Thursday 24 April 2014

The Karubi Island Dox Dox

Krüger and I have talked a lot about playing an orcs versus wood elves campaign on one of the Karubi islands, using HOTT and Warhammer as rule sets.

Sven plans to come to Berlin a couple of times this year and wants to bring his freshly painted goblins. So it makes sense to kick off the Karubi island campaign with a HOTT mini-campaign, involving 2 tribes of orcs & goblins and my elves.

I drew a map of the island Dox Dox.


dox dox

1 Kachelaj Oxib Tzuk - the largest forest on the western side of the island. It's where the elves live.

2 Kachelaj Imul - rabbit forest.

3 Suq - a large area of swamp. Giant mosquitos and Labyrinthodonts live there.

4 Kachelaj Jamaril - a very large forest on the eastern side of the island. Jamaril means "peace" in the language of the human population that lived on the island long before elves and orcs arrived. Actually it isn't such a peaceful place any more, if it ever was. Ruins of ancient temples are scattered throughout the jungle. Some of these are still used to summon old gods and demons.

5 A tribe of orcs & goblins under Krüger's command.

6 Juyub Labal - the bad hills, also called "the pumpkin hills" by the elves.

Now here is the problem. The elves who like to live in forests settled in the west where they found 2 small forests. The orcs on the other hand, who prefer mountain caves, settled in the east, but in the east they found a large area of tropical forest and only 3 small hills (Juyub Jamaril). It would be best if the orcs moved to the west and the elves to the east, but instead both parties defend their territory and try to conquer the whole island.

Monday 21 April 2014

Sven's Old Campaign Map Resurrected

In 2008, around Christmas, my cousin Sven made a map for a HOTT campaign, involving 5 parties: dwarves, pirates, elves, undead and dark age Germans on horses.

We got together with a couple of friends and started to play the campaign but were not able to finish it because we only had one day. It was fun anyway.

I have been thinking about Sven's map lately, because I want to use it as a setting for our ancient "imagi-nations" project, as a landscape where all the different parties meet. (Maybe "imaginary ancient kingdoms and city-states" or "imaginary ancient lands and islands" would be a better name for the project.)

I drew the map again, only changing little things. Forests grew a bit and mountains appeared where there were none before. Caused by the movement of tectonic plates?

sven's old campaign map

Here are some suggestions for names, mostly ideas from the original map. These should be translated to ancient Greek at some point to go with the imaginary ancient things theme. I will try to translate to English for now.

1 Granitinseln - granite islands

2 Eisenzipfel - iron ding dong

3 Augenkralle - eye + claw

4 Grünhuhnland - green chicken land

5 Farnoth - no idea what that means, the name was suggested by the Elven player

6 Wambeler Bucht - Wambel bay

7 Löwenkaff - backwater lion. Home of a thracian tribe under king Rhebulas. I'm going to play these.

8 Schwarzwassermoor - black water moor, land of the dead

9 Krabbwasser - crab river

Tuesday 15 April 2014

Browsing the Internet and Selling Books

I spent a month in Dortmund, going through my father's large collection of books. My father was an obsessive collector who left me about 2000 travel guides, coffee-table books, science books and a collection of Playboy magazines.

old books

He had his themes. Ancient Greece, Egypt, England, Italy, North Rhine-Westphalia. And everything else.

At one time, he smuggled piles of new books into his study through the window from our garden.

There is a very good book about obsessive collecting which my father should have read: "Collecting: An Unruly Passion" by Werrner Muensterberger.

When I got tired of looking at so many old books, I browsed the internet for miniatures and games. I found a couple of interesting sites and added them to my collection of favourite links (Herr Zinnlings Links + My Blog List).


Then I got interested in pulp sci-fi and old school space battle games because I met Gilbert. Gilbert is a distant relative who likes to come up with names for space heroes and their opponents. Like "Zador, the dominator of space." Or "Gortak, Zorax, Orlok."


If you share my father's interest and collect out of date travel guides, here is where you can get them: mjb78 (Amazon).

In 50 years Lina, Hendrik and Joaquín will go through my things and ask: why did he collect 28mm pirates? Plague marines? Elves? Ancient greeks? Why did he sculpt and paint 24 naked green monsters? What was wrong with him?