Happy 2025 and some pictures from Scotland

Happy 2025! I hope you all have a year filled with thrilling adventures. 

As I mentioned last September (in my post on the Kirkyard of St. Cuthbert), I spent a few weeks in Scotland last August. Here are a few more pictures from that trip to begin the new year. I think that some of them could be used as visual aids in a fantasy role-playing campaign.

[Eilean Donan]

[Battle of Culloden monument]

[Some ruins of Urquhart Castle overlooking Loch Ness]

[A wall of Urquhart Castle overlooking Loch Ness]

[A hill on the Isle of Skye]

[Mealt falls on the Isle of Skye]

[Some Skye locals]

[A rare picture of the Akratic Wizard (in Plockton)]

The Kirkyard of St Cuthbert

One of the reasons why I haven’t posted much here recently is that I spent a couple of weeks in Scotland in late August, followed in early September by a week of work in Manchester. I then returned to North America (first my permanent home in Toronto, then to my new temporary apartment in Chicago, from which I’ll be visiting Notre Dame University weekly as a research fellow at the Center for Philosophy and Religion until late May 2025). It’s been a busy time!

While in Edinburgh, I naturally visited the kirkyard of St Cuthbert. A saint in our own world from the 7th century, St Cuthbert also famously travelled to the World of Greyhawk (Oerth), where he became an important deity, a champion of law and order against the chaos and evil of vile Iuz. In fact, one of the characters from my recent Greyhawk campaign, Cedric the warrior cleric, was a priest of St Cuthbert.

Here are some pictures I took while visiting:

[The back of Edinburgh Castle. Our temporary accommodation was only a block from this view.]

[The cross in St Cuthbert's kirkyard.]

[The entrance to the kirkyard.]

[The view of the kirkyard from Ediburgh Castle.]

[Statue of David Hume. No relation to St Cuthbert obviously, but one of my philosophic heroes.]