My Love of Fantasy

My love of fantasy was started when my parents bought me a book for holidays. We always took one good read with us and, in this case, I had picked a Choose Your Own Adventure. This was an interactive novel where choices took you to various pages. I think mine was about ninjas but I can’t be sure. It wasn’t even fantasy but it did lead me into Fighting Fantasy, the choose your own style book based around goblins, orcs, elves, wizards and all sorts of creatures that had my mind racing.

Fighting Fantasy were amazing books written by Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone, and I loved burying my mind in the story while I rolled dice to see if I had felled the next monster. My collection grew over the years to quite an impressive size, but somewhere down the line my brother’s fantasy game drew me further down the rabbit hole: Dungeons & Dragons.

I loved using my imagination to picture battles and the latest part of the adventure, and moving away from being told the story and into a world of storytelling seemed to be the natural direction in which the stream flowed. My character was a thief, possibly chosen because it sounded cool and different (please note that driving 75mph on the motorway is probably the furthest I’ve pushed the law nowadays), a character who could pick locks, slip money out of the bystander’s pocket and…that was pretty much it.

At one point I bought my own D&D set and my brother was certainly not up for it. He was the dungeon master in the house, no one else, so he swapped it for another gaming book he had. I had now begun my life with Warhammer. This roleplay game took things to an all-time higher level for me; writing adventures; reading stories in their magazines; and designing the latest game. It was fantastic. Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, Warhammer Fantasy Battle, Warhammer 40K, Bloodbowl, Space Crusade, Mighty Empires, Warhammer Quest, Epic 40K – I or my brother had them all. I played table top battles, painted miniatures under the lamp and, more importantly, wrote fantasy adventures for my friends to play. In my world, the hero fought the villain, sought the treasure guarded by dragons, and rescued the armies from approaching hordes.

Then university came. University wasn’t really the place for roleplay games and deciding who had the most powerful army (both in the tactical and strategic sense of course.) It was the time for clubbing in the student’s union, studying in the massive library, and staying in bed to watch the Tweenies. Or was it? The spark of imagination in the fantasy world was still there, but I didn’t quite know where to use it. My friends wouldn’t be up for gathering in a circle to fight demons (the influence of The Big Bang Theory was a long way off) and I did want time to chill and not just write. We had a small computer room in our science block, so I took to the internet to poke around and found play by email.

In PBeM you took on the role of a character and poster regular snippets, interacting with other players. You’d leave spaces for them to fill in gaps in conversation or write them together. Based in the Star Trek universe, I was the Klingon Kaa T’Kora, wanting to join security in the Foothold space station, but coming onboard as part of the fleet instead. I fell in love with other characters, fought like Worf on a bad day, and filled the space station with adventure. Today was a good day to die. I’d play it consistently for over four years, and it soothed my writing addiction.

When I finally gave up on PBeM, I finally started on my first book: The Privileged Few. It was the first tidy sized novel I wrote, based in the Warhammer 40k world, but probably of poor quality. What was more important for me was that I finished it, and finished it so that it was a tidy size. It was the point at which I realised I could potentially write a novel, actually be an author, that the possibility was there. I’d enjoyed the writing and immediately began looking to start something else.

If you want to know more about my up and coming zombie apocolypse fantasy novel you can see tit-bits and fantasy background on my facebook page https://www.facebook.com/HywelGriffithsAuthor. Feel free to leave comments and I’ll reply back asap!