"Your Own Cover Band"

I'm still hard at work finishing up the first draft of the second edition of Thousand Suns, so I'm not yet ready to return to regular blogging here. However, I recently read something that helped me organize some thoughts I'd been having for a while and I thought they might be worth sharing, especially in light of my advocacy for long RPG campaigns. 

As you know, I'm a big fan of science fiction. Truth be told, I much prefer sci-fi to fantasy, despite the fact that I've probably played more fantasy roleplaying games than science fiction ones over the course of the last 45 years of gaming. That said, I'm very particular about my science fiction. I don't like everything with a spaceship or robot on its cover and, as I get older, I find my tastes are getting ever more picky. Consequently, I tend to be skeptical when someone recommends that I pick up a new SF novel, because I've been burned one too many times in the past. I'd much rather reread an old classic than take a chance on new stuff and be disappointed.

Still, a friend of mine recently recommended I take a look at "The Captive's War" series by James S.A. Corey, who was also responsible for "The Expanse" (which I've never read). The new series is planned as a trilogy and the second volume just came out, only two years after the first one. Both of these facts piqued my interest, because I have no patience for interminable series or series whose volumes aren't released at regular intervals. I don't want to wait until I have one foot in the grave before I see the end of a story. 

Still, my natural apprehension made me look into these books a bit more before committing to reading them. I figured I owed it to myself to know what I might be getting into if I decided to take the plunge. In the process of doing so, I came across a recent interview with the "author" – really two authors,. Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck, with a shared pen name, but I'm sure most of you already know that – that includes some genuinely interesting and insightful comments about the writing process and ultimate direction of the series. It's these comments that sparked this post and about which I want to write for a bit before returning to the salt mines once again.

Consider, for example, the following:

“We live in a world where every large universe is supposed to be endlessly flogged,” Franck says. “Star Wars is never going to stop. It's told the same story a thousand times at this point. The evil Empire has been defeated over and over and over again. It always comes back. Plucky Rebels have to defeat the new iteration of it over and over and over again. It just endlessly repeats. And Star Trek is the same way. If you have a big universe, it is expected you will just keep dipping in that well over and over until you die, and then somebody else will take over and do it for you. Daniel and I don't enjoy that. We like endings. We like getting to an end: ‘Here's the end, and it's over.’”

I could probably devote several posts to the above alone, but instead I want to focus on what was said immediately after this: 

Franck credits Abraham for coming up with a saying that sums up their feelings about longrunning series: “At some point, if you keep going, you become your own cover band.”

“We never want to do that,” Franck says. “We never want to become our own cover band, where you're just endlessly repeating what you said, and writing a slightly different version of the same story you've written a thousand times before. That would bore the shit out of me.”

These comments really hit home, having just concluded my decade-long House of Worms Empire of the Petal Throne campaign last October. Since then, I've been regularly asked what I might do the next time I decide to referee a Tékumel campaign and my answer has always been, "Nothing: I don't plan to run a Tékumel campaign ever again." That's not for lack of love for the setting – quite the contrary, in fact. It's precisely because I do love Tékumel and all that my players and I did with it through the House of Worms campaign that I'll never touch it again. 

This is not a new point of view for me; I've articulated it before. I'm very much of the opinion that it's quite possible – probable even – that you can reach a point where there's nothing left to explore through a particular setting or game. I feel that way about Tékumel for certain and I probably feel that way about a number of other RPG settings I've played extensively over the years. Again, it's not for lack of affection for these settings. My disinterest in returning to, say, the Forgotten Realms says nothing about whether I like the setting, only that I feel I've sucked all the marrow from its bones and now am looking for new sources of nourishment.

When I say this, many people look at my like I've got two heads. Some have even tried to (gently) suggest that maybe I'm lacking in imagination if I think I couldn't run more adventures in this or that setting that they know and love. The truth is I could run more adventures or even whole campaigns in Tékumel or the Realms (or Star Trek or ...) but why would I? There are so many more worlds to explore through roleplaying. Why keep revisiting the same ones over and over again? 

That's what the quoted sections of the interview got me thinking about and I think it's a topic worthy of further discussion. There's a lot of talk these days about living in a "stuck culture" and I definitely think there's something to this. I may be old but that doesn't mean I want to see everything from my youth – never mind the youths of my parents – forever recycled. It's OK to move on. It's OK to seek out new things and new ideas. That I, writing on this blog of all places, am saying this probably means something. Just what I don't can't quite say. Perhaps that'll be another blog post when I find the time to write it.