The Day

For fourteen years, this day has held a single, blazing, burning, polestar role in my life. It is my North Star, the one unyielding point of reference around which my whole world turns. It is the light by which I navigate the dark… and somehow also the dark that forces me to navigate at all.

On December 11, 2011, a young man who was very important to me — and important to so many people — died a senseless, accidental death. That was Austin.

On that same day, that terrible loss brought another young man, his very close friend, into my life. That person became my best friend. That was Jon.

For the last fourteen years, every year, on this day, this has been a day that served as a kind of marker. A benchmark. Proof that we had made it through another year on this messy, terrible Earth… and proof that we had not forgotten the person whose loss had set our lives colliding with one another.

This is my first time facing this day alone.

I hate it.

It’s so… so… empty.

Every year, no matter how heavy the weight of the day, I knew it would end with a call from Jon. We would tell stories about Austin. We would imagine how… how he would feel about who we had become. In truth, all of that was more about Jon. He needed this day to connect with the friend who he had lost. I needed this day to… reckon with the guilt of events that I banished from my brain the other 364 days of the year. We both had things we needed from this day. He needed to know he was a good friend. I needed to know that it wasn’t all my fault.

The night would always, eventually, turn to other things. At the end, when the clock chimed something heinous like 2am, we would devolve into reminding one another that Austin left us a gift. He left us each other.

December 11 was not just the anniversary of this terrible loss, it was also the anniversary of the way we found forward together.

And now it’s… not… that.

My therapist is not particularly familiar with how much I write. I don’t really talk about my writing much. I just sort of… do it… and then inflict it on people. Like you. Thanks for reading. But she told me, in anticipation of this night… she suggested I should think about writing my way through it.

She thought maybe I should write to them. Since I can’t talk with Jon tonight. Or… you know. Ever again.

What would I say?

What could I say that would be enough?

I can’t do it. I can’t write to him. I can’t write to Austin. I can write ABOUT them. I can write about how I feel, and how I hurt, and how I am ashamed and embarrassed and upset and lost and frustrated and a thousand thousand other things. But TO them? Impossible.

I don’t MISS Austin. Not in the way I wish I did. He’s been gone so long… he’s been a wound on my heart, an annual acid bath of guilt and recrimination, for FIFTY-SIX TIMES as long as he was a part of my life. But I remember him. I remember moments that still sit in my brain with lambent clarity. But he was never mine to miss.

I miss who he could have been. Who he would have been. The mark he would have made on the world and the people around him. I miss his potential, and his impossible way of making people feel like they mattered to him, no matter what else was going on. The people he loved loved him back. Without fail.

I miss who I was before he died. But I wouldn’t trade who I became. That… that feels like tribute, in some way. That the ME who exists as a result of the guilt and the loss and the… the hard times that followed his passing… I love this ME. I am better. He did not walk a single step on the road to this better version of ME alongside me, but he set me upon it. He sank that first paving stone into the path.

Jon? Jon I miss. I miss him because I can’t count the memories. The moments. The months. The living we did side by side on that road that Austin set us both upon. It is immeasurable, innumerable, and unimaginable to try to bring the wholeness of him into my brain. Impossible. He doesn’t fit inside my brain. His part in my life cannot be contained, described, or understood. No one will ever see the whole of it.

This day has always been about them both. For them both to be gone now? To walk this road alone? Not alone on this Earth, of course–I have such wonderful friends. So much wonderful family. A husband who has been here with me through all of this. All of it. I am not alone. I will never be alone.

But that one person who understood this all in exactly the right way? Whose heart had weathered the exact same storms at the same time for so long? For him to be gone… and me to still be here. Still on this road. A road I almost…

I feel like a trespasser. Jon gave me permission to be here.

And now, it’s just not the same.

I don’t have a point.

I don’t have a letter to write to Jon. Or to Austin. Not a delicately constructed, purposeful missive.

I just have words. It’s all I ever have. Noise in the form of ink and pixels.

But here. Here are a few treasures. A reward for walking this little way with me as I find my way. And then a last word. A last splash of ink and pixel and hurt.

Austin. Picture courtesy of one of the finest educators I have ever – or WILL EVER – know. She knows who she is.

Jon and Austin… November 2011. After Austin passed, I gained custody of his school laptop, where he had… a lot of videos of goofing around with his friends. I know they were drinking here. I know. God, I know. But I never saw this side of the two of them together… not til after Austin was gone.

Someplace impossibly important.

This necklace was Jon’s. It’s… the last picture on his Instagram. It’s the state quarter for Oklahoma, for Austin. It is the most precious thing I own. I wear it every day. A tiny little bit of metal that somehow keeps both of them close to my heart.

This is my one day of the year that I allow myself to feel all of the horrible things. And now… it is winding down. The hurt about Austin goes back in the box in the corner of my soul once the 11th becomes the 12th.

But right now? RIGHT NOW? My phone should be ringing. My phone should be ringing. I should say HOWDY. Jon should say HEY. And then, just like that, we should be picking up a conversation that never ended, only paused… from day to day, from text to talk to pic to song and back again… for fourteen years.

And right now, my phone is silent.

It isn’t going to ring.

It…

It isn’t going to ring.

Jon

I know the blog has been pretty quiet for a long time. And most people come here for nerdy roleplaying game stuff. That’s all still here. But this is also the place where I hash out the big, momentous challenges in my life. And folks… we are in the middle of the biggest, most momentous challenge I have ever faced. I’m going to talk about it. At length. And it might just be the least linear and coherent thing I have ever written (that’s a high bar…) — so proceed with caution.

And before I go any further… if you know my fantastic husband Tom, please send some good vibes his way. He’s stood side by side with me, navigating all of this, and I have no idea how I would do any of it without him.

Many years ago, my life sort of… imploded. I was teaching high school English (well, technically, I was just teaching high school science fiction at the time…) and a student to whom I had grown particularly attached, Austin, passed away as the result of an inadvertent drug overdose.

You can learn more about Austin and that specific situation HERE.

I did not process that loss well. I, in fact, took Austin’s passing as a very personal failure. I absorbed so much guilt and blame and regret for not recognizing what was happening at the moment, for not somehow reading his mind or seeing the future, and for not taking every possible action to prevent this otherwise preventable death. I folded in on myself and I shut down and I broke. That was December 11, 2011.

On December 12, 2011, I went to work. I went to school. I sat in the auditorium with the staff as our principal let everyone know what had happened, and then I set about trying to take care of kids who were shook and shocked and overwhelmed with grief. When kids die, it… does something. A ripple of horrible energy just explodes outward from them, reaching even people who on the surface had nothing to do with the person that’s now gone. And I threw myself into that morning telling myself, “You won’t let this happen again.” I walked a zillion kids to the library where the grief team was meeting with them. I kept my shit together.

Then, as I was making the trip to that back hallway later on in the morning, I saw two people walk in the back door of the school. Two people I did not expect to see that day. Austin had a lot of friends, but one that really sort of… stuck out… was this kid named Jon (and his girlfriend-at-the-time, who is awesome but is a little tangental to this story. Sorry, BC). I hadn’t spent much time with Jon, really–just one afternoon when I was watching the library and he was working on a government class assignment while Austin was getting grilled in the office about something. Austin was pretty gifted when it came to finding ways to get into trouble. To be fair… that’s the only reason I knew who he was. I was pretty gifted when it came to trying to like… rehabilitate kids who spent a lot of time in trouble.

