I've written about rediscovering Kult 1st ed. and updating the classic Taroticum scenario on a previous blog. You can read the first and second session reports of our all-day Kult session; here's the third, which picks up the action when we reconvened in the evening.

First, a couple of reflections. Taroticum is structured in a heavy-handed way. The PCs are drawn to Sandburn Hospital to rescue Mary Langsbury, but 24 hours later the evil Barkley returns from Hell. The original scenario states:

The authors also say: "The only way he can miss her is if she is in a place with a high magical aura that it pains him to visit - for example a cathedral." The idea that creatures of Inferno are pained when they visit Christian holy places is a novel addition to Kult's lore and, I must confess, rather at odds with its antinomian themes. Yet this is from the pen of Gunilla Jonsson and Michael Petersen themselves. It's not a concept I'll be adopting (except perhaps for the sacred geometry in some of those Nicholas Hawksmoor London churches).

The main point, though, is the railroad-y structure of the plot: Mary "cannot be saved" and "will die, regardless of what the PCs do." This imposes a frustrating restriction on the PCs' autonomy and a burden on the GM, who must come up with a way for Barkley to kill Mary that succeeds come-what-may, even if the PCs are armed with bazookas.

Taroticum Unbound takes some liberties with this plot twist, by ruling that the PCs are still under Barkley's control, despite being reincarnated. It is the PCs who must abduct Mary and bring her to Barkley; it is the PCs (along with Leonore Carver the necromancer) who cut the foetus from her body and present it to Barkley. Only when they come back into contact with the Taroticum is his control over them broken.

This gives the PCs existential horror: they must secure their own free will, before they can start getting concerned about the Child of Magick. They also have a powerfully personal reason to hate and fear Barkley.

Faraday explains that, for the Child of Magick to be born, the foetus must be given a soul - not a tired old soul, reincarnated from many previous lifetimes, but a brand new soul. Such a soul can be created out of Achlys, 'the abyss that was before Chaos,' but he does not know how to reach Achlys. ​He recognises Mary's references to the "fools on the Isle of Dogs" as the 'Court of Fools' which is somewhere in London's Docklands. He advises that, if the PCs go among the fools, they wear a third eye painted on their foreheads.

Faraday predicts that Barkley will send his agent Leonore Carver to seize the cards and advises the PCs to parley with her: she is not as loyal to Barkley as she appears. 

The Taroticum Unbound encounter tables generate some pleasing weirdness. Sir Phillip witnesses riot police brutally dealing with peaceful protesters but finds his government contacts utterly indifferent: he senses the influence of the Taroticum strengthening over London. Mike Batton looks into a Goth band called Subhuman Channel whose lyrics reference Achlys. In his work at the prison, he deals with prisoners who seem to be disappearing as they become 'forgotten.' 

Sam Jones work as a paramedic, but his ambulance becomes lost as the London streets warp and change. HIs driver disappears and the ambulance is stranded in Metropolis; his dead patient reanimates and joins a hooded and masked procession that winds through the empty streets, ringing a rusty bell. When Sam returns to the streets of London, he is miles away from the hospital. Unable to account for the disappearance of his driver and patient, he is given time off to recover. The police will be in touch.

Sir Phillip's contacts reveal that there is a secret government policy to get homeless people and mentally ill rough sleepers off the streets. Those rounded up in the Isle of Dogs are being kept at a detention centre in a former school in Richmond, a leafy suburb in south west London.

The PCs interact with the weird Bazaar in Metropolis. Mike purchases a Bible that belonged to a past life from the English Civil War, in exchange for a year of his own life. When demonic Erinyaes attack, Sam has to drive through the crowd. The Illusion seals behind them and the bus crashes in an abandoned car park in the Isle of Dogs. They have rescued Waya, her two dozen mad fools, and escaped.

What follows is the extended passage where Waya directs the PCs on a mystical journey to integrate their hundreds of past lives - which she then tattoos onto their flesh while they sleep. These tattoos will protect them when they travel beyond the Illusion and enable them to journey to the very edge of Achlys, where being is consumed by nothingness. But that is in the future.

For my group of gamers, it is 9.30pm, the end of a solid day of roleplaying in the world of Kult. For the PCs, they awaken, covered in magical tattoos but entirely naked, in an empty Docklands car park, in the small hours of Christmas morning. It starts to rain.

Well, everyone had a great time. We will resume on the next day when we can all be free, hopefully early in May.

Taroticum has certainly shown the main features of Kult in a good light. I take these to be: a setting where ordinary reality can melt away at any moment and be replaced by a terrifying and perilous true reality, humans who are really monsters, madness as a tool for understanding reality and having power over it, Mental Balance getting more extreme the longer you play, and a sense of unremitting menace right from the very beginning.

The scenario also introduced a nice blend of detective work, exploration, incidents of action and violence, and occasion black humour (the final bus chase verged on knockabout comedy, but the supernatural danger kept everyone focused).

Some features need altering. I've already discussed the changes made with Barkley controlling the PCs and Leonore Carver as an unlikely ally. Carver is too good a NPC to waste on the story's final chapter. By bringing her in early, she can be a useful patron, instigator of disturbing quests, and source of information.

Likewise, Tabitha Kreel is a useful addition. If the PCs have to do too much of their own detective work, the pace slackens. The published scenario gives little thought to this. For example, after Barkley murders Mary and seizes the foetus and the cards, there is then a good week or fortnight delay until Rupert Faraday writes his expose in The Times. Once the PCs read this, they are supposed to seek Faraday out and receive his guidance. What are they supposed to be doing in the meantime?

In the original scenario, it's proposed that they go questing to retrieve the foetus, but, frankly, that's a big ask. The PCs have just had the asses handed to them by Barkley and witnessed Mary's murder; are they really going to go straight back to Sandburn? Hardly!

In my telling, the PCs knew to seek Faraday out straight away, because they had seen him at Sandburn Gaol in their previous life, found his photograph at the Old Gaol in 1994, and discovered who he was from Tabitha Kreel's notes. Approaching Faraday was at their own instigation: much needed autonomy in a scenario where passivity and helplessness are too common.

Speaking of which ...

The 'Way of Waya,' in which the mad sorcereress leads the PCs on a baffling journey into ... well, who can say? ... is an uninterrupted GM-driven narrative where the only role for players is to nod. I've added a few occasions for dice rolls, just to generate some mechanistic drama, but there's definitely too much of this in Taroticum. It's only a partial solution, but Taroticum Unbound​ leavens this material with opportunities for PCs to explore and instigate change. I wonder, is there a way of going further with this and radically reinterpreting the frequent 'dream voyage' sequences in the scenario?

Finally, I have a concern about roleplaying which is, to be fair, a common problem with horror RPGs. Kult invites players to create PCs with provocative and troubled back stories - especially, compared to, say, Call of Cthulhu, where you are just another dusty academic, gumshoe, or dilettante. My players certainly embraced the opportunity to create some very rich characters, with lots of potential for interpersonal, emotional, and psychological conflict.

However, Taroticum doesn't really offer opportunities for any of this to matter. Indeed, it rather assumes the PCs are rootless loners who can disappear for days on end, or devote themselves to spying on a mental hospital with a bunch of people they only just met. Once the action kicks in, the PCs are on the run or out of their minds. The promise of a personal horror experience goes unfulfilled.

But perhaps it doesn't have to. I have some ideas for how the story can develop in a way that draws in the PCs' relationships, past histories, and personal crises. Can't wait to see how that works out!

If you read my previous blog, you'll know all about The Taroticum, a classic 1974 adventure for Kult 1st edition, written by the game's designers, Gunilla Jonsson and Michael Petersen. The Taroticum hwas their inspiord scenario/mini-campaign for the game's 1st edition and Taroticum Unbound is the expanded scenario I've been running, incorporating all the London-set plot hooks mentioned in the 1st edition and its supplements Metropolis and Legions of Darkness. The result is a big open-ended sandbox adventure and my plucky players committed to a marathon all-day session to get as far through it as possible.

In the Prelude, the players were doomed prison guards at Sandburn Gaol, which slipped into Inferno under the demoniac rule of Governor Barkley. Now it's a century later. It's a wet, foggy December in London. Interview With The Vampire is showing at the cinemas, serial killers Fred and Rosemary West are on trial, and East 17's Christmas hit Stay is stuck to the top of the charts.

Let's introduce the new PCs. To create them, we used a Kult Character Generator, which makes use of the Tarotica Deck, which now exists, thanks to the Kult: Divinity Lost (AKA 4th edition) crowdfunded campaign.

When our story begins, our heroes do not know each other. Nonetheless, they are all disturbed by the same nightmares: a pregnant woman named Mary, dishevelled and dirty, in an abandoned building, in possession of a magical set of cards; she pleads for help, she is terrified someone will harm her baby, she tells the PCs this is all their fault. Her gown identifies her as a patient at Sandburn Psychiatric Hospital.

As the nightmares recur, they entangle themselves with the PCs' own traumas: Mike dreams of Mary being the victim of his brother's attack, Sir Phillip dreams of Mary being the girl he trafficked for a sacrificial ritual, Sam dreams of Mary as the medic who saved him in Iraq.

Taroticum Unbound generates further strangeness. Sam argues with his brother about being excluded from the family Christmas plans, and his brother calls him 'Michael' then denies doing so. Sir Phillip dozes on his sofa and watches a late night horror film, set in a Victorian prison, where the actor playing the chaplain looks exactly like him, but he cannot find any record of the film in the TV listings afterwards. 

The PCs flee to Sir Phillip's well-appointed flat in Clapham to work out what to do next. They study the Taroticum and find a card linked to each one of them, but try as they may they cannot separate cards from the deck.

Sir Phillip explores the Isle of Dogs, where the Docklands development has created an urban wasteland of derelict factories and office blocks standing empty. Homeless people have occupied this area, in huge numbers, but Phillip is robbed by feral youths. When he gives chase onto an empty Underground station, he is confronted by a mob of insane, possibly undead, youths. He flees, but has learned to fear a name: Gelocheli.

Their enemy has returned from Inferno and remains their master. What are they to do?

This is the point we broke for supper (a pint and a pizza, courtesy of J D Wetherspoons). The action has reached its point of absolute despair and catastrophe. We've covered most of the material from the Prelude and Chapter 1 of The Taroticum and, even though they feel utterly defeated, the PCs have interesting choices to make.

If you read my last blog, you'll know all about The Taroticum, a classic 1974 adventure for Kult 1st edition, written by the game's designers, Gunilla Jonsson and Michael Petersen. I'm currently on a project to revive and enjoy the various RPGs from my youth that never got played. Bushido never got played because teenaged-me simply didn't know enough about Japan to wrap my head round it - but that's working out fine now. Kult never got played because twenty-something me didn't know gamers with the sort of demented imaginations who would enjoy it - this too has changed.

