Fan Club “Blog” #17: Season 2 is two weeks away also my brain is cooked ham

Hellooooo everybodyy.

I hope you've been enjoying our intermission of Play to Find Out. I'm super proud to announce that the big show - Season 2 of Quinns Quest - will begin shortly. I won't tease too much, just the above video, and I'll say that this season is brighter, sillier and represents a whole lot more of my energy than season 1. I think you'll love it.

On the subject of energy, I'm gonna write a bit of a curveball blog today. I want to write about burnout.

Last night I had some company over to play a TTRPG. Specifically, my brain was positively scuzzy with excitement to run some friends through this:



Nightmare over Ragged Hollow is a first-level adventure module put out by mastercraft old-school roleplay publisher The Merry Mushmen, and the crinkly damaged paper effect on the cover isn't me being careless with my books (for once), it's part of the art design.

I've been reading the "best" OSR adventures for years now, and this is even a standout amongst those. It's so good. It's so, so good.

There's an adage that if a GM wants a good roleplaying session, they shouldn't make an adventure so much as a situation. That's what Nightmare over Ragged Hollow is. There's no adventure path, and no fixed middle or end. It's just a high-calorie, deeply messy, frequently funny situation that starts in a posh little town famous for its paper mill and quickly teases the players outwards to explore miles of messy, tense surroundings, drizzled in secrets.



It does have a beginning, though: The players arrive at the town of Ragged Hollow to find its citizens freaking out because their local temple has just now become trapped under a huge, indestructible dome of magic resembling an implausible snowglobe, with 36 townsfolk (including all of the town's children) stuck inside.

Each night, the survivors inside the church ring the bell 36 times. Surely this means that all 36 of them are still alive? But as the adventure continues, the bell tolls less frequently. 35 times... then 32... 27...

Superbly, the party can see the solution from the very beginning. The highest tower of the temple is sticking out of the bubble! If there was only a way to get up there. Perhaps then they could climb down in through the bubble and see what's happening? But how could they possibly get that high? And what brought this nightmare on the temple, anyway?



It's a setup that offers urgency, questions, heroism, and best of all, total freedom. The party could prioritise seeing what secrets the townsfolk are keeping from them (there are loads), they could go and see what the various folkloric nasties in the surrounding lands might possess to help the situation (they've got plenty of secrets of their own), or they could do what my party did and take advantage of a town on its knees and immediately start a crime spree that was - in its own way - heroic in its ambition.

So I had this great module, I had a table of great players, I was even using the evening as a chance to test drive one of a half-dozen rulesets that people recommend when you wanna run old-school D&D-style adventures like this one! Specifically, I was running Shadowdark.

But I came away with just one problem. I didn't enjoy myself.

In fact, it's worse than that. At the end of the evening, which was only supposed to be this little sampler of the module & the ruleset for all of us, I asked my players if they wanted to keep playing it and for me to work this new campaign into my rotation, and they all said yes, and we booked session #2 into our calendars...

...and then the next morning, with something like an anxiety hangover, I texted them all to say to please take the event out of their calendars. I just couldn't do it.



I don't want this post to sound too distressing to all of you amazing Quinns Quest patrons. In fact, this is the opposite of bad news. It's a sign that I'm taking care of myself. But gosh, when I started Quinns Quest and a lot of people balked at the idea that I'd be playing a full campaign of everything I review? Those people may have been onto something. 😅

Really, the only thing that's changed in my life is that this month has been a lot. Getting Quinns Quest Season 2 ready to launch has been exhausting, I've got some life stuff going on right now that's arrived at the worst possible time, and also? Maybe you GMs out there can relate to this, but recently I've realised that the amount I enjoy GMing is less to do with how much my players enjoy themselves than it is to do with how ready I feel before the session begins.



I'm of course talking about reading books and modules (and taking my little notes) so that I have rapid recall of everything I need to know. But I'm also talking about having the psychological breathing room in the week leading up to a session so that I'm thinking about the world, the story and the vibe while I'm going grocery shopping or taking a shower. I'm also talking about just being rested and happy so that when my first player arrives and the doorbell rings my first thought is "😃❗" and not "🔊🫠".

So this morning, me texting my players was me taking a stance. I'm not gonna do it. I refuse to go tumbling into the trap of running a new campaign, no matter how exciting it is, when I know on the other side I'm going to come out less passionate about TTRPGs than I was going in.

This isn't a sprint! It isn't even a marathon. What I've got in front of me for the next however many years is a vagabond lifestyle where the resource I need to manage isn't "energy" but "chill".

Imagine me, looking out from my scraggy tent towards the town of Ragged Hollow, and the Bleak Mountains and Gloam Wood beyond that. My heart yearns for those adventures. Then imagine me zipping my tent back up, and tucking myself back into my sleeping bag.

Adventure can wait. It has to. Today, we sleep.

-- Quinns