About the Author

"...I would tell bedtime stories based on my old LARP characters which my children called 'Tales from the Mouth'..."

Hi, I'm Noël and I'm the author of the book series 'Tales from Owtdare' which is based on the adventures of GRiNdaL the Goblin and his many friends.

My journey to Owtdare begins

I have been playing table-top wargames, role-play games like Dungeons and Dragons, Call of Cthulhu and Spacemaster, plus live action role-play for many years. I have had the privilege to play with and against some amazing characters.

Back near the start of my table-top RPG experience (in the mid 1980's) I challenged the accepted norms that assumed players would want to be Humans, Elves, dwarves or gnomes. Our games master modified the rules to let us take Goblins, Orcs and Ogres as characters and in time we adapted these uruk characters to play at our local LARP club and then at the Summerfest LARP event at Drum Hill in the UK.

We had some great adventures that in time and I realised I wanted to share these with a wider audience but finding the right medium and tone to do this in an engaging way was quite a challenge. Our Uruks were very boisterous and adult in the themes we explored as characters and whilst we talked about our past adventures frequently, documenting them became a problem. After we stopped playing our Goblins, Orcs and Ogres my brother and I still talked about these golden days of LARP and started to add 'fictional' characters to the roster but still couldn't quite manage to bring the stories to life...fast forward 20 years...

A revelation...

The idea for the series began when telling my two children bedtime stories. Although we have many children's books, I would often relate adventures based on my old Live Action Role-play characters which my children would affectionately call "Tales from the Mouth" and the Tales From Owtdare were born.

Its taken me a journey of nearly 40 years to travel from that first character sheet of Grobbelobelob in the original Warhammer Role-play rules system to bring you these stories and I have had to learn so many skills on the way to make this happen.

The delight it provided my children inspired me to share these stories and also bring all these colourful characters to life through my illustrations, proving that heroes come in all shapes and sizes.

Over to you, the reader

I've taken the opportunity of creating these stories to build a new world made from elements of the many different games I have played over the last 4 decades and I'm sure the players from some of those games may recognise their characters and some of the adventures.

I'd like to offer heartfelt thanks to each and every one of those players and games masters I have had the privilege to play with, and also my creative group of close friends who have supported my efforts over the last few years to bring these stories to life

I hope you enjoy these adventures as much as my children have.