Who I am

Let me introduce myself. I am a role-playing gamer, martial arts enthusiast and general nerd for all things connected to fantasy. I have about twelve years experience as a player and – much more often – as a game master. I love telling stories, creating complex, entertainingly evil antagonists for my players to face and gigantic, realistic worlds for them to explore. I have created several worlds for my different gaming groups, and have tried to learn how to do just that from different masters of Fantasy.

I tip my hat to masters of the art (and also the craft) of storytelling like Patrick Rothfuss, David Gemmell, Brandon Sanderson and Steven Erikson. Without your creations my life – and those of many, many people around the world – would be less interesting. I salute you!

But back to my own project. "Scath, Shadow of the Fomori" was born sometime during the year 2009, when I started reading books about Celtic mythology, and my brain immediately told me that these ancient stories would be excellently suited to being incorporated into a shadowy fantasy world of horror. I started writing nearly on the same day. By 2010 I had assembled a group of like-minded people (and by that I mostly mean: "people nearly as crazy as I am") and started playing a long-lasting fantasy RPG campaign which I, back in the day, called "Overworld".

After many, many adventures, some successful, some not so much, my heroes managed to discover the secrets of the past, defeat the Fomori and their dark minions, and actually saved the world. Two of them died along the way, one got trapped in a dream – world forever, and a fourth one sacrificed his own life-force to give the world a chance to survive. But they made it, and it has been an amazing experience! A few months after I finished game mastering that campaign I realized that the world of Scath still seemed unable to rest.

There were still so many stories to tell, so many battles to fight, and so many secrets to unveil. Thus was born the idea to create a real, "proper" Pen and Paper book for this world, and with it give other people the chance to share the experience. The thought that people all around the world, both those known to me and those I would never get to talk to, might one day play the very adventures I had created, fight the dark powers that have – mostly figuratively, of course – crawled out of my head and hopefully feel a cold shiver of excitement after coming to grasp one of the ancient, hidden truths of Scath, made me think the huge amount of work coming towards me would be worth it. Thus, with these thoughts in my head, I turned back the wheel of time, called the slain Fomori back to live and prepared to dive into the darkness of their world as I had never done before.

Then I started writing... I have not stopped ever since.    

Alex, May 2015