The Halcyon Journey

So, we are two old guys who started playing games together back in first year of secondary school. Through my mum, a college Economics lecturer I had learnt about this weird idea called Dungeons and Dragons and 1980, as it was, I went and bought myself the ‘Blue Book’ D&D rules. Taking a big A0 sheet of 2cm graph paper my dad had from his work as a graphic artist I drew a dungeon and took it to school along with some dice the rule book and some miniatures. I found half a dozen kids that were interested and they remained my friends for the next 55 years…

The first board game was created by Darren, co-founder of Halcyon Games. He had this idea for a kind of military quest game where there was a knights’ faction and a peasants’ faction and a thieves’ faction all in the kingdom of Irithian. He drew all the cards by hand and actually it was pretty cool. I don’t think anyone actually won a game, the end game section was kind of sketchy, but a sterling first effort for a 14 year old.

The next BIG game was Kabal. I had been reading a lot of grail quest stuff and hanging round the Folklore Society library at UCL and the game had a global map and there were faction and cults and you were all searching for the grail. It never really clicked and then Magic the Gathering landed in the UK and we were obsessed by it and the card game formerly known as Jyhad and Kabal became a card game. A collectable card game where the players could submit their own cards for review and acceptance. We played that for two years solid. You took control of the factions and got regional control of different spheres to play card, you recruited agents and specialist cults vied each other for global control, seized cities. I also invented a sorcerer that wore a trench coat was heavily based on John Constantine and I called him Dresden (that is the original card in the image header) cos I though it was a cool name for a sorcerer that wore a trench coat (this was 3 years before Harry Dresden would make his debut in Storm Front, just goes to show synchronicity's a bitch). We were working in IT at JPMorgan and we did all the first drafts of the cards in PowerPoint…

Time passed, marriages, kids, jobs, stuff. Then a few months back Darren comes over and he says he has had enough of IT and he wants to make games. I had a stable of board games at this point made up in flashes of inspiration. Darren wants to try something different he harked back to an email conversion we had started 30 years earlier where two Vancian style wizards bickered with each other each trying to outdo the other. I did cuss this in a separate blog post so you can check it out in more detail there.

So we starting to craft Musings. I am great at mechanics, Darren adds loopy imagination and if great at organising files, not a thing you would have guessed if you had ever met or talked to him. Now Six months later we are ready to do this for real. We have a couple of my old games, Musings and I even found all the old Kabal files on a memory stick. It go time…