The Taroticum has been widely praised for its imaginative story and widely panned for its linear plotting and railroading assumptions. To address thus, I spent far too long composing Taroticum Unbound, an expanded version of the scenario incorporating all the London-set plot hooks mentioned in the 1st edition and its supplements Metropolis and Legions of Darkness. The result is a big open-ended sandbox adventure.

The scenario features the titular magical deck of cards, and the new edition of the game has brought us an actual version of the Taroticum deck. I've incorporated the deck into the encounter tables for Taroticum Unbound and use it through the session to generate plot twists, spooky atmosphere, and background detail. 

There was a time, before the forging of the One Ring, when I used to meet up with friends at lunchtime and play RPGs through until the end of the evening - a good 10 or 12 hour marathon. When I was a schoolboy, this would be interrupted by my saintly mother bringing us tea and sandwiches. As a university student, it would be accompanied by beer and cigarettes and much else besides. Those days are long gone: a RPG session for me now occupies a tidy two hour slot, maybe two-and-a-half, from 7.30pm and over by 10pm. Admittedly, the games can be a bit intense and the plotting is pretty freewheeling, so I guess they're a bit more exhausting than the dungeoncrawling of my youth. Nevertheless, I worry that I've gotten too timid. I never cut loose any more. We don't commit to a game and go where it takes us, for as long as that takes.

The story begins in London, 1894, at Sandburn Gaol, a disease-ridden, overcrowded, and brutal Victorian prison, at which the PCs are staff. Things change with the arrival of a new Prison Governor, a man named Barkley who has unconventional methods. The regime becomes strict, then cruel, then demented in its excesses. Finally, in the depths of winter, Barkley recruits the PCs to carry out a dreadful ritual in the basement of the Gaol and things, quite literally, go to Hell as a result.

The players select pre-generated characters from a set of six; I ask that at least one of them plays a guard.

Barkley promotes Dorsleigh and Brown to guard captains and has Dorsleigh clean out the Lower Basement, where poor 'Dash' has been left in sensory-deprived solitary confinement for months. He is now quite mad. The next day, the prisoner is dead, and Dorsleigh and Brown must take the corpse to the Reverend for burial: Wilson notices that the prisoner died of being drained of blood through knife wounds, before being impaled in the heart.

When the three PCs take no action, Barkley knows they are his men for the next task: a midnight ritual to summon and bind a hideous goddess and steal from her the set of occult cards, the Taroticum.

The PCs are now resolved to act. Rev. Wilson, who has been haunted by dreams of the imprisoned Goddess, steals a key to get into the Lower Basement and learns from the Goddess that Barkley is learning to use the Taroticum to master reality itself; to empower himself to do this, he has moved the entire Gaol to Inferno. Wilson learns how to overcome Barkley: first, weaken his authority over the Gaol, then bind the master card, named Demiurgos, to a powerless person, by shedding their blood on it.

Brown makes a deal with prisoner Baines to trigger a wholesale revolt during supper by leaving the cells unlocked. Dorsleigh sneaks past the Razides to free poor Superintendent Clarke from his cell: the man is a tattered mannequin of blood and scars, but Dorsleigh helps him upstairs to the Governor's Office where the Taroticum is laid out, hoping this powerless wretch's blood can steal the Taroticum's power away from Barkley.

The revolt is triggered. The unstoppable Barkley tears through the mass of prisoners opposing him, but the PCs manage to get Clarke to the Taroticum and he bleeds on the Demiurgos card.

Barkley smashes down the door, but the PCs notice he is bleeding from a cut: he is no longer invulnerable. Dorsleigh shoots him with Superintendent Clarke's old handgun. The walls of the Gaol collapse to reveal the Inferno. Hideous Nepharites arrive to claim Barkley's soul, but also the souls of the PCs, who must be punished in Purgatory for the ghastly things they have done.

It's 3pm and we pause to take stock - and to introduce the new characters for the main storyline, which occurs a century later.

A big criticism of the Taroticum Prologue is that certain events have to happen and the players have to respond to them in defined ways, otherwise the story can't even get started. The Refereeing & Reflection blog puts it like this:

If you read through the Prologue, it can strike you as precariously railroaded. In actual play, it didn't feel that way at all. The players know they are taking part in a prologue, so they are constructively looking for the prompts and hooks that move the story on. Plus, the things they are expected to do are the things any sane person would want to do: find out what the hell is going on (and the Goddess is your only possible source here), then find a way to destroy Barkley (and the Goddess tells you how).

I was more worried that the Prologue would be an immensely passive experience: that the players are just listening to a story I'm telling them, that there are few occasions for them to make choices or be autonomous. The new event tables in Taroticum Unbound provided situations that afforded them choices (like the flogging scene), but the real issue was always 'How do you feel about what's just happened? How do you justify what you've just been a part of?"

The climax was certainly cathartic - and left everyone excited to bring on their 'proper' characters for Chapter 1, set at Christmas time in 1994.

​But to read about that, you'll have to wait for the next blog.

​My 2025 resolution is to play a bunch of those RPGs of my youth that shamefully gather dust on my shelves. It​ has delivered a great Pendragon campaign and thoroughly enjoyable Bushido games. Now it’s time to tackle somethin​g difficult. Something dark. Let’s play Kult.

​Yes, Kult. A game so shocking they banned it in Sweden. Well, no they didn’t, but there was certainly a moral panic about it in the Nineties, similar to the US ‘Satanic Panic’ about D&D in the ‘80s. With its graphic themes of death and madness and anti-religious imagery, Kult was an incongruous product in Swedish toy shops (where RPGs were sold, Scandinavia lacking specialist hobby shops at that time). It was cited in a 1997 motion in the Swedish Parliament, which sought to cut public funding for youth groups involved in RPGs, referencing the Bjuv murder, where two teens allegedly influenced by Kult killed a friend. Critics linked Kult to further tragedies, including a teenage suicide and a missing persons case, and the book De Övergivnas Armé warned that RPGs like Kult preyed on neglected children. Kult became a symbol of anxiety about youth, violence, and occult subcultures.

​Ed Grabianowski describes Kult as ‘the most controversial RPG ever made’ in his 2013 Gizmodo review. " 'It's banned in Sweden,' is pretty much the best possible sales pitch you can make to a couple of 14-year-old boys,” he says, reminiscing about shopping for the game in his youth. “Kult was never a big success in North America, it still holds that strange frisson of ominous allure."

As it did for me, when it blew my mind back in my Twenties. It was a game that seemed too problematic to play. I stuck to World of Darkness roleplaying, with its safety rails of consent and high-mindedness.

​Kult was created by Gunilla Jonsson and Michael Petersen in 1991 and first published in Sweden and France by Target Games. It was later translated into English and released in 1993–1994 by Metropolis Ltd - a company created by Terry Amthor of Iron Crown Enterprises with the sole aim of making Kult more widely loved. Unfortunately, the game’s sheer unremitting bleakness and its unsettling treatment of themes like rape and child sexual abuse kept mainstream gamers at bay. But it developed a … ahem… kult following, despite its high ‘ick’ quotient and somewhat boilerplate rules.

​More recently, there’s been a deluxe crowdfunded reinterpretation titled Kult: Divinity Lost, but that’s not what I’m talking about. No, I’m going back to the 1st edition, the one with the tortured angel on the front and blood-spattered imagery all over the pages. The version that caused all the trouble.

​​Kult is a modern-day cosmic horror RPG, with a particular focus on gritty urban settings and psychologically-troubled anti-heroes. Like Call of Cthulhu, it positions PCs as people who stumble into the horror of a wider supernatural reality populated by lunatic cults, alien gods, and portals to other dimensions. But rather than homaging Lovecraft, Kult takes its aesthetic from antinomian Christian heresies, Gnosticism, Kabbalah, and Clive Barker’s Books ​of Blood.

Hellraiser (1997), based on Barker's stories and a big influence on Kult

​​Derek Guder has a great review of Kult on RPGNet and I can’t improve on his summary of the deep lore in Kult, so I’ll reprint it here: 

​In Call of Cthulh​u, sanity is a resource that you lose as you penetrate the secret truths of the Mythos, especially when you encounter monsters or cast spells. In Kult, you have Mental Balance, which is zero for an ordinary person, but can swing into high or low (negative) scores. Both types of extreme Mental Balance are ‘crazy’ by ordinary standards, but Kult encourages you to lean into the crazy: as your Mental Balance veers to the extreme, you get more powerful, not less, eventually transcending humanity and awakening to your true divinity. The Light and Dark Roads (of high or low Mental Balance) both involve turning yourself into something that is, by ordinary standards, deeply abnormal, possibly monstrous.

​All of this points to the fundamental problem with Kult, which becomes very clear in the published scenarios: the players are, by necessity, passive - they just can't accomplish much in the face of such perils - so scenarios have to be linear and railroading.

Think of Call of Cthulhu’s famous ‘onion skin’ approach to scenario construction. For most of the scenario, the PCs are researching. Perhaps they do a bit of interrogating or breaking-and-entering, maybe they rough-house with some goons. This is all well within the parameters of PC skills. At the end of the scenario, you meet Deep Ones or Mi-Go or Star Vampires or Shoggoths. These things can kill you out of hand, but by then you’ve gotten hold of an Elder Sign or a Spell, or just enough dynamite to seal that well shaft forever. If the PCs have failed their research, they will go up against the Big Bad armed with only their stats and guns. Puny humans will die. But serves them right: there was always another way.

Kult is much less coy than Call of Cthulhu. Its horrors don’t wait offstage for their third act cue. The beasties of Kult aren’t sealed away or waiting for the stars to be right. They are here among us, or just on the other side of the Illusion, and they’re not going to wait until the third act to start causing trouble. Moreover, there are no Elder Signs to wave in their faces. If PCs are to use Spells, they need to choose these Advantages and Skills at character creation and starting PCs will never be able to cast the demanding Binding Spells.

Kult’s solution seems to be to introduce PCs to powerful NPCs who can keep them safe then railroad them through a linear plot that introduces them to the horrors of the Kult-i-verse: not much player agency going on, because of course if the players make choices then there’s every chance they will make suboptimal ones and that will kill their characters.

Taroticum has also been adapted for the new Kult: Divinity Lost, but, other than re-naming the main villain, I believe the new shares many of the features of the original (above)

​The story begins in 1894, as a sinister conjurer in London summons the Goddess of the Forgotten, keeper of the Taroticum—a deck of cards representing the hidden forces governing reality. When the ritual goes awry, the Taroticum fuses with London’s spiritual fabric, subtly reshaping lives and places across the city. A century later, in 1994, the player characters uncover their spiritual link to those past events—and undertake a desperate mission to bring into existence the only being who might shatter the occult framework that now binds their destinies.
​
Great stuff. Unfortunately, the scenario (or rather, mini-campaign) was widely decried for railroading PCs to a shameless degree. The excellent Reflections & Refereeing blog sums up the critical consensus:

​Here's where I think this criticism is overstated. The PCs in the Prelude are pregenerated characters and the behaviours attributed to them in the scenario are pretty plausible. Even if you have players who are particularly dense or who subscribe to the “it’s-what-my-character-would-do” school of RPG perversity, the significant NPCs can bring about the Prelude’s denouement and, for the rest of the scenario, the PCs can be assumed to be the reincarnation of those characters. Some dramatic unity is lost, but nothing is derailed.

