The Oneiromancer is the home of Frederick Foulds, a games designer and archaeologist based in the North East of England.
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Getting back in the saddle
Recently, Chris McDowall of Bastionland posted a retrospective looking at his career in games design, starting from the very beginnings of his engagement with the hobby and ending with the fulfillment of the very successful Kickstarter for Mythic Bastionland, which raise nearly £270,000. It's a very good read and I recommend you go take a look at it. For me, it was also a bit of an eye opener and the ignition of a determination to try and get back onto the games design horse. Much of this stems from the fact that Chris is roughly my age—both of us being born in 1985—and there is a very big gap between our achievements. Yes, yes, they say don't compare yourself to others, but it is clear that Chris has had the determination to stick with designing games through thick and thin, while I have gently drifted, coming up with ideas and then parking them due to a lack of both time and motivation. Despite this, I do have achieved two scenario writing competition wins and a Platinum Bestseller on DrivethruRPG, so I can be doing everything wrong...
One of the biggest barriers to me actually getting things done and out there, I think, is that my brain wants to sit down and work on something over an extended period of time. I work as a researcher for my day job and I spend a lot of time thinking about things and tinkering with them before I put pen to paper, and I like to have a significant amount of time set aside to work on aspects of my research projects with no interruptions. It never works like that in practice though, and I constantly have to juggle all sorts of responsibilities from teaching to admin to organising meetings about all kinds of boring shit that distracts me from what I really want to be doing. So, my question is, if I can deal with that in my day job, why I do end up struggling with it so much in my leisure time when I could be making stuff up and writing it down?
If I go back and dissect the few RPG items that I have managed to achieve and put out there, I begin to notice something of a pattern. Keepers of the Woods was knocked out over a weekend, from realising the idea, writing it up and laying it out as a one-sheet scenario. The reason? I had the impending deadline of a scenario writing competition that I wanted to enter. Similarly, Those Within, which was one of the winners of the first Chaosium scenario writing competition was written in a blurry haze while suffering jetlag over the course of a panicked 48-hour period following a trip to Canada in order to get it over the finish line and submitted. I remember the horror of that well enough. I dug out the submission email to Mike Mason—it got in at 11.42pm, with just 17 minutes before the competition submission closed. Ominous Crypt of the Blood Moss was written while I was furloughed during the COVID-19 pandemic, in a six week window where I really had nothing at all to do with myself. All in all, it took two weeks to knock out, working probably 2 to 4 hours a day. I set myself a deadline in that I had to get it done before I went back to work and while I had the free time to devote to it. I eventually released it on my birthday in 2025. As of writing, it's sold over 1000 copies (technically over 2000, but nearly a thousand of those sales don't count towards bestseller badges because they were free as part of a charity bundle...).
So, what can I learn from this? I think the main this is that I can achieve things that are relatively well received if I put my mind to it. And I do best at getting things over the finish line if I either have the free time to play around with them or some form of impending (and most likely panic-inducing) deadline. I suppose the same goes for the academic papers I write for my day job—I have deadlines to meet for my co-authors/grants/conferences etc. that force me to work, or I have the time to sit down and ruminate over a problem in order to find a solution. Forcing myself into high-stress situations just to churn out hobby material doesn't seem like it'd be a healthy solution to my languishing motivation, and honestly, I value quality over quantity in the long run. I'd rather put out one good thing than ten half-baked ones. Time, on the other hand, appears to be difficult to pin down in today's day and age, especially the long interrupted periods that I seem to require in order to get things done. Everyone and everything clamours for your attention, dividing and distracting it. I recently watched a TED talk about making art which pointed out that if you spent 3 hours on your phone a day over the course of your life, you'd lose 10 years of your life to it. Finding a compromise in which you're able to carve out time for yourself and your creativity must then be the answer.
The other big hurdle I have is imposter syndrome. There is a little voice in the back of my head that goes, "yeah, you produced something that might not be an absolute turd, but you'll never be as good as X, Y or Z". Over the years, especially as I have placed myself within an ever widening circle of RPG playing peers who have been successful in putting their creative works out there, I have found that I shrink back more from placing my own creativity out there. Instead, it remains bottled up, screaming for release. This, of course, runs contrary to the feedback that I've received about my games writing, in which people tell me that what I've written isn't too bad (and might well actually be good).
Chris' post is an eye opener at what can be done if you press on and push through. It's clear that he has suffered from difficulties and set backs through it all, but has persevered and pushed through, and it is this perseverance that has led him to the point he is at now. And overall, I think it's galvanised a wish to pick up some of the projects that I have put aside over recent years, dredge them up, dust them off and see what can be done with them. I think the best way to do that is probably through the medium of blog posts—I can break them down into more managable chunks and put them up here as I complete various parts. If you find them interesting or want to discuss them in more details, let me know on BlueSky (@judgefredd.bsky.social) or drop me an email.
I've a few 'pot boilers' kicking around, so I listed out the ones that I am probably the most enthused to pick back up again:
- Secrets of the Black Obelisk: an OSE adventure/mini-setting with some science fantasy elements.
- Feathers and Bones: A Mausritter adventure about an Owl Necromancer and a usurped parliament.
- Heresy Afoot: An Warhammer Old World hack of Devilry Afoot. Definitely one that's never going to be for sale, but a passion project for those interested.
- The Pustulant Priests of Norn: A Mork Borg/Forbidden Psalm adventure/mini-campaign about rotten priests and eldritch horrors.
- Magnificent Death Garden: A Mork Borg/OSE adventure concerning love, death and torments of the soul.
Both Secrets of the Black Obelisk and Feathers and Bones have probably had the most work on them, so those are the ones I intend to focus on first. I hope you find them interesting...