It is said that King Lycaon himself, father of wolves, still lives somewhere, in the deepest, darkest dens of the forest.Įlsewhere, Arcadia is not entirely abandoned. These werewolves feed on the unwary and the lost. In its wilder regions, the Sons of Lycaon wander the deep forests, wolves by night and men by day. Now they twist and turn, choking the life out of the land. The bowers and arbours are overgrown with the thick, fibrous vines that once yielded up the grapes that Bacchus used to make his celestial wines, drunk with joyous abandon in every nook and corner. Its bathing pools and lily gilded ponds are filled with rot and decay. The babbling brooks and streams have long since dried up, nothing sleeps in their beds now but desiccated earth and bleached bones. Ancient trees, long untended, clog the forest trails, roots rise up from the ground to topple the statues, fountains and sundials, cracking open the conservatories and summer houses. Silence reigns over the weed infested garden walkways. Everywhere life blossomed with joyous abandon.īut Pan plays his pipes no more, Diana hunts not in the deep forests-green, dryads and nymphs dance no longer in dappled moonlit glades to the music of the spheres. Even mortals, those chosen of the gods, attended the revels. Satyrs and centaurs gambolled in the sunlit groves, druids and sprites tended to the trees and flowers. Ares, lord of war, rested here after bloody battle, and Ceres sowed her seeds of plenty in its lush farmland. Hera plotted vengeance against her husband, Zeus in dusky glades, Aphrodite seduced many a mortal, even a god or two, in its sweet smelling bowers, lovers embraced in candle-lit forested walkways. Once they walked its sylvan paths, sipping ambrosia, plucking the golden apples of immortality, drinking the wines of Bacchus, and filling the elysian groves with their laughter. Fans of the Dirk Lloyd books will appreciate Jamie's distinctive authorial voice at work here:Īrcadia, the garden of the Olympians. And in creating a world I'd always go for Tolkien's goal of a full subcreation. Greek and Roman never really did it for me. The ones I really liked were the Norse myths. The wheel forever turns."I read all the mythology books when I was a kid. So now this Graeco-Roman stuff comes across to the gamer of today as new and original - or at least a nice change. But since the rise of Lord of the Rings and Warhammer and their ilk, goblins, green-skinned orcs, Alien rip-offs, elves, dwarves, chaos demons and so on have taken over the majority of fantasy. It's kind of interesting in the sense that this kind of mythology was ten a penny in our day, so much popular fiction revolved around those myths ( Hercules, Clash of the Titans, Jason, etc etc). It's all Graeco-Roman which I have unashamedly mixed up together (which once would have outraged me, but nobody cares anymore). "I quite like what I've written as it's in classic gamebook prose, which I haven't really done for a long time, so it was fun. After I mentioned his Vulcanverse project a while ago, Jamie shared some of the background material he's been developing for it.
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