Living in a fantasy world

As regular readers of this blog know, I enjoy the trappings of power that being a famous blogger brings such as the money, the international travel and the constant requests for public appearances (I’m afraid I couldn’t make it to the Oscars this year as the organisers had already met their ‘British People’ quota).

The only drawback to my fame is that I now hate to give the oxygen of publicity to any other bloggers out there as I fear they may steal my precious followers (I love you all, please don’t leave me...).

However, I often see a blog that I feel needs a little bit more internet attention than it is currently receiving, in which case I’m happy to direct some of my fanbase over to it.  I was planning to recommend DJKs Fantasy blog, after it was brought to my attention a couple of weeks ago.  However, as DJKs blog is so good and I’m so lazy, within a few weeks (the first post on the blog was in February) the blog already has loads of followers.  So my idea of bestowing fame on one of the little people has failed. 

So, there’s no need for me to talk about the excellent work that DJK is doing on his blog, but I’m going to do it anyway.  As I say there have only been a handful of posts but each one is chock full of goodness.  Each is a detailed account of scratchbuilding wooden buildings suitable for fantasy, medieval or even old west gaming and he’s been using my favourite of materials, the wooden coffee stirrer.  DKJ gets his for free and they need washing so I’m not sure what he’s up to.  I hope he works in Starbucks.

DJK seems to have the polar opposite approach to me for terrain building, I like to draw detailed plans and measure everything as accurately as I can (I’m an engineer, it’s not my fault) whereas DJK seems to have a more rustic style, as he says himself:

I don't set out with detailed plans of what I intend to build, quite often I have an idea for the type of building I want or a feature I want to include and then see what happens.

I like his approach and it gives the pieces real character.  I hope I don’t sound like I’m damning with faint praise here; these models are fantastic and I felt inspired to try some of my own.  As a Frugal Gamer these buildings really appealed to me, they’re really cheap to make and look great when finished.

There are a lot of gaming blogs, that try to be funny (hello!), that show fantastically painted miniatures, or that teach you how to build gaming boards bigger than a swimming pool, but DJKs blog really appeals to me, it’s the kind of feature you’d expect to find in an old copy of White Dwarf.  It’s not only useful and very well presented, it also doesn’t try to hard to show off or be too clever.    In an age when everyone has to have a great new novel idea it’s heartwarming to see someone doing something simple and doing it so well.  I look forward to seeing what DJK comes up with next.

So in other words, I can highly recommend this site to you all, get over there now and check it out.

Happy gaming!