Retiring Night of Swords

There are some projects that serve more as growing pains than actually good work. I think all artists (I use artist as a pejorative term when referencing myself) experience this phenomenon. It can be frustrating, especially with more recent work, to commit so much time to a project, go in with the best intentions, and then look back at the result three years later with contempt. I think that's why Stephen King recommends locking your finished manuscript in a desk for six months immediately after writing it before you start editing. Some things are too close, too fast.



Night of Swords was an independent study my really nice professor let me write for a whopping four credits. It's an rpg - my first experiment with hacking Apocalypse World and also the first rpg I had attempted in years. "I know how to write these things!" sophmore-me thought. I didn't know.

Today I redacted Night of Swords from my itch.io site in embarrassment. The writing is bad; the how to play sections sound condescending if not hackey. The rules are a blender of disparate ideas that don't serve the fiction. Some of the rules manage to offend my sensibilities at the core. The only redeeming aspect of the game was the experience I had playing it with my friends. NOS was their (unfortunately) first ever roleplaying game, but we had a wonderful time connecting over the story despite my sloppiness.

Sometimes it's good to let old ideas die, even the ones you really wanted to make work. Those ideas can resurface when you least expect it to become something greater. I'd love to revisit the demon-filled undercities of NOS sometime soon, start again from scratch, who knows. Until then I'll have to remain comfortable in the notion that at least these past three years have been milestones of artistic improvement, and not degeneration.