Last night, I didn’t sleep much. I was too busy processing the end to the pencil and paper RPG I’ve been playing with some friends over Discord for the past year or so.

It’s not that any of us don’t want to play anymore. We’re all going to turn around and jump straight into a new game with new characters here in a week or two. But the game had reached a certain point. We’d done what the game master, my dear friend Ev, had wanted the game to do. It wasn’t that he didn’t like the characters or the setting. No, far from it, we all loved where we were and who we were in this game. But that was part of the problem: to run the game, Ev had to be at least a little detached from the characters we were playing in case one of them accidentally died. And that distance didn’t exist anymore. And the reasoning behind the game – Ev, as a social scientist, always has so many layers to what he wants to do and why he wants to do something – well, we’d kinda accomplished what he wanted to with it. We all agreed we’d reached a natural stopping point for the game.

It’s not that we couldn’t or wouldn’t have gladly run those characters until we died. We would’ve. My character – a young woodsman named Hogarth who’d become a shaman and an avatar of a dragon god, who’d fashioned himself into a magical living weapon who could do more damage with a punch than he ever could with his bow and arrow – was a chance for me to have entirely too much fun doing ill-advised things and just hoping the healer would have enough pieces of me leftover afterwards to put me back together (he usually did). I kinda love Hogarth, that goofy sunnuvabitch. But we’d helped Ev reach his goal – which I’m being purposely coy about, because it’s his business and not yours – and so we stopped.

And that was hard. We hated to end it. I hate knowing that Hogarth will go on more adventures that I won’t get to be a part of. That we may never return to this setting, these characters, ever again. It’s a lot to process. I didn’t get as invested in the characters as my fellow players did – just not in my personality to do so, I guess – but I admit to being a little sad that we’re done with that game, while I’m also looking forward to what we do next.