We didn’t have a Sunday game due to a combination of people being unwell, exhausted, or attending the Geek Retreat anniversary – and my own brain fog didn’t help. I’ve made it a priority this week to give myself some time to let my head reassemble itself a bit.

Still, it is also giving me some more time to plot more aspects of the story – or at least the various jigsaw pieces that can be encountered along the way. I have now sort of got an idea of how the story arc is likely to end – or rather an idea of the important choices and dilemmas along the way. How that will all end up being strung together will largely depend on which way the players jump but that is one of the joys of this style of game.

For the next section at least there’s some road travelling and some thematic pieces of world setting and building I want to do. The homeland that Thorin’s backstory is set in saw fierce border wars during the Last War, with territory changing hands many times between the three neighbouring nations. Thorin’s Folk Hero background was born in these lands, and the scars and remnants of battlefields will be looming large. There will be visible remnants of his heroism, and reminders of his failures – and I think as a journey it will prompt a lot of roleplay between the players as we put some meat on the bones that have so far been only lightly addressed.

Thorin left these lands in search of a new start, and reinvented himself almost by accident – now its time to see where he came from.

Alternatively, expect a lot of dick jokes, because that’s positively Shakespearean too.