Through The Hedgerow is a RPG inspired by fairy tales, albeit odd ones. Four of the types of Player Characters are Fays. They are eldritch beings of the Otherworld who find themselves travelling the highways and bridle-paths of the Old Shires, carousing in roadside inns, hiding in ruined monasteries, or ruling their estate from ivy-crusted manors. How do you roleplay a Fay being? What are their motives and goals? Since they have their origin in fairy tales, here is the first of four tales to introduce the Fay Gentries of the Old Shires. Through The Hedgerow Buggeber by Peter Johnston The Tale of King Alfred and the BuggeberOnce upon a time, but not so far away, there was a King named Alfred, who had lost his Kingdom. The Kingdom was Wessex, which in those days was part of the Old Shires, and King Alfred had fought many battles to defend the Old Shires against their enemies. One by one, his friends and family died or deserted him, until eventually King Alfred could fight no more. Alone and humiliated, he fled to the fens of Athelney to hide himself. With night falling, King Alfred arrived at the house of the Fenwitch. He knocked on the door and the Fenwitch spoke from within: "Who's there?" Alfred replied: "It is Alfred, your King, armoured and armed to defend this land, and I need shelter to hide from my foes." "My little house is too low for so high a guest as a king," said the Fenwitch, "so you must set aside your crown if you would enter in." This Alfred did, though it daunted him to set aside his crown. "My little door is too narrow for so broad a guest as an armoured warrior," the Fenwitch continued. "Take off your mail byrnie and set it aside if you would enter in." This Alfred did, though it misgave him greatly to set aside his mail byrnie. "My little bones are too fragile," the Fenwife said, "to endure the presence of a guest armed with a sword. Lay your weapon down if you would enter in." Alfred debated with himself concerning this, for his sword Goldenhilt was an heirloom of his grandfather, who slew Beornwulf of Mercia. Runes were upon its hilt and jewels upon its pommel. Nevertheless, he laid it down. Entering the house, Alfred beheld a cauldron in which a meat broth was cooking, and an oven in which seed cakes were baking. art by Peter Jackson ©Look & Learn "What would you have, O King?" demanded the Fenwitch. "My broth is sustenance for a warrior, but my seed cakes are dainties for a land at peace. Choose." Alfred gazed upon the chunks of meet that bobbed within the broth. They were most appetising to him and the smell of it set his mouth watering. Nevertheless, he answered in this wise: "I have been a King of war and met only with misfortune. I will sample the dainties of peace, though it seems your cakes are still awhile to bake." The Fenwitch seemed pleased with this answer and instructed him thus: "Tonight must I go to visit with my sister in Cernyw. Abide you here, until my cakes are ready. But beware, for this night shall a monster visit this hall, the troll named Buggeber that hungers for mortal flesh. He does not wait on invitation. Do not let him sup from my cauldron, for if he does, he shall grind your bones to make bread for his broth." Alfred cried, "How shall I oppose such a fiend, having set aside my crown, my mail, and my sword?" But the Fenwitch made no reply, for she was gone, and Alfred was alone in the darkening hall. The long watches of the night passed slowly for the unhappy king. How he hungered to sup from the broth, but he remembered his choice to break his fast upon the dainties of peace. He prayed to the All-Ruler, but in this haunted place his prayers were mute. Then, at the darkest hour of the night, the Buggeber entered in. Old he was, that Buggeber, born in the ancient darkness, they say: one of the children of Cain, who carry the sign of the Murderer upon them to trouble a sinful world. Like steel were his long claws, like the pelt of a bear were his matted hairs, upon his neck there was no head, save only a maw of many teeth that gnashed and drooled. "Step aside, mortal man," the creature roared, "for I hunger. I hunger for blood, I hunger for flesh, I hunger for bones, bones, bones!" The Buggeber reached for the cauldron, his long tongue lolling down his chest. Up spoke Alfred, and these were his words. "I have a sweetmeat for you daintier than a witch's broth. A tall warrior, whose golden hair sways in the summer wind. Struck down, he is, by