The Big Idea

Hello, everyone, and welcome to Really Bard Ideas! A blog I intend to use as a hub for my creative endeavours in the world of fantasy.

Here, you’ll be able to find posts and links to such things as podcasts relating to my tabletop RPG campaigns, painted miniatures which I use in those campaigns, and original stories relating to my homebrew world of Esthia.

For me, the fantasy genre has always been a place of comfort and joy. Somewhere to escape when the real world gets too much, and somewhere I can experience the amazing and fantastical. Whether it’s reading the novels of Roald Dahl in when I was younger, falling in love with the writing of Terry Pratchett in my teens, or devouring the epic fantasy tomes of such authors as Brandon Sanderson, Steven Erikson, and Robin Hobb in more recent years, the fantasy genre is a place I can call home.

But it wasn’t always books. At university, I was fortunate enough to make friends who would actively nurture my nerdly tendencies by way of introducing me to Warhammer Fantasy Battles. Who’d have realised that a few plastic rat-men and some paints would bring such a sense of achievement and peace? That being said, I found myself lacking interest in the game itself, preferring instead to while away the hours painstakingly adding tiny pecks of paint to my growing plastic army.

After university, my friends and I moved to different parts of the country, as so often happens. To prevent a loss of connection, I sought a way to keep us together. At this time, I’d been wanting to give Dungeons & Dragons a try for a while, so starting researching what I needed to get started. However, as I’m sure many of you know, DnD can be quite expensive to get into, especially if you’re scraping by after university. As a result, I found Pathfinder, a fantastic table-top RPG based on DnD 3.5 by Paizo publishing. I must admit one of the biggest selling factors at the time was that it was completely free and available online. I took it upon myself to act as the GM and roped my friends into regular online games using the fantastic online table-top site Roll20.net and since then we haven’t looked back!

Since then, I’ve tried to rope pretty much everyone I know into playing with me, sometimes testing the patience of my wonderful wife. Apparently not every social interaction needs to be turned into a TTRPG session. Who said anything about need? I have loved being a GM for several groups over the last few years and creating sessions and content is what has inspired me to create this website. As campaigns have moved on, I have gradually created locations, characters, and magic systems that have evolved into my homebrew world of Esthia. Now, I want to share it with anyone who will listen!

Over the coming weeks and months I will be posting Esthia-related content on this blog. This will take the form of podcasts where I talk about my campaigns, pictures of miniatures I have painted for use in these campaigns, and original content in the form of stories from Esthia, culminating in a series. I really hope you enjoy my stories and ramblings, and hope to see you soon when I start posting.

In the meantime, please come and check me out on Twitter and Instagram where I already have some content posted in anticipation of the blog release.

Goodbye for now, and I hope to see you soon.
Really Bard Ideas