role-playing games – Nathan Ryder

February already?

The run up to Christmas and the New Year was busy in our house, and then it was straight back into work. Except that work was not the way that it is regularly. I’m trying to add to my business, or rather my outputs, by being a publisher of role-playing games and materials. Unpacking that is a post for another day, but I found myself working on that business a lot in the quiet days of January – when universities are less likely to hire a skills trainer for workshops and the like – but also feeling secretly like that was something I wasn’t supposed to be doing.

I earn a living and support my family by doing workshops (and sometimes selling books!), not from games. It felt wrong to spend my time on those things. And yet I wanted to be working on making zines, developing games, commissioning artwork and laying out text. So what was wrong?

Summer Experiments Revisited

Just over two months ago I wrote a post where I talked about my plans for the summer. I would be blogging less, and on different things, and I’d be doing that because I had a writing project that I was super keen on! I was going to change the world! I was young, the world was good and nothing was going to get in my way!

Ahem.

Well, what actually happened was I went on holiday for a week, came back, looked at what I was writing and fell head over heels out of love with it. I thought that the writing itself was alright, but I wasn’t sold on the overall project any more. It didn’t sing to me. And similarly for the alternative blogging that I was thinking of doing on here, I just didn’t have the heart for it any more. I liked the concept, but wasn’t sure about where the execution of it was going. I guess, maybe it didn’t need to be going anywhere in particular, but still I just wasn’t feeling it.

So I did something completely different: I started a role-playing game business.