But I knew that Austin and Jon were close… and that unlike so many of his other friends, Jon wasn’t there the night he died.

Jon saw me coming down the hall. I saw him coming down the hall. He walked right up to me, not giving one single solitary damn about who was around or what else was happening, and he gave me the biggest, longest hug. I don’t know if we cried. Probably. I cried a lot that day. That week. That month. That year.

But from that point on… Jon was my person. That voice in my head that said “You won’t let this happen again” grabbed hold of this young man who was hurting so deeply… and it became “You won’t let this happen to Jon.”

I tell you all this because it’s important to understand that our friendship began in a heavy, heavy place. We were wildly untrained grief support for one another, at first… and I like to think that was exactly what each of us needed.

The last semester of high school came and went. Jon graduated and started into his adult life… and I left teaching behind. I remained working with schools, but something that broke in me when Austin died remains broken. I can’t… I can’t be responsible for students. I couldn’t risk what losing another one would do to me. So I found other ways to do the work I was called to do. And along the way, there was always Jon.

We would grab lunch while he worked as a maintenance man. Or he would come over to watch TV or movies when he had a free night (or weekend! We did some pretty intense full-show binges over some long weekends from time to time). We played games, or we took walks… but above all else, we talked. He moved to another job with much crappier hours (from my perspective…), and he moved on to a new relationship… and still, we stayed in touch. Years went by. I checked in pretty regularly, making sure he was OK. Sometimes he would come to me when he had something heavy on his heart. Sometimes he would just come to me because he wanted a distraction from the rest of the world.

I always felt… a bit like a secret. Ours was a strange friendship, given its origins, and I never met any of his family (besides his mom at graduation) or spent even 5 minutes with any of his friends (outside of their last semester of high school). What I got, what was so special… was uninterrupted time with this incredibly funny, smart, insightful human. I got front row, unobstructed seats to watch him grow into an adult that made the world better and brighter.

Then he decided to move to Maui.

When he told me that he was moving to Hawaii (along with his girlfriend-at-the-time, who is awesome but is a bit tangental to this story, sorry BM!), I was terrified. Not for him–Jon was so freaking CAPABLE. There were really no situations I could envision him in where he wouldn’t find a way to thrive. He was just sort of magic like that. He fit in everywhere. No, I was terrified for ME. He was going to leave… and that was going to be the end of us. That’s just… logical. We had already remained close well past the natural expiration of this relationship.

We had dinner one night not long before he left. It was the first time we’d ever really drank together (this would have been late 2017. I wasn’t much of a drinker at the time… but Jon was 23. Just wanting that clarified for the prudish among us…)

But there were things that bound us together. There was December 11, when no matter what else was happening in the universe, we would get together and remember Austin. There were musicals–I had inflicted so many things that I loved on him, and been overjoyed when, oftentimes, he found that he loved them too, that he had quickly become my go-to person whenever I discovered anything glorious in the world. There was music–he loved to share music with me, and his tastes were always growing, always changing. There were a million nerdy things. I had to hope that those things would be enough that he would not get on a plane to the other side of the ocean and just…

And just forget me.

At first, things were strained. He was building a whole new life for himself, connecting more deeply with the family he had on Maui while juggling the family and friends he had left behind. But that first time he came home for a visit? When he had a million, million people to see and things to do?

He spent a whole day and night at my house. Every time he came home, I got a day. Every time. Even if I was still mostly a secret… I was a secret worth the trouble of keeping. His visit became a highlight of each year. I would make lists of things for us to do or see or taste or sip “Next Time Jon’s Here.” And we would text, or chat on the phone once in a while, in between. It was good. He was OK, even far away.

Things changed pretty dramatically when COVID came. The isolation of lockdown was very hard on me (which I recount a bit more about HERE). But that was a cost that mounted over time… and it had a fascinating, glorious offset. Jon was locked down too. Sure, he was on Maui, but…

We started talking every day. We talked on the phone every week. For hours. And hours. We watched movies together, five time zones apart. We got closer than I had ever imagined possible. We became safe places to share all kinds of secrets and hurts and hopes. We unpacked truckloads of trauma with one another. He started to come to terms with things about himself that, over time, helped him become more and more complete as a person and at home with the universe. He became not just my friend, but my best friend. An integral part of my every day. He was there with me, across the ocean but right there with me, as I grappled with anxiety and depression in ways I had never experienced before. He was the other voice in my life cheering me on. My husband on one side of me, and my best friend on the other. And dammit, I worked so hard to be that for him. To support him through a lengthy-challenging relationship that pushed him to be better in a way I had never seen… to help him navigate himself. We were really good for each other… and the distance didn’t even seem that vast.

As the world went a little more back to normal, we stayed close. He came back for visits. Things were good. For him, they were not always easy. He had challenges–vast ones. He made poor choices–often. But he knew that there were people who loved him, and that he was a work-in-progress. I told him all the time how proud I was of him. How grateful I was for him. How excited I was for what came next for him, or how in-his-corner I was when something went wrong. I never wanted him to feel alone. Not literally… He was often surrounded by people! But… inside. In that place where his heart would beat so much faster than the cool, collected look on his face let on.

We went to Vegas together in 2023. It was a terrible trip. I learned things on that trip about how dark a place he was in at the time. We had fun, but that trip strained us. He did things that hurt me, and he had never hurt me before. I feared that trip would be the end of us. I worried about him. I bugged him SO MUCH for the weeks after that trip. Constantly worried, checking to make sure he was OK. He was not OK… but we talked about it. A LOT.

And then… a couple of months later… he ran away from his troubles for a week. He took a house-sitting/dog-sitting gig somewhere in the jungle (his words…) and told his friends he was going to Iowa. He did not come to Iowa.

But he did spend about 4 hours of every day that week on the phone with me. It was like… I dunno. Detox, or something. It was… a chance for him to reset from the stuff he was tangled up in, from the mess of a hard break-up and a transition away from some complicated job things. He buzzed off his hair and shaved his beard and… and I was scared for him. But I just held on and pushed and did what I do, what I have always done, for this human that means so much to me.

He was finding his way back to himself. At the end of that week, he had an interview for a new job. He got that job (like I told him he would!) and that job changed his life. It brought him amazing new friends, a new routine and healthier rhythm, and he just… he just freaking TRANSFORMED. All of the sudden, in the space of a few weeks, he was more himself than I had ever seen him. He was happier. Kinder. More generous to himself and more compassionate to others–all things that had been suffering in the dark first half of 2023. And then…

He asked me to come visit.

And… I did.

I flew to Maui and spent 8 days (mathematically… flights and layovers and time zones and all that crap meant it was really 7) with my best friend. It was the opposite of the 3 days we spent in Las Vegas in every single possible way. He was amazing. He was joyful. He was excited for the future and for the life he had made for himself. He was more himself than I had ever seen him. We talked about everything. We picked out fingernail polish for him (he asked me to pick colors. HE KNOWS I CAN’T DO COLOR, and he let me pick them anyway. Weirdo.) and we went to a zillion bars and restaurants… and everywhere we went, people flocked to him. Yet somehow, he managed to make me not feel out of place. And in Maui… I wasn’t a secret. People knew who I was. I… don’t think I was prepared for what that felt like.

