Folkloresque-Ritterian North West Mageckrawl, Part 0: The Fool, OR, Delineation of the Scope and Intent of this Projeckt
This is a followup to my recent post about how using the tools of proceduralism, and in particular the hexcrawl, in Mage: the Ascension games. It might be worth reading that post first, but it isn't essential. Actually, this post isn't really essential either - it's what the World of Darkness tends to frame as setting the Mood and Theme of the forthcoming project, outlining the aesthetic influences and intended functions of the final product.
In this case, that product is a Mage hexcrawl, set in a somewhat-standard World of Darkness, albeit disregarding basically everything specific they've written about Britain.
Mood: Folkloresque-Ritterian
The First Bit
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| Mine |
Satyros Brucato's description of the 'Pagan' game tone in The Book of Secrets isn't so far off what I mean by 'Folkloresque':
'a lush and living world where even supposedly inanimate materials are alive. Spirits, rituals, earthy passions and unapolagetic carnality are all part of this "witchy" tone .... stories feel more rural, elemental, and "natural" than urbanized adventures do; that said, the urban pagan flavor emphasizes a defiant naturalism breaking through the façade of an industrial world.'
Folkloresque, to me, sits somewhere between this (rather Wiccan-inflected) paganism and the surprisingly banal world of everyday superstition, incorporating both at its far ends. It's the world of the fairy tale, and as described in episode 177 of the Weird Studies podcast, 'if the myth attempts to imprison us in the necessariness of fate, the fairytale attempts to free us to forge a singular destiny.' The fairy tale is unwilling to explain itself or classify itself within a broader canon - each one, though a branch of an older narrative form, is also something quite detached from an established world. This isn't the uncomfortable and largely untenable form of 'folk' as ancient bloodlines and their traditions, but the folk as crowd of people here now, with no particular qualifications, making the stories of the world anew with bits and pieces left behind by their forebears. Yes, faeries dance, people become one with animal spirits, but these beings often aren't the relics of ancient gods and godesses so much as they are new things, slipped into their shoes. The actors that comprise the world dance through unending flux.
At the same time, all of this enchantment goes on under the skin of a place which seems quite normal. Perhaps the aesthetics lean towards the natural, the wild creeps into the rural [1] and the urban pavement cracks under the weight of fallen leaves, perhaps a few more people read tarot or hang a horseshoe over the door on stormy nights, but to most people the world is as it is for us. There's a class element: for the better-off, Technocratic reality is stronger and the beliefs of ordinary people more risible. Broadly, the setting is unsympathetic to their agenda - in stories, those who think they know better than a magical power almost always come to grief, and if this isn't so here it's only because they're clutching reality greedily with all the power exploitative late imperial-capitalism can muster. That said, it doesn't assume that their enemies are automatically virtuous. The justice of the folk story is cruel, and the justice of folk belief often wholly absent.
Media:
- The art of Stephanie Pui-Mun Law
- The art of Wynn Abbot
- Francis Young's Twilight of the Godlings
- Any of Ronald Hutton's academic works, especially The Stations of the Sun.
- Any collection of British folk-tales or folklore studies works you care to pick up, particularly ones from Lancashire, Cumbria, or Cheshire.
- Steve Roud, The Penguin Guide to the Superstitions of Britain and Ireland.
The Second Bit
That's enough biography. I didn't know any of this when I first heard Ritter play. I was a child in a beautiful fugue of half-heard and misinterpreted lyrics on long car journies, and I knew him as the boyish, strangely ethereal figure on the cover of Hello Starling.
'Strangely ethereal' is a good description of a lot of his songs, too, despite the energy of many of them. Many of them seem to be literally 'about' very specific places in America, often with enough detail that you can trace the journey described - see, for example, 'Wings.' But the journey is also dreamlike, periods of history mixing together. The characters follow a presumably long-gone Jesuit missionary, and also witness the explosive and industrial preparations for the coming of Christ. They meet cynical 'press and businessmen, tycoons, episcopal philanthropists lost in their appraisal/of the body of a woman', and they meet (spoilers? a shocking number of Ritter's songs can be spoiled) angels who appear to be refugees from... something.
Again and again, the ordinary and the extraordinary coexist in Ritter's songs, with neither taking precedence over the other. Not all: 'the Bone of Song' happens is entirely otherworldly, with the narrator finding a bone in a buried myrtle box implied to have been the inspiration for many past musicians, whilst something like 'Kathleen' seems to be purely a sweet love song. But even so, these share an album. And then you have works like 'Girl in the War', 'Galahad', 'the Curse', or the magisterial 'Thin Blue Flame,' where apostles, Arthurian Knights, angels, werewolves and more drift by scenes of realistic bloodshed, con-artistry, and love of varying degrees of doomedness. These tangled together in my youthful brain until they were entirely inseparable, creating a vision of a world where human details, normal relationships and places and politics and violence, all happen alongside the workings of 'higher' powers without really mattering any more or less. The worlds are interwoven.
