O is for Olicanalad

An Epic Battle...

Olicanalad's Games is a blog I follow on occasion. James Roach is a wargamer and a superb painter, whose output in sheer quantity of figures alone is amazing but when paired with epic battles like the one shown above is awe inspiring!

Check out his blog for more great pics of other battles. The way wargaming was meant to be! :-)

Elric - by the Chaosium - any good?

The map is pretty cool! But how does the game play, I wonder?

N is for Nunavut

Canada's newest, largest and northernmost territory, Nunavut came into being on April 1st, 1999 when the North West Territories was split into two parts. Largest, but also the least populated. Way up at the northernmost tip of Ellesmere island is Alert, the northernmost continuously inhabited place on the planet.

M is for Manticore

The Manticore is one of my favourite mythological beasts. Sometimes they are attributed with tails that can fling barbed spikes, but I think I prefer the version with a scorpion tail. In some settings, notably Games Workshop's Old Worlde (Warhammer Fantasy), they are treated as Chaos Beasts, but I prefer to classify them merely as creatures of the wild. Along with Minotaurs, they are just another form of the so-called "Beastmen."

L is for Lohwand

Lohwand is an anagram of "Howland" which comes from my own name; it is a name I have often used in the past for wargaming or role-playing. Whenever I needed a fictitious nation or world, sometimes pure fantasy, others vaguely historical.  Others have Ruritania, I use Lohwand (though I'm not knocking Ruritania!) In it's current incarnation it is both the name of this blog, and a nation in my Garden of Kama setting.

K is for Kalidah

Illustration by W.W. Denslow

With the heads of a tiger and the body of a bear, I think the Kalidah would be a great creature for the Garden of Kama setting, even though it doesn't come from any eastern mythology. Instead it comes from Frank Baum's "The Wizard of Oz", from whence this illustration comes.

J is for Jasoom

The view from Barsoom
(NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona)

When Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote his tales about John Carter and the incomparable Dejah Thoris (see "D is for Dejah Thoris") he went to some trouble to do more than just set out the plot. While he didn't develop entire languages in the way linguists such as JRR Tolkien did for Middle Earth and MAR Barker did for Tékumel, he did work out the martian names for people, places and things. Barsoom, of course, was the name for Mars itself. Jasoom was their name for Earth, and Cosoom was the planet Venus.