a sharp blade. Into the ground, his bones are laid. Then behold, he rises again." "Where is this wondrous warrior?" muttered the Buggeber. "For I see only you here, with no armour nor sword. Bring this warrior before me and I shall rend him with my claws." Then Alfred said, "It will avail you nothing, for he will rise again wherever his bones are laid. But look, I have captured him and crushed him and placed him in a small cell. Will you sate your hunger upon him now?" "Right willingly!" roared the Buggeber. "Bring me the warrior's body!" Whereupon Alfred took up a pair of iron tongs and withdrew from the oven the skillet bearing the seedcake. "But what is this?" howled the Buggeber. "This is not a warrior's flesh, but a cake of flour." Alfred answered him this: "The wheat is a warrior who sways in the summer wind. The seeds are his bones that rise again in spring. This cake is his body. Will you share with me now the dainties of peace?" Then Alfred and the Buggeber broke their fast together upon seed cake. In the morning, the Fenwitch returned to find her cauldron undisturbed and the fierce Buggeber now as meek as a newly baptised infant. She carved for him a face from a turnip in her garden. The Fenwitch counselled Alfred, "You have sojourned here a night, but a season has turned in the affairs of mankind. Behold, your kinsmen and vassals come seeking you. An army assembles: the men of Somerset, the men of Wiltshire, the men of Hampshire. Leave now, Alfred, you have a kingdom to rule." King Alfred departed from Athelney and lo! his army waited for him in the Somerset Levels. And it is said that the Buggeber went alongside him, who was now the most loyal of all the King's knights. Jack O Bear by Jrusteli on DeviantArt Buggebers as PCsRoleplaying a fairytale monster is cool, even more so if the monster is a hairy troll with claws and a carved turnip for a head. Not everyone will flee in terror when you approach. The Glamour is a magic that stops mortals from recognising Fays. Most humans see you as big and imposing, perhaps rather savage-looking and hairy, but they only see the monster if they look shrewdly, or with the eyes of Innocence, or if they brandish Cold Iron at you. Buggebers start off as Martial characters who can acquit themselves in a fight - especially with their size and claws. They are also Arcane characters with an affinity for Dark Sorcery, so they can use some of the more destructive spells without penalty. Roleplaying a Buggeber revolves around your Appetites, which are the things you yearn to eat. Each character has their own selection of appetites, which are all quite abstract: for example, a wild beast, something that's been dead for a long time, something that's been specially prepared. Given the game's themes of riddles and illusions, you can match these descriptions in odd and imaginative ways. Something with the insignia of a wild beast might satisfy you - or something that share the same name as one. Like other Hedgerow PCs, a Buggeber will have a Doom: this is a tragic or bittersweet destiny. 'Mastered By The Beast' means you will destroy yourself recklessly while 'Defying the Heavens' means you renounce the Light. Acting in a way that aligns with your ultimate Doom is empowering for your character: every time you do this your Doom Die gets bigger until eventually it increases past d12 size and your Doom is upon you. For Buggebers, the Doom is usually related to their status as demons of the Dark who have been co-opted by the Light. You are one of the 'good guys' now, but perhaps not willingly. You need to decide, how did your character end up serving the Light? Was she 'converted' by a powerful figure from history or folklore like Merlyn or King Alfred, Robin Hood, Shakespeare, Oliver Cromwell, William Wordsworth, or Winston Churchill? Did you 'defect' from the Dark after failing in a mission - or because you were troubled by the first stirrings of conscience? Related to this is your second question: what's your character arc going to be? In Through The Hedgerow, every PC is growing in power until their Doom comes calling for them. AS a Buggeber, you might be experiencing a redemption arc, where you discover friendship, love, or atonement - or an antihero arc, where you betray your comrades at the end and go back to serving the Dark. When your Doom arrives, you and the Judge must collaborate to decide what happens - so get thinking about it ahead of time.
