Yesterday was an indulgence but the kind of rich treat that is its own delight: I found myself writing up and developing some ideas for an Otherworld. Some ideas tend to linger in my subconscious and surface periodically, over and over. Left alone, they prick at the edges of my attention and then sink back into the dark. Over the years, I’ve tended to leave them alone.

Because I have a little more spare time at the weekends – no longer podcasting RPR, no longer trying to run two games at once, being a player instead – I found myself enjoying a Saturday where I had less to do and no pressure to perform. Into this space arose an old idea that has been dancing around my subconscious for too many years. I let it surface and gave it some attention.

Otherworlds are all around us. They are in the loose threads of history that make us wonder, ‘What if…?’ They are in the things we watch and hear. They are in the books we read. Some, of course, are other people’s worlds that we are invited to explore through products… but the Otherworlds that surface in my mind are often a blend of influences and suggestions from throughout my life.

Something primal arose yesterday. That Otherworld I have been itching to play with from before history, from the time before writing and settled villages. Primal is a mix of recent archaeological data, the result of DNA discoveries that disprove the old models of evolving humans, and the pseudo-science of old writers seeking to explain something intuitive.

I went to 60,000 BCE and imagined the meeting between Neanderthals and Early Modern Humans, different flavours of the same species. I imagined the cultures implied by the burials we have discovered and the clash of those cultures upon the face of what is the Levant but back them was a very different and more lush forested mountainous realm near coastal plains.

Fantasies are richer when they are based on something more plausible. Dropping the idea that early humans were less sophisticated in their experiences and their thoughts is easy for me. I never truly believed the old prejudices about ‘cave men’ and their lack of intellect. The evidence suggests something richer even if, because it has been lost to time, their expression of it is impossible to grasp.

I am a creature of spirit and wonder. I picture the world through the lens of profound gratitude for the sheer magnificence of the natural world. I feel the ancient places alive with hidden spiritual powers and hear the whisperings of the past. Imagining a world caught in a profound cultural and spiritual clash between two distinct yet related groups of humans comes easy.

All of which is to say that I poured out my ideas and tried to give them an initial shape, a form that might (some day, just possibly) form the basis for a table of role-players to consider stepping into an Otherworld 58,000 years older than our primary realm. I’m discovering that allowing myself to write down and loosely develop the framework for an Otherworld is deeply rewarding fare.

Game on!