Magpie Ambition

I often pull open a text file and start writing some opinion piece about what things inspire me or how much I like this game or that game or some esoteric crap about evoking player agency in games or blah blah blah whatever. I read other blogs by people who apparently have all sorts of stuff to say about all sorts of gaming topics (not that that's a bad thing, I mean, I do like reading them) and while there's always that same sort of "Me too!" feeling that happens whenever I observe any creative endeavour—although the magpie-like approach undermines the appellation 'creative' to the endeavours—I suspect there's something besides ADD keeping me from finishing an editorial post. There just isn't enough weight to back my lame opinions. I haven't actually been gaming all that long, especially compared with some of the bloggers I follow. Hell, some of the people I game with regularly were knee-deep in orcish cesspits by the time I was born.

That might be the reason my inner editor keeps my cursor away from the 'Publish' button: To the fellow-gaming community, my ideas sound like rehashes drawing on the same cultural melange but twenty years out of step. I read about things like the early days of Pagan Publishing with a sort of Lewisian wistfulness, a nostalgia for things never seen, dreaming of some frat house of horror gaming belching out still-unrivalled supplements. These days it's all crashes and doom and bursting d20 bubbles. Looking back through rose-tinted telescopes, I can just barely glimpse a day when there were giants in the earth. What paltry mortal means have I to even peer up at those lost heights? What does my name in a few supplements and rulebooks compare? I've been playing for a mere decade! I have barely a year of weeks-GM'd to notch on my sword. Definitely not enough to have an opinion to set forth in the basalt rock that is the internet.

There's still the magpie collection of half-gestated bloggery, though, and it mocks me even as it congeals. Perhaps the foolish ambition of the young will push me toward completion of something, even if it's a monster-a-month feature. Or geomorphs. Everyone likes geomorphs, right?