Presently I am in the midst of doing some major downsizing, which includes my substantial roleplaying game collection. For the last several years, most of my RPG books have been in a basement that suffers from damp, mold, and neglect, so many of the books are not necessarily in good shape to begin with.

As I was going through shelf after shelf sorting books into “keep,” “sell or donate,” and “trash,” and waffling on quite a few of the books, I was asked a question: how many RPG campaigns do you have left? The person who asked me the question, having observed only my last campaign which has lasted about eighteen months, suggested that the number was ten.

This was a bit of a shock, but then I realized that, at fifty years of age, and with each campaign lasting eighteen months, with six months in between campaigns, that ten campaigns would take me to age 70, which seems like a good goal for my gaming life (although I have fantasies about keeling over behind the GM screen on my hundredth birthday party gaming session.

Which raises the question, if I (or you, gentle reader) only have ten RPG campaigns left in your life, what would they be? I get that there are people who can be a part of two or three RPG campaigns at the same time and meet multiple times per week, but I am not that human.

So back to the question: what would the ten campaigns be? Here are my first thoughts:

• Dungeons & Dragons (or clone) I feel like this is inevitable not because I have a big yen to do yet another D&D game, or some D&D knockoff (aka “Fantasy Heartbreaker) like Pathfinder or Tales of the Valiant or an OSR clone. Rather, this is because fantasy RPG’s have become the standard RPG operating system of current times, and if I am going to find a group with which to game, it will likely be in this genre.

• Superheroes This is much more in the “want” category. I would love to find a group that has a shared notion of what I love about superhero stories and can invest themselves in a superhero universe. I am not sold on a particular system, just the idea of what I think of as a classic superhero story.
• Science fiction Specifically a harder science fiction than a science fantasy kind of story. As was recently pointed out to me (by Stacy Abrams, on a podcast no less) the Star Wars story can literally be dropped into any genre (and has), but a real science fiction story, like Star Trek, can not. So a real science fiction story, not just magic swords in space.
• Horror I think by the definition of the genre most horror campaigns are fairly short, failing that they devolve into monster-hunting fantasy. I include this genre mostly because I have never experienced it; horror is such a hard genre to pull off in RPG’s (see the classic book by ICE Publishing Nightmares of Mine for a thorough exploration of why that is the case).

Four options seems like a good start. There’s bound to be some repeating genres in there along the way. But contemplating my mortality, and the finite aspect of my creative life, has been a bit of a sobering, thought-provoking process. Probably better than some other questions out there (I’m looking at you, RPGaDay…)