying to keep players from having powerful characters, I just want some of the challenge to be grounded, not avoidable through build choices. This is also why the breather game I chose (when I thought that’s all I’d be running for the rest of the year) was Twilight:2000; it’s a masterclass in running dangerous combats and forcing tactical thinking even though the crunch level is only moderate.

I’m excited about new games about to start, though I am a bit bummed about timing; we have two more sessions in the next month so it’s very unlikely I’ll be starting my new game before August. Summer always slows down a bit, but as it’s already been two months since I ended my last long-running game, the transition this time feels especially protracted. Given everything that’s happening, though, that is fair. Patience is a virtue, and if nothing else the summer doldrums will provide more opportunities to continue writing.