by | March 19, 2026 · 3:13 pm

Unfinished Symphonies of Faerie Wood

Later than promised, for sure, but here I begin a look at some of the Faerie Wood stuff that never reached publication, for good or ill.

A glance at the ‘Faerie Wood’ folder that has survived through a succession of Apple and now Linux computers reveals a number of unfinished or merely unpublished adventures. Thankfully, LibreOffice is a very unfussy word processor, readily opening ancient file formats such as ClarisWorks 4.

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Ah, Clarus: beloved ‘Dogcow’ from ClarisWorks. Happy memories from a more innocent time, when software just worked, for years, without a subscription.

Still more Faerie Wood goodies, many of them handwritten, can be found in an old briefcase that I keep at home. It’s bulging!

So what do we have?

At the top end of the “very nearly made it into print” scale is The Ghost of Gwinbosch Castle, which I have mentioned previously. It’s a hauntingly good adventure, with some very funny golems in it. (Faerie Wood golems aren’t like classical fantasy golems, but more of a ‘Jim Henson’ sort of beastie.) With this one, only a lack of illustrations held us back.

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“Draw the front door here,” I told Garry… in 1994.

The only pictures that exist are the front cover (which I showed here) and the floor plans…

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It’s not desperately important – a floor plan is only a diagram – but I do like a castle to have realistically thick walls, which is why I reproduced the original plans (left) with a chunkier version (right). I lacked suitable software in those days, so the ‘fill’ was literally done with a brush and a pot of paint. (Dyson’s would have done it far better.)

At the other end of the scale, I have silly little scraps and oddments, written down on any envelope or piece of paper that was to hand whenever they occurred. Many of them are on the back of lecture handouts (which says something about my priorities in those days) but if they exist only in this form, it means these weren’t subsequently used in a game. For example…

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Just some ideas

I quite like the idea of the rolling boulder trap that’s actually got a gang of little goblins inside. Just one more thing I never used, but I have dozens of little adventure fragments like this. Faerie Wood had started life with a campaign in which the first three players explored the Wood in a series of solo adventures; I was far from home and, quite frankly, didn’t know a lot of good players. (Roleplaying at university always seemed to be a bit clichéd, somehow, but perhaps I was just a snob…) I went the solo route as well, creating the Faerie Isle as my alternative to the Wood, mapped out such that each grid square contained an encounter or challenge for the player to find. The geography of the Faerie Isle is the reason why the ‘Airy Faeries’ supplement takes place in a coastal location; something I’m sure nobody has ever bothered to question!

Back in the digital Dead Letter Office of Faerie Wood, we also have The Faerie Wood Compendium – a 2005 effort (unfinished) to save some documents that were in old file formats, gathering a number of old games into a single volume. It featured all our published supplements and some newer, less well-known ones such as All the Fun of the Fear and Raiders of the Frost Bark. Since 2005 was also the year in which I bought a house in slightly worse condition than Gwinbosch Castle (more accurately, a plot of land with some bricks arranged on it) I imagine it was inevitable that this effort would be shelved.

In 2012 I had another go at writing a Faerie Wood adventure, spurred into action by some interactions with Garry that brought back happy memories. The result was Mister Whoosh Whoosh Bang Bang, which is complete but has never been play tested. (Also, it suffers from the Curse of Gwinbosch: no artwork!) Alarming to think that that more than thirteen years have passed since then! Working on these games was always a pleasure, but the realities of life do seem to get in the way.

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by | March 8, 2026 · 12:52 pm

Still Faerie After All These Years

Last night, I undertook a mission to enlist the aid of a fickle sorceress. While my companions were hasty (they were rude to the talking door knocker that looked like a pig, with the result that her magic sent them flying into the duckpond) I attempted to concoct a story about how I’d “come about your chimney, your ladyship…”

Our story certainly seemed to have more than a little faerie DNA about it. There were rugs that sought to smother us, and enchanted sets of clothing that waltzed about the room (and could attack, if provoked). Something about magical wardrobes, too. (I get the feeling that something was cut, here, to ensure the adventure finished before we ran out of time: good game mastering.) It lacked nothing, save perhaps a flying teapot: a closer experience to the Faerie Wood era, I haven’t had for thirty years or more.

Perhaps I should explain, where by ‘explain’ I mean provide additional information, albeit with my usual tendency for personal amusement over veracity.

