Death of a Campaign

Some games you remember for the wrong reasons, some games you remember for the right ones.  Way back when Covid was around, I and several friends came up with a concept for a game called Pantheon, It wasn’t going to be a regular game where one person came up with the plots and then ran the game through to completion, this was going to be a game where everyone got on board, everyone built the world, everyone put the ideas in, everyone was invested, and most importantly.

Everyone was everything.

The idea was that each of us would take a turn in running the game, getting the others up through five levels whilst their character was off screen for a while, meaning that every one of us would GM for five levels, and at the end of it, we’d have all the characters up at level 20 for the finale.

Ambitious?

Always.

The difference behind it was that in the time of Covid, this was one of the things that kept me going, my Dad died in the middle of that, and everyone was there for me, but more than that, this was a story that all of us fully invested in.

And I mean invested in.

This went beyond “This is my character”, there was a world, maps, songs, SONGS for fecks sake, somewhere on the recordings is me with one of the other players, singing an original song made for one of the other players session 0, when their parents were singing to each other. This was deep magic, and I’d just finished my arc when things went sideways.  One of the players didn’t want to continue, and they didn’t want their likeness to be used for any future games or have reference to anything else, giving the rest of us no choice but to try to start again (a few years and countless hours of play in) or to abandon and think of something else, by which time Covid was over and all of us were infinitely busier than we had been, we didn’t have the time to set things up as we had the first time.  It had been a collaborative thing where we hadn’t considered that one of us would want to walk away, so we’d not signed anything or put things in place, and in one of the darkest times of my life (2023 wasn’t good) I found myself missing the thing that had got me through a lot of the darkness.

Does it mean I’ll never play again?

No, it really doesn’t.

Does it mean I’ll ever put that amount of myself into a game again?

Probably not.

I got the notification this morning that I was being made the admin of the Trello board that we’d all built the world on, with all the ideas that we’d had, Hell being the body of the first dead Titan that made the universe, stories being the literally soul of the universe, the truth that the Dragons died and became the ideas that fuel all other life, so many things.

And I’d only get that notification if the player who made the board relinquished it.

So I'm the only one of us left there...

And I can’t write about the world we made, and I can’t show people all the joy we had doing it, and a part of me weeps for that, because it was such a life affirming game in a time when life really wasn’t affirming, that it becomes sorrowful that it’s gone.

Because that game had a life of its own.

And now it’s dead…

It’s a truth that you never realise how much something meant till it was gone, and there was a part of me that had forever hoped that we would get the game going again, that there would be a reconciliation, that we’d get to finish the story.

But we won’t…

I’m going to find a quiet place away from the internet and look at the world we made and wonder.

What If…?