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.