Welcome to a long time ago in a land far away. 

    Well, maybe not so far if you happen to be in Wales or Cornwall, or even Scotland or the Isle of Man, right now. As I have never been to the land of my ancestors, it seems so very far away to me. 

    And yet, it feels so near, like the crashing of a wave. Or a flower in the field. Dougie MacLean (yes, I know he's Scottish!!) completely nailed the feeling of longing or remembrance of a place you’ve never been.

Yes, this place is endless thin. 

This feeling has a name: hiraeth. Appropriately enough, it’s a word of Welsh origin and describes the motivation for this blog. I have participated in table top games since I was a wee lad and so many of the games hinted at adventure and discovery…yet always remained trapped in the paradigm of hired hit men or grave robbers.

 One game really stood apart: Runequest! Such an intricate system absolutely wed to the world of Glorantha. A beautifully constructed mythic place that would always remain alien and would never be home. The ability to create a shared story, though, that would be engaging and thrilling and not require one commit all seven deadly sins to progress…something more was needed.

 

         

 It seemed that the system should lend itself to the ancient world of Earth and an early iteration involved the Roman occupied world of Asterix the Gaul. While the feel of the game was not quite what I wanted, Katherine and Maggie talked about the game for years…and kept pushing just a bit for me to run it again.

 

    The problem was the world of Roman occupied Gaul was already too…old. I needed a younger world where magic could still be innocent, the gods like those described by C.S. Lewis in That Hideous Strength. I needed a world before the oracles failed. And before they became soaked in blood as described by St. Augustine in City of God. 

I needed a world that was before Arthur and Merlin...

...a world when the Green Knight went by a different name.

 

An answer was to be found on page 5 of the original Runequest rules: the Bronze Age. I had not looked far enough back into history to find a mythic time of magic and heroes! Plenty of contenders for regions to set up a campaign…Sumer, Babylon, Xi’An…

 

    

But I want happiness and joy! When I looked to the fae folk of different cultures, I was struck by the uniqueness of the Tylweth Teg of Wales. These creatures, unlike the Tuatha De Danann, were generally happy and helpful. The idea began to take shape around the country of my ancestors. As I looked into the historical Bronze Age Wales, I discovered that there was a transition of Neolithic peoples to the Bronze Age Bell Beaker civilization beginning around 2000 B.C. 

Barrows of Ogres might be a nasty, nasty place  

What the historical record does not reveal, however, is that the Neolithic peoples were actually…ogres…and they did not survive the transition to the Bronze Age.

It has been 2000 years since Man came out from the Sea. The Age of Arrival has ended. The Age of Man beginning portends the shattering of the Cosmic Wheel and sundering of the Axis Mundi at the end of this age. Two thousand years is a long time…unless you are an elf…or a dragon…

 Welcome to Cymru!