Fan Club “Blog” #14: The heartache of Quinns Quest

I’m back from holiday! And BACK IN ACTION, working on Quinns Quest season 2. But I wanted to take an hour this morning to share something with you folks..

Readers, I’m heartsick.

I was walking home from the pub last night, slightly puzzled from a few pints of stout. I was thinking about what music to put through my headphones...

...and I decided to put on the playlist from my old Wildsea campaign.

This always launches my imagination back into that world like a psychic trebuchet. I click play and suddenly I’m there, back among the irrepressible treetops that contain a different, utterly cursed animal at every turn. Wandering the rickety walkways of towns unmatched in colour and warmth. Back aboard a ship full of wildsailors, those brave souls who know that the act of exploration is worth dying for, even if not a one of them could put their finger on why.

I do this all the time, putting on an old RPG soundtrack and just remembering like some ancient but happy octogenarian, lost to thoughts of a rich life.

Except this time, something went WRONG

Picture me, power walking home through frosty Brighton streets, feeling overexcited, dynamic, drunk...

...Except when I got home I realised that I’d spent the entire walk designing how I would begin a new, second Wildsea campaign. Drawing on all of my experience and enthusiasm for Wildsea after I’d had time to reflect on it, I was asking myself how I’d introduce players to the world if I was to do it all again, how I’d get them excited about it, how I’d breathe life into sailing with all of its tension and danger and knotty teamwork. In other words, I was daydreaming about how I might make this the most exciting start to a campaign my hypothetical players had ever experienced.

As I arrived at my front door, slightly out of breath, I discovered that not only was I in love with my own answers to these questions, I was even boozily thumbing my phone to choose an album for this prologue I was workshopping: Irish folk musician and flautist Brian Finnegan.

I imagined my players designing their characters in session 0, and then having a twist where as session 1 begins, we (surprise!) open on everyone's characters as children. We see them drilling to be wildsailors on a training ship in a drydock. We get a Kobayashi Maru-like test where the children have to decide what they might do when facing down their own death. This is followed by them being harangued in sequence by an ancient captain... when a sudden disaster means that these wet-behind-the-ears children and their woebegotten training vessel are the town's only hope to rescue a ship full of grown sailors.

Finally, at the end of session 1 we'd flash forward to the same children a few years later as the grown-up Wildsailors that they designed in character creation.

It was perfect.

Think about it! We see each player wrestling to master their station on the ship, which means when we flash to the present day we perceive our protagonists as likeably competent. We show the raw practicality and heroism that defines the Wildsea setting by having the community put children into danger for the greater good. The players get the thrill of a scene that shows they’re not ready to be sailors followed by a scene where they have to be sailors. The players get to imagine what their characters were like as children, which is a ton of fun, but also this flashback will bond them together enormously, so as we jump forward into adulthood they’ll be starting the campaign proper with very close, familial relationships that will make the scenes we do so much less awkward.

...And then my heart sank, because I realised how slim the chances are that I will ever run this opening.

Even though when I close my eyes right now I can see the technicolour, undulating trees of the Wildsea, I’m not sure when, if ever, I’ll be able to go back.

Because with Quinns Quest, my quest couldn’t be clearer: Find great TTRPGs and share them with my audience. And that's just not a journey that allows me to retrace my steps.

And as I write these very words at my wrap-around desk I’m surrounded by TTRPG books I haven’t played yet. When I designed my new desk I thought that would be inspiring. In reality it feels like being watched by a flock of carrion birds.

These fuckin' books are at head height above my monitor, they're at my back, even circling my knees; books I’ve read, books I need to read, and books I have read but if I am 100% honest with myself I need to read again.

There are designers who I am going to meet at conventions in 2025 who I know deserve a Quinns Quest review and the payday and the attention, and I just don’t know if I could hold their gaze if the reason I hadn't played their game was because on some level I'd succumbed to nostalgia.

Fuckin' nostalgia. That fetid cloud that chokes geek culture, preventing us from seeing the sunlight of new ideas.

It's nostalgia that means we all get stuck buying and playing D&D, and nostalgia that means games like The Wildsea don't sell or get made in the first place. But then what does playing The Wildsea ultimately leave me with? Another canister of nostalgia to huff like an addict, searching inside it for better days.

I'm sorry. It's just... this month marks the first anniversary of Quinns Quest, and it’s just become clear to me that this is going to be the real heartache this project. It’s going to be a long, bruising pattern of me falling head over heels in love with a TTRPG... and never being able to go back to that world.

Never being able to revisit those beloved characters, or show the game off to new people and see what story they tell with it, or to simply use everything I learned in the first campaign to take the experience to even greater heights.

Never being able to see if I can make the game really soar.

On the other hand, cry me a river, right? I know the TTRPG community is practically defined by the misery of GMs and players who can only read these books and dream about being able to play a campaign once, let alone twice. Better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all, right?

And I do still believe with all of my soul that the most rewarding way to engage with this hobby is to be constantly exploring new TTRPGs with new ideas, new fantasies and new rulesets, rather than getting stuck on one game. It makes for better GMs, better players and better campaigns.

But maybe let’s you and me be realistic. There's a reason that the most common way people play TTRPGs is to pick a game, like D&D or Blades in the Dark, and then just persist in that world forever.

And isn’t it because they’ve fallen in love?

And then by contrast, what does that make Quinns Quest?

Just one long goodbye.