I’ve been thinking about Dungeons & Dragons lately: specifically, the period in the mid-1980s when I was most obsessed with the game. (This is a periodic thing for me: I don’t play anymore, but once or twice a year I get the itch to relive past glories.) I’ve been reading some of the adventure modules and other materials from that era, and one thing I remember is how much time I spent as a kid just reading those same books, poring over the pictures and the endless statistics and rules (well, the rules I mostly skimmed) and regretting that I didn’t get enough serious playing in. I felt like I was missing out. I’ve since heard from many D&D fans who in fact never played the game at all, either because they didn’t have friends who were interested, or they weren’t allowed to play by strict parents, or they just didn’t have enough free time.

I am certainly familiar with the daily ritual of examining gaming materials that would never see a round of melee combat, but my situation was a bit different: in those days, the writers at Dragon and Polyhedron (and, I dunno, White Dwarf I guess) put an awful lot of emphasis on the importance of developing your campaign. “Campaign” was the word for the ongoing game over the long haul, and in particular the interconnected skein of events, personalities, and long-term goals that transformed a series of disconnected sessions and small-stakes adventures into a sweeping epic like The Lord of the Rings or The Chronicles of Amber. A properly developed campaign was, it was hoped, the stuff of legends, the kind of immersive collaborative storytelling that years later would make players wistful as they recalled together, “Do you remember that night in Shanar, the one with the Halfling assassin?” “Ah, yes, I remember it well.” Sighs of contented reminiscence all around. It’s no wonder that the word campaign itself was borrowed from military jargon by way of wargaming: were not a group of players bonded together over time and shared experience in a manner akin to veteran soldiers?

Equally important, at least in the pages of Dragon, was your campaign world. It was fine to play in the World of Greyhawk, the default setting of most of the early published adventure modules (replaced later on by The Forgotten Realms and a number of other prefab settings), but it was assumed that you would only be satisfied with that for so long, and that at best such supplements were to serve as a springboard for your own Great Work, the Magnum Opus of any Dungeon Master: your own individual campaign world, one that you created, and sown with seeds for adventure derived from the unique geography, history, and culture(s) that you came up with. It all sounded very compelling, and just as importantly designing your own world from scratch gave you something to do during that time when you weren’t playing but you were leafing through the rulebooks anyway.

In middle school, I had a lot to learn about worldbuilding, Dungeon Mastering, and storytelling, but that’s not the point of this. No, the main thing I remember about my campaign, set in the world of Ix-Nay, was how it got harder and harder to get all four (and later three) players, including myself, together, until finally we were playing maybe once a year. No wonder Ix-Nay never had the breath of life in it! In roleplaying games, a setting isn’t really a world until it has been set in motion and players have been given a chance to explore it. So I felt that I was missing a key experience in any serious gamer’s career (and as you can tell, I took this calling very seriously indeed).

But here’s the thing: even though my campaign with my custom-made world and handpicked players withered on the vine, in retrospect I played D&D quite a lot. There would be random pick-up games with kids who would come and go, most of these sessions one-shots with characters who were never seen again. There was even a Dungeons & Dragons club at my middle school, held in the art teacher’s room. Sometimes I was the DM and sometimes the player. Sometimes you would be playing with people you didn’t even particularly like. The game experiences I had ranged from total party kills at the hands of rigorous (to a fault) DMs who had strong ideas about the integrity of the game, to freeform fantasies that included guest stars like Bon Jovi. I have a lot of memories of playing D&D (or the mutated offshoots of it we came up with ourselves). Yet at the time, snob that I was, I didn’t think those games “counted” because they weren’t part of my campaign. They were, at best, pre-season or exhibition games (to use the parlance of sports with which I was hardly conversant at the time).

It wasn’t until much later that I renewed my acquaintance with the Devil’s game from the player’s side and experienced some truly excellent Dungeon Mastering. I learned that developing a campaign is a two-way street, built upon the contributions of both Dungeon Master and players, and most of it all it requires regular care and feeding with weekly or biweekly sessions (ultimately I just didn’t have time for that kind of commitment, but I kept it up for a few years). Perhaps that helped put my youthful gaming in perspective: I could stop beating myself up about my “failed” campaign and embrace the fun and growth I had experienced in the “unofficial” side quests. They really hadn’t been so different.

All of which brings me to the changes I’ve gone through in the last year and how that has been reflected in this blog. This weekend marked four years since I began Medleyana, and as I always do at this time of year it’s time to set down a few thoughts about what I’ve done with it and where it’s going. I’ll be the first to admit that writing hasn’t always been the first thing on my mind this year: my work as a musician and teacher has kept me busy, and even “free time” doesn’t always equate to writing time if I really just need to recharge my batteries. (I won’t deny that the dreadful state of our politics has gotten me down as well.) I’ve also noticed that the majority of my blog posts have become reviews: it’s much easier to get the words flowing in response to a movie or a book or comic, and it makes it easier to stop when you reach the end of that topic, as opposed to the open-ended ruminations that Medleyana started out as.

At the same time, however, when I look back at the past year, I’ve actually done a fair amount of writing. Although there were some gaps in posting, I’ve averaged about two entries a month, and I can be proud of what I’ve written (revisiting my first year, it strikes me that many posts were filler, born of self-imposed deadlines). Among other things, I also completed the draft of a novel earlier this summer, an undertaking of at least the last four years or so (another one of those “small” projects that grew bigger as I went); it’s still in need of complete rewriting before it will be fit for any kind of public consumption, but being able to write THE END on it, even in the state it’s in, has been a real relief, and is perhaps one reason I can look at what I’ve published this year and be okay with it.

Ultimately, just as I learned when playing D&D, there is little difference between what I see as my “real” work and what I produce in the mean time: it’s all part of the process, and it takes just as much focus to write a good blog post as it does to complete a novel, the only difference being the length and the relative challenge of sustaining that focus over the long haul: the difference between a one-off adventure and a campaign, if you will.