Y is for Youth

Yes, perhaps I will stray into the territory of "bad" nostalgia for this post. The type of nostalgia that limits my present life and casts it into shadow instead of flavoring it with sweetness and rejuvenating my passion.

In the first part of my personal testimonial regarding my roleplaying career, I talked about a "golden age" in my gaming life as a teenager. No doubt the majority of gamers have tales of being young and without a heavy burden of responsibility. This lack of responsibilities made it easy to spend copious amounts of time on roleplaying. Marathon sessions that lasted all day and night, whole weekends devoted to reading rulebooks and playing games...I don't think I need to go on, I'm sure you can relate.

I yearn for my youth once again. I know this is probably not an unfamiliar feeling for many of you out there. I was doing alright for a while and not feeling that ache, but all things come and go, eh?

I'm definitely feeling the crunch of adulthood these days. I know, that's a tired old song on this blog, right? But I fear that my blogging aspirations are going to be put to a serious test in the days to come. In particular, I started a blog for my current Labyrinth Lord campaign, Thunder Rift Sagas. However, I'm realizing that I probably won't be able to update that blog as much as I would like, especially when it comes to writing session recaps and adding posts detailing locations and NPCs. I'm not looking forward to that blog stagnating, but I fear it can't be helped.

The majority of my free time is going to have to be spent on work for my current Labyrinth Lord campaign, so I can keep track of occurances in sessions, create scenarios and plot hooks, keep my campaign world as "alive" and "lived in" as possible, etc. This is, and should be, my priority. Actually running/playing in games is my true goal for returning to gaming...not to be a blogger regarding gaming. So in that sense, I am fulfilling my roleplaying goals. And I should be happy about that, and I am.

So I just need to resign myself to the reality of making sacrifices, in order to focus on actually gaming.

Some other thoughts/feelings I'm having:

1) Of late there's also been an urge in me to run a game that is not D&D or closely related to D&D, especially when it comes to mechanics. Here's the short list of candidates:

- Dragon Age RPG
- The One Ring RPG
- Technoir (a cyberpunk RPG)
- Savage Worlds (with potential genres such as cyberpunk or Star Wars)

2) Another part of me would like to be a player more often. One of my Labyrinth Lord players, Bill, runs Savage Worlds on nights when I am not running my campaign. And it's really cool, especially since he's running us through the Solomon Kane setting. But I would also like to play in a D&D-like game now and then, either Castles & Crusades or Labyrinth Lord.

Anyway, just needed to vent. Please let me know if you can relate, and talk to me about your own experiences with conflicts between your "real" life and gaming life.