Rogan’s Ruminations

Ok, so yesterday was all about how my journey began in writing as a youngster, today I will expand upon that journey. These are the stepping stones that lead all the way to The Shattered Realms; The Great Army, book 1.
Many hours spent playing with toy soldiers and cardboard cut-out monsters set my imagination on fire and I was soon ‘playing’ wargames for real, I joined my first wargaming society aged 8, and I also began painting the figures (badly!) around that time. This great adventure began with all things Napoleonic, a period I was fascinated with as well as the whole of the Roman period.
Wargaming soon turned into role-playing as my mind began to develop and I suddenly discovered the endless limitless possibilities of acting out my fantasies, the natural development being that I became a games master presiding over other players as they adventured. This required me to write the adventure ahead of time and then gently usher and guide the players through the setting that I had created.
At this point I should thank J.R. Tolkien and the creation of Middle Earth, nothing has come close to the inspiration those books gave to me in my formative years, especially when reading the Hobbit, I think War and Peace ran it a close second!
I.C.E or Iron Crown Enterprises bought the rights to Lord of the Rings and they turned that into one of the worlds best loved role-play games in history and that also became a rich form of maps and books about everything from Butterflies to Balrogs and everything in between.
I must thank video games like Skyrim, and Dragon Age, which are both incredibly immersive games, which also added to the already burgeoning arsenal of writing material that was floating about in my head at the time.
I also discovered another facet to my imagination, ‘what happens next?’
My first attempt at writing a fantasy novel was when I took the scant details of Middle Earth and continued the story after Aragorn and Arwen’s son had grown up. I called it ‘The Fourth Age’ and put it out there on the internet as FanFiction, after which I wrote a ‘what happed next’ story following the events after the end credits roll on Fallout 4. That story appeared on FanFiction websites, as “Fallout 4: Aftermath.”
Enter my youngest daughter… “Why don’t you write something original Dad?!”
That was when the Shattered Realms began to take shape, the story was ordinally penned under the title, The Shattered Kingdom,” and it was always going to be about a world where society had broken down into factions and where powerful forces were at work behind the scenes, but I wanted it to be seen through the eyes of one individual, a young boy/man as he was growing up.
I wanted to include various races as each of them either carried the best of human values (the Elves) or the worst of values (the Orsk). Then I wanted to throw in the fact that Rogan was confident in the simply way in which he viewed life, verses life’s real complications.

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