Mykenia: A New Fantasy

Last night I began something which has been a huge amount of fun and a real trip back towards what it means for me to be a Games Master. In short, I began to design and map my own fantasy world.

While it’s tempting to roll your eyes and sigh, this project is something larger and more adventurous than anything I have attempted in the last 30 years. In fact the last time I did something even close to this was when I was around 14 years old.

And, boy, have I been having some fun!

Overnight, I sketched and coloured, outlining a huge continent. I’ve added continental barriers, a huge inland sea, numerous rivers, and imagined the stretch of the hemisphere’s climate. In the end, I have created the World of Mykenia and it has grabbed my imagination fully in the creation.

The eight sector map of Mykenia.

Going Old School

Mykenia has grown from the confluence of three different influences over the past couple of weeks. One was a game idea shared from a friend; the second was a growing desire to build something Hargravian; the third was starting to read my Castle Oldskull library.

For a long time, I’ve been experimenting with Old School fantasy gaming. At least one of my friends has dismissed this as nostalgia, as though that was something both bad and unnecessary. It began with going back to Red Box Dungeons & Dragons, developed through my enjoyment of Mythras Classic Fantasy, and has recently matured as I read and digested the excellent, “Playing At The World” by Jon Peterson.

Last weekend, a friend mentioned that he was beginning to do some writing which was a fresh take on Old School themes. A confluence of ideas and desires was set loose as I imagined what I might do with this once it was completed. On top of that, reading extensively from my library of positive psychology, the simple idea of adding more of the small things that you enjoy percolated to the surface of my consciousness: “I like imagining fantastic realms”.

Being a Games Master, I enjoy creating places and cool things for gaming. That thought – “I like imagining fantastic realms” – resonated strongly. I was picturing images of a Hargravian melange of the wondrous when someone on G+ casually mentioned the “Castle Oldskull” stuff. It was like an explosion in my mind!

Enter Castle Oldskull

For those of you have not discovered Kent David Kelly’s writings, Castle Oldskull is a line of roleplaying products designed to provide you with a lot of random tables and useful inspiration. The particular book that has grabbed my attention this weekend has been the “Game World Generator“.

I wasn’t sure I’d like the Castle Oldskull stuff. To be honest, I am not entirely sure I like the stuff now. Yet, I am using it and experiencing some fantastically amusing times! The rational part of my mind, the bit that has for so long been deployed to keep my gaming logical and simulating realistic worlds, hates Castle Oldskull: it’s too weird and mixed up, messy and random. It’ll never work!

And yet… the intuitive and elastic part of my mind, the bit that inspires wild dreams and fantastic ideas which has been for too long suppressed, is loving it! Castle Oldskull’s Game World Generator has, in a matter of twelve hours, taken me from the vaguest desire to build a fantasy realm to having a complete 2.6 million square miles of map to go explore! I’m ready to zoom in on one small area of that world and go to town!

In short, I’m ready to build a starting local map and think about the first few adventures.

Unknown Destination

I don’t know where this project will lead me. And I don’t really care, to be honest. It’s the doing and the creating that’s the delight!

For many years, every time I sit down to prepare for a game it has been on the terms of the players at the table. This is, by the way, not a bad thing at all – it’s the usual way for most Games Masters, I have little doubt. Some part of every GM’s role is to deliver what the player’s want or expect.

That being said, starting a fantasy realm for my own personal pleasure has been a liberating experience. The energy released has been a massive leap further than anything I have played with before. It’s another step forward in my creative thinking which was unlocked by Mystamyr and nurtured through writing three game modules for Classic Fantasy.

It’s hard to articulate the joy of creation. Maybe it’ll be short-lived and be but a blip in my gaming career… but I hope that there’s more mileage to come from the effort. All along, I’ve been telling myself this is a project for my own private consumption… a setting for my solo play, perhaps. And yet, the more I create… well, the more I want to share it and experience it with others.

In truth, it doesn’t matter.

I’ve discovered the power of letting my creative intuition loose in my gaming hobby. Years of bottling up the craziness has overflowed onto eight A4 pages of hex paper. Along with that I have oozed out the beginnings of notes on 46 separate realms, each demanding multiple maps and many words to be spilled.

All of it has arisen from letting myself create.

Going back to my formative experiences of roleplaying, yes – that it nostalgia. But that’s no bad thing, as the psychologists will tell you. Adding the things I love from David Hargrave’s Arduin, or Gygax’s Greyhawk, or Arneson’s Blackmoor, or Mystara, or wherever… that’s all part of letting my inner child come out and play.

I’m not sure where this might lead. It might be a dead end or it might be the beginning of a grand adventure. In the end, the only way to find out is to take the journey.

Game on!