Hag Quest

When we encounter hags in RPGs, they are invariably villainous. They're cruel, manipulative and selfish creatures. We see so much of this archetype that I think it has become the prevailing conception of what a hag is. It's tempting to shrug this off as a symptom of the gameplay requirement for opposition in RPGs: The child-eating crone in the woods makes for an engaging adversary for heroic player characters after all. 

But this issue isn't particular to RPGs. In films, TV, books and games it's hard to escape the sinister hag. Which leads me to think the real reason for this is societal. A hag is not just an old woman, she is a powerful old woman. As such, she's been historically side-lined and vilified to the extent that her negative aspect is all that survives. Which sucks.

So what can we do about this in our RPGs? One thing for starters is to find a representation of the hag as something other than yet another flavour of "nasty old witch who does curses". 

I'm running some D&D games based in my own setting which is inspired by Scottish folklore. Hags are a big feature and yes, in the old tales, sometimes they are antagonists. But the pre-Christian myths and legends, where these stories have their roots, are seldom so clear-cut. There's another side to the hag that we seldom see. The wise-woman. The supernatural guide. The Goddess.

So this was one of the things I wanted to explore with my game setting. A hag inspired by the writing of Sharon Blackie and Lucy H Pearce, and the art of Red K Elders. I wanted to prominently feature hags who are powerful, ancient, and have a meaningful connection to The Otherworld. Hags whose wisdom and experience is honoured and respected, rather than feared and reviled.

As I was planning the campaign, I was also reading the preview for Chris McDowell's Mythic Bastionland. I love the treatment of Seers in this game: Cryptic oracles dwelling in distant sanctums, who know the past, present and future. Players are mechanically and thematically motivated to seek them out for advice and guidance. The Seers are also weird, each changed by their unique gift of Sight. In the presence of a Seer, players will be aware they are in the presence of something not quite of their world.

All of this has led me to a version of the hag I'm having a lot of fun with in my games, and I look forward to sharing this in a future post!

Vampire Adventure

It was my birthday. Then I got sick. Feeling old and wretched, I was in the perfect mindset to revisit the excellent Thousand Year Old Vampire solo RPG.

It had been a while and I stalled a bit at Character Creation. "Imagine a character from the distant past" is such an open prompt, I ended up rolling some dice to generate a year*, then googling what happened that year.  Apparently in 1498, The English Merchant Adventurers Guild were granted a trade monopoly with the Netherlands.  Merchant Adventurers Guild?  Sign me up!

That sort of discovery is a huge strength of the game. I'd found a corner of history that captured my interest and imagination and I had fun reading around, finding out about these Merchant Adventurers. 

After a couple of hours I had a newly sired vampire, skulking around Amsterdam having just murdered his best friend, with a beloved child sister back home in London whose prospects were suddenly looking very bleak indeed.  She actually became a vampire too, I don't know what became of her after that.

I had a fun afternoon bouncing around the prompts in the book making friends, drinking blood, getting buried for 100 years. Wikipedia was a helpful co-pilot for the gamebook, though I definitely found there was a balance to be struck with how faithfully to stick to history. I settled on a relaxed approach, using it mainly as a jumping off point (similar to the prompts in the book). This is pretty much the same approach I use for running D&D in a published setting like the Forgotten Realms.  Try to relax, and let your own version emerge organically.

I should have adopted another good practice from running D&D actually and had a 'go-to' resource or method for generating character names.  You need a lot of names for TYOV!  Next time I play I'll maybe try it with this random name generator from Behind The Name.

There's also a balance to be struck with how 'close' you position yourself to your vampire. You want to get into their head to be able to make decisions that are true to the character, but the game is at its best (I think) when revelling in the gloom, embracing the darkness as things just get worse for your vampire. So you don't want to be too close.

I did notice though that I'd created a vampire that was mostly just trying to find a quiet, safe space to Get Stuff Done.  The most heart-breaking moment for him was having to flee his research laboratory in Florence. By the time he'd re-established himself in the University of Altdorf, he'd forgotten what drove him to seek knowledge in the first place.

As with the last time I played it, real life started happening before my game finished, and I'm not sure when or if I'll get a chance to find out what happened to my vampire. But I left him in a good spot, somewhere in the 18th Century, schmoozing around the aristocracy offering private night-time tuition.  What could go wrong?

* I used 3d10 for a d1000, then added 1000 to the result to give me a year between 1000 and 2000 AD.