This is my new website about my Sword & Sorcery setting Kaendor and my Space Opera setting Iridium Moons for the RPG systems Dragonbane and Coriolis. I also have another site were I share whatever I am currently working on at Spriggan's Den. I am also on Mastodon.

I was born in Hamburg and then grew up in Lübeck during the late 90s and early 2000s. I then went to university in Bayreuth and Heidelberg, and eventually ended up working as a gardener back near Lübeck.

The Star Wars Story

When I was 10 years old, we moved from Hamburg to Lübeck. A couple of months later, I went to visit my best friend from school in Hamburg for a weekend. My dad was commuting to the university and took me to the train station, where I got picked up by my friend and his mom. But before we drove to his home, we still went quickly to the department store next to the station to pick up a toy he wanted to buy. It was something I had seen on shelves before but never paid attention to, and in the car I asked him what it was. And he was like "Dude! You've never seen Star Wars?!"

When we got to his home, he showed me all his Star Wars toys, which we somehow never had gotten out the many times I've been at his place after school. And I found them really interesting. He later asked his parents if we could watch Star Wars on video that night and so we did. Lying on the floor in front of a tiny 12" TV. We had been watching Star Trek every day at home for as long as I can remember, but this was different and amazing. We then watched The Empire Strikes Back right after it (probably without asking to stay up watching movies that long), and the next morning we watched Return of the Jedi. The rest of the Saturday and Sunday was all playing with Star Wars toys.

Later that same year I made a new best friend at my new school, who also happened to be a big Star Wars fan. We went to his home after school a lot and most of the time played X-Wing on his dad's computer while he was still at work. When we got a computer at home, X-Wing was one of the very first games I bought for myself. And it was not that long after that, that the Star Wars special edition movies were released and of course I made my family go watch them. And by then we also had a video player at home and I got the movies on video that Christmas. From there it was all Star Wars, all the time for me and my brother. By 1999, I had probably read almost all Star Wars books and played nearly all the PC games. When the new movies came out, Star Wars made a shift in tone and style and focused on different characters, and I never really got hooked on any of that. But 90s Star Wars is still my favorite thing ever and I think I am as much a hardcore fan of that as one can be before it gets embarassing. All because my friend wanted to get that weird toy that day.

The Baldur's Gate Story

In the summer of 1999, it was a Saturday and I was incredibly bored out of my mind. I had some money saved up and having absolutely nothing else to do, I decided that I should go buy a new game for my computer. I took out my stacks of collected game magazines to flip through them for any highly rated games that I had not really paid attention to before. (We did not have internet yet back then.) And one game that stood out for having extremely high ratings in several magazines was Baldur's Gate, which had come out half a year earlier. It was a fantasy game, and I didn't play any fantasy game, and it was in the RPG section, and I've never actually read any of the articles in the RPG section. Strategy, Action, Adventures, and Space Sims were the whole game world for me. But Baldur's Gate was at the top of any recent release rankings and so I did give the reviews a read. I didn't really understand what kind of game to expect from that, but the reviews were nothing but high praise. And I really was just looking for something to waste some money on and play for a week or so.

So I hopped on my bike right there and then to ride downtown and see of any of the stores had Baldur's Gate. Grabbed it, got back home, and played it all weekend. At that point, I had read The Lord of the Rings once because it looked interesting on my parent's bookshelves, and thought it was quite neat, but didn't think anything more about it. Other than that, all my experience with fantasy had been children's books and fairy tales, which our parents had read to us a lot. Somehow fantasy had been something that I knew existed but really didn't care about the least bit. But Baldur's Gate had me hooked immediately. It got me into playing a lot more fantasy games after that, and got me into picking up Dungeons & Dragons when the 3rd edition came out the next year. All my hobbies and everything I've been working on for the last 23 years is because I was really bored that day and desperate for about anything that could keep me entertained for a few hours hopefully.

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