Bronze Blades Postmortem 2025
I’ve wrapped up my Bronze Blades campaign for the present. This is ostensibly due to availability/energy. Well, work and life are great actually, but they are liquid and flow to fill the bottom of their container.
I would like to express my gratitude to my players for bearing with me thus far. Thank you all.
The campaign is not over, but it is definitely kaput for today. In its next incarnation, I hope for something more flexible: both schedule-wise and player roster-wise for reasons I’ll describe ahead. I am considering that the session must resolve itself (the players go “back to base”), time tracking is 1:1, and players may drop in/drop out.
In the first half of the campaign, I felt the game went well. I felt able to satisfactorily prepare several games in advance with fully DIY content. I ran at the beginning of the week, so I had the prior weekend to prepare in luxury. Each game session date/time was determined by poll, which I originally felt communication-heavy and I thought this was a pain point. But I now realise it was most pragmatic: when I tried to run the game on a regular basis on the same fortnight and time, I was constantly up against work/life demands. I did have to put the game on hiatus due to project deadlines, but we returned. That did feel a bit like “strike 1” to me, though.
(OK, I did promise to run with Roll20 many times and never did. Optimistic to a fault. I’ll be honest, I dislike being tethered to a computer for D&D. I use the game as a means to relish analog life: books, notebooks, maps, drawings, writing, character sheets, pens, pencils, dice, eye contact, jokes and negotiation. In my day job, I use computers to program computers and simulate computers to design and test computers and computer software. It’s computers all the way down. Which I love! But setting up and using Roll20 just feels like more computer work - not “D&D”. So no thanks. Each day, I start work at 7:30 AM, and if I’m running online, I’m still sitting in that same seat by 12:30 AM as I’m sorting out the loot and XP. We gotta do what we gotta do, but also fuck that.)
Later, I had to switch to running on a Friday night to accommodate some players, and this coincided with a change of project pace. My prep time was crowded out by work catch-up (the work was manageable in and of itself), and the game itself was on the tail of a big week: I was done. I tried to accommodate this by running a module. This felt like a compromise and perhaps “strike 2”.
I should also note that I added a couple of extra players at around the switch to Friday night. It was challenging to onboard the new players with the details of what had gone before. I wish to decouple from the “moment by moment” passage of time where each game picks up from the last minute of the game before.
“Strike 3” was some work travel + poor health + family support + accelerated work demands. I would have been putting things on hiatus even if strikes 1 and 2 never happened, but strike 3 is strike 3.
I’m feeling good about this break since I wish to build out other adventure locales a bit deeper and revisit the “alignment mysteries” mechanic. Planet Crasis has been a blast, and it has been fun seeing what my players make of it.
– Dallas
| Date | Notes |
|---|---|
| 26 November 2025 | Initial version |
| 30 November 2025 | Clarify some points |