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)
