How did this all begin?
A few years ago I came up with the idea of doing a children's book based on the Irish natural environment. They key character, a red squirrell named Dearg (Irish word for red), went around showing you different things you could find in the Irish landscape, their importance in history, along with their benefitis today. I am still in the process of completing this project, but here is a sample....
While doing research for this project, I came across an assortment of interesting facst about the Irish past. Funnily enough, it seemed to me that the most interesting and happy times of Ireland's history had not been taught to me in school and now reading about them made my country come alive and interesting, as well as happy (not all the doom and gloom of the Irish and the famine). This led me to develop an idea of doing another children's book based on the Irish medieval society. Here are a couple concept art pieces for this book...
I then began to remember as a child, my friend Adam and I getting these rerally interesting board games, but since they were so complicated we would make up our own rules and play the games the way we wanted to. I had always desired to make a game that would be interesting but simple and the Irish medieval system seemed to be a great platform on which to make this sort of a game. And thus, Túath started to grown in my mind. The more I read, the more hooked I became. Coincidentally, about this time, I was introduced to the hugely popular Settlers of Catan. While I found the very game good, I wanted something more simply, something easy to produce and easy to get out there. A little more research lead me to the game Citadels, which was more along the idea of what I wanted to produce.
You might note that the above artwork, while not entirely accurate historically, were part of the early development of these ideas, and will be refined (probably many many times more to come!) over the next while.
Stay tuned for my initial game design and feedback from a playtest.