So: be it understood that last night’s shenanigans came about as a part of East Riding Libraries* recurring Festival of Worms. (Some kind of misprint on their website, whereby they repeatedly call it the ‘Festival of Words’ but this is clearly a mistake: it’s always been ‘Worms’ in this household, anyway.)

* You might not be familiar with riding libraries, as they’re very rare, nowadays. Most of them have been retired from their former life and now they stay firmly in place. They still have books in them, but the days when you could travel on one, all the way to Southampton or Samarkand, are long gone. You can still make out where the saddle and the stirrups went, if you look closely at the Bodleian, or Bridlington North.

East Riding Libraries usually has a distinctly unhealthy obsession with crime and crime writers, I find, but on this occasion the programme included some more interesting fare, among which it was ‘The Enchantress and the Shifting House: A One-Shot D&D Game’ that particularly caught my eye. When it comes to D&D (“Dand”?) the torch has been very much passed to the next generation: both Large Main Nephew and Small Auxilliary Nephew played with school chums and continue to this day, via the Internet. Back in the summer, Small Auxilliary Nephew put on a game for Spludge: his first ever. I was scandalized to learn that the whole thing was conducted without so much as a single miniature. (Young people, eh: what’s the world coming to?) Apparently, though, it was a hit.

So I took Spludge to ‘The Enchantress and the Shifting House’, having promised not to use “that Scottish accent that you do” – and to my surprise and disappointment, I managed to obey this grossly unfair rule. Even when I chose to play a dwarf, I resisted the temptation to make him Glaswegian. Dunno how I did it.

Our venue for this particular offshoot of the Festival of Worms was The Game Shack, which I think must be one of those magical shops: you know, the kind that can appear and disappear at will. Certainly, I’d never noticed it before, but I’m pleased to know that we have such a thing in the area. I’ve wanted to go to a gaming café ever since I found the ‘No Rolls Barred’ YouTube channel (specifically, you need to see ‘Communopoly‘). The Game Shack proved to be a very welcoming venue, though I was soon reminded just how hard roleplaying can be in a noisy environment. Since a run-in with long COVID, I’m still struggling with partial deafness in one ear (horrible, bunged up sinuses) but that wasn’t the only thing that made me feel like an official Old Git: the text on my charcter sheet was abso-fecking-lutely minute. The character sheets were computer-generated and it seems that D&D has become a lot more fiddly since the late 1980s: there were loads of modifiers and things noted on the character sheet, and my cleric’s list of magical abilities might as well have been written in Sanskrit (or worse yet, Comic Sanskrit) for all the sense they made for me.

The game master’s assistant was helpful, but referred to them as “spells.” That can’t be right, can it? They’d be prayers, surely? Or maybe D&D has changed more than I thought.

To my mind, the things that were good about our evening of gaming (the people facilitating; the adventure itself) were game system agnostic. The biggest frustrations came from the D&D system. It’s just too finicky – and too serious. Spludge played a barbarian and said he felt that he struggled to contribute because “everything was magical” and his character wasn’t. The game, being lighthearted in nature, would have worked far better if we’d actually been faeries. Opposite Spludge, a girl called Iris (our characters were unnamed) played an elf mage, but she acted far more barbaric than our barbarian. Anything that was described was immediately met with “I try to steal it” or “I smash it”… which is great, but she really, really needed to be sprite. It just would’ve worked better.

I have no idea about dwarves’ religion in D&D, which made me feel something of a fraud (perhaps it’s detailed in all those endless supplemental rulebooks they have nowadays…) but again, as a character in a very ‘faerie’ adventure, I felt that I was far too ‘serious’. We all were. D&D is just too ‘heroic’ in that ‘what Americans fondly imagine the Middle Ages to have been like’ way, no doubt complete with fibreglass castles in Florida. So I didn’t like the rules system much, but I enjoyed stepping back into gaming – and most importantly, Spludge said he had a good time. I get the feeling that I’ll be doing it again before too long. Playing with strangers is hard and we largely limited ourselves to saying what our characters were doing, rather than actually talking among ourselves as our characters (background noise in the venue didn’t help…) but I think there’s a lot of fun to be had with ‘The Enchantress and the Shifting House’.

