I started CardForge around the seventh of April this year. Two sets went up on the website, and then there were weeks of work you didn't see, because I only decided to start writing any of this down today. So this is going to read like it all happened at once. It didn't.
There are two new sets up now, and one of them is a hard sit.
BOUDICA
She was the Iceni queen, and she was abused horribly by the Romans. You can't put that into kind and gentle words. She was flogged. Her lands were stolen. Her daughters were raped.
There's no way to make that flowers and rainbows. You just have to say it like it was.
This is probably going to make a lot of people not want this pack of cards, and that's okay. I'd rather you know what's in it before you buy it than after. If you're looking at it for a young reader, read the cards first and decide for yourself.
The other thing about her set is that everything we know about her was written by Romans, decades later, by the people she was fighting. Two of those Romans are cards in the set. That's why it's marked LEGENDARY instead of saying every fact is verified. Nothing about her comes to us first hand, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise.
PAUL REVERE
This one's the opposite problem, and I think you'll find it interesting.
Paul Revere lives in a poem. Longfellow wrote it eighty five years after the fact, and almost nothing in it is what happened. He never reached Concord. He didn't row himself across. He was captured, and the man who actually finished the ride was Samuel Prescott, who you've never heard of. William Dawes rode the same night and got none of the poem either.
So this set is about the fifteen people standing around that night instead of the one man in the poem. The wife he had to leave behind in an occupied city. The friend who was selling them all to the British. The sexton with the church keys.
Longfellow is a card in it himself. His title on the card is Historically Inaccurate Poet, and he earned it.
There's one card in that set with no picture on it at all. A man named Isaac Bissell carried the news of Lexington down the post road, and the clerks copying his name along the way turned Isaac into Israel. It's Israel who ended up with the grave marker. There's no likeness of Isaac because nobody ever looked at him long enough to make one. So his card carries an empty frame, and the question on it asks whether you'd rather be forgotten, or remembered under another man's name.
That's what these cards are for.
Loretta