Guts and Iron and Ideas That Don't Work Out

Back in October, I shared an image from one of my first attempts at a game called “Guts and Iron.” This (admittedly very faint) image is an early pencil sketch from that game. The art ultimately didn’t work (neither did the game) for some pretty straightforward reasons, but there are also the embers of something here. Keeping those embers burning until the idea for Far Away Land caught fire in my imagination took time and effort. And that’s really all this post is about: “Guts and Iron” didn’t work, but that is totally okay because very few ideas worth anything are easily made into reality. In some ways, I think that’s true when you play an RPG, too. The effort to shed the world around you for something new, to leave everything else behind and escape to somewhere far away, doesn’t come naturally at first. Sometimes it’s because you haven’t built that muscle yet. Sometimes it's because the world we all live in can be pretty relentless. But as long as the ember burns, your imagination can still catch fire.