A beginning (of sorts)

Here will be the receptacle into which I pour my ideas about gaming, illustration, aesthetics and various miscellany. I'm tentative about making the first steps, a few things need to be put in place before everthing can flow naturally and smoothly towards its destination, however, some steps need to be made.

So...

This is going to be a blog wherein I chart the development of a campaign setting/megadungeon for Labyrinth Lord called the Middenmurk. Middenmurk is a word I came up with many years ago when I was a teenager as part of a rambling, incoherent and poorly documented world-building project. I cannot remember the particular phase of my life-long process of idly dreaming up fantasy worlds to which the Middenmurk began. I can, however remember that it was the Mordor of the setting, the realm of deadly doom and darkness. I intend to build on this trope, drawing from various mythic underworlds to make a setting that is not only playable and fun, but, most importantly, puts into a concrete and playable form some of the ideas that have been floating around in my head since about 1987.

Another significant strand of this project is the illustration component. I am going to produce a product entirely illustrated by me. I have been drawing for precisely the same amount of time I have been interested in fantasy, and have spent too many years of my life studying art and trying to be an artist when what I should have been pursuing was illustration. While I was at art school, drawing monsters was considered kitsch and immature, and ,being shy as I am, I avoided delving into the delicious depths of fantasy illustration. Art school taught me a lot of things, the most important of which is the overused and terribly dorky "be true to yourself". I'm going to enjoy the process of drawing monsters and heroes, I think I am capable of turning my capacity for imagining the grotesque into a revenue stream. This blog is a step in that direction.

Finally, the Old School Renaissance is a community of people with an attitude and an aesthetic that I can really appreciate. Like a coffee-shop full of jazz mavericks, the community is rich and enthusiastic and incomprehensible at times.

I've found a bandwagon onto which I can jump. It's nice to have made a start.