Unexpected Dark•Heritage progress

Well, I had a surprising bit of news yesterday. The evening before, Monday, I guess, I sent out an email to my gaming group, since we currently had no next session scheduled but had talked vaguely about getting together this coming weekend. Being somewhat motivated myself to get back together, perhaps I took more of a leadership role than I otherwise might have, given that I'm not actually running here.

To make a long story short, after some potential veiled drama amongst the group, it came out that the GM was feeling a bit lax on scheduling in part because he was more in the mood to play than to run, and didn't have a strong read on how motivated we all were as a group, fearing that we were feeling ho-hum ourselves. While assuring the GM that I was not in fact feeling ho-hum and was highly motivated to continue the campaign, I also offered, depending on exactly how much malaise he was feeling, to step into the breach if needed.

Ah... still not short, is it? Let's cut to the chase. It looks like what we're going to do is alternate. The Rise of the Runelords campaign will continue, and hopefully a bit more quickly than it has gone lately because with any luck our effective once a month or so schedule will again approximate every other week, like it's supposed to in theory. At the end of each module in the campaign (we're about to start 3 of 6 this weekend), Rise of the Runelords will hibernate and it looks like I'll be running module-length (4-6 sessions) campaign chunks, and we'll alternate as such for the time being.

Although I haven't yet pitched Dark•Heritage to the group, it's certainly what I'm excited to run, and it's sufficiently different from the standard D&D of Rise of the Runelords that it'll be a nice partner to it, I think. Plus, my group is pretty open about trying most anything, and at least one of the guys still in the group was part of my last Mk. I Dark•Heritage campaign, and still talks about it fondly, which is nice. Not that the current iteration of the setting much resembles that; it actually much more closely resembles my Pirates of the Mezzovian Main mini-campaign that I ran a year or two ago for this same group. And, I've recycled tons of names, themes and ideas.

In fact, I'll have a fair bit of work to do. I can't turn around and use what I've put into my DungeonCraft series of posts, because I've already used most of those elements with this group. I'll have to find another corner of the setting to explore, and start over a little bit in terms of local development. In fact, I'm leaning now towards setting something in the so-far little detailed vampire nation of Tarush Noptii.

Which means I need to get developing fairly quickly, but not exactly urgently. I've got anywhere from two to three months before I need to be ready to roll, which is plenty of time. I'll have to focus my development activities on items that are more immediately useful, though, rather than on whatever strikes my fancy.

So, anyway... Yay for me, I suppose. I'm certainly excited about the suddenly and unexpectedly looming prospect of putting all my recent theories and development work into action sooner than I expected. As always, as I work out the kinks of this game, I'll post updates here, including, I hope, brief session reports.