​Over on the r/Kult Reddit, there’s a great thread on ‘Taroticum Reshuffled’ which tries to redress the linear plotting.

Kult: Divinity Lost has produced an actual Tarotica deck, only described back in 1994. Eerie!

​Redditor Responsible-Catch903 suggests adapting the scenario so that the PCs are tracking down the Taroticum cards across London, gaining powers and fulfilling destinies by so doing. That’s a pretty ambitious re-write, effectively treating The Taroticum as a setting guide. He goes on to break the story down rather brilliantly to illustrate his ideas.

I find The Taroticum a puzzling product in other ways.

Each of the Taroticum’s 7 chapters ends with stat blocks of the main NPCs, but, as we’ve seen, the supernatural antagonists are so powerful that stat blocks read like a cruel joke, or perhaps a type of modernist poem on existential dread.

Moreover, none of Kult's rule mechanics is referred to anywhere. There are no suggestions for when you should make EGO rolls, or for the  Terror modifiers when you do. The PCs will experience physical and spiritual transformations, but none of this is interpreted in terms of Mental Balance. The PCs might be minor sorcerers themselves, but no consideration is given to what might happen if they try to use spells to resolve situations.

Given that this is the Kult’s actual designers composing this, one can only assume that, despite the rulebook’s plethora of rules for guns, bombs, and spells, Jonsson and Petersén far prefer theatre of the mind and don’t really intend for all those rules to be used anyway.

Now, run as theatre of the mind, Taroticum could be a vivid exercise in storytelling. Nonetheless, I’m looking to introduce my players to Kult as a set of rules as well as a storytelling setting, and I want to provide a ‘sandbox’ experience where the players have genuine choices about where to go and what to do in the wider metaphysical world of Kult.

The Kult 1e rulebook gives quite a few locations and NPCs in London, and these sourcebooks offer more.

I blame Shogun. If you watched the slick Rachel Kondo/Justin Marks adaptation of the lumbering ​James Clavell's potboiler about Renaissance-era Japan, you too will be gripped with the romance of Nippon: honour versus duty, forbidden love, betrayal, tea ceremonies, ritual suicide, all that stuff.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a forever-GM inspired by a new film or TV series must be in want of a RPG experience to pursue it further. Which brings us to Bushido​.

Ah, Bushido. Like Leo Woodall's Roxster in the latest Bridget Jones film, I was too young to appreciate you when you came into my life back in 1982. I was a callow youth of 15 and you, you were ... err ... well, you were three years old, and that sort of age gap doesn't work. But now, in my fifties, I think I'm ready to commit.

Bushido is a TTRPG from 1979, when it was published by Robert Charette and Paul Hume through Tyr Games, later to be picked up by Fantasy Games Unlimited (FGU), in a beloved boxed set. Mike Polling's review in White Dwarf, which was then my Bible for RPG wisdom, awarded it 10/10, saying "maybe the best game I have ever seen." That was why I went out and bought a copy. A copy that gathered dust for decades.

You see, Bushido was very much ahead of the curve, as few reviews in 1979-1982 could appreciate. It was a pretty early entry into the RPG scene, especially as a non-derivative product in a quasi-historic setting. D&D co-creator Dave Arneson had been planning to shame his rival Gary Gygax with a feudal Japan RPG called 'Samurai' but Bushido got in there first. Not that Arneson would have finished 'Samurai' even if the genre had been entirely ignored by other designers.

Nor were the game rules easy to pick up. A review in Dragon (not, perhaps, the kindliest critic of indie rivals like FGU) stated that the "rule books ... make advanced nuclear theory texts seem like light reading by comparison." That's too harsh, but the rules are not only unfamiliar but make too much use of TLAs (Three Letter Acronyms) and are scattered around the densely-paragraphed books.

All of which is to say that, if you were an adolescent RPG fan in the early '80s, Bushido was a deeply unfamiliar sort of game, both in mechanics and setting. Sure, feudal Japan had touched popular consciousness in Britain and America. Clavell's Shogun novel came out in 1975 and the popular TV adaptation with Richard Chamberlain in 1980, so we all sort-of knew about samurai and ninjas and seppuku. 

But there was no Internet search engine to fill in the gaps and not a lot of books in your local library. Bushido does a creditable job of laying out the world of Nippon in the 'Warring States' (or Sengoku) period of the 15th-16th century, deducting Portuguese Catholics and gunpowder, and adding in magic and mythical monsters. But it's a huge step away from the accessible world of medieval fantasy, dungeons, and the Keep on the Borderlands.​

I often see Bushido referred to as 'Japanese Pendragon' which perhaps reflects the fans' love for both games, but it doesn't strike me as quite right. Bushido isn't trying to tell a dynastic saga that will enable players to perceive a cultural sweep, from Sengoku to Edo, and take part in the great events of the era. Its focus is low-key and personal: your particular samurai or monk or yakuza, perhaps his feudal superiors and clan (though these details are a bit sketchy) and what he can accomplish over a few years of adventuring.

A better comparison is with another late-70s RPG with a rigorously historical setting and dense rules. Bushido is the 'Japanese Chivalry & Sorcery.' C&S was a D&D-clone with a heavy focus on medieval France, Catholic religiosity, and heraldry, that evolved into a complex game in its own right. It was published in 1977, also by FGU, and designed by Ed Simbalist and Wilf Backhaus. The two went to GenCon'77 to present their game to Gary Gygax, but ended up pitching it to FGU founder Scott Bizar (supposedly because they took a dislike to Gygax once they met him in person, which by all accounts was not an uncommon experience). Early editions of C&S were certainly complicated; some called it 'unplayable.' 

Yes, Bushido has dense rules. Not unplayable though. Combat is more technical than D&D, but still boils down to a d20 roll to hit and a damage roll to reduce your enemy's Hit Points. No, the complexity is in the variety of skills and the algorithms that link them to your stats and derived stats (there are a lot of derived stats)  - and how all of these lock into a rigorous system for training and study. Years later, I picked up Ars Magica and it reminded me of Bushido. 

All of which is to say that Bushido went quite over my head as a young 15-year-old. Character generation was a fraught business of flipping between half a dozen sections in the first rulebook: newfangled personal calculators were essential, given the maths involved, and every tweak to a stat altered dozens of derived stats in unpredictable ways. You have to be pretty committed to bring a game like that to the table and once you have, well, I just didn't know what to do with it. There's an intro scenario where you slaughter bandits at a tea house (at least, that's what I recall happening) and I had no sense of where to take things from there.

And so the dust settled.

Here I am in 2024, contemplating the Bushido rules. I'm not planning anything time-consuming, nothing ambitious. Just a low-key mini campaign, maybe one or two PCs, something easy, no stress.

So of course I spend a month fiddling around with a spreadsheet to help create characters. Who am I kidding. I'm still fiddling around with that spreadsheet, six months later. You see, I had to learn how to do Excel formulae first, so it took a while.

Bushido has elements of both random character creation and point-allocation, but it's a maddening synthesis. Yes, you allocate 60 points between your six stats - Strength (STR), Deftness (DFT), Health (HLH), Speed (SPD), Will (WIL), and Wits (WIT), remember I said about TLAs? - so a 'Classic NPC' has 10 in each, but players will want to tweak.

​That's easy enough, right? 

Your choice of character class imposes a bunch of modifiers to your choice, such as Bushi (warriors) getting +10 to Strength and Deftness, +15 to Health, +5 to Speed, but -5 to Wits. There's also a ton of derived stats, which are usually based on your Stat Saving Throw, which is a 1-20 value that is actually used in game play, calculated from 1/3 of your raw stat. These saving throws are then added or averaged or manipulated in various ways to produce more characteristics - and your raw stats are added or multiplied to produce your skill scores - and those are then divided by 5 to create 1-20 skill-based saving throws.​

Long story short, even a small change to one of your raw stats has a 'trickle down' effect, altering all sorts of saving throws, derived stats, skills, and skill-based saving throws.

Seriously: how did we do this back before spreadsheets?

And then there's the stuff you can't control. A percentile dice roll determines your caste and your rank within that caste. From this derive various starting skills, equipment, money, and whether you are eligible for classes like Ninja. You might roll a high-ranking samurai with a horse, cool armour, a finely-crafted heirloom sword, and lots of sophisticated skills. Or you might be a low-ranking heimin (peasant) with a stick and an aptitude for popular dance.

Did I mention you level-up? Yes, there is a reason to go adventuring rather than just train perpetually. Levelling up grants you more Hit Points/Magic Power Points, and generous bonuses across all your class-related skills, plus boosts to complex derived stats like 'Zanshin' which enables you bto take multiple actions.

The granularity of all this is very satisfying. Once you get familiar with the rules, you start to see how training in THIS leads to gaining points in THAT which leads to trickle-down benefits in something else entirely. It's a finely-tuned machine indeed. Or a tutorial in Reaganomics. It was the early-'80s, after all.

Now here's the thing: not only do the random and non-random aspects of character creation influence each other in interesting ways, but they also dictate the sort of story you can tell. A scenario for a bunch of aristocratic samurai will be different from one for a mob of  yakuza gangsters, or Shinto priests, or peasant martial artists. Some of these combinations are deeply implausible: any D&D party can feature a paladin, a cleric, a thief, and a monk, but it's hard to propose a good reason for a samurai to team up with yakuza and a mob of peasants. Or at least, I find it hard.

One option is to ditch the dice-rolling and simply choose your caste. Fair enough. The whole 'roll your background' trope comes from a bygone era of RPG praxis. We don't need to do that any more. We can just sit down, knuckle our foreheads, and compose compelling Bushido characters out of thin air.

Except, of course, we can't all do that, especially if we're not particularly au fait with Shogun and feudal Japanese adventure fiction. Everyone defaults to being a Ninja or a high-ranking Samurai. The other option is pre-generated characters: the trusty GM rolls up characters and presents them to the players, maybe inviting them to tweak a few stats and watch the numbers trickle down the spreadsheet.

My friend Karl rolled up his character to launch the mini-campaign. Nakatame Atagi is a low-ranking peasant bushi (warrior), equipped with ashigaru armour, some mediocre weaponry, and a big tetsubo cudgel. He selected iaijutsu as a skill so he can perform lightning fast sword draws in duels.

In many ways, Atagi illustrates the problem in Bushido: a character of such lowly provenance will struggle to interact with the political end of the game, with court, with samurai culture. In Pendragon, everyone is a knight, but in Bushido, the likelihood is you will be someone like Atagi: basically, henchman material.

You might say: sure, why not? Why not run a 'thug' level Bushido campaign, far away from the haiku-swapping pretensions of the samurai. After all, I ran a One Ring campaign where the PCs were hobbits and the action revolved around Bree and its satellite villages, and an encounter with a solitary goblin was a big deal. You could run Pendragon where everyone is a peasant and no one ventures more than a day's journey from their village: the scenarios are all about missing pigs, contested land enclosures, the local druid versus the local priest, the tyranny of the knightly landlord, lusting after the miller's pretty daughter.

