Asked often in dimly lit rooms by dimly lit goblins of the type your ancestors encountered, not those comically nasty green-skinned things they made up for the rpg industry. Even Tolkien described them better than that.
What I am doing is splurging this chaotic nonsense into the world and out through my creative mind and these artists hands. What I am doing is justifying myself, a bad habit acquired from years of abuse at the hands of toxic narcissism, specifically the form of pressure, control and coerced conformity which stifles the creative empath the way the gallows stifle breath.
This year I was, at last, officially diagnosed with high-functioning autism. It came as a breath of relief that ‘an expert’ had validated what I have felt all along to be the best way to describe what it’s like for me. All those classical symptoms, yes.
But that is not what I am about.
The hyper-focus, passion and knowledge of roleplaying games since I began GamesMastering in 1984 has been a lifelong core, which at many times has taken over my life to the extent of bewildering the bewilderbeasts of beastly wildering who have utterly failed to conform me into their antiquated, machinated ordinariness of being entertained by tv, rather than entertaining myself and others with the fanfare of imagination.
My post-modern urban cave contains shelves of mostly-finished projects, hand-crafted tabletop terrain. My hard drives and shelves of notepads contain mostly-finished projects, worlds and rules systems for games.
Along with hyper-focus comes the brain-fog, the absolute lack of focus which means I need rest after stimulation, the exhaustion and fatigue a malaise which lasts days after dealing with toxicity of people who deem any such thing as creative thinking to be a curse upon their earth. Again, anxiety-driven breathing a difficult thing, to get oxygen where its needed to keep me fresh.
So that’s what I represent in this cute little tale, a fresh breath built upon stagnated bricks of 12”x12” modular dungeons made from foam and cardboard. A mind plugged into slipstreams only occurring during Mercury retrograde for most people, if at all.
Age brings into focus with clarity that there is more behind than in front. Weeks become days and months become weeks. What I have to do is finish and release the many unfinished and unreleased products. As it happens, this gives me a nice little corner in the vastness of a corporate dominated market. Products which mostly exist to entertain others and secondarily exist to fund a coffee addiction and dog food.
In the decades of development these projects have taken form, the technology has arisen to make possible a legacy. Back in the day we had play-by-mail role-play games. Now we have livestream, global scale, group voice chat, in multi-user virtual reality (SecondLife). OldSchool pen&dice games are better than they ever were. Finding dedicated groups of campaign players though, even with the global forum, is still no easy feat. Some things will never change.