I met so many of his friends, including those closest to him. I met his dad for the first time. I stepped into the ocean. I took my shirt off where people could see me (for the first time in well over twenty years). I saw sea turtles. I stayed up way too late, way too often. We walked. We listened to music. We argued about the meaning of the word ‘concede’ and about whose cover of ‘To Make You Feel My Love’ is the best. There were hard parts to the trip–it wasn’t perfect, and we are both complicated people–but it was… it was a magical week. It ended with us sitting on a beach, watching the sunset, recording a video about the trip… reflecting on so many things. Then he took me to the airport and gave me that huge, massive, amazing hug that only Jon could give. And then I got on a plane and flew away. That was February 8, 2024. That was the last time I saw my best friend.

I know the exact moment that I first hugged him. I know the exact moment that I last hugged him.

Things got hard again, between that February and this spring. Money needed to be made, so he switched jobs, searching for a place that felt as right but also could keep the lights on. He worked two or three jobs for a while, pushing so hard that he strained his relationships. We talked a little less often, because when he wasn’t working he was sleeping so he could be ready to go back to work. But we made it work.

As the fall approached, it got harder. He got harder. He got… harder to pin down. Less kind to himself. He was living harder too–doing what he needed to do to feel better, or to feel less. We talked about it, and he assured me that he had things under control. He just had to get out of this job, or get better shifts at that job. He was in the thick of the hustle, sorting out his grind.

He wouldn’t let me come back to see him in October when I tried. Or in February, 2025. He promised I could come in February 2026. By then, he would have things sorted out. He just needed more time to figure everything out. I said of course. Of course. I love you. I’m proud of you. I know you can do it. Let me know how I can help. Let me help.

His birthday was in March. He texted me a couple days after, encouraging me to make a choice I had been dragging my feet on. He said “You should do it! I think it will be good for you. I think you need it.”

That was the last text my best friend ever sent to me.

For almost a month, I texted every day. He read them, but he would not reply. He would not answer the phone when I called. I thought… I thought he was mad at me. I reached out to his amazing friend who I had met there and I asked her if he was OK. She checked on him. He replied to her. She saw him. He was still talking to his dad, to others… just not to me. I didn’t know what I had done. I didn’t know why he had shut me out, but… but if he was still seeing people, talking to people, just not me… then at least I knew he was OK.

But here’s the secret.

He was not OK.

On April 24th, 2025, that amazing friend of his, who I count as my own friend as well, called me to tell me that my best friend had taken his own life that morning. Or the night before. Overnight. In the dark. Under the stars. Alone. Alone. Alone.

I know what the last text I sent to him says. I don’t know if he read it before… before he… but I choose to believe that he did. I told him I loved him and that I was here for him and that he was my favorite person in the whole universe and that… and that I missed him and I just wanted him to call me so I could know he was OK.

He was not OK.

And now, I am not either.

He’s gone, and it hurts so much because the hole is so big. Because I swore to myself that this would not happen to Jon, and he’s gone anyway. It brings a million old pains back in stark detail, and it ladles on gallons of guilt and anguish and anger and horrible, overwhelming, impossible loss.

There’s no one who can be all the things that Jon was to me. There were… there were parts he played in my life that will never be played by anyone else. Those threads of myself are just… done. And that hurts. It hurts that he did this to himself, to everyone who loved him, to everyone he loved.

Because I know he loved me. I know it.

And I miss having something so undeniable, like gravity, in my life to hold me together.

I’m getting help. I’m seeing a therapist for the first time in my life. I am talking about my feelings (probably too much, but you get what you get, folks). I am leaning on my husband so hard right now, and he is trying so hard to take care of this very very turbulent being that I’ve become.

I’m trying to navigate this all in a quieter way moving forward. It’s been a month since he left us. 30 days to try and reconcile the loss of a relationship that I have cherished for more than thirteen years. It’s slow going.

But I got a tattoo. A tiny little something to remember him by. While I was staying with him for those 8 days on Maui, he told me these words often. He wanted me to just… go with the flow. To accept that sometimes good things happen when you leave yourself open to them. He said… ‘No plans. Just vibes.’

Right now, the vibes… they are not good. But they will be again. And I will try, really hard, to remember that sometimes, it’s OK to just… go with the flow. Because sometimes, that brings something wonderful into your life. And maybe… maybe if you don’t make so many plans for the future, loss hurts less?

I doubt that part.

A quote sits on my heart these days, from Next to Normal. My favorite musical. Jon’s too. We saw it together, once.

“The price of love is loss. But still we pay. We pay everyday.”

Transmissions from the Quiet, Part Two: Distraction

So… it’s been about a week since I wrote Part One of this series. That one, if you missed it… is pretty much required reading for understanding this one. Part Two will take that same subject in a new direction, addressing something that I found to help me through the struggles and how that little distraction has become something new entirely.

BUT… this is not the same kind of post. Part One was a chance to examine what’s gone wrong in my brain… and it helped me, a great deal, to sort it out into words. Since so many people read it and responded, I did want to carve out a moment here to give a bit of an update.

Addendum to Part One

I’m feeling better most of the time. The days over the last week or so have been a mixed bag, with some feeling fairly stable and calm, others featuring returns to the heart-pounding, brain-drowning sensations. Sleep has been a little easier to come by, with only two major nighttime implosions. But… I go back to work tomorrow, so… of course, today has been the worst day in the last few. The transition back to routine and ritual may, in fact, be exactly what I need… but at the moment it comes cloaked in dread.

I would be remiss–and mostly a jerk–if I did not mention the EXTRAORDINARY kindness of so many of my friends, family, and colleagues. Every message, text, reply, or comment was received and valued, even if I was too far into my own head to write you a thoughtful response. I have never doubted that I am fortunate to have an amazing tribe in my corner… and though distance and safety have taken you from my proximity, you have made it clear that you should never be far from my heart.

I have doctor stuff coming up later this week. We’ll see what comes from that. Other supports are under investigation. It’s all moving very slowly… because moving any faster scares the crap out of me.

OK. Let’s shift gears and talk about something that has a bit of an upbeat energy to it, shall we? Still serious. Still important. But… different.

Distract, Obsess, Annoy

You may or may not know this, but I have a *highly* obsessive personality. I’m not carrying any proper OCD or anything like that, but I get very, very attached to things (people, universes, ideas, whatever). This has been going on for as long as I can remember, but was especially prevalent in what we could colloquially refer to as my personal Dark Ages (Summer 1998 through Summer 2000). That was when I was deep in the process, and trauma, of coming out… first relationships… broken hearts… failed friendships… all of it. Those two years were the loneliest years of my life, coming after high school ended but before I settled into who I was going to actually be as a college student and adult.

During that time, my fixations took on a larger than life significance–the comic book The New Warriors led to me making friends and family out of an internet mailing list, for instance, and soon consumed hours and hours of every single day of my life. I took solace in fiction especially (this is no surprise, I am sure), and it became my security blanket. Whether it was comics or novels or TV shows or movies (Did anyone REALLY need to go see the first X-Men movie 11 times in the theater while unemployed in the summer of 2000? NO THEY DID NOT. Yet I did), there was always someplace else to be.