Hang on, I was moved to do this by watching Shogun, remember? So haiku-swapping is de rigueur. Also: elite culture throughout history is quite easy to approximate (or stereotype) in a RPG because we're familiar with it; working class culture is always underrepresented in the historical record. Pseudo-medieval peasants are mysterious enough, but pseudo-medieval Japanese peasants? That's asking a lot.

The visit-five-shrines structure lets me devote a scenario to five different aspects of life in Nippon: so, Ninjas will feature, and Yakuza gangs, also noble Samurai, war, the supernatural world too. The pilgrimage conceit gives Atagi the opportunity to access elite society as Koji's bodyguard - and Koji's blunderings will occasion conflicts and problems to solve. Between adventures, there is downtime at each shrine, so opportunities for training with elite tutors.

The whole thing borrows from 'Journey to the West' (or 'Monkey' if you watched British TV in 1979). 

OK, Monkey was set in China - and Journey To The West is a Chinese classic - but it was a Japanese show and it makes a great RPG template.

Even with this campaign concept, there's still not enough haiku-swapping for my taste! So I came up with this 'bookend' structure. Each scenario kicks off with a scene between the pivotal NPCs, with the player getting to represent one of them. 

I like this bookending structure. It feels very appropriate for a game like Bushido, partly because it lets the players view the plot from different social altitudes, but also because it allows an opportunity for freeplay-style roleplaying. Bushido has wonderfully granular mechanics, but like a lot of games of its era (that's the '70s and '80s, not Sengoku), it has assumptions baked into it that the PCs will spend most of their time sneaking and stabbing. There are no mechanics for social interaction beyond skills like Tea Ceremony or Poetry Composition. Rather than bolt on more rules, it feels more natural to wave them away, and engage in a bit of improv during the prologue and epilogue.

That's Bushido: another 'lost game' from my youth reclaimed. Now excuse me: I have to get back to work on that spreadsheet ...

Jon Peterson's weighty Playing At The World came out in 2012 and, at 720 pages, won plaudits from the chin-strokers of the gaming community, but was only ever going to be a niche entry in popular history.

Nonetheless, its status grew and it proved itself prescient: the last decade has seen a torrent of books exploring the inspiration for D&D and the rise and fall of TSR and of founder Gary Gygax. Yup, the 1970s is officially 'the historical past' and therefore another country, requiring travel guides. I don't mind: I was only a kid in the '70s. When someone tells me the 1980s is the historical past, well, that's when we riot.

For this 2nd edition, Peterson has divided his magnum opus in two. This, Part I, covers the chronology of D&D's appearance, dutifully starting off with H G Wells publishing Little Wars in 1913, leaping ahead to the appearance of the Avalon Hill company manufacturing board-based wargames in the 1950s, then the emergence of a wargaming fandom in the Midwest in the '60s that proved particularly creative and collaborative, with E. Gary Gygax as its mover and shaker. The book goes on to explore the people and groups that 'ran with the ball' once D&D emerged from the correspondence of Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson. Peterson examines the vibrant fandom on the West Coast that produced the fanzine Alarums & Excursions. He discusses the impact of conventions like GenCon and Origins in the mid-Seventies, and the, often heavy-handed, attempts by Gygax's company TSR to control the ownership and direction of D&D against a grassroots movement of fans that was often more radically creative than the game's original designers.

Part II, due in 2025, will abandon the chronological approach to delve into three key 'pillars' of RPGs: a more theoretical approach.

At 370 pages, Part I is still a hefty tome, but Peterson has a light style and covers ground quickly. He's particularly good at tagging key personalities and publications and keeping them distinct. What would otherwise be a welter of confusing names (Gygax, Charlers Swann Roberts,  Lee Gold, Don Featherstone, Donald Lowry, Hilda Hannifen, etc.) and fanzines with names that are either quirky (Corner of the Table, Fire the Arquebusiers, Owl & Weasel), prosaic (Great Plains Games Players Newsletter, Strategic Review), or just a jumble of letters (IFW, APA-L, CITEX), becomes a crisp narrative with a shifting focus that reminds me of the opening sequence to TV's Game Of Thrones. The key players are placed before the reader then orientated in time and space: Peterson prevents things turning into a blur. Academic writing of this clarity is no small achievement.

Nonetheless, it's dense stuff, and not the ideal starting point for people who don't yet know their Kasks from their Kayes, their Lakofkas from their Leibers.

The sheer granularity of Peterson's analysis is impressive. He's read every amateur rules set, every fanzine, cross-referenced all the letters pages, unscrambled the anagrammatised pseudonyms, tracked gaming road trips across the continent, broken down inventory lists to spot the emergence and abandonment of products, and deconstructed the attendances at conventions. He deduces who met whom at a San Francisco dinner party in December 1974  then played D&D into the small hours of the morning - then he finds their session write-ups in a letter or amateur press association article. 

Cultural history is an elusive thing, because the world is full of broken Roman pottery, but poetry is winged, and vanishes unless someone writes it down. Thousands of people discovered D&D in the 1970s, but reconstructing how they found it, how they played the game, how they influenced each other: that's the missing pattern. Gygax was a voluminous correspondent and the Los Angeles gaming scene documented almost everything they did, but between Gygax's Lake Geneva and the LA burbs stretches a 'dark continent' from which only stray names and texts emerge: Ken St Andre publishing Tunnels & Trolls in Arizona in 1975 or Richard Berg in Baltimore, coining the term 'role-playing game' that same year.

I'm reminded of books on Dark Ages history. You've got a few monks writing in Latin, a few genealogies of Welsh kings, and the historian surmises that the Cynddigilligwdd who died at Amyggyllydd fighting Rhydyddydyd must be the same Cynddigilligwdd mentioned as the brother of Nggiog in the Life of St Gwrgygwgion. Names emerge out of the murk and get anchored to the few secure landmarks in a vast sea of anonymity.

The price Peterson pays for this granularity is a loss of, well, the culture in cultural history. Peterson is so busy pinning down names and terms, who met who where and how they influenced them to write what and when, that the experience of playing D&D rarely gets touched upon. There are flickers of ancient passion from the gushing letters, idiosyncratic session logs, and fan fiction that Peterson quotes from time to time. And of course, you can still feel the heat from the letter page debates condemning styles of play - and dragging the Blackmoor supplement over hot coals of criticism. You pick up a sense of Gygax's prickly, preening, passive-aggressive personality. But you're left with little sense of what anyone else was like as a person, what they got out of D&D, what it was like playing those early, groundbreaking games.

The reward is lots of insights into the development of ideas in the abstract. Where did 'rolling for initiative' come from? Not D&D - it appeared in the short-lived Warriors of Mars wargame that TSR rushed out for 1974's GenCon VII. Who invented the Thief class? Not Gary Gygax: it was submitted by California fan Gary Switzer in early 1974, but made its way into the 1975 Greyhawk​ supplement uncreditted. How about 'role-playing games'? As noted above, it was Richard Berg, reviewing the new trend in fantasy games for New York wargames company SPI.

Peterson isn't just doling out fascinating titbits. He draws broader conclusions from these things. TSR's appropriation of the Thief class, without giving credit, is made into a touchstone for the way Gygax's company attempted to define 'canon' and rein in the creativity of fans. The term 'role-playing game' becomes a way of exploring, not just what makes D&D different from other wargames, but a distinction between D&D itself and the RPGs that followed, like Tunnels & Trolls, En Garde, and Runequest. With the arrival of this term, D&D becomes simply a role-playing game, which has important consequences for TSR's attempt to discourage competition with threats of copyright infringement.

One chapter that, I think, illustrates Peterson's strengths is #10 'Return of the Referee.' He identifies a Twin Cities wargamer David Wesley who, back in the early Sixties, reintroduced to the hobby the idea of a Referee, which had lain dormant since the 19th century. Referees were important when wargames were military instruction tools, because someone had to arbitrate which side would prevail when asymmetric forces employed different tactics against each other. Wesley adopted this playstyle, with its revolutionary principle that 'anything can be attempted' but the Referee decides what worksl. To this he added a concept drawn from a Parker Brothers family board game: the idea of victory points.

From this combination came Wesley's pivotal Braunstein wargame in which players took roles of combatants and civilians in a Prussian siege - and one of the Braunstein players was Dave Arneson, who pitched the as-yet-unnamed and unsystematised D&D to Gary Gygax a few years later.

There were other ingredients crucial to the creation of D&D: the growing acceptance (amidst resistance) of the fantasy genre in wargaming circles, the idea of gaming moving between a geographic/exploratory mode and a tactical/combat mode (which Peterson sources in fan variants of Diplomacy from the late-'60s), and the emerging and collaborative fan culture that Peterson traces back to Avalon Hill's in-house magazine The General and its 'Seeking Opponents' column.

What's missing is an attempt to link these innovations to wider cultural movements of the 1960s and '70s. Some of that will doubtless inform Part II next year. However, in this 2nd Edition, Peterson does address some current year preoccupations of race and gender. He celebrates the important contributions of Lee Gold and Hilda Hannifen from the West Coast fandom. He finds great resonance in Len Lakofka's notorious article from a Diplomacy fanzine in 1976 that argued for female characters having lower Strength scores but instead having a Beauty attribute which could be used to seduce men. TSR foolishly reprinted the article, prompting a community backlash, and Peterson cleverly links this to his theme of who could and should define D&D authoritatively. 

I found Peterson's deep dive enthralling, but maybe I'm a special case. I discovered D&D in the UK in 1978 and pored over the product lists and reviews from far-away America. I never read Alarums & Excursions but it was a title redolent of wonder for me; likewise Empire of the Petal Throne, Blackmoor, the Egg of Coot, GenCon, and tournament dungeons. Peterson reads, to me, like a Bible concordance, unpacking all the childhood stories from Sunday school.

Maybe you'd rather wade into D&D's tumultuous history with something less academic, less impersonal, more dramatically engaging? OK, here are four alternative reads:

Empire of Imagination (subtitled 'Gary Gygax & the Birth of Dungeons & Dragons') by Michael Witwer has a GREAT cover. It's an homage to the Unearthed Arcana D&D expansion, casting Gygax in the wizard role, complete with slack-jawed expression. It tells the tale of Gary 'n' Dave, their falling out, Gary Gygax's excesses, and the loss of his beloved company, in the style of an in-flight magazine: a lot of dramatic cliffhangers and flashbacks, but not much real insight. It's attractive and accessible, even if you know nothing about D&D.

Of Dice & Men (subtitled 'The Story of Dungeons & Dragons And The People Who Play It) by David M Ewalt has a GREAT title. It's popular journalism, like Witner's book, but much better written and more insightful. It has a revelatory structure: as well as a history of the game and its key personalities, it's a memoir and road trip, culminating in a personal pilgrimage to Lake Geneva, the birthplace of D&D. It's a book with a lot of heart, even if the history too often takes second place to the vibes.

