Storytelling with Spirit, Part 3
By Cape Rust
As you can tell from the first 2 installments of this series, my gaming life felt like it was falling apart and I was becoming angry in the process. The hit and miss nature of the past few weeks had taken its toll. To compound all of the drama that had transpired; my workload had increased and I was behind on some writing projects. When it rains it pours and I was caught in a tropical storm named epic fail.
I had actually reached the point where I didn’t care what we did the next game session, I didn’t even care if it happened, I was done! I admit I was still reading the Spirit of the Century rulebook, thinking about action scenes and reading several other sourcebooks; but that’s normal behavior for a guy who has reached his wits end with intermittent gaming, right?
I had started to call our gaming sessions the weekly lottery of disappointment. I wasn’t prepared for any good news and expected the worst. Pattern analysis indicated that we wouldn’t know if our harried GM would be free and even if he did have to work, there was a good chance the rest of the group might not show up. Thank the gods for Sentinels of the Multiverse! As the week progressed our gaming group was running silent. If we had been submarines, no one could have found us. The lack of communications did not bode well for gaming success that following weekend.
Friday rolled around and our GM was 50/50 for work. I was so far gone that I just said “whatever” and left it to the fates. The following morning I received a call saying he was in fact working and we were going to play my Spirit of the Century game. In most situations like this I would be excited; here we were getting ready to try out a new system that is a complete departure from our normal games and I was getting to run it. Sadly I had been burned the previous weekend and was still bitter. I think at the time my response was something about “we’ll see if the game even happens tonight.” A few hours later I achieved cranial recital separation and realized that like I always say, life is what happens between games and last week’s abortive attempt to game wasn’t personal; it was just how the cookie crumbled.
After getting over myself, I went back through my game notes and realized I was actually ready to have my players create characters and get the SotC game started. I still doubted if the game was even going happen but in my new Zen state, I wasn’t going to worry about it; Tyler Drudan was right! In fact I was in such a happy place I even took a nice long pre-game nap. I did decide to head over to my buddies house early so I could get things set up in case the game did actually happen. Set-up didn’t take long and then my buddy and I just hung out for a little while, I didn’t even mention my previous doubts. Start time rolled around and we received a text from the married couple saying they were going to be a little late. My right eye started twitching a bit, I was about to let a single text ruin my blissful state. I had to take a long deep cleansing breath and then I lost it, I simply couldn’t have the game fall apart yet another week!
Will the couple show up? Will Cape throw a full blown temper tantrum? Will he ever get to game again stay tuned!
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