(“Oh, Shifting House,” the hypothetical Glaswegian dwarf would have said. “I thought you said Sh-“)

I noticed, during the evening, that our game master was running the game from what looked to be a professionally produced document, nicely typeset and illustrated with AI images. I was surprised to learn that such playful adventures exist, but sure enough: it can be yours today, for just £4.57 on Etsy (as a downloadable PDF). I’m not surprised that it’s made for use with the D&D system – that’s the most common ruleset, after all – but it would’ve worked better as a Faerie Wood game, which is why I’ve dusted off this blog, to add the first new post in very nearly a decade.

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I shouldn’t finish without a mention of the miniatures and scenery, which were just right for the game. (The flowers in the garden surrounding the Shifting House were enormous, but perhaps they genuinely were. Such is magic…) The front door, complete with talking pig face; the fearsome rugs; the dancing clothing… everything was perfect for the game’s aesthetic. (I’d also have shown where the walls were, in each room, but that’s me.) Full marks to The Game Shack for the things they’ve made: they’ve got some beautiful scenery and playing pieces for a number of home-grown games that I want to know more about…

Next time.

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by | July 3, 2016 · 6:48 pm

Whatever Happened to Faerie Wood?

Sometime in the mid-1990s, we ground to a halt. I’m sure there were lots of reasons.

One of the frustrations that I remember from that time was that I felt that I needed Garry, but he didn’t really need me: he could write rules and supplements, and produce illustrations for them, while I could only write the games themselves. If the artwork wasn’t forthcoming, there could be no more books – and I wanted there to be more. Looking back, it seems terribly immature to have been keeping score, but in a sense I was. I wanted to be the author of more Faerie Wood material.

Of the supplements we’d produced, I was the author of just one and a half (the one being ‘Goblins!’, while the half is ‘Airy Faeries’ which appeared as half of a double booklet, along with Garry’s ‘Bagpipe Blues’). Garry had also created ‘Bowls!’ / ‘The Starwood Tree’ (another double booklet), and The Garden Snatchers.

Although the limitation was frustrating, it wasn’t the reason I had to give up on the books: that was down to the supply of artwork. I had edited and typeset Garry’s ‘The Ghost of Gwinbosch Castle’ but after the cover itself no further illustrations were forthcoming. I finalised the maps of the castle (engineering and architectural drawing I can do…) but I couldn’t produce ‘classic’ Faerie Wood illustrations, and without pictures there could be no new books. There were a lot of adventures that might have been published, but something had changed. Perhaps our living hundreds of miles apart had finally had an effect: significantly, I don’t recall what was going on in Garry’s life at that time. There may well have been good reasons to call a halt, but since I was no longer close at hand I couldn’t know them – and as we entered our mid-twenties it was quite natural that there were other things afoot.

Cover detail from The Ghost of Gwinbosch Castle

Previously unseen: the Ghost of Gwinbosch Castle

By 1995 I’d be a homeowner, I’d be engaged (disastrously, as it turned out) and I’d be working on a PhD. There were lots of reasons not to create Faerie Wood material. No doubt Garry could write a list of his own.

One reason for the supply of pictures running out I can guess at: new artistic media to be explored. I recall that at this time Garry had largely ceased to be interested in line drawings of the kind that we had relied on for Faerie Wood. If you look at the artwork for ‘Airy Faeries’ you can see that a new style is used: I was expecting more of the same, but Garry was branching out. New styles, and new interests.

Detail from the village map in Airy Faeries.

Detail from the village map in Airy Faeries.

Alistair was given a (in fact, the) print copy of the Game Master chapters (sans illustrations) and ran a game or two, but playing in those marked the end of my Faerie Wood experience. I continued to be very proud of what we had done, to the extent of showing the Players’ Book to prospective employers… but no more books would be completed, and we were almost at the end of the creative journey.

There remain about seven unpublished Faerie Wood supplements (being imprecise, because it depends upon your own standards in terms of quality and completeness) that reside on this computer, and its ancestors. Coming up in the next instalment, therefore: a sneak peak at some of the unfinished symphonies of Faerie Wood.

(Update from future me: there was no ‘next instalment’. Sorry.)

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by | June 29, 2016 · 6:57 am

Herbalism – Simples!

(Introducing the idea of “folk remedies” for faerie folk.)

If you’ve ever played a herbalist character, you’ll have endured occasional frustrations where you’re either unable to find anything useful, or you keep on finding the wrong things. Naturally enough, upon finding a herb that one currently has no use for, the herbalist player is tempted to seize the ingredients anyway, in an effort to build up a stock of materials over time… but than can introduce long-term game balance problems.