Escapism is VERY important to me. My passion for games, especially tabletop RPGs, is rooted in that same need.

You see… it wasn’t until much, much later in my life when I started to envision my life as a place I wanted to be. Too often before, for vast stretches of time, I needed to believe in those better worlds… because the world in which I found myself on a daily basis was not always a kind place. For instance…

The first day I showed up to teach in my school district, as a student teacher, I was told by my well-meaning and kind-hearted cooperating teacher that I needed to under no circumstances let anyone else in the building know that I was gay.

The first year that I worked at one of our high schools where I taught reading–for the entire first year–I was asked on a regular basis by colleagues who I was subbing for. I… had worked there all year, and yet they couldn’t even remember that they had seen me before.

The first time Tom and I ever went to dinner together on Valentine’s Day, the restaurant sat us in the exact center of the dining room, while all of the other couples were seated around the outside edge. Staring at us.

Three little examples of what I mean… not that life was massively unfair to me or any such thing. Just… ways in which I found the universe in which I lived to be… short. Unworthy. So escapism kept playing a key part in my life.

In recent years… things have gotten so much better. I’m completely out at work–I never even consider the possibility that someone might *not* know about me. I interact on a regular basis with hundreds of people who know who I am, and I never feel like I don’t belong in the work of my school district. Tom and I are a singular unit that never feels unwelcome or out of place at the wonderful restaurants we frequent… even if these days that’s all curbside and carry out.

So my affection for escapism had become less… urgent. Less vital. I was reading less, and even watching less TV right before the pandemic hit. As the decision to stay at home 24-7 came to pass, I brought those hobbies back as sanity measures and as things to do to help pass the time that would have otherwise been spent out shopping, or playing games at other peoples’ houses, or just driving places.

Man, I miss driving places.

Anyway.

Escapism started to regain some appeal, at first as a way to stay busy… but as the months ticked by, it started to become more urgent and vital again.

I resumed the world’s slowest chronological/release-order rewatch of the Star Trek franchise. After years of slowly rolling through TOS and TAS and TNG, I watched all of DS9 and am barreling through Voyager at practically warp speeds. They don’t really do all that much for me, but… they give me a way to just sort of unhook my brain and be somewhere else. That’s nice.

I returned to Farscape and watched the whole thing–that show is very important to me, very affecting, and it stirred some serious energy in my brain and my heart… but it was all wrapped up in November… and I needed something else that I was a little more invested in. That brings us to the Distraction… the Obsession… the Annoyance that maybe, sort of, kind of, saved my life.

The Main Reason We’re Here

In September, we watched the Emmys. They were *so bad*. Virtual awards shows are a disaster and should be stopped. But the one thing that was not bad was getting to hear the lovely speeches from the cast and crew of a little show called Schitt’s Creek.

Now, many of you are probably old hands in the Schitt’s Creek game–early adopters. I… don’t do early adoption. I do STUPIDLY EARLY ADOPTION (where I know about it before it ever takes off–like with Love, Simon) or I do AFTER THE FACT ADOPTION (where I wait til you all stop talking about something before I bother to try it–like with Game of Thrones and Walking Dead). I just… don’t like to feel like I jumped on a bandwagon, I guess. So I had heard many people talk, and many internet people rave, about the show… but I filed it away as something to deal with later… after the world moved on.

But listening to the speeches of the cast and crew–especially Dan Levy–and their messages of what the show stood for… something clicked for me. Something crawled in my brain and said, “This. This. This.”

I told Tom that I wanted to watch it, and I thought it would be a good thing for us to watch together. He relented–he’s a sucker for award-winners just like I am–and we started a nice, casual watch in October or so. We watched an episode or two a week, sometimes as many as 4 in a week, and…

And honestly? I didn’t really feel it. The first season is stiff… but I have lived through stiff first seasons before (my favorite show of all time is Babylon 5, so… yeah) and we stuck with it. We marched through season 2 at the same pace (so it was something like late November when that wrapped up) and found it improving, but still not setting my world on fire.

Season 3 is much stronger. The show starts to BE what it wants to BE (instead of just the setup for what it wants to be) in Season 3. As we move forward here, I will try to limit spoilers, but… *shrug*

My mental problems first manifested as an inability to sleep because of awful, awful shadows in my brain. Whenever I would settle in to sleep, my brain would conduct a sort of horror audit of my failings and my failures and play those out in agonizing detail. Those first few nights of this phenomenon were some of the scariest nights of my life… not because of the vividness of my imagination so much as of how easily those nights tore away my sense of self. I didn’t know what I was going to do.

About five days into that hellscape, we watched the season 3 finale of Schitt’s Creek. If you have seen the show but don’t remember details, it’s the episode “Grad Night” and the ending of the episode involves a car ride after dinner.

Without giving too much away, I will say that Patrick Brewer (a character on the show who has a significant moment in that episode) saved my life. Or at least my brain.

Like a drowning person thrown a life preserver, I grabbed on to that character, and the show in general from that point on, HARD. I had found a distraction that would occupy enough of my mind that I could drown out the ugly stuff. I still stayed up all night… but I was watching YouTube clips of scenes and interviews and analysis and such… I was wallowing in a genuine kindness, affection, love, and acceptance that this show unspooled in steady, comedic spoonfuls episode after episode for its entire back half. I devoured the final three seasons, forcing Tom to adopt a watching rhythm that he despises (full-on binges of whole seasons at a time) because I was so scared that my 4+ hours of YouTube every night was going to eventually spoil something for myself.

You should have seen how careful I was to not ruin things… how many interviews I watched only until I caught the wiff of a reference to an episode we had not yet watched, before I nearly jammed my finger tapping the pause button on my ipad. I knew there were scared milestones that I dare not spoil… Open Mic, Olive Branch, Meet the Parents, The Hike, etc. I needed them. I needed to see them, to feel them, to let that world and those moments wash over me.

But then… we got to the end. It was my fault we got there so fast, of course… I ruined it by making us rush. The ending of the show is pretty much perfect, and I have no complaints. Other than, you know… it ended.

It was all over. There was no more. Nothing more new. I had seen everything the internet had to offer (even that amazing post-Season 6 graduation Zoom call video. Oh my gosh.) and… it was done. Early adopters had had six years to get ready for the end. Or three-ish years if, like me, you only really invested in the Patrick era. I… had only a matter of days.

I had found this new security blanket that had kept me warm and safe, and now it was torn back away from me. (Again, I know it’s my fault. But it was still a strange kind of trauma.)

We actually watched the last season on the day AFTER my breakdown. That was what we spent all day doing… indulging me in bundling up my heart with laughs and tears as I watched Patrick and David navigating the most wonderful life I could imagine. A life where people just cared, innately, for one another. Where they grow past their flaws. I smile and cry (mostly happy tears) just thinking about it.

I mentioned in Part One that there was this idea of “Hyper-Capable” that really resonated with me. When Dan Levy, one of the stars and creators of the show, won a GLAAD award in 2019, the cast introduced him, and their own characters, at the ceremony. Patrick Brewer is played by an awesome human named Noah Reid, and Noah introduced Patrick on that stage as “David’s hyper-capable boyfriend.”

