I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.

Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time

I’ve been working with the World of Eezoes folx for a couple years now, trying to make a roleplaying game to pair with their amazing creatures and art. Our arbitrary deadlines just kinda whizzed by because there was always something higher priority that needed to be done first. And before we knew it, 3 years had passed.

During those three years, I had done all this:

• Made a D&D 5e compatible module…
  • But then WotC WotC’d.
• Made a Powered by the Apocalypse version…
  • But I couldn’t get my kid to wrap his head around it. The source material begs for the game to be family friendly.
• Made a No Thank You, Evil version…
  • But I couldn’t get around how much the system wanted to advocate violence. That is antithetical to the spirit of the source material.
• Made a Kids on Bikes version…
  • But my kid couldn’t wrap his head around that either.

None of these systems are bad. I love them all for different reasons. But they didn’t fit my vision for this game. So I sat on it.

And sat on it.

Aaaaaaand sat on it.

I’d make tweaks, eventually creating three completely different versions that all sorta worked. But nothing that I could hand someone and say “Here, try this.” But without a non-arbitrary deadline, they stagnated. That’s why, when one of our cohorts said she was going to GenCon and she was bringing the Eezoe stuff to show to EVERYONE. And thusly, my butt needed to get in gear. Within two weeks I went from “which word doc had the right version?” and scattered sticky notes.

I read the rules so many times that the words all lost meaning. Since I find it easier to edit on paper there are printed copies all over my dining room table. I called in favors to get proofreaders. Every waking moment was trying to get it into our friend’s hands before she left.

When I got home, I felt a huge wave of relief. And then I made the mistake of looking at one of the copies I had printed that morning. After four more revisions, I had finished the ashcan version.

Too bad GenCon had already started.