"Chicago by Night, Where there is Smoke..." wrapped up in January of 2005. As I started to review old entries to post into this collection, I noticed that my efforts towards fiction had dropped off considerably by then, coinciding roughly with the birth of my daughter. My participation in table top RPG's died off for a while as I focused on my little one and starting a new business.
By the end of 2005 things had settled down enough that I allowed my friends to talk me into running another regular campaign. We started "Forgotten Future," a Traveller chronicle, in the winter. I also started to participate in regular, ongoing LARP's, something I had avoided until then. By fall of 2006, Jenn and I started our own World of Darkness LARP, the experimental and mildly successful "The Essentials."
Combined with stresses on in my personal and professional life, the additional pressures of running multiple, popular games caused a massive flame out in March of 2007. For a few months I lost all interest in gaming and sold off huge chucks of my collection of RPG books. I would not get interested in gaming again until attending GenCon in August of 2007. After that event, I re-discovered RP in the form of MMO's and eventually started running regular table-top games again. As of May, 2010, I still don't play games set in The World of Darkness.
OK, so where's the stuff?
"Forgotten Future," "The Essentials," and other games I participated in during 2005, 2006, and 2007 generated a lot of fiction. I very fondly remember a character submission I wrote for the LARP "Empires Rising," one of the best character "sketches" I ever wrote. By April 2007, however, I felt myself completely spent. I couldn't really think of a time when I'd want to get back into gaming again. In a fit of drunken melancholy, I permanently deleted all the files I had created, the stories and write ups I had written since I first started gaming. The Chicago by Night files were spared, safe on our webserver.
The moral of the story kids? Don't drink and delete.
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