My aim here is to record my thinking and progress on a collection of linked fantasy gaming projects, just for my own pleasure. If you've stumbled upon it, I hope you find something interesting buried in what is usually my longwinded ratiocination (I chose that word just to make the point!)
For a while I've wanted to return to fantasy gaming. I've always veered between fantasy and historical gaming, but for the last few years, played virtually no fantasy wargames. My family and a few friends used to be frequent GW gamers, but most of that interest declined with the death of Warhammer, changing family priorities and the seductive attractions of online gaming. I'm no longer much of an online gamer, as I exhausted most of my excitement for it in its early days (I wrote a few books on computer gaming in the 80s and 90s).
I tinkered with Frostgrave when it first appeared - liked the books and the fluff, but hardly played. Then, earlier this year I came across Rangers of Shadow Deep, and later, Oathmark, and these together breathed new life into that fantasy coma.
I tried to start small, using Oathmark as an excuse to winkle some ancient figures out from the nooks and crannies of the attic and finally get them painted. I expected my interest to flip to something else in a month or so. As usual.
However, I'm one of those whose ambitions always exceed their grasp. Three months on, I've simply become more and more interested in the fantasy ideas that Oathmark in particular has led me to or resuscitated. Hence the blog.
Here's a quick summary of the new things that have arrived in my head thanks to Joe McCullough's expert prompting, each of which gets its own page on this blog:
1) a revival of my old fantasy world, which I'm now calling "Ird" (for "Earth"). It's sometimes called "Zyr".
2) an attempt finally to paint as much as I can of old, languishing figures, of which there are quite a few
3) some exploration of ways to connect the Joe McCullough worlds
4) writing, both for the wargames press and fiction
The way I've approached this is, for these five topics, to build chains of linked pages starting from these first links, as well as using labels within the occasional posts. You can always click the link to return to the Home page if you wander further than you want, or skip to one of the other pages. You'll see below the main labels I'm starting with.
