The Tales From Owtdare Project

We are very excited to tell you about The Tales From Owtdare project. It has been many years in the making and there is still a lot of work to do, but we have finally reached a point where it is ready to start sharing with you.

About the team

The Tales From Owtdare creative team is led by Noël Mallet and comprises a talented group with a diverse skill set.

• Noel leads the project, provides creative direction, illustration and design skills, plus writes the storybooks featuring GRiNdaL and his friends
• Jon assists with the creative writing for characters, items and locations as well as providing a voice for the characters in our forthcoming audio book series.
• Steve’s focus is the Cartography and overarching economic, historical and political aspects of the world. This rich focus on detail has brought this world to life and enabled us to tie characters and items to places and events.
• Richard's role has been key in designing the core characters of Gobba, Bilge, Big Dave and Ra-Ra who accompany GRiNdaL on many of his adventures. He now has a more hands-off role, providing arms-length feedback on stories and concepts.
• Andrea provides a real-world and generally non-gaming perspective on the content. Her focus is on marketing support and helping the team break down the barriers of understanding for non-gaming readers.

All the team members support the whole project with creative ideas and feedback on a regular basis. They are backed by a steering group of parents and gamers with many years of experience between them.

Not all Fairies are good, not all goblins are bad….

The characters from the first stories set in the world of Owtdare are all based on our old live action and tabletop role play characters.

We wanted to play goblin, orc and Ogre characters when most other players considered them the ‘monsters’.

In our live action role-play experience our persistence with playing uruks started to change perceptions amongst the players at large, who realised each of our characters had individual characteristics which shone through just as strongly as if we were playing elves, dwarves or humans.

About the setting - a wonderous Twilight fantasy world

So rather than brand our characters as good or evil, we want people to be able make their own minds up based on the decisions the characters make in our stories.

All the current stories in production are set at night because that’s when the goblins wake up. It adds a dimension to the look of everything because all the illustrations are focused on a twilight/ moonlight theme.

We have written 11 bedtime stories so far and 2 are finished and available as ebooks from selected retailers. The Adventures of GRiNdaL Volume 1 is a hardback book which contains the first three stories is available on Kickstarter from 15th September 2023.

More to come

Alongside the bedtime stories a lot has been written about the world of Owtdare, our setting for the stories.

A world is starting to take shape and we are beginning to develop narratives beyond the bounds of the Creepy Crawly Woods and the The Hard Lands.

A deck of trump cards featuring the key characters is starting to take shape, as well as encyclopaedias of the Creepy Crawly Woods and the Hard Lands.

Maps of Owtdare have been drafted and glimpses of them can be seen on the website homepage and in the stories that have already been published.