The Sunday Circle: What Are You Working On This Week?

PETERMBALL Sunday Circle

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The Sunday Circle is the weekly check-in where I ask the creative-types who follow this blog to weigh in about their goals, inspirations, and challenges for the coming week. The logic behind it can be found here. Want to be involved? It’s easy—just answer three questions in the comments or on your own blog (with a link in the comments here, so that everyone can find them).

After that, throw some thoughts around about other people’s projects, ask questions if you’re so inclined. Be supportive above all.

Then show up again next Sunday when the circle updates next, letting us know how you did on your weekly project and what you’ve got coming down the pipe in the coming week (if you’d like to part of the circle, without subscribing to the rest of the blog, you can sign-up for reminders via email here).

MY CHECK-IN

What am I working on this week?

I’m gearing up to announce the next short story collection this week, which means focusing on proofing pages, producing meta-data/blurbs, and doing the text around the main text ahead of the launch-date at the close of the month.

On the writing front, it’s all engines go on the thesis—I’m aiming to get the critical half drafted by the end of November, then switching back to the creative work over the Christmas break.

What’s inspiring me this week?

My partner and I mainlined the first two seasons of The United States of Tara this week, which is a show full of incredible performances (particularly from Toni Collette). We’d been meaning to watch it for a very long time, but it’s only recently that we discovered it streaming on Amazon here in Australia. 

I tend to run a bit hot-and-cold on Diablo Cody’s obsessions as a screenwriter, but this is definitely one where things came together in an interesting way.  

What action do I need to take?

I mentioned being at the end of a long-running superhero RPG campaign back on Friday, and this coming week will see the final session to we wrap up an eight- or nine-year game. 

Which means it’s both time to plan this week’s sessions, but also put together some idea of how we’re going to transition to something new when we’re done. 

Almost Done: Some Thoughts After the Penultimate Session of a Very Long RPG Campaign

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The most read posts on this website, year after year, are Thirteen Things I’ve Learned About Superhero Games After Running 30 Sessions Of Mutants And Masterminds and its follow-up Fifteen Things I’ve Learned About Superhero RPGs After Running 150 Sessions of My Campaign. They’re both RPG-centric posts about an ongoing superhero game I’ve been running since early 2011.

Last night I ran session 199, and when we convene for session 200 last week it will be the last game of the campaign as it exists in its current format. One of the original players is moving interstate, and we’re hitting the end-point of plot elements originally set up somewhere in issue 20. The heroes just beat-up the Herald of a world-devouring galactic horror, and next week they’ll fight the ancient robot from the dawn of time trying to bring that galactic horror to earth.

Which is not bad for a group of heroes that got their start chasing down escaped velociraptors and re-skinned knock-offs of the Vulture, all while fretting about whether they’ll fail English.

I’ve run long RPG campaigns before—D&D campaigns that spanned three or four years and took the heroes from 1st level to the top of the XP chart—but it surprises me that the longest in both years and the number of sessions has proven to be a superhero-based game because, frankly, I’ve tried to get one running several times over the last few decades and they usually falter very early on.

Fortunately, we’ve had a good lead-in to the end of the campaign. Lots of forewarning that the player in question was going, and I’ve spent a good chunk of time thinking about what made this campaign work and what I’d do differently if I started a new supers campaign tomorrow.

It’s largely refinements of the notes I wrote in last year’s Fifteen Things, with some influence from reading games like Blades in the Dark, which have really interesting systems for achieving long-term goals and keeping all the power-players in the setting active and coming up against one another.

It was also largely theoretical—I’d been intending to set superhero games aside when the campaign is done and try something else. For someone who ran a lot of D&D and other games, sticking to a single campaign world for nine years is a weird feeling. I was looking forward to running something else, and enjoying a change of pace.

Then, about three weeks back, I sat down and jotted notes for two different ways of continuing in the setting. Not the same campaign, necessarily, but doing a kind of reset that would take the end-point we’re heading towards and fly off in a new direction. Something that would work rather well with two player characters instead of the larger group, and give me a chance to try and lock down the lessons of the last nine years and formulate them into a broader theory. Maybe even a chance to try and replicate the kinds of things comics do that don’t come naturally to games.

And it’s tempting. Extraordinarily tempting. If only because running a superhero game is so much less prep work than anything else I’ve ever run, especially if I try and stick to my plan of only using twenty or so villains for the first year or two of gaming.

New Cubicle

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When I started my PhD they gave me a cubicle at university, ostensibly a quiet place to work and store books and be close to research tools. I’ve done a few tours in the post-grad world and they’re almost never that–put enough postgrads into a room looking to procrastinate, and the distractions will come thick and fast.

My little work space was relatively heavy with distractions, so I worked from home a lot of the time. All my stuff was already there, and there weren’t so may distractions.

Last week, I got the news that my post-grad desk was being relocated to a bank of cubicles on the top floor. A slightly larger space, less of a thoroughfare, and with about three times the number of post-grads around. Fewer people who went through their initial study at the same time that I did, though, which means I’m largely a stranger who can wander in and just…work.

Not sure whether that will tempt me to use it any more than the last spot, but it has the potential to serve as a going-out-to-work space that doesn’t actually require me to buy a coffee or food court snack. That’s a thing worth keeping in mind until something happens to change it.