I liked that idea. I, in fact, like everything about Patrick. I like that he just… makes everything OK. He always figures it out. He keeps David level. He makes David better. He finds contentment and joy in being the take-charge guy, the one who, in spite of being new to everything in his life, always finds the right way to say, or show, the people he loves how much he loves them. I want to be that guy so bad that it hurts.

I kind of want to marry him too, but only in an alternate universe where I never met Tom. I’m not a crazy person. Besides… the best thing about Patrick is how he makes David feel and grow.

The show started as a distraction. It became an obsession. To those of you in my closest orbit (Tom, especially) it’s become an annoyance (as in, JEREMY STOP TALKING ABOUT IT)… but it was also my life preserver.

It still is. I’ll be rewatching it… for a long time, I think. Like Love, Simon before it, it brings an energy into my universe that I never knew I needed until I saw it, felt it, breathed it… and suddenly felt the absence that predated it.

In the nights that have come since the finale… and the nights that I know will still come, as we work to figure out how to best treat my issues and mend my wounds, I’ll cue up a parade of Patrick and David clips and just… feel love that exists without reservation in a world where people want one another to be happy.

That’s the one prescription I’ve written for myself in this process, and even when it gets to be more obsession than distraction (for example, the actor who plays Patrick has two albums of music. I bought them. I am listening to them right now. They make me happy)… even when it gets to be more annoyance than obsession (apologies to the handful of people who I have decided to only communicate with via a series of adorable Schitt’s Creek GIFs)…

Fiction can heal us. All of us. Us as in the whole damned world.

I know that it can heal me. Or, at the very least, play a part in that healing.

So… let me have my distractions, my obsessions, and my annoyances. And I promise to always, ALWAYS, let you have yours.

And… if you ever need a reason to strike up a conversation with me, watch some Schitt’s Creek and tell me you want to talk about it. It’s the world’s most perfect bait for catching a Jeremy-fish right now. 🙂

Only one more of these to come. Part Three is all about… well… Responsibility.

Transmissions From The Quiet, Part One: OK

I am not OK.

This is, I suppose, not an uncommon sentiment. It’s 2020, after all. Global pandemic day 284 by my Des Moines count. 

But here’s the thing… I’m always OK. I wake up every day and I make a choice to be OK. For nearly 300 days, I have made that choice. I have been OK for myself, but more importantly I have been OK for all the people that depend on me. For my husband, for my friends, for my family—for relative strangers that I support at work. I get up and I make a withdrawal from this psychological bank account that I have been steadily depositing into for… well, for decades. Ever since I found my inner extrovert and discovered the way that being with people feeds my soul. I’ve lived a life that, while not without strife, has been largely sheltered from a lot of trauma in recent years.

In fact, my relationship with trauma is so well insulated that you probably know about every single one of my traumas. They are few, and I process them at length and in public as one more facet of the way that I derive this “psychological bank account” — something that I will refer to as Cope for the rest of this post. I have a *lot* of Cope. My willpower for MAKING MYSELF OK is… well, I would have told you that it was inexhaustible.

That doesn’t mean that I was never frayed or wounded or over-extended. Most of you have seen me be all of those things. It just means that it was never so bad that, with a little time and a little perspective, I couldn’t draw on my Cope and just BE OK.

I know that this is sort of a superpower. That for so many people, it doesn’t work that way. Most people can’t just rile themselves up, blow off some steam, and then just set their brokeness aside. It makes me a REALLY bad advice-giver when it comes to mental health stuff… I am a decent listener, but when I try to ADVISE, I… I lack frame of reference. Because I just draw on the Cope and MAKE MYSELF BETTER. And I confess to sometimes being confused as to why other people don’t do that themselves.

But you see… I am stupid.

There are limits. That supply of Cope… it… 

It is *exactly* like a bank account. No matter how hard you try, sometimes you can spend your bank account to zero. Worse… the very very worst… is that sometimes, when you lose track of things, you can overdraw that account.

Then? Then you realize that you are kind of fucked.

School is hard. My job is… a rollercoaster of reaction and adaptation and support and empathy and most of the time I love it, but it has been a different kind of demanding in this moment. Delivering professional development (and for that matter, all forms of teaching) without the direct back-and-forth interactions with other human beings is HARD. It is EXHAUSTING. It is DEMORALIZING. But I wake up every day and I draw on my Cope and I make myself OK.

Life is hard. I miss my friends. I miss casual conversations. I miss face to face conversations. I miss hugs. I miss the way that some people reach out and touch you on the knee or the elbow when things get heavy in a conversation. I miss sitting beside people instead of across from them. I miss privacy. I miss spontaneous connections. I miss fancy happy hours. I miss playing board games and roleplaying games and the satisfying clatter of dice on a table or the awkwardness of my inability to shuffle cards. All of these things—every bloody one of them—used to put deposits in the account. But now? I try to do as much of them as possible, to simulate these experiences so that the connections remain so that someday, when I can do all these things in person again, I will still have my people. That they won’t forget about me. So I wake up every day and I draw on my Cope and I make myself OK with simulations and half-measures. 

Family is hard. I have missed so much of the young lives of my nephews and nieces over the past year. I have a niece who is hardly even recognizable when comparing the little person she is today in videos to the baby I last played with at the tail end of 2019. I have two nephews who have basically become young adults while I’ve been locked up in my house. That isn’t to say that the loss of time with parents, brothers, sisters-in-law and others are not hard as well, but the kids… I have always been close to the kids. And before much longer, they won’t even hardly remember me. So I wake up every day and I draw on my Cope and I make myself OK with the absence and the distance.

About two weeks ago I stopped sleeping properly. If you know me, you know that I can sleep on demand. I can sleep through ANYTHING. But that just stopped. My brain wouldn’t slow down, and I would spin and spiral from one worry or tension to another like some sort of manic ballerina. It got really dark for a while—the first week, my most frequent obsessive fury during the hours from 11 to 3 (I could usually collapse to utter exhaustion by 3) was… bad. Bad in a way that I have rarely allowed space in my brain since the darkest of days in 1998 and 1999. But I found a cheat—a way to distract myself while exhausting myself, and in the process push those really dark thoughts out. That… that’s coming up in Part Two.

Anyway. So obviously, things were NOT RIGHT. But I just thought… stuff happens. It will pass. I woke up each morning (usually on a luxurious 3 hours of sleep) and I willed myself to be OK. More Cope spent. 

And then came Christmas. I have never had a Christmas Eve away from family… and only one (ONE!) in 41 years that wasn’t spent with *my* family. I knew it was going to be hard. So I woke up Christmas Eve—a day that has historically been a bigger deal even than Christmas for my side of the family—and I drew on my Cope to make myself OK with being away. But I didn’t realize that when I did that…

I emptied the account. The pandemic finally won… and those daily withdrawals, in a world where virtually nothing makes deposits because of my alarming extroversion, had eaten away at the balance that I had spent my entire adult life accumulating.

It was all gone. And I didn’t even realize it. I mean… I felt my feelings differently that night. But… I’m a pretty emotional person anyway, so that was no big deal, I thought.

