I'm curious as to what the rest of you think.
For the past couple of years, I thought interest was climbing. The In Her Majesty's Name rules surely seemed to have injected some life into the genre. But it seems to me that perhaps we have reached the summit of interest, and other genres of gaming are replacing VSF. Much the same thing happened with pirate and zombie gaming in the past, so the historical precedent is absolutely clear.
I know that I am spending less time working on VSF projects. Part of that is because I feel very much as if my creative juices have been wrung dry in this genre. Note, if you will, the failure to produce even a single issue of The Aethergraph this year as an example. I have had a few submissions from other writers and artists over the past issues, but the majority of the content has always been my own. Partly this is a result of having a bit more work to do this past year with my new job and then the change in texts and so on, but mainly - I'm just not producing much.
Maybe it is this failure to produce that has me pessimistic today. Maybe it's just the end of a year and the start of a new that has produced this melancholy.
I gamed only a bit in VSF this year. Perhaps two or three small Dystopian Wars actions, and a couple of IHMN skirmishes. That's about it. I did paint the Bobbies, and put together (as you most recently saw) one structure. So a bit of project progress, I suppose. A couple of small vehicles half completed (one Martian, one Maton). A couple of large creatures for Doctor Vardu's yet-to-be-seen forces painted. I suppose I could stat them up for IHMN and field a small Varduvian force, just to get them on a table.
