The Bandits' Defilement: Map25.01

Another friend and I were lamenting that we missed the creative process that was fulfilled by gaming back in the day (both of us have stepped away due to the politicized gaming community). 

Christian smartly said: “Don’t do anything grand, fellas. Field notes map doodles, star block, adventure seeds, etc. Quick little bites for a daily creative check in, but leave it at that.” 

And you know what? He was exactly right. I immediately stepped back, pulled out my field notes, and tossed this together. No grand “I am going to publish this!”, no “I am going to throw this into Affinity and clean it up, add color!”…just a notebook and a pen.

I think too often my desire to create morphs into a desire to create things useful to others. My enjoy moves from the most important thing for me and is replaced with others' needs. I think I have let this dominate the way I create things for so long that I honestly do not know how to just do for me. This left me feeling very much unfulfilled as a creator, gamer, heck...person.

After a month away, and discussing this with my other good friend Bill, I realized what the problem was: I missed gaming for me. Doing what I enjoy and (sorry) reader/others be damned. I need to do what brings me joy. I have always enjoyed mapping, so I followed Christian's advice and took five minutes or so at work and drew a map using what I had handy. Luckily, I always have a Field Notes style notebook, pens and a marker.  The result is what I posted at the top of this page. 

Is it perfect? Heck no. Might someone use it? Maybe? Do I care? Not really. Around the same time I stumbled upon Solo d6 Fantasy. Now, I love me some d6s and a simple system and I have tried dozens of them and they just felt lacking, this one though, I really liked. Just deep enough to be interesting, but not so deep that it kills the speed of play for me. I am going to play it for a while, goof off, and have some fun. Some of you might like it, most probably won't but you know, I don't care.

So I guess what I am saying is...

"Hi. I am back. I am going to have some fun for me and enjoy some creating and gaming, my way."