It Slices! It Dices!

Our favourite "jaded, debauched urbanite," Epoch, posted "the Big List Of Games He'd Like To Run... Someday" on April 26th, 2002.

I've been mulling my own.

I've said many times, but I will reiterate for this forum, that player masturbation and GM masturbation take different forms.

If you'd like to call it "playing with yourself," go ahead, but I'll call a spade a...shovel-like thingie...if I want.

Player masturbation takes its most common form in creating characters for campaigns that don't exist. Because there are not a lot of solo-adventures (and those that do exist are rarely a step above "Choose Your Own Adventure" books) a player with unspent gaming-libido has little outlet.

Have I recommended the Badlands of Hark recently? (The sequel, Invaders of Hark isn't quite as good. Hey! They're both available in Spanish!)

GM masturbation, however, is a more indulgent fantasy. GMs spill their creative seed in worlds that may never see the light of a campaign. Their succubus is always, "The next game... the next game..."

Did I say succubus? Maybe it's a chimera. See, "the next game," for me for years has been "the definitive urban faery game." I've been working on it for those same years in my head.

It's got Black Annis, and the Wild Hunt, and it has houses where doorways take you to different realms, and it has an order for two-hundred and fifty cheese pizzas. It has leprechauns with sawed-off elfshotguns, it has nursery rhymes, and it has muppet ghettoes.

It'd be fabulous, if...well, if other games didn't demand my attention.

I'm running "The Glitter and the Glamour." Which is in kind of a lull, with players off getting married, moving, and working on other projects. There's "B?te Noire," the letter game I started (and wherein people keep insisting I'm GM for some reason). In the works is, "To My Enemy's Enemies" which I haven't really had a chance to even look at in two months, and now I have to start thinking about AmberCon NorthWest games, because, heck, they're only 6 months away and I only have ideas for one game so far...and that's the Katie Karnage serial.

That's not including the list of games I still want to run in the future.

• I want to run a Nightlife game based off of a political election.

• I want to run another Shadowrun/Middle Earth crossover.

• I want to run a Kult game loosely based on both Shirley Jackson's We Have Always Lived in the Castle and The Haunting of Hill House.

• I want to run a Shroudling/Vampire crossover.

• I want to run an In Nomine game with rules for the equivalent strength of pagan deities, and their avatars and angels and whatnot.

• I want to run a good, old-fashioned dungeon crawl, with miniatures.

• I want to run a furry pirate game outside of the Furry Pirates! rules.

• I want to run a Kobolds Ate My Baby/Ninja Burger crossover, with Kobold Ninjas delivering food and stealing babies.
  

That's just the beginning of the brainstorm of ideas I have considered. Those are games I want to run. That's not the list of games I merely want to design, or even near the games I want to play.

Astute readers will count how many times "Amber" is mentioned in the list.

So, I court my particular succubi. I feed them gaming ideas. I arch my back and purr in the pleasure of reading sourcebooks. My toes curl as I come up with yet another setting... but I must have more.

I'm still not satisfied.