An Ominous Wind Blows - You Seek Shelter From The Threatening Storm. You See Ahead, In The Forest...

Well.  There it is.  This project has been an ongoing labor of aspiration, love & foolishness.  Among all the follies man is subject to - running a game must be the most pernicious.  

My prior experiences in being a creator (of sorts) have prepared me a little, just a little, for the work I decided to set out to accomplish here, though the effort has never been quite as reasonable as it ought to be.  Unreason.  That's the territory - the High Country - where we think deeply and for long about things like Our Purpose, Our Goals, Our Dreams.  So how did it come to this?

I was more or less destitute - to the point of having a roommate long past the point where you'd reasonably expect an adult man in late-capitalism to have a roommate.  We gamed.  Him and me, and our friends who'd come over just as often as we could get them to.  We gamed a lot.  Now Roommate, a good guy - a player.  A maker.  He says to me - complaining about his day in the healthcare industry at me, who's simultaneously none too keen on my work in the legal field.  "Boss was at me and said - 'well if you don't want to do this what do you want to do?'"

"What did you tell him?"

"I told him I'd make a game design company and make games all day."

And I thought.  Well that's not bad.  I never got the sense that I'd be quitting my job to pursue this hobby, this dream.  But I never got the sense that I wouldn't, if I could.  So, like anyone who wants to win the lottery I bought myself a ticket.  In this case - I made some books.  I keep making these books.  

The Game of the North is a project that comes from a place of hope & dreams, of magical thinking & abiding passion.  The stories we tell in this hobby of ours - this Thing That We Do Together - these are worth effort, worth time, worth a little sacrifice.  Because they're stories & stories are the ever-expanding frontier.  The boundless horizon of what could be and what might be and what can never be.  We, us, Who Do This Thing That We Do Together - we're pioneers.  In my estimation - pioneers of the unexplorable country of the imagination.  Off forever, limitless we decide how it will be and how to get there and what can and can't happen in the billion, billion unseen worlds that We All Make Together.  

You like stories, I like stories, You have this hobby, I have this hobby.  Maybe I've taken it a little farther than is reasonable, maybe I'm committed to making two books a month, a monster a week, two or three worlds a year - maybe I have more games in me that are waiting to be written down, bound and offered up.  Maybe.  But this is the work of a person, alone.  The Thing We Do, We Do Together.  And that makes all the difference.

This is my preface, my statement of mission & intention.  I expect to use this place to speak about the work of game-making, of running tables & as commentary on what I know & think about This Thing Of Ours.