Here’s a quick-and-dirty set of optional rules that allow a player to get a little more out of their herbalism skill – rather than being a supposedly good faerie carrying around a bunch of poisons for no better reason than because the ingredients turned up.

The existing rules that describe how to make ointments and potions remain unchanged, but there are other things that a herbalist can do to provide aid, such as mixing a remedy for a sore throat. Potions and ointments remain ‘special’ in that they are formulated to last a long time, but herbalists can also derive beneficial effects from relatively common plants, and other ingredients such as honey. These herbal remedies are prepared and used on demand: they aren’t stockpiled like potions, because they only work when fresh.

The ingredients for these minor remedies are easily found: nothing is particularly unusual, so if the herbalist is prepared to expend the stated time they are likely to be able to gather all the required ingredients, and make enough medicine to treat several faeries. The Game Master does not need to make a die roll to determine what herbs are present: the simple ingredients required for these remedies are always available – unless the character is trapped underground, it’s the middle of winter, or it’s too dark to search for the required ingredients, etc. (The Game Master can rule on any such limitation.)

If the player declares that he/she is going to make a herbal remedy, any of the following may be chosen. The character then expends the stated time to gather the ingredients, and chop, crush, boil, etc. as appropriate. At the end of that time, 1d100 is rolled. Making herbal remedies is a relatively easy aspect of the herbalism skill, so if the roll is less than double the character’s herbalism skill, the remedy is found to be a success, and can be used for treatment.

If the 1d100 roll is greater than double the character’s herbalism skill, the herbal mixture is clearly absolutely awful, and won’t do any good. It is thrown away… but the herbalist can try again by expending more time.

A list of herbal remedies follows. Game Masters may wish to allow additional herbal remedies (learned from books, or NPCs) during gameplay…

 

Herbal remedies table

That’s it! Thanks for reading, and I would be interested to know what you think…

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by | June 20, 2016 · 7:10 pm

We need a ruling on rules

Garry contacted me out of the blue, requesting copies of the ‘Game Master’ notes that I could give him. (Yes: he’s thinking about running some games!) This is almost reason enough to sell up and move south, quite frankly…

But.

We’re looking at game mechanics that were designed a quarter of a century ago. We’ve changed, and we think we can do things better, now. The rest of the world has changed, too. FaceTube; Tweets; immediate gratification in all things. Are people really going to plough through a hefty rulebook, in order to join a game? Are those special people that we call Game Masters still willing to go to all that trouble?

We’re not sure.

Garry has in mind some changes. In fact, his deliberations cover a whole spectrum, from “leave it unchanged” to a card-based approach. Options include a system with no miniatures and no maps… and some approaches that fundamentally change the role of the Game Master, or even eliminate it. We’ve discussed solo gamebooks, web-based services, ready-made ‘encounters’… all kinds of things.

And we’re no closer to a decision.

So I thought, let’s see what some other people think – and here’s my little opinion poll.

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by | December 31, 2013 · 10:36 pm

If you go down to the woods tonight…

If you like reading old blog entries, you might recall that I described our sales trip to Exeter to promote Faerie Wood, when I ran into an old git who claimed that our faerie-themed roleplaying game was immoral because it involved magic, and would lure people into devil worship.

Just keep that in mind while I tell you about another game project that Garry and I worked upon.

The Call of Cthulhu.
In the woods.
At night.
Gulp.

This wasn’t a live roleplay: nobody would be required to wield foam weapons or throw tennis balls as “spells”. None of that frantic activity… we were simply going to use the existing landscape of Petts Wood at a scale of 1:1. Dice would be “rolled” courtesy of a box with a clear plastic lid, to be shaken up and then inspected. Garry would be the Game Master/narrator, and I would keep track of the stats on the various character sheets. Garry had also procured a sound effects tape and portable speakers, to add atmosphere.

There were to be no counters or figures; each player would represent their location simply by being there, while the two of us would stand in for whatever NPCs might be encountered.

The players would be given one paraffin lantern and one torch between them, and they would find ‘clues’ or suffer mishaps as the adventure led them along the forest paths. They would be asked to wear drab clothing, preferably resembling the inter-war period, but above all: wellington boots!

I knew the woods well, and took Garry to see various locations that I thought were exciting, proposing some ideas and listening to others. We planned a series of encounters, and clues… Garry said he had a book on demonology that looked suitably horrific, and would make a good piece of ‘evidence’ to plant in a half-ruined shed. If I remember rightly, we were thinking in terms of a cult that had kidnapped the sister of one of the players, and were intending to sacrifice her as part of a summoning ritual.

