This week is a half-term holiday, a single week during which I am at home. My wife and I have time together and we are expecting a visitation from family midweek. As for me, in between chores and repainting the bathroom, I have been itching to return to deeper play.

I’ve been wanting to return to play alone. I’ve recognised that the pathway towards the Otherworld that keeps calling me begins with a journey solo. I’ve also felt myself drawn into the hard to express depths of my subconscious mind where the gateway to the Otherworld I am discovering resides.

And so yesterday, through a period of reflection, I found my way back to Mythras and opened that gateway.

Beginning

These words have been echoing in my mind:

The world is unimaginably old. That is what the Old Ones say. They say it is old beyond the memory of our kind, beyond the dreams of the maddened mind. They also say that it is but one world among many. That the realms of this world connect to other places, each themselves unimaginably old. That the whole is far greater than any can imagine.

To explore this unimaginably old world that I can barely perceive and yet which echoes in my mind, I’ve decided to simply let it emerge through the action of play.

GURPS requires that I hold a clear image of the world in my mind but I don’t have anything more than some intuited feelings and a few disparate images in my mind. Wanting to begin in play, not to spend time figuring it all out upfront, I decided to take a different path.

The limit of the right hemisphere from where, I believe, this unimaginably old world emerges is that it cannot communicate with words. We must help it to emerge through other means and translate those impressions on its behalf. This is the essence of creativity.

I had almost selected the tools of the Basic Roleplaying System but then the intuitions of my mind pointed me back towards a much loved relative: Mythras. The sense of returning to my roots with deep fantasy and rolling d100 was strong, but I also knew that Mythras contains a style that celebrates the ancient world I seek.

While I had the full Mythras Core Rules on the table in front of me, for some reason my sense has been to begin – at least for now – with the recently released and much expanded (and free) Mythras Imperative published in December 2023.

We’ll begin with a character and some dice, a pencil and an eraser. We’ll begin with random generation and the intuitions about who our first protagonist might be. We’ll see how far into this unimaginably old world we can journey.

Game on!