So, how does this fit in? Well, it's the ordinary magic(k) of it all. You can run into a godling working in a grocery shop if there's power there or if it just happens to have some inscrutable motive to do so. People hurt other people, and pray, and create beautiful art, and pine, and sometimes it's awful but even if it is there might well be an angel looking on, crying. Wonder in small things, in little details of a locality, in travel, in a good night out with friends. Some things are genuinely big, generally for the worse, but a lot of things are just small. (I suppose this speaks to romantic side of the anarchist in me). In a way, therefore, the setting is pretty typical street-level mage, but it isn't the 'flashy clothes, barking guns, blazing graffiti, blaring music' of the Book of Secrets' 'Urban' genre element. Or maybe those things are there (minimal guns... this is Britain, and not London at that), but the world keeps drawing your gaze away from them towards the moon, the flowers growing out of the brickwork, the face of your lover.
Originally, I was planning to take inspiration from a Ritter song for each hex. There are... uh... too many hexes for that. But I'll be listening through all of his albums again as I write this.
Media:
- Obviously the entire Ritter discog
- I often refer to Mumford and Sons and The Decemberists as two additional 'apostles' alongside Ritter in a hypothetical 'bible' of folk-y, slightly weird music that influenced me as a child. Having discovered them much later, Tom Waits and Brown Bird are sort of deuterocanonical books.
- China Miéville, King Rat - I love all of Miéville but this is the only one that manages quite the right tone, with the supernatural sparsely distributed and surprisingly human-scale in its concerns
- Alan Moore, Jerusalem
Theme: North West Mageckrawl
The First Bit
This is the North West of England. I live here, somewhere, in a location I'm going to be trying very hard throughout this series to avoid doxxing.
Well, it's sort of the North West... I've drawn blue lines around bits which don't fall into the political boundaries but feel much more like part of it than not (and also Flintshire in Wales, which is here more because of its close ties with the Wirral and because, for reasons which will be seen, it's a fairly important place in my version of Mage Britain). In general, these lines follow watersheds. I've also chopped off South Cheshire. The whole county is on thin ice anyway, and nowhere South of fucking Stoke can claim to be in the North, I'm sorry. Please ignore the following meme.
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| I would never fall victim to this. The Midlands and the South are regions, not counties, and EVERYONE KNOWS CHESHIRE'S BASICALLY IN THE MIDLANDS. |
Anyway, here are some fun maps. See if you can spot a common pattern!
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| I have to caveat this one by pointing out that the Heptarchy's a bit of a myth, and Northumbria controlled the whole North after the fall of the Kingdom of Strathclyde, but still! |
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| From the Medieval Coin-Hoards of Britain and Ireland map. West Ireland, Cornwall and the Scottish Highlands and Islands are less densely-behoarded still. And have a look with the deposition date setting - those in the North West trend much later too! |
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| From a deleted user on reddit |
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| At least we managed one? |
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| Aerial photograph of the 2022 UK heatwave, from the ESA. |
None of this to say the North West is a backwater - Cumbria (specifically the Lake District) is an artistic and tourism hotspot, Lancashire and its former holdings in Manchester and Liverpool drove the industrial revolution, Liverpool and Lancaster were the largest and fourth largest slave ports in the country for much of the pre-abolition period (and kept profiting from that atrocity long after), and Cheshire is also here!
What it is to say is that the whole region is weird in many ways. Much of it, especially North of Manchester, is economically left-behind, to the point that amongst Southerners it seems to be something of a byword for the ills of the British working-class, if they think about it at all, which they often don't. On top of that, it has a climate more in keeping with non-English parts of the UK, with some areas of temperate rainforest(!), close ties to Ireland and Mann (and borders with Scotland and Wales), and far more areas of nearly-uninhabited hills than you'd think if you only ever visit the cities.
Of course, those hills are far from true wilderness, long since scoured of their natural forests to make way for sheep, and, especially in Cumbria, the holiday houses of the rich. They still kill people now and then to remind you they can bite, but most of the time they're just a beautiful place for a walk. That sense of things stripped away is widespread, too - it's the only place in the UK, to my knowledge, where a Celtic kingdom survived the initial Adventus Saxonum but there's virtually no sense of non-English nationhood or nationalism now. [1] Anecdotally, even the folklore seems to be much harder to dig up than it is for other bits of the country, and believe me - I've tried!
Oh, and then there are the murders. Have a look at a list of famous British murders. See how many happened around Greater Manchester.
