Hunting White Whales

Happy new year and welcome back to Stargazer’s World. I finally found some time to blog again, so lo and behold my first post of 2025!

It has been a longtime tradition to make resolutions for the new year on New Year’s Eve and there’s one thing I decided to do, or rather not to do anymore: hunting white whales. For way too long there have been a few things I have been chasing for years now without ever getting any closer while at the same time frustrating me to no end. This has to stop! I am sure many GMs know this all to well and perhaps some of you may want to share your own experiences in the comments below. But let me first talk about my white whales…

The perfect system to rule them all

It’s silly, I know but for way too many years I have been looking for that one roleplaying game system which I could use to run everything. There have been times when I thought I might have found the one system I could use for everything while still being easy to play and run. At least for me, this system doesn’t seem to exist. For a time I thought FUDGE could be it, or maybe Savage Worlds, but neither of these games are the best fit for every setting or genre, nor do I always want to run games using the same mechanics. I also love to check out new games all the time, which totally contradicts this urge to find the one game to rule them all. So my resolution for 2025 is to give up on trying to find that special game in favor of just playing what’s fun at the moment.

The Great Fantasy Campaign

I guess everyone who’s ever played D&D or similar fantasy games has this dream about running an awesome, year-long fantasy campaign on par with literary epics like Game of Thrones or Lord of the Rings. The longest campaign I ever run lasted for about half a year or so. Usually my campaigns ended because life got into the way, I lost interest in the campaign or I got overwhelmed for some reason or the other. Life getting into the way unfortunately happens way too often and there’s not much you can do about it. Players are moving away, are starting families or you’re just so busy at work that you don’t have the energy to run games in the evening. Getting overwhelmed is not inevitable. Not trying to turn every game into that Great Fantasy Campaign is a good start. I think it’s way better just to play what is fun to you and your players and if everyone comes back for more, you’re on the right track. But trying to force it is recipe for disaster. So, no more planning of Great Fantasy Campaigns for me.

Perry Rhodan and Ultima as tabletop roleplaying games

There are two franchises from my youth I have a lot of warm and fuzzy feelings for: the space opera series Perry Rhodan and the classic computer roleplaying game series Ultima. I still feel a lot of nostalgia for both and both are incredibly hard to run as roleplaying games. I have written about both on this blog before and I think I’ve also described what makes these setting hard to turn into tabletop RPGs. The Perry Rhodan universe is huge and the story spans thousands (if not millions) of years. There’s more than enough material there to run countless campaigns, but the sheer size of it all makes things hard. The stakes are usually high, characters are often extremely powerful, space ships are huge (spheroid space ships with diameters of 2.5 kilometers are not as rare as one might suspect), and there’s so much lore that even its authors get stuff mixed up all the time. For years I have thought about how to make it work, and it only frustrated me. To make things even worse: most of my friends don’t even care for the setting and they are the people I want to run games for.

Things are similar with the Ultima series. I feel a lot of nostalgia for the series (especially from Ultima VI on) but most of my friends haven’t played any of the games or even heard of them. Then there’s the issue that especially the games I am most fond of just don’t work very well in a tabletop RPG setting. Because of technical limitations the Ultima world is either extremely empty or extremely small. Both seriously mess with one’s suspension of disbelief. What makes matters worse is that the shape of world changed all the time. And don’t get me started on the canon and the constant retcons. Yes, I love these games, why do you ask? During the last holiday break I invested countless hours writing an Ultima RPG, tried to find ways to solve these issues, but in the end I realized that I would never be able to be truly happy with the outcome.

Conclusion

So I’ve decided I want to keep away from hunting these white whales in the future. Only pain and frustrations lie on this road, so I shouldn’t keep following it. I think these are reasonable New Year’s resolutions. Perhaps giving up on these unreachable goals will give me the chance to pursue a few reachable ones for a change. That would be something, wouldn’t it!