Am I still creative?
I was on the verge, like no joke a day or two away, from posting that I was going to quit blogging. Over the last several months my life has changed pretty significantly for the better. However, as I have somewhat tongue-in-cheek already discussed, I have as a result struggled creatively. Over these last several months, my home game has come to a screeching halt (we've only played I think twice in this time). Almost everything I've posted was a finished draft I had on hold for exactly this kind of circumstance, a mostly finished draft that I gave some kind of unsatisfying finish to, or stuff that I did think were cool ideas but didn't give them the effort they deserved. I haven't done any javascript stuff, which I miss, and I'm a significantly better coder now than I was a few months ago, but I just haven't had the time to do anything particularly cool with it for the blog. Would also like to do some more RPG-applied machine learning stuff since I really have no excuse not to do that now that that's literally my profession 0.o.
I had also even before that become really disengaged with the community, which didn't help. I'm almost never on discord anymore, G+ is long over, I lurk on reddit a bit still but rarely post, I still follow a bunch of blogs and try to comment but I rarely discover new blogs unless one of the other bloggers I follow blogs about them. It seems like a lot of people have moved to twitter, and I have a twitter, but I just really don't like twitter. There's been this whole zine thing which several months back I would have been all over but now I just don't want to. I still get a few awesome individuals who will occasionally comment on my blog posts which I deeply appreciate. I don't feel as bad when a post doesn't get many views or comments anymore because I feel less engaged in general, but it always helps to get some kind of engagement.
The blog was beginning to feel like a chore. I wasn't feeling motivated to create. I felt like I was getting diminishing returns for my efforts in every sense. My fellow blogger friend semiurge discussed once, somewhere, that he felt that creativity was something that happened to him passively, and I used to feel that way, but it has been feeling effortful for me for quite some time, and as a result I haven't been prioritizing it at all.
Revival?
Then randomly, just over the last week, I've been starting to feel a bit creatively energized again. We'll see how much of that actually translates to the blog, but it's nice. I get random ideas that pop into my head again and I write notes. One or two ideas I've been sitting on for a while are starting to come together more organically. I'm still struggling to get my home game together but I'm going to be starting another group with some work friends which will hopefully energize me.
I had said that after I got my career together that I'd start prioritizing commissioning art and potentially publishing something, and it took me longer to get my career together but it happened, and now it's taking me longer to get the rest of my life together but it's coming along, and I'm hoping maybe I'll soon get back to that place where those things seem plausible for me.
I've found that whenever I do these kinds of posts about things I want to do, or my mental state, that putting it out there into the world makes me more likely to actualize it. I don't want to abuse this superstitious placebo effect, but I'll briefly preview a few ideas / priorities. Feedback may affect how likely or how quickly these things happen.
Setting and/or System Idea with three possible names
This idea is one of those "darlings" that I've spent way too much time thinking about and wanting it to be my magnum opus and pinning too much of myself on it to the point that it cannot ever be what I want it to be and trying to make it that is just making it worse, so I'm trying to just give up on that and let it be something much more ad hoc and small scale. Instead of telling you at all what it's supposed to be about, I'll just tell you the three titles I'm considering and hopefully the titles speak for themselves. I might also try to fold it in with It's Okay to be a Monster.
Title 1 (original)
KILL YOURSELF: The Karma-Punk RPG
Title 2 (originally a different idea very loosely inspired by my thoughts on Feast of Legends that I'll probably fold into this)
Free the System: An Absurdist World of Corporate Fantasy
Title 3 (just came up with it the other day)
Maximum Recursion Depth, or Sometimes the Only Way to Win is to Stop Playing
A few Weird species for an undetermined setting
Weird fantasy, and specifically Weird fantasy species, are hard to get right. I was going to try to hyperlink all my attempts but there are too many. Some have been successful (at least imo) and others not so much. But here we are again. Isaac Asimov's The Gods Themselves is one of my favorite novels of all time, and has a really interesting trinary-gendered, totally inhuman species. I recently read Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of Time, and it was excellent. He does such a good job of creating a species that is very Weird and inhuman, yet presented in a sympathetic way. It is partially what has reinvigorated me to try to create some new species that are truly Weird, but that hopefully can be relatable and playable. Here is a very brief preview of these species. I haven't really decided on any other features of the setting yet, it can be anything I guess.
(Tentative Names)
The Goop: The primordial soup as a singular, viral-like superorganism that create water-goop-carcass vessels to traverse on land. Some are as large as cities and contain whole ecosystems inside themselves, others are chimera held together by carved whale bone and coral.
Hu: An evolutionary offshoot of humanity that has evolved to fill the ecological niche of ants and use pheromone-signalling and an ever-rotating maintenance crew of hu to remote-pilot Frankenstein abominations.
Freakazoids: Created by an advanced AI. They are biological but have mechanics and design principles not found in nature like wheels and treads and combustion engines, and look like freaky animal-cars, animal-bikes, etc. and do freaky science.
Unnamed Pterosaur Humanoids: The most human-like and imo, at least so far, least interesting. They're basically meant to be the closest thing to a human-surrogate since some people need that. I'll try to make them interesting without making them too "Weird". They lay eggs and have some peacocking stuff with their vestigial wings. I dunno I'm open to suggestion.
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