From Introduction: The Middlemist campaign realm is the realisation of two different original aims. The first is to provide players of fantasy roleplaying systems with a high fantasy campaign world that doesn't stray too far from the traditional genre, but which provides a greater variation of fantasy realms beyond that of the medieval, simultaneously integrating many popular concepts from many different, and in most cases existing, sources. Our hope is that players can then enjoy all the benefits of many decades of fantasy development from a huge number of great sword & sorcery masters whose epic works are sometimes ignored in the modern milieu of game systems and realm settings. We have not stolen from our inspirations, but instead expanded on the ideas they originally put forward, the method in which almost all fiction and fantasy fiction in particular develops. Sources include J R R Tolkein's Lord of the Rings, The Silmarillion and The Hobbit, Tad Williams Memory, Sorrow and Thorn series, the celtic fantasies of Katherine Kerr, the dragon tales of Barbara Hambly, Janny Wurts and Michael Swanwick, the science of Terry Pratchett, the classic tales of C S Lewis, the fantasy games of Ian Livingstone and Steve Jackson, and the Forgotten Realms series of fantasy fiction from TSR and the magical imaginings of Ursula Le Guin. Of course, we have also introuduced many fresh and original ideas of our own devising to the realm of Middlemist, not least the concept of the Heart Stone, the origins of the dragons and the unique time-twisting aspects of the Age-Chasm.