Slaying The Dragon (subtitled 'The Secret History of Dungeons & Dragons') by Ben Riggs has the worst title, far and away. Unlike the previous two, it's a proper piece of historical research, but Riggs's focus is less on the game than on the business side of D&D. Like Peterson, he has the gift of lucidity and the ability to draw out a revealing theme from a mass of confusing detail. Based on interviews with the main actors (but not, alas, the much-maligned Lorraine Williams) and a forensic eye to contract law, he traces the rise and fall of TSR and its flawed business model throughout the '80s and '90s. I heartily recommend this one, especially if you grew up on the D&D settings and novelisations in the '90s.

The Elfish Gene (subtitled 'Dungeons & Dragons And Growing Up Strange') by Mark Barrowcliffe has the BEST title. It's an autobiography, so you only get historical details about D&D in passing. What you do get is an unflinching analysis of a teenage obsession with D&D when it first landed in Britain in the late-'70s. Barrowcliffe doesn't spare himself any blushes with his by-turns comedic then tragic dissection of clueless adolescence and the deep (and possibly damaging) addictive quality of D&D for young minds. It's a story of friendships lost and opportunities for growth squandered - but every word of it resonates with me.

"The Fates are just: they give us but our own," writes the American poet and abolitionist John Greenleaf Whittier, adding: "Nemesis ripens what our hands have sown."

The best Nemesis - your adversary, opponent, BBEG - is the one crafted exquisitely for you, the one that matches the contours of your heroism and magnifies your flaws as well as your strengths.

Tolkien gave us memorable heroes, but it's his villains that live in memory: the stooped and snuffling Ringwraith on the East Road out of the Shire, the mockney Orcs intriguing in Cirith Ungol, the schizoid Gollum, and the magnificently grandiose dragon Smaug.

The iconic scene in Ralph Bakshi's Lord of the Rings (1978)

Whittier's point goes even deeper: Nemesis is created by heroism, it emerges in response to it, it is the Jungian Shadow. You sow the seed of adversity, Nemesis makes it grow.

This is the basis for designing the Nemesis in Through The Hedgerow. The game is low-key enough that it doesn't need a moustache-twirling villain. Briar Knights might be searching for a child lost in the woods, aiding a widow facing eviction at Christmas, or rescuing miners trapped by a cave-in. The rules provide tables for generating all sorts of conflicts and crises in the different historical eras in which it takes place.

But then there's the Dark. Behind these workaday perils and dramas, a supernatural menace is at work. At first, its focus is not on you. But then you draw its attention. Perhaps your reveal yourselves to terrified mortals and their panic-stricken Dread sounds a supernatural alarm. Perhaps you take an ill-advised Respite or violate a Ban under which your mission labours. Or perhaps you encounter the Dark's spies. Evil sharpens its focus: the Dark is tracking you now.

In game terms, the Nemesis Die gets bigger, which means threats become more deadly, opponents are from further up the hierarchy of menace. Eventually, the Dark's Emissaries take notice of you. Excrement just got real.

Who are these Emissaries? Through The Hedgerow divides the Lords of the Dark into four factions and for each adventure the Judge chooses one to be active.

The Raven Margrave is a god-like entity, a spiritual force of death and horror. It is always off-stage, but it sends its Murthering Ministers through the Hedgerow to enact its purposes in different centuries: Feannag the Archer, Brandt the Necromancer, Kraaj Crowface, Dame Ragnall the Hag. These are apex Bad Guys, your classic supervillains. Briar Knights do not want to meet them in person. You certainly don't want to fight them. Best let them capture you (and Through The Hedgerow's combat rules encourage outcomes like this) so they can monologue you instead, as good villains do.

But if you run into the Ministers, things are already out of hand. Lower down the pecking order, you will probably meet the Raven Margrave's Undead emissaries: vampyres, wraiths, ghouls, and liches. 'Liches' here means walking corpses, like zombies, not the immortal sorcerers from D&D.

This means horror, and the Raven Margrave lets you create horror-themed adventures of corpses stirring in plague pits, wraiths unleashed from barrows, and vampyres predating on Victorian debutantes in stately homes.

It also means violence. Briar Knights aren't allowed to harm mortals, but the walking dead are quite another thing. Out with the flaming swords!

Moreover, the Raven Margrave is the principle antagonist in the Age of Swords (the 9th century). He has spread his cult among the invading Vikings, so in this era he has a human army at his command. This makes for a classic swords-and-sorcery adventure, helping Alfred the Great resist the Great Heathen Army as well as the Raven Margrave's necromancers and undead.

My favourite minions of the Raven Margrave are right at the bottom of the scale. The Margrave manifests through flocks of crows called Malignities. As threats go, a Malignity of crows isn't the most deadly, but the first time someone loses Resolve in a Challenge involving them, the Nemesis Die grows in size. Players learn to fear the sinister rooks swirling over the copse of trees, or the solitary raven perched on the farm gate.

Yes, I stole the vigilant crows from Susan Cooper's The Dark Is Rising (1973), especially the scene where the rooks assault the hapless Walker.

Maybe you like your horror a bit more subtle, more like a dark fairy-tale than Gothic or swords-and-sorcery. Maybe you prefer Roald Dahl to Stephen King.

The Cailleach is a coven of Hags who excel in illusion and shapeshifting, potion-brewing and poisoning, and of course mind control. They're pantomime villains compared to the Margrave Raven, but no less deadly than the Murthering Ministers. If you meet a Hag in person, you're in deep trouble, but typically you will interact with their lesser emissaries.

There are Witches doing their bidding, of course, and a tribe of doting Ogres that can pass for human. More troubling are their Manikins, cobbled together from junk and filth and woven with illusion to pass for human. The Hags control humans directly by making dolls called 'poppets': these mesmerised Changelings act as spies, in the same way as the crows that serve the Raven Margrave, but they're still human deep down inside, so Briar Knights can't just kill them.

The Cailleach's real menace is its agenda. The Hags hate innocence, cleanliness, and childhood - and they want to make everything filthy and corrupt. There's creepy comedy to be found in this: the Telltale Signs that someone is a Changeling or a Manikin by the dirt under their nails or their sudden taste for spoiled milk; the Hags can be repulsed with soap and tuneful singing. The gruesome aspect is what the Hags do to their victims - especially children.

Of course, Roald Dahl's The Witches (1983) is a huge inspiration for the Cailleach.

The Cailleach is the main adversary in the Age of Thunder (1940s, during the War) and their targets are often orphaned or evacuated children. Any adventure against the Cailleach is a journey into paranoia, where no one is who they seem and good people are being replaced by manikins and changelings; this is exaggerated in the febrile atmosphere of the 1940s, where everyone is on the lookout for spies.

Peter Johnston gives these Hags pantomime-themed Regency attire - and there in the background is Bilge with a bag on his head (the first Hedgerow PC)

Sometimes, you don't want horror, you want action-romance, perhaps with a bit of dark humour.

The Feral Squires are Fay Lords who crossed over into the Mortal Ages to serve the Dark. They were godlike beings once, but they've been enslaved by their own appetites and diminished into caricatures of what they once were. Caricatures still bite, so beware!

Their names of familiar from folklore: Isengrim Von Ulf and his wolfish wife Dame Hirsent, Martin Le Ape, Paddock the Baron of Toads, Tybault Prince of Cats, and Reynard the Fox. They're here to lord it over humanity: they want to hunt people, eat people, enslave and abuse people. Diminished they may be, but they've scaled the British class system and preside over walled estates where they conduct slave auctions, cannibal banquets, and debauched parties.

They are off-the-scale formidable as opponents in battle, but PCs will probably be dealing with their minions: Dark Druids curry favour with them, Werkynde are lycanthropes with buyer's remorse, Feraldines are wicked talking animals, but they have many Beast Spies, similar to the crows that work for the Raven Margrave. If Tybault Prince of Cats is your Nemesis, then every household tabby or farmyard mouser is a potential informant against you.

The Feral Squires are the main adversaries in the Victorian Age of Steel, where they enjoy the opportunities for greed and exploitation the British Empire brings with it.

Adventures against the Feral Squires are opportunities for high fantasy derring-do. They and their minions aren't human, so Briar Knights can unleash a bit more violence than they usually like to. The Squires are a fractious bunch, so politicking can play a part in defeating them. They're Fay Lords, so stories often involve other Fays lurking in the corners of British society. Plus: mansions! Think Downtown Abbey​ with werewolves!

Alternatively, the Feral Squires can be used for adventures focusing on tragedy and horror. The Werkynde are cursed were-creatures and the abuse of power by wicked aristocrats over ordinary commoners is more terrifying than any vampyre or hag.

The final Nemesis faction is in some ways the weakest, but most likely to cause problems for PCs. The Witch-Harrow is a human organisation, although one infused with the corrupting power of the Dark. It is a secret society, albeit one that operates quite openly in the 17th century Age of Plagues, wherein it is the principle antagonist for the Light.

The Witch-Harrow organises humans to identify and target 'witches' in their midst. It is driven by paranoia, intolerance, and authoritarianism. What constitutes a 'witch' might vary. In the 9th century, they are pagans and fays; in the 19th and 20th century, the Witch-Harrow targets reformers and non-conformists. Women are always a particular target.

In the Age of Plagues the Witch-Harrow reaches a pinnacle of power, seeking out witches to put on trial, torture, and execute. Some of these witches are actual sorcerers, some are luckless Fays, a few might even be servitors of other factions of the Dark, but the overwhelming majority are innocent humans, whose crime is defiance of convention, or simply being a woman.

The Witch-Harrow employs Snoops and Scolds, who act as spies and troublemakers, rather like the beasts serving the Feral Squires. As the Nemesis Die swells, the PCs can expect to meet Hexenhammers and Hexenhounds, armed with cold iron talismans and heavy weapons. The big hitters are the Inquisitors, who are formidable magic-wielders (though they don't think of themselves as such).

The problem with the Witch-Harrow is that their membership is entirely human. The Light bans Briar Knights from harming humans. In addition to this, the Witch-Harrow is influential and can bring to bear the power of the local authorities: unwitting magistrates, hapless constables, judgemental clergy.

An adventure against the Witch-Harrow is less likely to involve violence or supernatural horror; more likely, there will be moral dilemmas, intrigue, and stealth.

The touchstone for any adventure against the Witch-Harrow is Arthur Miller's The Crucible (1953), in which the witch hysteria in Salem in 1692 introduces the self-righteous witch hunters like Rev. Hale. 

For your first game of Through The Hedgerow, you have a choice to make: who is the Nemesis? 

A Through The Hedgerow campaign might involve just one Nemesis, being confronted in different ways in different centuries. A bit like the way the Master turns up all the way through the 1971 season of Doctor Who.

Alternatively, different adventures can pit the Briar Knights against different Nemeses, allowing you to vary the tone of the game between violence and politics, comedy and horror.

