National Campaign Creation Month

Greyhawk Grognard

Have I ever told you how much I love Greyhawk Grognard? Well, yes I have. From his incredible and expansive Greyhawk knowledge, to his creation of the amazing Adventures Dark & Deep, probably the closest AD&D could have been variant ever written. I just really like his work. I also admire his endurance in the blogosphere, the quality of his posts, and his ability to finish the projects he starts. 

Recently in my email in box the most recent post of GG popped up. He had posted the first back of the envelope scribblings of a campaign he was designing. Not really knowing what he was doing exactly--GG is a long time Greyhawk DM, as in it's the primary campaign he runs--I read through the entry. I was immediately smitten. The very old school way of doing what he was doing, and the clear window into the design process was not only revealing it struck a chord in my heart. Since I design almost exactly like he does in this early stage I felt an immediate affinity for what he was doing. So often in today's gaming world one can feel incapable of tackling the job of such work as campaign design, adventure design, world building and heck even character creation when so much of the industry represents only its finished products.

We have become so sensitive to "inferior" production values that few designers ever get out of the gate. And here we have a GM who is a recognized, published game designer and writer of products with high production values, showing us inside what we essentially have been doing in this hobby since before 1975. I was enchanted.

Not to mention the campaign shows enough cool seed ideas to peak even the most jaded players' "that would be cool" spots. The thing is, I have notebooks jammed with ideas just like this, but most if not all are "unfinished" in one form or another. I, unlike GG, do not have the same finisher ethic. Which is why, when I finished reading through the email and stopped by his blog I was excited even further.

I'm slow at getting news, but evidently there was a website that had sought to copy NaNoWriMo's success but in game design. Nation Game Design Month aka NaGaDeMon (is that a cool name or what?) appears to be defunct this year sadly. However, GG had participated back in 2011 and been successful at producing a rather neat wargame. That alone was enough to excite me, since I've been secretly working on a game concept in my underground lab for months now. Unfortuantely, I can't say any more about that--don;t worry, I won't finish it ... But what GG has done is take that same spirit and created NaCaCrMo! Yeah, not as cool of a name, but wth. Nation Campaign Creation Month is what GG is informally calling his efforts this November and yesterday's post was his first efforts in that vein. Is that cool or what?!

Now, I have already started my seed idea for NaNoWriMo, I'm growing out my moustache for Movember, I'm trying to finish my game for NaGaDeMon, I'm celebrating National Native American Heritage at my largely tribal school and now I'm designing a new campaign for NaCaCrMo! Let the festivities begin! I think I'm going to ask for my two week vacation this month ...