Apart from a brief period with Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay when I was about thirteen, and a briefer period trying to interest my children in Dungeons & Dragons, I’ve never been one for actually playing RPGs. They take too long, it’s hard to find people who get exactly the same things from them that you do, and more so than any other tabletop game I find them policed by a sometimes insurmountable conceptual barrier. Entering into an RPG campaign requires you to make not just an imaginative leap, but a leap past your own sense of embarrassment and self-consciousness. In the same way a great actor has surmount their sense of self in order to inhabit their role, a roleplayer has to disassociate themselves from the long social and cultural conditioning that says it’s somehow childish for an adult to pretend to be somebody else. All this is my failing, I have to stress. There’s a level of abstraction in other tabletop games (wargames, board games, card games etc) that makes it easier for me to engage with them. Roleplayers, the tabletop elite, are essentially not my tribe.
Saying that, I have long loved reading RPG rulebooks, and they can be a real source of inspiration and enchantment for me. I love the way RPG writers develop a world from the ground up, and the way the mechanics of their games represent how that world is to be interacted with. In this article from about ten years ago, the writer Damien Walter noted how RPGs can be a form of ‘ergodic literature’, the type of texts that make specific demands on the reader and upend the conventional physics of reading. Obvious examples would include David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, with its constant flicking back and forth between text and endnotes, or Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves, with its footnotes and handwritten inserts, its finicky layout and editorial asides. Perhaps the greatest example would be BS Johnson’s The Unfortunates, a book that the reader must assemble for herself from a box of separate unbound sections. RPGs, if we’re following this example, provide the reader with a non-sequential system of environmental detail, societal background, character types and material culture. A world has been deconstructed into its constituent parts and themes, and it’s up to the reader to blend them together in a way that makes personal sense to them. Although provided with the same information, no two readers will assemble that information in the same way.
All of which is a long preamble to explain why the roleplaying game Through the Hedgerow has had such an effect on me recently, and why I thought it would be worth reviewing here. Written by Jonathan Rowe, with wonderfully evocative illustrations by Peter Johnston, the book is published by Osprey as part of its Osprey Games division. Billed as ‘A Roleplaying Game of Rustic Fantasy’, Rowe’s work here weaves together several threads that all exert a significant pull on very specific parts of my imagination. In fact, as soon as I read the word ‘hedgerow’ in the title, I not only knew this book would be for me, but that I could make a reasonable guess at the kind of tonal atmosphere Rowe was aiming for.
In summary, Through the Hedgerow is set in four separate era of British history. (I would actually say this is specifically English history, and a game that deals with English themes, but that’s perhaps a separate discussion.) These are: the Age of Swords (the Dark Ages and the Viking invasions); the Age of Plagues (the 17th century and the civil wars); the Age of Steel (the industrial Victorian era); and the Age of Thunder (the Second World War). Players create characters based on specific types, known as ‘Gentries.’ These can include more conventional figures like Hodkins (highwaymen, adventurers), Heathen Clerks (priests and priestesses who follow Heathen Saints) or Motleys (morris dancers, wandering vagabonds). It can also include more esoteric figures, like Tomnoddins (humanoid spider-creatures), Flayboglins (animate scarecrows) or Ouzels (bird-headed aristocrats). Plunged into a hidden world where the Light battles eternally against the Dark, the players are plucked from their home age and have to negotiate the maze-like hedgerow, until they arrive in one of these four Ages of England, where they will have to investigate and defeat the machinations of the Dark. Rowe is explicit here that, unlike other RPGs, his game does not privilege violence; player characters are on the whole not warriors who solve every problem with a sword. The missions they undertake might involve rescuing a village woman accused of witchcraft in the 17th century, or recovering a sacred relic stolen from a church by a Viking warband. The game stresses the importance of investigating, healing and restoring balance. The characters are supposed to re-establish a sense of equilibrium between the Light and the Dark, as much as exalt one over the other.
I’m not qualified here to talk about the mechanics of the game, but Rowe has clearly tried to move them away from the standard Dungeons & Dragons-inspired system of player stats, checks and bonuses, and he discusses this at length on his blog, Fen Orc (which is well worth a read for his ideas about RPGs more generally). What I’m most interested in here is the source material and the inspirations that have fed into this game, which Rowe details in the appendix and on his blog. Most clearly, Through the Hedgerow draws on Susan Cooper’s superb series of children’s books, The Dark is Rising sequence, as well as on Alan Garner’s approach to time and deep history. Rowe also notes the influence of 1970s TV serials, like Doctor Who, Children of the Stones, Worzel Gummidge and Catweazle. I would also say that there are links to a whole host of texts in the ‘British Weird’ or folk horror tradition, from the holy cinematic trinity of The Wicker Man, Blood on Satan’s Claw and Witchfinder General, to TV plays like Penda’s Fen and Nigel Kneale’s The Stone Tape. Even the haunting 2000AD comics series, The Journal of Luke Kirby, is drawing from a similar well. The Four Ages of the game are stations of the secular cross on which Britain has hung much of its quasi-mythological understanding of itself in recent years, from the reign of Alfred the Great to the chaos of the civil wars, or from Victorian materialism to the embattled siege of the Second World War. The game draws on archetypes or cultural touchstones buried deep in the British psyche, from the witch hunter to the wounded Battle of Britain pilot, the wandering wise man, the holy fool haunting the hedgerows. If the figure of Cole Hawlings in The Box of Delights, a magical Punch & Judy man engaged in some cryptic conflict between the Old and the New Magic, tugs on your imagination in any way, then Through the Hedgerow is the game for you.
Above all, I think this book is about the liminality of the countryside, the edgelands between the town and the open fields beyond. It conjures up a mysterious world of briar patches and bramble, of the mist threaded through the stubble of a wheatfield while crows gather in the hawthorn. It’s part of an imaginative, almost spiritual cultural response that sits adjacent to Mackenzie Crook’s Detectorists or the music ofJohnny Flynn, and although it’s explicitly a fantasy game it has as much to do with the writings of Melissa Harrison and Robert Macfarlane as Susan Cooper or Alan Garner. I wouldn’t go so far as to say this is a game or a world for environmentalists, but its emphasis on the rural and where the rural overlaps with the urban, does give it a certain political salience. The ‘folklore turn’ of much modern literary culture is arguably drawing on ideas of rewilding and environmental renewal, even on Derrida’s ideas of Hauntology (‘Re-enchantment is Resistance’, as Hookland says …), and Through the Hedgerow is embedded in that folk horror tradition. Beyond politics though, it has captured the sense that even though we are only passing through the landscape, our ephemerality can still leave a significant trace upon it, and that there is enchantment in the corner of your eye if you could only see it. It’s something glimpsed on a patch of waste ground on Bonfire Night, or from a train window as you pass through summer fields at dusk. It’s there in the drift of dead leaves on a lonely autumn afternoon, or the call of a raven on the edge of a sodden moor. This is a deeply imaginative piece of work, and it suggests you only need to make a small leap of the imagination to experience it for yourself.
If not exactly a work of fiction then, Through the Hedgerow has still provided me with what fiction does best; it has altered, to the smallest degree, how I look at the world. My lunchtime walks along the old railway tracks near where I live, with the autumn trees hanging over the path, now take on a new resonance. The call of a tawny owl at dusk from the cemetery along the road carries an extra thrill. A fox slipping through a back garden is an emissary of something larger and more mysterious. The hedgerow is thinner than it looks; who knows what might lie on the other side?
(Through the Hedgerow, written by Jonathan Rowe, with illustrations by Peter Johnston, is published by Osprey Games, £25, pp272)