Yield Not To Misfortune

Welcome to Ne Cede Malis.

The concept for this website first arose after years of miniature wargaming and hobbying that eventually (inevitably?) led to the idea to create a unique, bespoke setting all my own. This soon snowballed - as ideas do - into multiple modelling and hobby projects reflecting the various individuals, factions and entities inhabiting the world of Ne Cede Malis.

The inspiration behind Ne Cede Malis is multifaceted. Primarily, I'm a huge fan of Native American, Norse and early Slavic mythology and history, and there are strong 'what-if' parallels between the world of Ne Cede Malis and our own, circa the 10th-13th centuries CE. For example, the Black Order - the 'primary protagonist' of the Ne Cede Malis setting - is pretty clearly closely inspired by the real-world Teutonic Order, although it has been realised in a fundamentally different way. We'll get to that in a future post.

Other inspirations included a healthy respect for the Lovecraftian genre, as well as the Arthurian corpus. It's probably fair to say that the concept of the Dark - the cyclical, existential threat inhabiting the world of Ne Cede Malis - arose somewhere between the utterly inhuman malignity of Lovecraftian horror and the very human, fallible characters of the Arthurian legends. Again, we'll get to that in a future post.

I've always felt that verisimilitude is one of the great strengths of 'low' fantasy - whilst there's no reason why fantasy shouldn't be full of wondrous magic and impossibly virtuous heroes, I've always enjoyed universes where the mundane baseline of everyday life is not that different to our own, with magic a rare (but impactful) interloper. It'll come as no surprise that early inspirations were early-1990s video games like Bungie's Myth: The Fallen Lords and Myth II: Soulblighter, which in themselves dealt with similar concepts of cyclicity, eschatology and human survival in a world dominated by far greater, unknowable powers beyond our own.

All this might seem a bit grand for what is essentially a website about the miniature wargaming hobby. Primarily, the hobby for me is about storytelling, whether through the process of building and painting a miniature (visual storytelling) or through written stories based on the events of a tabletop game, in the finest traditions of games like Dungeons and Dragons. This website is just another means to that end.

My aim with this website is to have fun - to share blog posts, tutorials, battle reports and stories from a multitude of gaming systems, all set in the world of Ne Cede Malis. Hopefully, this might provide some food for thought to others in this hobby for the same reasons as myself, and along the way if it inspires anyone to pick up a paintbrush or put words to a page then I'll take that as a solid success.

Stay safe, and remember - ne cede malis.