Imbas forosnai – the illumination of inspiration – was not a gift in Irish tradition. It was a practice. The Filí who sought it first had to strip everything away: light, food, distractions, the noise of the surface world. Only in that darkness did the deeper truth become visible.

I've been called a bard more than once – usually as a compliment. I didn't expect to understand what the word actually meant until I had to tear my own work apart.

The thing I built that wasn't mine

Two years before my brother's 40th birthday, I decided to make him a board game.

Not buy one. Make one. From scratch. Built around the one literary world we had shared since we were young – Stephen R. Lawhead's Song of Albion trilogy. Celtic mythology, bardic tradition, a world that felt ancient and alive to both of us growing up.

I knew from the beginning that if I ever wanted to publish it commercially, the borrowed lore would have to go. For a private gift, that didn't matter – it was part of the point. I filed the problem away and kept building.

Three months of actual construction. A few scrapped rulebook drafts before that. Professionally printed components, 3D-printed figures. If I commit to something, I want it done properly.

Then we played it.

Gábor is not someone who flatters. He has played more board games than most people have owned. He said it was ready. That it was better than a lot of games out there. That it was more complete than some things that had actually been published.

Somewhere in that first session the decision made itself. This needed to exist beyond one birthday.

The wall I already knew was coming

The borrowed world had to go. I had known it would.

The hardest part wasn't the terminology or the place names or the narrative frame. It was Awen – a concept from Welsh tradition meaning divine poetic inspiration. It was the soul of the original game. The thing that made the mechanics feel like they meant something.

Letting it go felt like losing the game itself.

Then I found Imbas. The Irish equivalent. Older than Awen, arguably richer, entirely unencumbered. And something unexpected happened – the pieces didn't just fit. They fit better than before. The new foundation felt more like the game's true ground than the borrowed one ever had.

Losing Awen was like losing the IP itself. Painful, necessary, and quietly an upgrade.

The rebuild and the campaign preparation are running in parallel now. It is as complicated as it sounds. But the game emerging from this process feels more like itself than the original ever did.

In the end, the darkness was the point. That's what Imbas forosnai was always trying to teach.

Until next time, from the Mead-Hall
– Ull Sande / Dániel Lukács • June 2026