First the backstory: in July '24, a friend was visiting and saw my old AD&D books on the shelf and very vaguely indicated a desire that we should get a game going... For whatever reason I didn't take the comment seriously at the time, but in early December '24 I hit him with a counter-offer—if he wasn't dead-set on fantasy RPG'ing, would he be interested in trying out the sci-fi sibling instead...? [take note, this was mistake #1 in my 'failure to find an audience'] He was agreeable, and I told him to give me some time to build a document that would serve as introduction/invitation to the game. Once I finished, I would send it to him and anyone else we could think of who might be interested, and, if there was interest generated, we would get a game going!
So I pulled my SF books off the shelf for the first time since high school and dug in. Solo. [I found Frontier Explorer and Star Frontiersman and this site and a couple others well into my project—I am always out of sync, always in the wrong room, always show up when there's nothing left but ruins] It was a fantastic distraction from depression and feeling sick all the time, and I read all kinds of stuff about how a preying mantis' eyes work and how some neutron stars are magnetars and how acceleration makes artificial gravity, and discovered that I like SF a hell of a lot more NOW than I did when those books were brand new (despite some of the flaws I see in it now that I was oblivious to then). I tinkered and twisted and LIVED in that universe for about a month—that's about a page per day of my intro doc—and couldn't wait to get into this thing. I finished the doc and then made six audio files to go with it (one for each of the five species and one for The Frontier) that I refered to as 'audio puppet shows'... kind of atmospheric tone poems that were supposed to set a mood... [these I'm calling mistakes #2-7... I enjoyed the hell out of them, maybe no one else can. They're long (8-10 minutes each) and made of layered songs/sounds, sometimes as many as five songs playing at once, but DAMN they did EXACTLY what I wanted them to do. The Sathar one was so good at telling the story—if you can interpret the pieces—that I was worried it was going to spoil elements I didn't want the players to be aware of! Mistake #8: no one is on my wavelength]
Anyway, sent links to all the stuff out prepared for only a few hits and mostly polite declines and got...NOTHING. Dead air. Blank stares while crickets chirp and off in the distance you can hear a dog bark. No questions, comments, criticism, OR compliments. Nothing at all. So I guess we can gauge that interest level at about a 0.0. <cringe>
Mistake #9: totally mis-reading my audience? Or the quality of the product? Both? I don't know. It's disappointing though...I had really hoped to have an excuse to spend more time in that universe; I wasn't done there by a long shot. And I had really hoped I would get a chance to explain some of this stuff... So here's my message in a bottle. Hopefully somebody will find this and get some enjoyment from it. I'll post some notes in the forum section about what/why I did and maybe a little about what I had planned if this thing had launched. :(
