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      Holidays in Scotland

      Training 1

      Joey and his pals went off camping in an island off the west coast of Scotland. They arrived by ferry. Then they found a nice place along the seafront, which was a peninsula. When it got dark, they went to a pub. They took a short cut across the golf course, which had some little streams. So, they were marching along, when they fell into one of the streams. They dragged themselves out and continued onwards to the pub.

      Training 2

      When they finally got back, they couldn’t find the tents, or even the peninsula on which they’d camped. It turned out that the area where they’d set up the tents wasn’t really a peninsula at all, and when the tide came in it became an island. So, the tide had cut them off from their tents. For the second time that evening they got wet feet, as they had to roll up their trousers, take off their shoes and socks and wade across to the tents.

      Training 3

      At the time he was living in Elgin in the district of Moray, which is in the heart of the whisky distilling area. It has much fertile land for growing barley, and nearby there are hills where there is peat and fresh spring water, which you need to make whisky. So all of the famous whiskies come from there, like Glenfiddich and Glengrant, for example.

      Training 4

      Another time Joey went camping was on the Isle of Iona. Saint Columba, who brought Christianity to Scotland, founded a monastery there. It’s a very beautiful island, with the monastery, a very nice mediaeval church, and very ancient rocks. And there are some wonderful clean beaches there, with little rock-pools dotted about with little fish, crabs, and starfish in them.

      Training 5

      They camped in the north-west corner where there is a farmer who lets you camp on a strip of grass next to the beach. It’s a lovely sandy beach with lots of driftwood, so they made a fire there and sat around it cooking soup in an old pot that the farmer lent them and baking potatoes in the fire, drank a bottle of whisky, walked up and down collecting nicely shaped pieces of driftwood and watched the sun set on the horizon.

      Fantasy Games

      My first contact with fantasy role-playing games was in school. I immediately got deeply involved in them and started to buy books and materials for playing them. I started off by playing around a table, with one person acting as a storyteller, and the others playing characters in the story. They are really in the story, in that they can change the outcome of the story by their actions, which they explain to the storyteller, who in turn tells them what happens, as well as describing to them what they can see and experience in the game’s world. So, all the players interact within the story, with each other and other characters in the story who the storyteller describes. Usually, the players act the part of the “good guys”, but not always. All the players need is a piece of paper with a description of their character on it, how strong he or she is, how intelligent, how wise, how fast at running, and things like that.

      A year later, I heard about the existence of similar games which are played outside, in the woods, in old castles, and in other similarly atmospheric places. No papers are used, but instead the participants play the part of their characters, wearing costumes and carrying pieces of equipment and weapons – not real ones! – that they might need. You stay in your role for a period of time, anything between a few hours and a few days, and for all of that time you act out your character. It’s like living in another age or another world.

      The type of characters you can play depends on the setting and the story, but generally, within that, it’s nice to be a character with a different personality and different attributes to those you have in real life. You might be a knight, a thief, a magician, an elf, even a monster, in a typical fantasy world. Or if the scenario is a children’s story, you might play one of the characters from Alice in Wonderland. We use many themes, such as space, stories from Tolkien’s world, or various periods in history.

      Last year we used as a setting a very nice castle in Wales, and the story was from the Renaissance times in Italy, so we all had to learn a bit about that period of history in order to prepare for the game. Some people played members of the military or politicians from that time, and we set up the same situation as was at a particular historical date, but, of course, the outcome was not fixed. We just played out history from that point on, but the ending, the conclusion, was completely different to how things happened in real life. I remember I played an Arabian Doctor of Medicine, with a nice historical costume which was borrowed from a theatre. Most of the game was played by talking – there wasn’t so much fighting in that game. I think there was only one fighting person, who played a warrior from Switzerland. Most people played aristocrats, Dukes or royalty, or politicians. The storyteller of that game brought a little magic into the story, to spice it up a bit, and make it more dramatic. So, we had a seance in the game – it was actually quite fashionable to have seances in those times. That game was great fun, and it was really interesting to try to make every aspect of the game as authentic as possible, including what we ate and the way we talked.

      In some games I played the part of the storyteller, often in conjunction with one or two others. So, we made up the story, decided on the setting and the plot. We would introduce the story to some players, who helped us to make the setting, playing monsters or characters with a fixed role according to the storyline, whereas the other players wouldn’t know the story, and had to find out what was happening, by interacting with the other characters.

      In one adventure we created, the characters were all magicians and sorcerers, and their objective was to build up a tower, a tower of power. The setting was an imaginary country with a kind of Arabian atmosphere, and the participants were all dressed in Arabian costumes, with loose clothes, masks, turbans, and things like that.

      Many of our stories are set in different countries of one fantasy world, which is a conglomerate of many different environments. So, we have one country which is like Germany in the Middle Ages, a country like Iceland, some hot, desert countries, and things like that. This story was involved with making the building and fighting against dark powers who wanted to destroy the tower. When I write adventures, I like to put a moral into the story, and this time it was that the source of the magic is a dark source. Not all the magicians recognized this at first, and went on building and gaining power, but in the end, they had to recognize that their power was only a part of a dark power, to recognize that to make magic of this kind is too dangerous and uncontrollable. One sorcerer knew that the source of the magic wasn’t good, and that there was a dark power underneath the tower which would wake up when there was too much magic in it, but the others