I tend to start games with the Raven Margrave. He's menacing, but never physically present. He's clearly BAD - no one is going to be playing the Relativism Card and saying "Well, he kinda has a point!" He's trying to spread death and destruction in a general sort of way, but he's not usually tormenting one person in particular. The Malignities of crows are very atmospheric and play well with the rural setting. Most players of RPGs know what the Undead are and how to deal with them. Also, the Raven Margrave tends to act in the same way in every century, so you can deploy him in any Age without complications.

The Feral Squires are also straightforward. The Squires themselves are too dangerous to be fought directly, but they can be negotiated with, or tricked, or played off against each other. They're not omniscient gods (though they think they still are). As the centuries roll by, they diminish, becoming more comedic. In the Age of Swords, Isengrim is a wolf-god made flesh, ruling over a forest or an army of berserkers. By the Age of Thunder, he might be a tyrannical headmaster in a creepy boarding school.

The Cailleach are more challenging - and the themes of child abduction they raise are problematic, so check with your players. Their malice is often very focused on one particular child or family, but they work by corrupting whole communities. Their illusions make it difficult for players to know who to trust. Some players love the sort of supernatural thriller the Cailleach generate, others find it all a bit stressful.

The Witch-Harrow make the biggest demands on player ingenuity. A direct assault rarely works against them and they know how to incapacitate Fays and ward themselves against spells. These adventures are most likely to be rooted in historical situations and mortal politics. If your players love historical roleplaying and espionage, then the Witch-Harrow make compelling opponents, particularly because, like the best villains, they are heroes in their own eyes.

Ever since Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson termed D&D'scharacter options 'Classes', RPG designers have searched for different nomenclature: profession, archetype, career, template, etc. They're all 'Classes' really and there must be a tiny sorrow in the heart of every new designer, because whatever cool name you come up with for your RPG character types, once the game gets played, everyone is going to call them 'Classes.'

In Through The Hedgerow, I make my bid for immortality by terming my character classes 'Gentries' - partly because it's got an Olde English flavour to it that matches the game's Dickensian and folkloric themes, partly from the Latin gens meaning a clan or nation. Let's see if it catches on!

Buggebers are a Fay Gentry: they are headless trolls birthed from nightmare who (usually) serve the Dark, when they're not pursuing their own hideous hunger. They have teeth in their neck stumps, long prehensile tongues, hairy misshapen bodies, and big claws.

Peter Johnston's weirdly wonderful art for Through The Hedgerow. Here's a Buggeber from the Age of Steel (18th century), enjoying fine dining.

Not a very attractive option for a player character? Well, it takes all types. But in Through The Hedgerow all PCs are servitors of the Light, so how does this come about?

Perhaps your Buggeber is a condemned prisoner of the Light, fully deserving to be punished for their crimes, but offered a reprieve if they serve the Briar Company of Sky and Furrow. You're still a nasty piece of work, but fear keeps you in line (unless you think no one is looking!).

Or perhaps you're on the run from the Dark, having betrayed your ghastly masters or let them down in some nefarious task. The Light offers you protection, in return for service, but your monstrous nature is still unredeemed.

Then again, perhaps you seek redemption and a way to atone for your sins. Or perhaps you have become enamoured with humanity, or one particular human, or a place or a family, that you want to protect from the Dark. Or maybe you are just a supernatural mercenary and the Light commands your service for the time being.

Dark Buggebers wear their victim's skulls and animate them with their horrid tongues, but Buggebers serving the Light aren't allowed to do this: they wear hollowed-out turnips instead. The Glamour surrounding them can help them pass as (scary-looking) humans for short periods, but children and lunatics see straight through that.

The thing that distinguishes your Buggeber is its Appetites. Buggebers can eat anything, but they hunger for particular types of things: dead things, exotic things, beautiful things, things that belong to particular people. Feeding your Appetites during an adventure is a big deal, because you earn Free Respites that way (which Fay characters don't usually get). It will, however, send you off on side-quests to consume a corpse, a parrot, a family portrait, the Old Brigadier's wooden leg...

When an adventure starts, Buggebers will be living their best monster life: stalking small children, being hunted by pitchfork-wielding villagers, raiding graveyards, battling other monsters, masquerading as humans in an attempt to be 'good.'

You'll enjoy a Buggeber PC if you like playing the anti-hero or the touching (or comedic) attempts by a monster to learn humanity.

Another Fay Gentry, Flayboglins are animated scarecrows. That's the least of what they are, because Flayboglins are ancient (but now diminished) chthonic gods, now confined to a clumsy effigy and standing watch over a stretch of countryside.

These forgotten gods are motivated by a Fury - and you decide what you are furious about. Maybe it's the pollution of the countryside, or humanity's wickedness, or cruelty to animals, or the neglect of ancient traditions. Fury builds in a Flayboglin and is then released in a whirlwind that topples walls and blows open doors.

At the start of an adventure, a Flayboglin might be minding its own business, keeping the rooks off a far-flung field, until the Briar Company requests aid. Other Flayboglins drape themselves in Glamour and move among mortals, preserving those things they care about. The landlord of a local pub, the scoutmaster who trains a troop of Morris Dancers, the gamekeeper who chases down poachers, or the old woman who cares for stray cats and dogs: they could any one of them be a Flayboglin.

Flayboglin PCs are for players who enjoy taking on a mystical role, of a being that can pass for human, but has no humanity: only an passion for protecting a vanishing world.

This is the first Mortal Gentry: Clerks are ordinary humans who serve the Heathen Saints of the Hedgerow. The Saints are dimly personified beings: Elder Mandrake, King Wren, Lady Hagthorne, and Wuthering Stormcrow. This service binds them to the mysteries of the countryside and the battle against the Dark in small and great ways.

Clerks have access to a wide range of spells. They also gain powers from their Saint, as well as the ability to 'abjure' certain agents of the Dark. For example, Clerks of King Wren talk to birds, abjure the undead (like a D&D cleric!), and their spells can be violent or protective, but they are compelled by Elder Mandrake never to be the instigator of conflict.

Between adventures, Clerks have a role in the local community: a school teacher, the local squire, a farrier or ostler in a small village, a tramp who sleeps in the hay ricks. They carry out their Saint's work in minor ways until the Light summons them.

A Heathen Clerk is a familiar PC archetype: the rustic cleric or druid, serving a higher cause, but cut off from society by a lonely calling. Of course, your Heathen Clerk might be a family man, a housewife, or a local politician, in which case keeping their magical identity hidden will be a source of drama in itself.

Another Mortal Gentry, a Hodkin is a champion of the Light, albeit a tragic one. Each has been exalted as an immortal warrior in the war against the Dark, but the Light has robbed them of family and home. The power of Glamour means their loved ones no longer remember them and it is their doom to fight on, unrecognised, and hope only one day to die, unlamented.

Hodkins carry a magical treasure to aid them in their battle with the Dark. They are immortal until the Light finds no further use for them, and the Doom can be postponed over and over. Each suffers a very personal Sorrow, and roleplaying this burden and loss can earn you an extra Free Respite, in which to recover from your battles.

When not adventuring, a Hodkin might return to their loved ones - or descendants - to watch over them from a distance, or else dedicate themselves to defending little patches of history that mean something to them: an old farmhouse, an unmarked grave, a meadow where two lovers once parted.

Playing a Hodkin can be very straightforward: you're a time-travelling immortal warrior. The creativity comes in designing your magical treasure and in expressing your unique Sorrow.

Motleys originated as 'Holy Fools' - mortals whose madness gave them powers for the Light or the Dark. Credit to editor Phil Smith's team at Osprey for helping me develop this idea, This Mortal Gentry still consists of oddballs and eccentrics, but they are more like entertainers than simple lunatics. Each has been taught a cosmic Secret by the Light, a Secret that has transformed their perceptions as well as granting them powers.

This capering Motley from the Age of Steel carries a 'marotte' - a jester's stick, with an inflated bladder on the end

Your Motley is characterised by her Secret and the Day of the Week associated with it. As Monday's Child, you are a Harlequin who can lie and change appearance. As Wednesday's Child, you are a Lazar, your secret is Death, and you can kill with impunity - as well as talk with ghosts. AS Saturday's Child, you are a Jester who performs supernatural pranks.

Motleys are committed to Holy Poverty and never start an adventure with any equipment. Between adventures, they live a hand to mouth existence, begging or performing, or perhaps assassinating enemies of the Light if they are Lazars!

Play a Motley PC if you want to be the comic relief - or else delve more deeply into their Secret and the tragedy of being cut off from society by your own inexpressible strangeness. Each Motley Day functions like its own separate character class (there! I said it!) so there's a lot of variety with this Gentry.

Back to the Fay Gentries: this time the sorcerous Ouzels. These are humanoid Fays with the heads of birds who were expelled from Fayrie because of their determination to aid mortals against the Dark - or at any rate, that's the story they​ tell.

Ouzels cast spells pretty easily, but they are more than just magic-users. They can transform into birds, of course! There are eight noble houses ('sieges') that arrived from Fayrie, each aligned with a different bird.

Siege Cathartine are buzzards who revel in slaughter, while Siege Milhuyt are thrushes who delight in beauty and song. Dreoilin wrens are strategists and plotters, while Strigine owls are philosophers and knowledge-seekers. Each house has its own magical focus and powers.

Ouzels are political creatures: the sieges manoeuvre against each other, and Ouzels often involve themselves in mortal divisions too, taking sides in the conflicts of the Age they inhabit. In the Age of Plagues, they might be Cavaliers opposing Roundheads, or rebels rescuing accused witches from the Witch-Harrow. They are often in conflict with other Fays too, which unites the fractious houses as one.

Playing an Ouzel PC gives you plenty of spell power and shapeshifting, but it also involves you in politics and negotiations, often with the Proud Fay who live in the Mortal Ages and want nothing to do with the Light or the Dark.

The last of the Fay Gentries is probably the weirdest. Tomnoddins are humanoid spiders with lots of hairy arms terminating in hands, and human-like eyes.

Despite their gruesome appearance, Tomnoddins are fascinated by humanity; so much so, they obsess over one aspect of humanity, which becomes their 'weaving.' Some Tomnoddins are fascinated by money and live as merchants, others by love and they pursue romance at all cost. The problem is, Tomnoddins have an erratic grasp of humanity, so their weavings are always faulty. The Tomnoddin merchant tries to sell horrific or absurd things, like severed fingers or bottled tears, while the lover pursues their beloved with disturbing gifts and distressing poetry.

Tomnoddins have spider-like powers too, of course: they can use multiple limbs, scuttle along walls, and squeeze through tiny gaps.

Being a Tomnoddin means committing to a role in human society, but never getting it quite right. Adventures often start for a Tomnoddin with a crisis in their weaving, when they are confronted by terrified or outraged humans.

Tomnoddin PCs can play similarly to Buggebers if you want the character arc of someone monstrous who is learning to be human.

