"For They are the Oathsworn" - Oathsworn has Arrived!

Humanity was not destroyed by the hammer of war,

the gnawing of plague or the slow decay of time.

It was strangled. Choked by root and rot until

the Deepwood became its grave shroud.

The trees have consumed the land.

The great cities that survived the coming of the dark

age now stand alone, islands in a sea of death.

~ Oathsworn Rulebook

Welcome back, one and all, to The Art of Caesura!

I hope you are all well and that you've enjoyed this miniseries over the past few weeks of me revving up for my first game of Warhammer 40k in the modern era. You can read about the game itself in last week's post, and read about a noob preparing an army list in the post before that.

Today we are shifting gears from the grim darkness of the far future to...the grim darkness of The Deepwood!

Now. Back in, I believe it was October 2019 a new company, Shadowborne Games (made up of a circus conductor turned Games Designer, Jamie Jolly, and an engineer turned 3D sculptor, Toby O'Hara) released on Kickstarter a game that they had already been working on for 3 years at that point: Oathsworn: Into the Deepwood. Everything about the game completely captured me: the grim dark fantasy setting, the lovely chunky (45mm scale) hero miniatures with changeable weapons to represent the actual weapons you pick up in the game, and some truly breathtaking (and massive) "boss" miniatures. Not to mention a rich story contributed to by Aaron Dembski-Bowden (of Black Library, and indeed New York Times Bestseller List fame) and narrated by James Cosmo (Game of Thrones, Braveheart).

Anyway, I got totally caught up in the campaign and in one of only two occasions, I broke out of my weekly Art of Caesura posting cycle to do a deep dive on this game (which turned out to be one of my most popular post of the year). You can check that out here.

So enthused was I that I even spent a couple of weeks writing my very first fan fiction - a short story set in this world that got published on the Kickstarter page. You can find that here.

Things were moving along with production of the game and then the wheels flew off the wagon: global pandemic hit, shipping container crisis, cardboard crisis etc. etc. and the game was delayed by about 2 years.

But now...it has...ARRIVED!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!