I thought that was it. Like I said… usually, I just have to rile myself up, marinate in my feelings for a bit, and that gives me the last little nudge I need to square things up again. I stayed up til 3, collapsed in total exhaustion, woke up the next morning to be part of our little, personal Christmas… and I did what I always do. I dipped in to the Cope and I took out what I needed to make myself be OK.

And, just like back in the day when I was writing checks… I didn’t even know that I’d withdrawn funds that DID NOT EXIST. The overdraft notice was, metaphorically, in the mail.

At about 9pm Christmas evening, the bill came due. 

I broke. One minute, everything was fine and I was just sitting on the couch. The next minute, I was drowning in my head. My chest was pounding. When Tom asked me what was wrong, all I could do was stutter out half words—I couldn’t even make whole words, let alone coherent sentences. My chest HURT. My brain was running at ten thousand miles a minute in a hundred directions. I know I scared him. I was scared too. We… we went to bed.

DO NOT LOOK AT ME THAT WAY. Yes… we probably should have gone to the hospital. But… I couldn’t. I couldn’t even find the focus and the drive to care about myself *that much*. I just wanted to go to sleep and wake up in the morning and draw on Cope that did not exist to make myself BE OK.

I did sleep this time. My body just sort of… shut off.

I woke up early. Bawling.

Against my natural instincts, I told Tom what was happening. I try to shelter him from this—I don’t want to ever drop my weight in other people’s laps. I want to be helpful… I don’t want to require help. But, in a supremely rare burst of insight, I realized that I couldn’t do it by myself. Tom is the human being I have best empowered to help me through the worst of all things… and I had managed to convince myself I was doing him a favor by keeping him out of my head for *months*. Or worse. Maybe years.

You see, when I woke with a start that morning, tears rolling down my face and that same strange tightness gripping my chest that had driven me to bed the night before… I knew that I couldn’t make myself be OK anymore. The account where I stored my Cope had been so badly overdrawn that the whole damn thing was gone. The First National Bank of My Psyche had closed my account.

I was not OK. And no matter how much I wanted to be OK, I wasn’t going to be OK again. Not soon. Not fast. Not easily.
And there was a part of me that did not want to be OK. That part that waits for me to go to bed and then starts beating its drum about the countless ways that I have failed. The countless people I have failed. The countless ways in which I will never be enough.

Tom was so good. He listened to me, without judgment, as I explained the countless things that have been wearing me to pieces over the last nearly 10 months. I unbottled everything… I cried and I explained and I didn’t worry that what I was saying would hurt his feelings—because let me tell you, this is a worry that has crushed me for so very long. How can my need for MORE not signal some sort of judgment of INSUFFICIENCY upon him? I mean… it doesn’t. But I just always feel like that is how it will be taken.

Dammit, it’s how I would take it, if someone that I thought I was enough for came to me and told me that I was wrong.

But he was… my hero. He just listened and laid there with me and…

And we started into the weekend after Christmas in very uncharted territory for either of us.

I am the caregiver. I am the one who makes everything OK. I am, to borrow a phrase from something I will talk about in Part 2, “hyper-capable” — that doesn’t mean perfect, but… that’s my job in my life. Oftentimes… I just GET THE THING DONE. I figure it out. I make it work. I take care of it.

But now, I couldn’t.

I laid on the couch with him all day, basically. He indulged me in devoting a whole freaking day to the things I had found that would distract me enough to make me stop crying for a little while. To quiet my breathing. To lessen the aching tightness in my chest that refused to subside.

And in spite of all that… sleep did not come Saturday night. An hour here, an hour there. Waking after each of those hours drenched with sweat and tears and a malignant sense of dread that things would never, ever be better.

Sunday… was the same. We essentially did THE EXACT SAME DAY OVER AGAIN. And… we made the daylight hours bearable. But still my chest hurt. Still my brain was… somehow both MASSIVELY DISINTERESTED IN EVERYTHING and completely fixated on everything. It wasn’t til midday on Sunday that I realized I hadn’t eaten anything of substance since Christmas night. I just… did not care about food.

So… by now, some of you with a better handle on your own mental health have probably started ticking off some stuff on some symptom checklists. I know. Intellectually, I know about these things. But experientially… I have MANAGED VIA COPE through every one of my mental health crises in my entire life. ALL OF THEM. Even the worst. Even when people wiser and more caring than me told me I needed to get help. Nope. Not me. I’m ME. I’m a farm kid. I’m a white dude. I’m an Iowan. Whatever my excuses. Just like I can’t make myself wear sunscreen, I couldn’t make myself talk to someone about getting help.

I’m the hyper-capable one, dammit. I should be self-sufficient.

I mean, we all know that I am not, but… that’s what the voice in my head tells me. When it counts, I should just be able to do for myself.

After another night without sleep, and a consultation with a medically-astute friend, we decided I needed to go to the doctor Monday morning. The chest pain had not gone away yet, and my family history has more than its fair share of complications with hearts.

Cut to spending 8 hours in the hospital Monday as we ran tests to ensure that I was not having some kind of cardiac event. Or some kind of gastrointestinal event.

I came home with answers to what was NOT happening. And… that meant that I DID know what was happening. I’d known it all along.

I am not OK.

I don’t know what tomorrow looks like. A week from today is unthinkable. My general stability from minute to minute is… tenuous today. But it’s more dependable than it was yesterday. That’s gotta count for something, right?

My chest hurts less today. Like… naming the thing seems to have robbed it of some of its power. Writing this helps. Talking to people helps. I have talked to some of you… and I have avoided others. There is no judgment in that discrimination, I assure you. I just… don’t have the Cope to handle everything. 

Heh. I said I named it there, didn’t I? But I… haven’t.

I’m pretty sure this is Depression. At first I wanted it to be Anxiety—I convinced myself that anxiety was, I dunno… somehow more temporary. Something that would wrap itself up and move on and not require so very much effort to manage. I know that’s bullshit, by the way—that’s just what my half-functional brain settled on at first. But this isn’t that. Or it is, but it isn’t ONLY that.

I need to spend more time with doctors. It’s happening.

But as we all know, one of the things that I do to heal myself is to write. And right now… I can’t do fiction. It’s a monumental effort of will to just do this stream-of-consciousness blog stuff. But… it helps.

This is Part 1 of 3 blog posts… but only Step 1 of a potentially unlimited number of days that I have to spend in re-learning how to take care of myself.

And this is me, in typical me fashion, making a HUGE ASS DEAL out of something that I know a VAST number of my friends have dealt with their whole lives. And I’d probably be a whole lot healthier if I had dealt with mine back in the beginning instead of waiting 20+ years for an unimaginable stretch of pandemic days to come along and bulldoze every trick I have ever learned about how to make myself OK.

I think of all the energy I have spent in my life to be able to actively ignore my problem instead of getting help for it, and… dammit, I weep.

Maybe I need medicine. Maybe I need therapy. Maybe I need both. Maybe I need neither. We’ll figure it out. One thing I know I need… and God, do I know it more right now than ever before… is people. Is you. Is proximity and conspiracy and foolishness and all of it. But I know that none of that matters if I don’t figure out how to handle the times when I’m all alone in my head, too.

I am not OK.

And I’m going to have to be OK with that.

