Gradually, then Suddenly

It's been a rough few weeks for my ongoing House of Worms Empire of the Petal Throne campaign. Recently, the combination of the usual summer doldrums I've come to expect over the last nine years with the vagaries of my players' real-life schedules and obligations has resulted in fewer sessions where we actually play than those where we just chat. Now, there's nothing wrong with chatting with one's friends and, truth be told, I often enjoy those sessions where we shoot the breeze rather than roleplay. But House of Worms is a roleplaying game campaign, so I do take note of when we have an extended period of time when our playing is erratic to non-existent, as has been the case for the last month or so.

As it happens, one of my players also has taken note of it and today raised the question of whether or not I thought the campaign was in danger of sputtering out. Despite my optimism of only a few months ago, I had to agree that the campaign might indeed be entering its final days. Amusingly, our newest player, who only joined our merry band in January of this year, joked that he should have known this would happen. Anytime he'd joined a Tékumel campaign in the past, it fell apart soon thereafter, so why should House of Worms be any different? One of the original six players of the campaign hasn't been able to join us since earlier this year, while another of the original six is now taking an extended leave due to his work. Other players have also found themselves unable to attend for various reasons and that's had an adverse effect on our sessions, which, in turn, has slowed the momentum of the campaign to the point where the players are now openly discussing the possibility of things coming to a halt. 

As I said during today's session, when the question was first raised, we've had periods like this before, when our session frequency became inconsistent and we lost some momentum, but we always managed to keep things going somehow, so that might well be the case this time as well. However, I must confess that this time feels a little different. If I had to put my finger on why it's probably related to the loss of two of the original six players. We're entering into Ship of Theseus territory, where the thread connecting the first session in March 2015 and the present is getting ever more tenuous. Maybe that's not what's going on, I don't know. I can only say that I agreed with the player that lately House of Worms feels as if it's no longer as energetic as it once was.

Of course, the reason the player brought the topic up was, in part, to see if we could make an effort to "wrap things up," which is to say, reach a place in the campaign where, if we were to decide to end it, doing so would bring some degree of satisfaction. Given the meandering nature of the campaign after nearly a decade of play, I'm not sure it'd be possible, even under the best of circumstances, to tie up all the dangling threads into a neat little bow, but, even if that's impossible, there's no reason we shouldn't work toward some kind of closure. We've spent too much time with these characters, this world, and one another not to try – which is why, in today's session, the characters began to lay the groundwork not only to effect Kirktá's rise to emperor of Tsolyánu but also to ruler of a restored Bednallján Empire. They think big, don't they?

And who knows: thinking big might just be the sort of thing that helps pull the campaign out of its doldrums and ensures our contemplation of its end is for nothing.