Through The Hedgerow draws inspiration from children's fantasy literature and TV, so of course you must be able to play a child character, caught up in a fantasy adventure. Waifs aren't magical and don't have powers, but they are protected by their Innocence, which means they can't be seriously harmed or killed if the player doesn't want that to happen.

Waifs don't have to worry about a Doom Die and aren't bound by the Light's Bans, like the Law of Flint and Flame, so they can use technology and even harm mortals in a way that other Briar Knights cannot.

Eventually, a Waif's Innocence declines and is lost. When that happens, the Glamour might erase all their memories of adventures with magical companions: they have outgrown such things. Some, however, will join a Gentry, becoming a Heathen Clerk, Hodkin, Motley, or Warlocke, with a Doom weighing them down.

Playing a Waif PC is liberating: you don't have to worry about being killed or wounded. Nor do you have great powers to work out how to use. Instead, you concentrate on taking part in the story, using trickery, empathy, and honesty to win through. You also offer your companions 2 Free Respites, which will make you welcome in any Briar Company.

Warlockes are a Mortal Gentry of sorcerers who get their spells from an intelligent entity known as their Grimoire. The Grimoire could be a literal spell book, but often it's an animal or piece of technology that imparts magic to the Warlocke, who alone hears it speak.

This Warlocke from the Age of Swords has a Grimoire in the form of a talking pig. If you remember Hen Wen, the oracular pig from Lloyd Alexander's Chronicles of Prydain, you'll know what this is like.

Warlocke's are pretty effective magic-users, maybe not with the same mystical punch that Ouzels enjoy, but very potent if they take time to cast spells as rituals rather than on-the-fly hexes. Their Grimoires store spells for them, to cast as needed. But the main fun to be had with your Grimoire is the Oath it offers you.

Your Grimoire has its own strange agenda and it offers you an Oath to fulfil at the start of every adventure. In Through The Hedgerow you enjoy certain advantages while under an Oath and you get helpful rewards for completing it. While your Grimoire is weak, it imposes fairly trifling duties on you (e.g. protect a child from bullies), but as it grows in power, the things it wants you to do become more grandiose (e.g. breaking an innocent man out of prison).

Most of the fun in playing a Warlocke PC is in your bickering relationship with your Grimoire. The main advantage is the Oath, which gives you a lot of control over the way your Doom Die grows. Warlockes won't meet their Doom in a hurry, giving you time to mature the Warlocke and his Grimoire into an awesome spell-casting team.

You can watch players bringing some of these characters to life in our play-through videos.

Guess who's back?

Back again - on drivethrurpg or on Amazon

Back in 2020, The Ghost Hack was the first of my ventures into indie RPG publishing inspired by The Black Hack's irresistible mechanic of old school D&D stats married to a shrinking usage die. It was a bit primitive but it sold nicely - a Silver Best Seller in drivethrurpg. I was obsessing over ghost stories at that time and followed The Ghost Hack up with a slightly more polished expansion and a couple of short scenarios.

Now I've released a revised edition that incorporates both books in one volume, adds a bunch more content, and brings the rules into harmony with the more polished version I ended up using for The Magus Hack​.

Before I talk about the new Ghost Hack, I need to say something about its source material.

And yet. And yet. Wraith remains the one World of Darkness game that has never worked for me. I've run long campaigns with the other main games but every attempt to launch Wraith has met with, well, dissatisfaction. The closest I came to making Wraith fly was a version set in the 18th century Caribbean. Pirate Wraiths are cool.

Part of the problem is Wraith's setting which always struck me as incompletely realised. The other World of Darkness games are set in a bleak dystopian version of our world. Although werewolves and mages can step away into fantastical spirit worlds, they are still products of this world. Wraith is weird. Where are you? A sort of parallel reality called the Shadowlands that both is, and yet is not, the same as the world the living inhabit.

The moment you start playing Wraith, you butt up against confusions about what everything looks like. Wraiths perceive the world through a filter of decay. But how does that work? Do buildings in the Shadowlands have doors and windows, or are they shattered and broken? Can wraiths read newspapers and watch TV - or is the paper rotten and the screen cracked for them?

Wraiths get discorporated by rough contact with 'real' things. This makes crossing a street or moving through a house rather difficult. Wraiths are perpetually being bashed into insubstantiality every time someone opens a door into them, drives through them, kicks a ball at them. Your immortal vampire can walk down a crowded street at midnight, but your lordly wraith, weirdly, cannot. So where do Wraiths live? What do they do?

Wraiths are supposed to be driven by obsessive Passions and tied to Tethers, which are objects or people that mattered to them. Yet they are also supposed to be servile minions in the Hierarchy, a Kafka-esque slave state of the dead. The rules invite us to imagine NPC wraiths who are clerks or legionaries in this vast bureaucracy of the afterlife. I get it: I've seen Beetlejuice. ​

Yet these wraiths are also passionately tied to weird causes, like growing perfect tulips or avenging their wife's murder or finishing their unpublished novel. Where do they find the time? How can they be a committed servant of the Hierarchy and yet also dedicated to tracking down their cousin who disappeared in the Appalachians?  There doesn't seem to be a way to combine both ideas of what a wraith is. 

Then there's the Shadow, which is your dark-side given voice, whispering in your mind and offering power in exchange for the gratification of its own Dark Passions. If every Wraith NPC has this sort of Jekyll-and-Hyde persona, the social world of wraiths becomes unimaginably weird. How does the Hierarchy even function if all wraiths are self-sabotaging all the time?

The game recommends players roleplay each other's Shadows, acting as tempters and tormentors to one another. Great on paper, but I've never been able to get it to work. Some players are too amiable to play the Shadow with gusto; others throw themselves into it with such cackling enthusiasm that it derails the plot.

Never mind that, you can't kill wraiths - at least, not reliably. A dead wraith tumbles into a hyperspace realm called the Labyrinth where it is tormented by its dark side. This psychodrama element tells you a lot about the highfalutin' play style going on at White Wolf head office, but for a lot of ordinary roleplayers it feels incredibly self-indulgent. Then the wraith reforms and it's business as usual. Yes, there's a limit to how many times you can do this, but the bottom line is that you can't kill a NPC wraith because they just come back again, chastened and more sorrowful.

All of these conundrums weigh down a game that was already way too fiddly. Wraiths have Passions and Tethers, but also Dark Passions and Shadow Thorns, and Memoriam, and Angst; they are loyal to a Faction and a Legion as well as a Guild plus their own mortal attachments, as well as ... look, there's a lot to keep track of, a lot of dice to roll, a lot of points to tot up.

David Black's Black Hack is a short and sweet creative step away from Old School D&D. There are the familiar 6 Stats (STR, DEX, CON, INT, WIS, CHA, the old gang), plus character classes and levels. You roll a d20 to do stuff and you're trying to roll under your Stat. Penalties add to your die roll, making that more difficult. For example, attacking or dodging someone with more HIt Dice than you is hard: you add the difference to your d20 roll.

Black's system lends itself very well to cheap and cheerful dungeon crawls - and in this regard I'm particularly fond of Michael Thomas's Bluehack, which condenses the already-concise Holmes Basic D&D rules into Black's ultra-simplified template.

The secret ingredient Black introduces is the concept of a Usage Die. This is a die you roll that gets smaller every time it rolls a 1 or a 2. It might start off as a d8, so if you roll it there are six chances nothing happens, and two that it shrinks to a d6. Once the d4 shrinks then PFFFT! the Usage Die has gone.

In his original rules, Black only uses this mechanic as a way of tracking how many arrows you've got left or how much oil is in your lantern: don't bother keeping track, just roll the Usage Die every now and then to see if it's running out.

Then I came across Matthew Skaill's The Blood Hack. Skaill's little book has two fantastic innovations. One is to treat a vampire character's blood reservoir as a usage die. Every time you use your blood to heal or activate a magical power, roll the die. Once the die has gone, you're a hungry vampire.

The other is to make your vampire's Morality a usage die, so every time you do something evil you have to roll. But - and this is the clever bit - every time that usage die rolls a 1 or a 2, it doesn't get smaller: it gets bigger! A vampire with d6 Morality is pretty normal, a d8 Morality is a bit of a sonofabitch, a d10 is a sociopath, a d12 is a monster. If you reach d20 you are demonically horrible and if a d20 Morality Die gets any bigger then BOOM - you've turned into a NPC villain.

This is a great push-your-luck mechanic. Sure, with a d6 Morality, the first time you murder someone there's a 33% chance your die is going to expand to a d8. As it gets bigger, the chance of further escalation shrinks, but the consequences get worse. There's only a 1 in 5 chance your d10 Morality Die will get bigger, but if it does, then watch out!

The Ghost Hack uses character classes over up to 10 levels of experience. These classes (or Trades) do the job of the Guilds in Wraith, giving you powers you can do for free and perks towards advancing in certain ways. As a Poltergeist, you can interact with objects in the Living World, and you'll probably get a high STR stat really fast. Levels and Hit Points don't feel weird or implausible in a ghost setting anyway, because of course your Hit Points don't represent your body: you don't have a body.

The five basic character classes draw from common haunting tropes:

• Banshees: ghosts who evoke and trade in emotion
• Doppelgangers: shapechanging ghosts
• Poltergeists: ghosts who can influence the physical world
• Nightmanes: ghosts who excel at traveling through Hades
• Revenants: ghosts who can interact with the Living by possessing them

​And five more that are a bit esoteric:

• Anubians: a sect of ghosts who treat the Rot and banish Wights
• Fleshweavers:: sorcerers who control the Living World
• Grimliches: self-aware Wights who hate their Mortal Coils
• Helgaunts: violent ghosts who wage war on Wights
• Morpheans: mystics who manipulate dreams and illusions

The core rules are agnostic about whether these classes are just abstractions for ghosts with different aptitudes or actual organisations. In the appendices there are rules for treating them more like guilds that instruct ghosts in their signature powers and guard their privileges jealously.

Similarly, the rules offer a distant city of the dead called Dis (but you can call it Stygia), but leave it up to you whether this empire of the dead is just a rumour, a looming threat, or an oppressive reality.

These ghosts can walk through physical objects freely - but they are hurt by iron and repelled by salt, so the physical world has its obstacles. The ghostly Afterlife takes place in our world, but for ghosts the sun is permanently eclipsed and the moon has a lurid tint, so the lighting is eerie.

I offer five ghostly sects that can be allies or antagonists in your campaign. The Misericordium fulfils the role of the ghostly bureaucracy, but it makes more sense because, by recruiting clerks to write up the lives in its ghostly books, it steals away their memory of who they were. The other cults likewise replace your humanity with a Gnosis Die, so by joining them you surrender your soul, but escape from the burdens of conscience and attachment to the living.

Simplicity is the key feature of Hack RPGs. Half a dozen tables at the back of the book let you roll up NPCs with classes, powers, and spells, and plenty of tables throughout the book generate random possessions and encounters. There's a final appendix that lets you generate random scenarios and five worked examples that show how a feud between ghosts and vampires can take a very strange direction once the Church of St Thomas gets involved.

