The Kickstarter campaign is going very well, every day new people decide to support the project, and thanks to them (and by "them" I mean you!) we are quite smoothly approaching the first stretch goal. I'll probably do it a hundred more times, but thank you so much for your help so far - you're great! We appreciate your financial support, passing on information about the project, encouraging others to help, and any other form of spreading the good news.

In the meantime, taking advantage of the bank holiday in Poland, I wanted to share with you some thoughts about the sources of inspiration that brought me to write the Adventurer's Guide. I decided to start with that element of the Corny Groń world that, for me, is the most important task I set myself with presenting the fictional world. It's about the biesy, that is, the hidden neighbors of the mortals, from the forest nooks, deep caves, and cobweb-covered corners of houses.

What I have always envied about "Western" fantasy was the rich mythology wrapped around fae, spirits that live close to humans, but at the same time are not part of the Christian world order. In Poland, virtually all "folk" demonology has been subordinated to the religious world view, which makes it very difficult to transpose, for example, A Midsummer Night's Dream into "Polish reality." We do have a few texts from the Romantic era that delicately touch these uncanny, close-yet-distant worlds, but unfortunately, our Romantic poets were more preoccupied with maintaining the political fighting spirit in a nation occupied by its neighbors than preserving folk tales about the spirits. It's not that we have completely no texts about "fey creatures," but to a modern audience elves are either post-Tolkien, majestic, mythical, and assigned to "high fantasy," or fairy-like, like Tinker Bell in Disney's Peter Pan. We don't even have a good word in Polish to translate "fae" without referring to "elves," who have already taken a different place in the collective imagination than Puck or the Erlking from Goethe's famous poem.

So, biesy from Corny Groń are an attempt to create a place for such "Polish faeries" in fantasy fans heads, which, on the one hand, would not refer to the myths of the pre-Slavs (which are very poorly based in sources and many beliefs about the religiosity of the first Slavs are really just overlays of Nordic beliefs), but on the other hand - would differ from the Celtic fantasy "standard". It would be most correct to call them "demons", because that's how people living in these lands a thousand years ago treated them - as forest, field, and mountain spirits ("daimon" in Ancient Greek). Unfortunately, "demon" already has very specific connotations in Polish and English, in addition to being a borrowed word. On the other hand, "bies" or "czart," which are now synonyms for "demon" or "devil," are native words that actually once meant a being not necessarily from hell, not animal, but living outside the human order of things. One mountain range in Poland, the one that is the wildest and least developed by man, is called "Bieszczady," by the way. I thought this was a good starting point for creating a fantastic highland setting in which such creatures are an important part of the landscape.

Not all of Corny Groń's biesy are inspired solely by Polish highlands legends. I decided that just as people can wander and mix their cultures in different configurations, the Hidden Folk need not be tied to one region of the world. That's why you will also meet creatures inspired by beliefs from the Alps, Bulgaria, Ukraine, or Ireland in the Karpakian Mountains. The base of this dish, however, will be our "local" folklore, and I believe that in this melting pot of mythology a tasty dish will be cooked. 

I hope you all enjoyed this little "glimpse" of my way of working on this game material you are about to get. Once again I want to say "thanks" for your time and support for this project. In the next devlog I will bring you closer to the concepts associated with another important pillar of legends from the Polish mountains and of the Beyond Corny Groń itself - that is, the culture of the highwaymen.