I've recently had a fairly rude awakening. The upshot is that the work game will indeed be coming to an end with the current campaign, regardless of any other considerations. There may, just possibly, be scope for setting up a new game with some (or even all) of the same people, but it needs to be strictly decoupled from work.
The upshot of all of that is that any nebulous plans I may have had for a Spelljammer mini-campaign next have been cancelled.
The party are currently midway through part three of "Isles of Dread", and are making rapid progress. Meanwhile I've become bogged down again in the writing of part four. There is very little chance I'll make meaningful progress on that over the next few months, and yet that progress is urgently needed to bring the campaign to a successful conclusion.
As the title says, the race is on!
One funny thing I've noticed about every version of the "Star Wars" RPG that I've read (which is all the d6 and d20 versions, but not the FFG ones): they all say that Ewoks are first discovered around the time of the Battle of Endor.
But that's not so.
In "Return of the Jedi", C-3P0 already speaks the language of the Ewoks. True, he notes that it is "a very primitive dialect", but still that means that at some point someone had sufficient contact with the Ewoks to bother placing the details of the language into a droid's translation circuits.
Most likely, that means that there are other colonies of Ewoks, potentially much more integrated colonies of Ewoks, somewhere out there in the galaxy. Or, of course, the Ewoks on Endor could be the last remnant left over from some horrific Sith atrocity from one of the earlier wars in the galaxy, one so long ago that they have been entirely forgotten.
Which would, of course, make it even more tragic when the Rebels' destruction of the second Death Star unleashes ecological devastation on their last remaining homeland.
I suddenly find myself thinking that I'd quite like to try out the upper levels of 5e play. Now, the reality is that I'll never get to play those organically, as I just don't have the time or patience for a multi-multi-year campaign to get there, so it would need to be something designed from the outset for higher level PCs.
I'm currently thinking of a concept where the PCs are each top-tier heroes in their own settings who are pulled together by a mysterious patron to explore some obscure corner of the multiverse. Actually, my initial concept has them as servants of no less a figure than Vecna, the god of evil secrets (and also of the Eye and Hand, and indeed "Stranger Things", fame). In which case, their interest would presumably be in some secret that even the gods are not meant to know.
Which works remarkably well - one of the more interesting bits of obscure 3e lore is that the Bastion of Unborn Souls is literally unknown even to the gods, so it's entirely reasonable to posit that there could be other such secrets. And, of course, if there is a secret redoubt of such antiquity that even gods don't know about it, who can tell what dangers it could hold?
And there's another thought... what if it was a Spelljammer adventure, thus killing two birds with one stone...
I should stress at the outset that this isn't an original thought. But very few are, so here it is.
Back in the day, I was a fan of psionics, but in 3e that was a whole new subsystem that had some mental load associated with it. And so one of my policies very often was to offer psionics as an option at the start of the campaign, but if nobody took one of those options then it would be removed from play - there would be no opportunity to take any psionics stuff later. (If someone did take a psionics option, any psionics option, that opened the entire toolbox for everyone from that point onwards.)
Of course, that same option could be applied to everything. And, write large, it can be readily used by the DM for world-building - if one of the PCs is a dwarf then the species and all of their trappings can be added to the world, the clans, the underground kingdoms, and so on and so forth. But if none is, those elements can be omitted to make room for something else.
In theory, that still leaves a nicely diverse world - you potentially have four major species (plus any monster types you want), you probably have arcane and divine magic in some form, and so on. It's just that the world only contains those things that the players have, through their choices, indicated that they are interested in exploring.
The only downside is that the DM can only do limited world-building before kicking off the campaign, since he doesn't know which options the players will select. But that's not necessarily the worst thing, either.
Two years ago I received a belated birthday present of a cardboard 'puzzle' (model) of King's Landing. Over the past few months I have been constructing it, on and off, and finally completed it this morning. It has now taken pride of place in our loft, in lieu of a better place to put it.
But the exercise did give rise to an interesting lesson. The city itself was rather straightforward to construct, involving the assembly of two key buildings and then the addition of several houses. Those houses were of three fixed constructions, but by mixing and matching the details and then scattering the three types you got a more potent effect than they really deserved.
Which, of course, has all sorts of applications to D&D, and especially to map building: pick some key items to really stand out and apply the attention there, and then make up the rest with stock elements that you can mix and match, and adjust the details of, to suit.
Today's game was great fun - the party completed their explorations of a downed mind flayer Nautiloid, and after defeating the pilot they proceeded to loot the place. Amongst the treasure was the puissant servitor - a semi-sentient graft that could be attached to a severed arm or wrist to provide a replacement limb.
This then provoked extensive discussions over whether a given character would remove his own limb in order to gain the powers granted by this item. Several other characters offered to help (or 'help'), offering a wide variety of potential options for the approach taken. Cue several minutes of hilarity as the situation played out.
Which all served as a very timely reminder - it is for situations like that that we game. Nothing else can replicate them.