Game School

As part of PendraCon, the week-long virtual convention celebration of storytelling that am running, I decided to resurrect an idea prompted by a conversation with a good friend and frequent gaming collaborator about how I run roleplaying games.

PREFACE

I love RPGs. I’ve been playing them for the vast majority of my life, with particularly notable runs of the following games forming the basic foundation of my experiences…

• Earthdawn
• Shadowrun
• Mage: the Ascension
• Changeling: the Dreaming
• Brave New World
• Deadlands
• Marvel Universe Roleplaying Game
• Adventure!

And a few other games well-read but not properly played yet for a host of reasons…

• Wraith: the Oblivion
• Nobilis
• Marvel Superheroes Adventure Game
• Trinity
• Aberrant
• Dragonlance: The Fifth Age
• Cortex Prime (system)
• Genesys (system)

So you will notice a distinct lack of D&D or anything D20 on that list. I am familiar with those games and know how they work… I just also know that they don’t always work well for me.

That isn’t to say that the advice that follows is not applicable to other games… but it does help to contextualize five Golden Rules of Gaming that I live by… and that have surely influenced my style of storytelling, plotting, and game arbitrating.

FIVE GOLDEN RULES

1. Words are better than dice rolls.
2. One combat per night.
3. If you name it, it matters.
4. Everything is connected.
5. Flourish makes memories.

We’ll explore each of those a little more as we go along, but first… here’s the slightly abridged electronic conversation that prompted this post in the first place. See if you can feel the insidious nature of my golden rules anywhere in this dialogue…

REAL TALK

Q: I’m looking to pick yer brain on how you arrange/prep for a game, do you outline?

ME: I LOVE THIS QUESTION. Because I honestly never stop and like… process what I do. So answering this for you gives me a chance to sort out what I do!

So… Outlining? Absolutely. In a couple of phases.

Phase 1 is the Hardware Store. I go through the game and basically make a list of all the things I love about it (sometimes mechanically, but mostly story-wise). Once I have that inventory of ideas, I have to decide if this is a Kitchen Sink game (then I need an outline that will let me use ALL the pieces) or if it is a more tightly focused game… where I just pick the bits that align to a pattern or theme that I am feeling good about.

Then Phase 2 is outlining the arc. That’s where this Act I/Act II/Act III nonsense of mine comes in.

If it’s a game that people playing already know, Act I is usually about getting to know the characters… and teasing the plot elements that I want to get to. But there’s not typically any MAJOR plot movement in Act I… it ends with a small but significant moment where the group makes the decision to start dealing with the plot after we’ve all got a handle on their separate strands. This is how our last Mage game went, and to a lesser extent the previous Earthdawn campaign.

If the game is newer to the players, then I usually use Act I to tell a sort of archetypal story of the game–like, what is the perfect example (or several perfect examples) of how this game works and what its themes are. That’s how we started Shadowrun. And it’s kind of what I am going for in Wraith. [Editorial Note: This conversation happened before COVID-19 totally torpedoed a sweet Wraith campaign we were about to start…]

Oh, Brave New World was that way too.

But then, once you have the sort of mechanical/foundational nature of Act I figured out… that’s when the rest gets a lot more fun.

Act 2 (and any other Acts that are not the FINAL Act) just need a theme and a predetermined end point. I like each Act to end with a significant change to the status quo, and I pick those out based on what stuff from the list of story elements I wanted to include seems most intriguing or splashiest.

This is where I am a shitty GM though: I pretty much do anything and everything in my power to make my Act endings happen regardless of player input. Players determine HOW we get there, and how we respond to it… but the event itself is GOING to happen. Some of the best games we have ever had are when the players have written me into a bitch of a corner though, and I have to add stuff to the game, or twist, or reveal, just to get my ball back in play.

Then the Final Act is pretty much 80% tying up the loose ends that seem important to the players and 20% getting in whatever events or elements capstone the themes of the game. It feels weird, but my big elaborate endings are only about 1/5th figured out when the game starts… everything else cool that happens in final act stories comes from player reactions and interactions to all of the stuff I found cool enough in the setting to include in the game.

[Longest answer to a yes/no question ever? MAYBE!]

Q: You’re tellin’ me what I need to know tho!

Me: That’s my basic process! Happy to fill in any other blanks.

Q: So then scoping down a little to a game-by-game basis, do you just kinda have a hit list per game of, “This is what’s gotta happen?”

Me: Essentially. My session outlines are usually a list of five events, and one of them is a single Must Happen thing (usually the fourth or fifth event on the list, but not always).

These can be less railroady though, because the neat thing about sessions is that things can happen simultaneously… so maybe the players go in a different direction as a result of the third event… and the fifth event just HAPPENS without them. Like, now it’s in the background, and I can bring it back in, in its new state, later.

It is VERY difficult to meaningfully plan for “Player character must do X” types of events, because players are notoriously shifty!

Those tend to get assigned to an Act rather than a session… then I have room to try and make it happen. So, if I need someone to use the cursed magic sword… I almost never count on that happening in Session 14. But sometime in Act III? I can make that shit happen just by paying attention to characters’ (and players’) styles.

And that’s actually why sessions-per-act are always a guessing game. I often say “Oooh, 8 sessions in this Act,” but then sometimes it is 6 or 10 or whatever… I tend to just let that flow naturally.

Sorry, I keep shifting to big picture planning. I am not a good small picture planner! Seriously, when I planned a session of Brave New World, where I knew one fight per night was all we could handle, it would look something like this:

Sample Session Outline (seriously)

1) Truth brings an update
2) The Federal Response
3) Casing the joint
4) FIGHT: Ratmaster with Bombs
5) DISCOVERY: Three generators have to go

… and if everyone is lucky and I am at my best, I have stats for the fight and names for the NPCs beforehand. 🙂

Q: Yeah that’s a tricky one for me right now

Me: The trick to session outlining for me is to be crazy flexible, which comes with practice and experience, I suppose. My session outlines always end up as a map of story beats… because then people can respond to them in ways that feel meaningful and have an impact on the story. Like when the players concocted a plan to put the CEO in a duffel bag and abduct him from his house to get them into the skyscraper? I DID NOT FORESEE THIS. But we rolled with it, and the basic beats of the story were still able to unfold because I hadn’t sketched them out in anything more than the minimum detail needed.

Q: I’m really trying to get a handle on prep time. Getting ready for a session seems to take forever.

Me: One thing that helps me is to invest heavily in stat blocking like 10 characters, and then just ensuring they recur often so I can re-use those stats.

Beyond that… I get really comfortable with the game’s base difficulty mechanics so that I can rattle off three things in a hurry: The difficulty of an easy thing, an average thing, and a hard thing. That way, even when we are way off of the outline, I can keep it feeling like it was in my plan all along.

I have made an art form out of planning arcs/Acts before the campaign starts and then planning sessions 10 minutes before people show up. It is EXACTLY the wrong way according to every GMing chapter in the history of the hobby, I think.

But I also struggle to rationalize the mentality that the GM should be spending hours prepping for the game. Maybe in a world where the players are also spending time prepping for the game, but that’s not often the reality for most people. So, I say… minimize. Improvise. Sympathize.