In Mage terms, the dominant Essence of the North West is Primordial. There's a sense of a gap in memory, a 'surely there must have been more here?' But there's also something darkly beautiful lurking under the rot of the cities, the moistness of the seaside towns, something accessible not through history books or data but a sort of borderline-mystical experience of place. I can't quite describe it, but it's lovely when it isn't absolutely heartbreaking. I'm feeling it especially this Autumn, with the leaves yellowing as the leaves die in a wonderful long flash of fiery colour and another post-Austerity winter closes in (insert jab at the Red Tory inaction plan here) and it's what drove me to begin this project. It feels like a borderland, a little bit liminal, somewhere where what's true everywhere else breaks down in the rain and wind. The kind of place where forgotten things seep back through.
Media:
- Thomas D. Lee's Perilous Times
- Joseph Delaney's Wardstone Chronicles
- John Sparks' Shattered Moon
- Did I mention the books of folklore?
- Living here. I can strongly recommend living here.
The Second Bit
We're crawling because we're starting in the gutter. Your beginning mages are going to be somewhat powerful, yes, but not able to easily compete with even the non-mage supernatural factions yet. They're either nomadic bottom-feeders or minions sent out to do odd jobs, and either of those is likely to involve a lot of travel around the region. They might have a fixed HQ from the get-go or build one up later, but this isn't abnormal in crawl-style games - after all, every castle or dungeon presented on an OD&D map was a prospective player base!
We're also crawling because there's interesting stuff all over the ground. There's no way a simple set of keys on a big map can do justice to this entire setting - I can think of many places where a single square mile holds more paths and hidden ways than implied by a hexmap of a nation - but at minimum every hex should have something, somewhere, that's weird or useful. Something the characters could profit from, investigate, fight, wonder at, or all of these and more. I'm following Justin Alexander's injunction against sketchy hexcrawls with ephemeral encounters and empty spaces insofar as possible, though obviously it's going to take a while to fill up the whole thing and I'll be starting with the easier bits that aren't just 'massive stretch of drained marsh turned into grazing land.'
As noted in the tone section, I don't especially want encounters to be massive forces threatening to end the world; even a lot of the supernatural things likely live on and concern themselves with a run-down former council estate. There are hooks to follow and consequences for actions, but at no point should a given plot element hijack the entire map unless a lot is done to make that happen.
And we're 'ckrawling' because the pretentious k reminds us not to treat it too much like an OSR game. Most mages aren't just fighting for cool loot, they're fighting to transform reality, and belief is part of the terrain they contest (for which see my original post). There are likely hidden ways that make travel more than pure hex-by-hex navigation. And the ways in which our enemies are defeated will not necessarily include fireballing them until dead. [2]
Media:
- Susanna Clarke, Piranese and Jonathan Strange and Mister Norrell
- All the Mage material, obviously
- Justin Alexander's series on hexcrawls
- Veins of the Earth and other artpunk-y hexcrawls
2000-ish hexes seems like a reasonable number...
Here's our map, in glorious 3-mile hex scale. I debated as to whether this was too zoomed-in for a bit, and decided that actually it's too zoomed-out but the most I'll ever be able to manage.
After fucking about with about a dozen different maps, I just took a snip from google maps. It's not perfect, but it gets both topography and the major settlements so it'll do. This is of course a crappy sketch, there'll be a better one.
I'm reasonably pleased with this hex distribution. Nothing's perfect, of course. Kendal's annoyingly split. The regional canals don't appear, which I'll definitely be adding in as I go - they're essential to one of my monster ideas.
The Projeckt
- Part I: Nodes and places of power placed on the map
- Part II: Weird, non-standard and area-defining supernaturals, spirits etc. placed on the map
- Part III: Common or 'splatbook' supernaturals placed on the map; zones of control
- Part IV: Power, politics, and reality
- Parts V and on: fleshing out particular areas, adding more local colour
[1] Incidental side-note: I want a bucolic rural post-apocalypse. I keep thinking I need to write one; one features in one of my gameworlds, but no players have ever been there. I just love the idea of hedgerows and little villages turned into a near-jungle that still half follows the old hedgerows, stalked by survivalist hunter-gatherers whose ancestors lived in the farms just over the way. Maybe some beasties too? I might do something with this setting, some day.
[2] Which, to be clear, isn't bad per se, just interesting. I'm not much of a supporter of nationalism of any stripe, apart from the directly anti-imperial kind, and whilst I think there's a case to be made that the difference between nation-state and empire is largely one of scale, that nations can have an internal core and periphery etc., I don't think I could fairly claim any part of the North has lost as much by inclusion in Britain as Scotland, Wales or Ireland have.[3] All of which can absolutely also be true in OSR, especially the latter two, but aren't the default.
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