The Light and the Dark

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.

Quite simply, the best Young Adult fantasy series, published in the 1970s and investing the British countryside with apocalyptic significance. It's been a huge influence on me.

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.

The Light & your Doom

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.

Your Doom Is At Hand

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!

But what IS the Light?

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.

The late great John Romita created this iconic cover in 1967. When I saw this as a child, it burned itself into my  imagination: a symbol of the renunciation of power and the defeat of youthful idealism.

What about the Dark?

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.

And the Deep? And the Spire? And the High Magic too?

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.