And take better notes than I do. Jeeeezus, take better notes than I do. That sweet Final Act moment where all of the threads come together to make the themes of the game crystal clear, or the epic twist that no one saw coming takes everyone off guard and yet still makes perfect sense… those things only happen if you actually remember all of the balls you threw up in the air in the previous Acts… so NOTES. NOTES. NOTES.

A thing I need to invest in is a routine at session end where I write down things that mattered. They don’t have to be pretty–they just have to be captured. This is part of the growing I still have to do in this hobby.

Q: Is this method of planning similar to how you would approach, say, worldbuilding/lore for your novels?

Me: Exactly. There’s very little difference, except that where I would research from the handbooks and sourcebooks for a game, I have to invent for a novel.

But they take the same basic amount of time. I have to figure out how the world works, who the major players are, the basic shape of it, any quirks of language or culture, and what specific stuff I want to DO there or have happen there—similar to the Toolbox phase of game planning.

But unlike some more successful people… I basically ONLY figure out what I know I need. That leaves room open to invent stuff on the spot when needed (which is only a problem when I take shitty notes. See above. Sigh.)

Q: Oooo, can I make a suggestion for Game School?

Me: Sure! I’ll include them as Q’s Golden Rules, so as not to confused people with mine J

Q: Things I learned from running LARP, especially from running combat-heavy LARPs like Werewolf:

Q’s Golden Rules

1) Trust nothing not to die.  I have introduced plotlines and wiped their ashes off a seat 30 minutes later.
2) High-intensity/high-emotion stories with epic combats cannot be fudged.  If you fudge to make sure a player lives or dies, they will know it, even if it’s not a conscious knowledge.  Let all the numbers roll.
3) When in doubt, “this sounds like more fun” is the right answer.
4) (Added from the comments!) Just because it is filled with odd pieces and weird “extras” does not make it a good game. I have been bitten in the behind by “Oh look at what a cool new idea we came up with for our mechanics” and discovered “This easily lost small piece of wood dictates whether or not you have a complete set, Mr. Collector. How ’bout that?”

Me: I love those—especially the third one. Excellent advice!

[Editorial Note: Q is an awesome guy. If you want to learn more about his excellent taste in games and gaming, you could hit him up at his Twitch channel: https://www.twitch.tv/vaydyn]

About Those Golden Rules…

The conversation above covers my approach to planning pretty well, but storytelling in RPGs is a combination of planning the game and RUNNING the game. That’s where my Golden Rules (and Q’s, too!) come into play. I’ll unpack each of my five, and then add one more notion for good measure before we put this topic to rest for the night…

1. Words are better than dice rolls.

Games have rules for a reason, and I am not here to convince you to abandon them. But whenever it is possible to roleplay a solution to a problem instead of roll dice to resolve a problem, I try to lean into the roleplaying solution. Dice provide quick resolution when you need it, but for me the fun of an RPG is pretending to be your character and then throwing down in verbal exchanges with neat NPCs. My job as the gamemaster is to make cool NPCs for you to talk to, argue with, steal from, or quiver in fear before. Your job is to rise to the challenge of playing that encounter instead of just rolling a handful of dice to see if you get the better of the character in the encounter.

2. One combat per night.

Due to jobs, schedules, and logistics, a session of roleplaying in my group tends to be about 2.5 hours long. In almost any game system we have every played, a combat of any consequence takes the better part of an hour or more. That means that I know we will only really ever have one combat per night. That means that I need to make sure that the single combat we have is engaging enough that players and characters that live for fighting feel fulfilled… and it means I need to make sure there are ways to avoid or handwave other fights that might pop up during the session.

And yes, I will handwave a fight without hesitation. We play larger than life characters in our games, and if I have a choice between running a fight between the player characters and some henchmen at the gate or the player characters and the big bad in his lair, I will ALWAYS choose the more exciting fight… unless we are stalling for time so that the big bad’s fiendish scheme can come to pass, of course.

3. If you name it, it matters.

I hate naming background characters–the name of the innkeeper is not important. But if the players insist on a name for a character, I make it a point to give that character something more to do in the story. This is also why I work so hard to help villains escape from the heroes periodically–I want them to come back. Characters that recur, grow and contribute to the plot or the themes provide an essential degree of continuity and verisimilitude to a game… but if we are definitely never going to see see Innkeeper X again, I will do my damnedest not to name him. Or his inn. Stop asking me to name things, dangit.

4. Everything is connected.

This is going to get me into trouble with purists out there, but I think we have already established that I sort of do things my own way. I LOVE CROSSOVERS. I love easter eggs that show you strange connective material, even if it can’t logically be connected. I take a but of inspiration from the way Ryan Murphy uses the same actors over and over in his TV shows, or the way that Stephen King’s The Dark Tower series connected numerous novels that never seemed to be want to be connected. The most common way this connective material shows up for me is that I have a set of 8 NPC templates, archetypes if you will, that I fall back on when I need to develop new notable characters in a game. It is a trick not unlike how some players work really hard to play variations on the same three or four base characters, no matter the game. It provides me the chance to get GOOD at a characterization and to cheat to borrow gravitas and dread from past experience. When you are running the game, you sometimes have to manage and track scores of characters (I’ve run Mage games with fifty+ recurring NPCs that needed to be clearly differentiated and motivated and fit into the big picture in some way… some shortcuts using archetypes become a SURVIVAL MECHANISM.)

5. Flourish makes memories.

I only run games–I do not play them. I have said many times to all of my group that I am a trash player, and it is true. I have too many control issues and I am too fond of telling stories. But to trade off for always being the one to plot the campaign, I try to make each campaign we play unique and memorable–not just in terms of what happens in the plot, but in terms of the flourishes.

Here are three examples:

1. Our Shadowrun game had been building for years towards the election (and assassination) of the dragon Dunkelzahn. I had a massive campaign poster printed for the dragon’s presidential election and hung that in the game room on election night.
2. Whenever we start a new game that uses any kind of expendable currency (Fate Points, Karma, Pathos Points, whatever) I find a unique form of token to use that feels appropriate to the game. Sure, we could just use glass beads… but copper coins with dragons etched on them for Karma Points in Earthdawn: Age of Legend or black and silver plastic skulls for Pathos and Willpower points in Wraith, or red, white, and blue poker chips for Delta Points in Brave New World, add a tactile, visual flare to the game and help to set the tone.
3. This is the big one. I make musicals. Maybe you know this about me, but in games of a certain style (usually just World of Darkness games, actually–especially Mage) I try to build a musical episode as the finale of Act IV that advances all of the plots. Not only do I work with the players to pick songs that will advance their character’s arcs and pick songs to move all of the major NPCs, I also burn CDs of the music for everyone, print programs with all of the lyrics, write cue cards that help each character tee up their song at the right time in their dialogue, I make a custom cocktail for the event… OK. The musicals are OBSCENELY OVER THE TOP. I have done two major musicals, one in 2005 and one in 2015. They are two of my favorite memories of all time.

And I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Gaming is a communal experience where a group of people work together to craft something magical from the fire of imagination. If you are lucky enough to be the one shepherding that process… I hope you found something in this endless post to give you courage or hope or confidence or–at the very least–a new idea or two.

May there by riotous laughter and nail-biting tension around your table… and may there always be another musical Act IV finale in our futures.