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Consider a route you often walk, one you know well, going from home to work perhaps, or college, or to a friend's home. Doubtless, as you go along your familiar way, you pass a little lane or alley. It’s overgrown and clogged with weeds. It doesn’t seem to go anywhere. It just snakes between houses and disappears into leafy shadows. Probably it peters out among bin bags and barbed wire, or else ends with a ‘Private Property: Keep Out’ sign. You’ve have never abandoned your habitual journey to explore that lane. After all, why should you? But suppose you did! Suppose you went down that lane, leaving behind the noise of the traffic, the hum and clatter of modernity, and wrestled instead with the stinging nettles and the bobbing flies. Suppose you found grass under your feet and birdsong overhead. Imagine yourself recognising them by name: the old wren and whitethroat, the songthrush, the fierce yellowhammer. Imagine finding, at the end of that lane, overshadowed by the branches of hazel and sad yews, an upright stone, tilted, worn with age and furry with moss. And overhead, the song of the wren bubbles like a fountain from the treetops. Joy pierces your heart. Perhaps you stand a while, with your hand resting on that old stone. ‘I will come here again,’ you tell yourself, ‘when I’m not so busy, when I have more time.’ But you know that, search as you will, you shall never find this place a second time. Suppose, when you turn to go, you find you are not alone. Your companion is old, with a face as creased and crumbling as the stone from which he seems to have sprung. His coat is green as the creeping moss but his scarf is golden like the dappled sun and his eyes are merry as a wren’s song. “I’ve been waiting for you,” he says. Then, turning to step between the leaves and branches, he adds, “Follow me!” O, the child you used to be would not have hesitated. To step into the Hedgerow and out of this world, to follow the green man into strange centuries, no matter the peril: it is an adventure you have forgotten to yearn for. But if you have not abandoned yearning, well, I wrote this game for you. Step Into the HedgerowYou can follow any Hedgerow for miles, threading country lanes, crisscrossing fields and meadows. You can smell the foxglove and cow parsley and taste the blackberries and rosehips. Yes, but if only you could enter INTO the Hedgerow, what would you find inside? You would find a path, grass underfoot, bracken and thorns on either side, and a faint light from above, where the young leaves work their alchemy on sunlight – and ahead, drawing you on, the wren’s imperious summons. The path takes you through clearings and in each clearing there is a vision. A maiden weeps over a broken harp. Two crows feast on a dead knight. A statue points to a gravestone covered in vines and etched with runes: this too is in Arcadia. And overhead, the murderous cawing of the ravens gathers power. There is a Darkness in the Hedgerow that contends with the Light. The Hedgerow is really a Maze, you see: it is a Labyrinth connecting the centuries. Inside the Hedgerow you will meet other travellers who join your adventure: a scarecrow wearied with warding his acre, a soldier of fortune burdened with the immortality she never sought, a witch-girl bickering with a talking mouse, a cheerful troll with a turnip for a head. Some of Peter Johnston's stunning art for Through The Hedgerow When you leave the Hedgerow together, you have returned home but in a changed time. The invading Danes set flame to thatch while King Alfred hides in the marshes. Puritan mobs armed with muskets drag defiant women to the scaffold. A jilted fay stalks her paramour on a Victorian steam locomotive. A hag kidnaps children from the air raid shelters of wartime Britain. In all these centuries, the Dark is at work and the visions you witnessed within the Hedgerow will guide you in your mission to oppose it. To pass through the Hedgerow is to enter a war. It is a war that endures across the millennia, fought in every hayrick, under every stile, in the contested branches of every oak, in every sleeping byre. In this war the wren and the ouzel are your comrades against the basilisk and the vampyre and the witch-hunter with his cold iron chains. The shadows are lengthening. Time to take up arms. Inspirations for AdventureIf you’re my age, which is older than acorns but not yet an oak, you enjoyed a childhood of particular imaginative richness. There was Doctor Who of course: a source of primal terror and wild possibility as we peeped from behind sofas or barely parted fingers. We were too young to notice the shoddy sets. We just wanted time travel and monsters, but we got ecological fables and meditations on mortality into the bargain. Of course, the beloved face from Doctor Who returned in Worzel Gummidge, Jon Pertwee’s hero-fool now a scarecrow guarding a field in Sunnybrook Farm. Even in this lightweight fare, the enigmatic Crowman who makes all scarecrows hinted at a wider and more solemn legendarium. If you’re as far from an acorn as I am, the Crowman’s ancient eyes glinted with a faded memory: the actor Geoffrey Blaydon had played the time-slipped wizard Catweazle nearly a decade earlier. Who can forget Children of the Stones, a series which introduced us to a cold gnawing dread, so different from the visceral alarm of Doctor Who. The story made me (quite rightly, I believe) apprehensive about standing stones, thanks to the unearthly and atonal soundtrack by the Ambrosian Singers. A children's show with a theme tune to drive you quite mad Another show with a theme tune that sounded not of this world was The Tomorrow People: more troubling than Doctor Who, with its themes of puberty, repression, and magical outsiders hidden in plain sight in a society that feared them. It resonated with me far more than did the (similarly themed) X-Men, especially the idea of a group of friends utterly dependent on each other, but linked to a cosmic community of which ordinary humans could not guess. Come to