One thing I've retained from the original is the fantastic pulp-style art from the NUELOW Stock Art Collection. The quirky, anachronistic, yet often deeply unsettling artwork is great for a setting where lots of ghosts still look and act like people from earlier eras. Copyright is @2024 Steve Miller, All Rights Reserved.

The Ghost Hack is an approach to ghostly RPG - and Wraith, its template - that emphasises light-hearted adventure over personal horror. There's still personal horror there. Ghost PCs are slowly disintegrating and the end state is becoming a demonic Wight. You draw energy from your 'Mortal Coil' which means the people and things you cared about, and this can damage them. If you temporarily turn into a Wight, you are compelled to visit violence on your Mortal Coil. All these elements are horror tropes.

On the other hand, there isn't a tyrannical and oppressive empire ruling the underworld, the slave economy has been marginalised and applies only to mindless 'Echoes' rather than true ghosts, the Shadow has been removed, as well as the psychodrama brought on by being defeated.

These elements are reinstated in the Appendices, if you want morality dramas, player-vs-player psychodrama, underworld politics, it's all there for you. But the core rules focus a bit more on exploration, adventure, and facing peril.

One change from the Wraith template is to do away with the destructive storms raging in the Underworld and replace them with 'the Dread.' This is an acidic fog that rises from Hades and smothers the region. Tocsins blare warnings and ghosts flee to protected Fanes. This phenomenon gets rather more consideration in Ghost Hack than did maelstroms in Wraith, but again: this fits with a game setting where the main danger is external and the light and flexible Hack rules allow quick resolution.

Is this the last product for the Ghost Hack? I'm planning to revisit the two scenarios, which are edgy affairs, and republish them with more detail. It's in my mind to publish a scenario-and-campaign-setting combined: a haunted hospital.

But my main project this summer is Through The Hedgerow: don't miss that!

Behind the facade of normalcy, two forces contend. The farmer ploughs his field, sows the fertile seed. orders his land with neat hedgerows, tends fruit in the orchards, and blesses his family as they sit together at supper. This is the world of the Light. But at night, the Dark arises. The wolf scratches at the locked gates. The earth yawns open and disgorges the bones of the hungry dead that roam the lanes and lurk by stiles, waiting for the unwary shepherd hasting home, too late, far too late, as the sun slips from the hilltops and the night stifles his scream.

Through The Hedgerow borrows this trope from classic fantasy - but notably from Susan Cooper's The Dark Is Rising series (and perhaps F. Paul Wilson's Adversary Cycle is rattling around in there too). With my professor hat on, I can tell you that it's a mythological concept rooted in ancient Zoroastrianism and termed 'dualism' by scholars. It's the idea that the world around us is an arena in which two cosmic forces contend: the Light and the Dark.

The Light is the force the nurtures: it is creativity, discovery, lawful and ordered living, perhaps life itself. The Dark is its opposite: destruction, ignorance, chaos, death.

In Through The Hedgerow, the player characters have been plucked from their ordinary lives - or, in the case of Fay characters, their already-extraordinary lives - to serve the Light. They might not have chosen this service. They might resent it. It will certainly cost them dearly: at the very least, it will cost them their innocence.

Serving the Light means labouring under a Doom, which is a tragic (or at least bittersweet) fated end. You learn your Doom when you create your character. Perhaps you are fated to betray your companions, turn to the Dark, die defending someone you love, or settle down and lose all memory of the Light and the Dark and your erstwhile comrades.

Each character has a Doom Die which starts small (d4) but gets bigger as your Doom draws nearer. That's not a bad thing though - you can roll your Doom Die for any Check or Challenge, so the bigger it gets, the more powerful your character is. Advancing the size of your Doom Die is like 'levelling up' in convention RPGs, except for the fact that you can retreat the size of your Doom Die later, which is 'levelling down.' Why would you want to do that? Well, read on.

Your ultimate Doom also determines your Doom Trigger: a set of circumstances that reveals your heroic qualities, but also your destructive flaw. If it is your Doom to betray your cause, then your Doom Trigger occurs when you get up to something important behind your comrades' backs or against their wishes. A Doom Trigger only happens once per adventure, if it happens at all, but it causes your Doom Die to advance in size, so that d4 becomes a d6. It also makes your Doom Die 'unlimited' which means you can use it over and over and really rely on it. 

In The Lord of the Rings, the Elves have a Doom to depart Middle Earth and travel to the Undying Lands. For many, this is triggered by their first sight of the sea. Legolas experiences the 'sea-longing' when he arrives at Pelargir to battle the corsairs and hears the gulls. Art by Lorraine Brevig 

Relying on your Doom Die is a risky course of action. If you roll the highest possible number on your Doom Die, that also makes it advance in size. This also can occur once per adventure. This means even a starting character could trigger their Doom then roll the highest number when using their Doom Die and end up with a d8 Doom Die, which is quite a powerful asset.

The Doom Die can also increase when you gain rewards at the end of an adventure. In fact, there's one reward that forces you to advance your Doom Die whether you want to or not. The starting character I imagined earlier could end their first adventure with a d10 Doom Die.

Isn't that a good thing? Well, yes, insofar as it makes you powerful. Being able to throw a d10 at any particular Check or Challenge is a significant benefit. The problem is, sooner or later your Doom Die will advance past d12 size. When that happens, your character's Doom is at hand: you are about to lose your character.

Characters in Through The Hedgerow aren't at risk of dying on a routine basis. Even if they are defeated by a Challenge, they are usually just distracted or weakened or possibly captured. It's a rare Challenge that threatens to vanquish them, removing them from the adventure. Even vanquished characters can return in a future adventure: if the Judge allows it, the Light snatches its servants away from peril.

There's no getting round your Doom, however. Once that Doom Die peaks, your character's story has come to an end.

Through The Hedgerow imagines this Doom to be a collaborative process between the player and the Judge. The Doom should come about in a way that fits the theme of the adventure and respects the arc the character has been travelling. It might be brutal and tragic, or whimsical and bittersweet. Were you stabbed in the back by someone you trusted - or did you fall in love with the Elf Maiden of the Old Moor and decide to stay with her, renouncing your life of adventure? The Doom doesn't have to occur immediately and it might take place in the next adventure you take part in, which would allow the Judge to work your character's departure into the story in a dramatically satisfying way. But go you must!

It's easy to represent the Light as a force of cosmic goodness and the Dark as diabolic evil. Even handled this way, there's room for a lot of depth in character development. Some Briar Knight characters will be idealistic in their service of the Light, but many are bitter or reluctant.

​Hodkins are human champions who served the Light in their own age and were gifted - or cursed - with immortality to continue their service across the centuries. They have lost their homes, families, loved ones, everything they knew, to become warriors in an unending war across time. For many of them, their eventual Doom is a blessed release, 'a consummation devoutly to be wished,' as Hamlet says.

Buggebers are Fay monsters created to be minions of the Dark. Some have repented and seek atonement by serving the Light, some have offended their former Lords and the Light offers them protection, others are prisoners whose service to the Light is grudging at best.

For the bird-faced Ouzels, serving the Light is a political manoeuvre in the Courts of Fayrie: some see themselves as knights and strategists in a grand campaign, but others seek personal reputation or the means to defeat ancient rivals in the struggle between their Houses.

Peter Johnston's fantastic art for Through The Hedgerow brings these archetypes to vivid life. Hodkins of the Ages of Plagues and Thunder, a Buggeber of the Age of Swords, Ouzels of the Ages of  Swords and Plagues.

Dualism gets a lot more interesting as a fantasy trope when the Light and the Dark don't perfectly align with 'Good' and 'Evil.'

The Light promotes or perhaps arises from human flourishing - but in a rather abstract way. The Light tends to focus on the achievements of certain 'great souls' throughout history, strives to protect extraordinary treasures or locations of beauty, or tweak the destiny of pivotal figures. It isn't concerned with the 'greater good' and is unconcerned with causing suffering to bystanders as it furthers its plans. Briar Knights might be sent to abduct a child from its parents and entrust it to new guardians so that the child will grow up according to an important destiny - but along the way a family has been divided and parents left bereft.

Stories in Through The Hedgerow will often feature these dilemmas and part of the fun of roleplaying Briar Knights comes from exploring their reactions - from both mortal and immortal perspectives -to making these fraught decisions. Eventually characters will exhaust their idealism (if they started with any) and this is where the Doom comes in: there isn't only a game mechanism bringing your character's career to a close because Briar Knights end up seeking their Doom. Eventually, Briar Knights end up rebelling, or walking away, or finding their own corner of a friendly field to die in.

If the Light isn't entirely 'good' then what about the 'Dark'? Is it evil?

In many ways, yes. The Dark employs monsters and undead that hate humanity or else regard mortals as chattel or dinner. But it's worth distinguishing between ends and means. Among the agents of the Dark are more philosophical villains, such as the inquisitors of the Witch Harrow and the emissaries of the Raven Margrave. These adversaries claim to have seen a vision of the future so dreadful that any means are justified in averting it, including retarding human progress, extinguishing inspirational leaders and art, and unleashing plagues and disasters. Even an immiserated humanity is preferable to what the future holds in store. Viewed this way, the Dark offers a home to servants of the Light who have lost faith.

The core rules don't explore this in depth: the Dark is simply 'the Enemy' and its progress is tracked by an abstract Nemesis Die. The focus is on Briar Knights serving the Light, their encroaching Dooms, and the travails of their tortured consciences.

I'm designing further expansions that correct this: the Coven of Curdled Cream is an organisation of servants of the Dark, antiheroes working in opposition to the heroic Briar Company of Sky and Furrow.

The Light and the Dark are not the only forces at work in this cosmology. I'm designing expansions that explore the others.

The Deep is the spiritual power of the primordial waters - and death, which lies within and beyond them. From the Deep come ghosts, revenants, and doppelgangers, as well as alien races that occupy the border between life and death. The Deep needs policing and the Light and the Dark collaborate on this: the Pardon of the Grey Haar is a team brought together by their respective masters to tackle incursions of the Deep. Along the Salt Strand is a planned expansion that moves the action of Through The Hedgerow to the coasts, islands, and rivers, to storm-lashed cliffs, fishing villages, and drifting ghost hulks.

The Spire  is the spiritual power of human progress - and the force of religion. From the Spire come Fiends who draw humans to them in devotion and set them to labour in factories and businesses, spreading city streets and chimney stacks that are the aisles and steeples of their churches. Here is another antagonist for the Light and the Dark to find common cause against; even the Deep rages against the binding of its riverways with bridges and charters. Out of the Rookery is a planned expansion that moves the action to the great city on the horizon of the Old Shires, in particular the slums, sewers, and rooftops, where the Fay and their mortal allies fight a guerrilla war against the stifling oppression of the Spire.

Somewhere beyond these contentions - and perhaps reconciling them - is the elusive High Magic. Under the Hollow Hills is a planned expansion exploring the Otherworld of the Fays and a setting where Light, Dark, Deep, and Spire confront each other openly.