think of it, it's the marriage of teasing monochrome imagery and that fantastic propulsive melody The love of rural folklore was mediated through repeats of Oliver Postgate’s strangely doleful Noggin The Nogg, later Ivor the Engine, and The Wombles. The Herb Garden, Parsley the Lion, and The Magic Roundabout established in my child's mind the important truth that there can be no more suitable place to meet with a godling or demi-demon than a walled garden. In the lands of the North, where the Black Rocks stand guard against the cold sea, in the dark night that is very long the Men of the Northlands sit by their great log fires and they tell a tale... And those tales they tell are the stories of a kind and wise king and his people; they are the Sagas of Noggin the Nog. When the age for reading novels arrived, there waiting for me was Stig of the Dump, Five Children And It, The Ghost of Thomas Kempe, and Watership Down. But these were only setting the stage. The Weirdstone of Brisingamen by Alan Garner subjects young Susan and Colin to a journey of nightmare and delight, hidden among the landmarks of Cheshire, where they must keep a mystical jewel out of the clutches of the Morrigan and her morthbrood conspiracy. Its apocalyptic sequel The Moon of Gomrath takes place on a numinous night: “one of the four nights of the year when Time and Forever mingle.” Frankly, it defies synopsis. Garner wrote other books and a case can be made for The Owl Service and Elidor. All have a sense of creeping menace, of ordinary relationships revealing pagan themes, of nightmares lurking in plain sight that only children can apprehend. Garner's books in turn were surpassed by Susan Cooper’s The Dark Is Rising and the quintet it dominates: Will Stanton, seventh son of a seventh son, discovers he is the last of the Old Ones to be born on Earth. His arrival unleashes a cascade of prophecy as the Dark rises amid the familiar farmlands of Buckinghamshire Cooper weaves King Arthur into the story (in an oblique way), the Wild Hunt, primal goddesses of the sea, and a quest to retrieval talismans of ancient power. As with Garner, ancient pagan cycles recur in modern families and innocuous folklore and village ceremonies are revealed as totems of dignity and dread. The scene in Greenwitch where Will and Merry confront Tethys the Ocean still shivers me. “Even in the darkest sea they knew they were observed and escorted all the way, by subjects of Tethys invisible even to an Old One’s eye. News came to the Lady of the Sea long, long before anyone might approach. She had her own ways. Older than the land, older than the Old Ones, older than all men, she ruled her kingdom of waves as she had since the world began: alone, absolute.” Brr-rr. Building The GameI wanted Through The Hedgerow to allow for a type of roleplaying quite different from high fantasy adventure, like D&D, or supernatural investigation, like Call Of Cthulhu. For one thing, I wanted a game where you can roleplay children alongside adult characters – and for the children to have interesting contributions to make. This means de-centring combat and violence and allowing wits, charms, riddles, jokes, and pranks to accomplish the stuff that other games demand you resolve with a broadsword or a gun – but still to allow for characters with broadswords and guns to do their violent thing. Tales From The Loop offered me good ideas about a children-only RPG that still featured adult themes and elements of horror and peril. The One Ring does a good job drawing together characters of very different power levels – an immortal Elf or battle-ready Dunedan alongside a Hobbit. Through the Hedgerow's Check & Challenge system was half of my solution – I’m not going to call it an elegant solution, but I think it’s an innovative one. I’ll cover the mechanics in a future blog. The other half of the solution is in the structure of the adventures themselves. The Player Characters arrive in a historical period where they know the landscape and are concealed by the mystical Glamour, but struggle to interact with the mortal inhabitants. This is a problem because the riddle they receive at the start can only be interpreted with the help of mortal NPCs. Moreover, only by taking Oaths to mortal NPCs do characters get the power boost they need to confront their enemies. This means the game contains a lot of befriending, questioning, offering help, trying to fix the life-problems of ordinary people (or at least, people who are ordinary enough for their period – the life problems of a Viking chieftain can be pretty hair raising by modern standards). You might create a character who can wrestle trolls, but you might find yourself trying to reconcile a dejected husband and his angry wife. Of course, you’ll get to wrestle trolls too. This gives a Through The Hedgerow scenario a distinctive pattern. Receive your ‘conundrum’ (as the mission is called). Investigate the NPCs in the local community to work out who you can help and what they can teach you. Then identify your mission target and claim victory. Except of course, the Dark is sending its emissaries abroad to beat you to it. The clock is very much ticking and revealing your Otherworldly nature to hapless mortals only advances the timer and invites the Dark to intervene, probably harming innocents. You need to make use of all the resources to hand. This includes mortal NPCs of course, but also the supernatural community, up to and including the enigmatic Old Gods who still haunt the landscape. Magical Herbs can help you, fragments of Elder Lore can be discovered and traded, and the power of Mythic Sites can be unlocked with world-changing consequences.
I’ll devote a blog to each of these concepts in the coming weeks. |
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I'm a teacher and a writer and I love board games and RPGs. I got into D&D back in the '70s with Eric Holmes' 'Blue Book' set and I've started writing my own OSR-inspired games - as well as fantasy and supernatural fiction.. Archives
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