Scary stuff.

Mark wanted no part of it. If you’ve ever seen ‘Mr. T’ refusing to board an aeroplane, that’s pretty much the level of approval we got from him.

No way, sucka.

And of course, Mark was right. It’s one thing to explore the woods by day, and imagine what they’ll be like by night… quite another to actually experience them.

The grand finale that I had in mind for our Cthulhu game involved the players discovering that the cultists have taken their drugged victim into a partially flooded tunnel, and set up a mass of candles and so on, preparatory to killing her. Surprisingly, the otherwise wholesome Petts Wood provides the perfect venue for such a thing, in the form of a broad, shallow stream that runs through a brick-built culvert, right underneath a major railway line.

Hence the requirement that all players who took part in the game brought wellies: not merely to cope with any mud, but so that they could participate in the final chase, right into the belly of the Beast.

Call a “time freeze” where players must stay still and close their eyes, while we go on ahead to set up the scene, perhaps lighting the candles and playing the spooky soundtrack, then tell the players that the person they’ve gone to rescue has almost bled out and a demon is taking shape inside the tunnel. Take up positions as crazed cultists determined not to allow their ceremony to be interrupted… and hope for an express train to thunder by overhead at the right moment to shake everything up. Enjoy the bowel-loosening terror of the moment together: not so much “hatchling dragon” as Hatching Dagon.

Right?

Well, we never did it. As games go, this was to be one of our unfinished symphonies. A general reluctance among players was one reason; another was our own experience in those woods. We stayed too long at the tunnel, and it was completely dark by the time we began to retrace our steps. The tiny flashlight I had brought along did very little to light our way. It showed trees and roots and the like, but did nothing to give any sense of direction. I had reasoned that an electric torch from the 1920s shouldn’t be all that great, and I didn’t want the players equipped with a powerful searchlight. It seemed like a good idea at the time, but we could have wandered in circles until the moon came up, if it hadn’t been for an obliging owl that kept hooting, providing a point of reference.

Eventually we found our way back to civilisation, and I’m not sure that either of us entirely regret that we didn’t try it again, with the scary soundtrack. Thus, the good folk of Chiselhurst were saved from the demon, who cancelled his “one night only” appearance, and we turned our attention to more wholesome forms of role-playing. Within a year or two, Faerie Wood was born.

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by | December 16, 2013 · 2:27 pm

The Faerie Wood Manifesto

In a recent article I reproduced Garry’s first article about Faerie Wood, as published in 1991.

One thing that we need to remember, when we look back upon the days when Faerie Wood was taking shape is that it didn’t exist in isolation. Faerie Wood was a reaction to something. Perhaps a lot of our claims about the game were highly partisan, although not in the sense of crudely marketing our own game – remember, at the time of Garry’s first article we wouldn’t have anything to sell for something like two years – yet already in that first magazine article, Garry is setting out his stall; marking his territory. What we had there was a Faerie Wood manifesto.

And why might we have felt that the gamer community was going to need a manifesto, at that point in the early 1990s? Basically, because gaming had gone in a bad direction; wargaming and roleplaying alike. Let me use a couple of examples.

In the world of wargaming, Warhammer had been a lovely little game in its 2nd edition. It came in one bookshelf-sized box; and there was a supplementary book (just one) providing stats and army lists for every race. Included in the basic set were rules to allow players to create custom stats for any other creatures you might wish to model, and (how’s this for an example of how nice Games Workshop once were, before the greed took hold?) it even included card figures to cut out, suggesting that you glue them onto coins or washers to form the armies, if you didn’t have enough figures. Then the third edition appeared; an expensive, glossy hardback book stuffed with adverts for Games Workshop stuff… and some unpopular rules that basically existed to flog gear. Give an expensive model powerful stats and make it ‘cheap’ in terms of the points it costs in an army list… and rake in the cash. A lot of present-day online computer games are criticised for a ‘pay-to-win’ business model where the keen player must pay to acquire extra items or abilities, but Games Workshop has been doing pay-to-win for a quarter of a century.

In roleplaying, the system we cut our teeth on was Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. In a sense, it’s still the definitive roleplaying game. Unfortunately, when we were in our late teens there was a reinvention in the form of the ‘2nd Edition’, published in 1989. It was simultaneously more complex in terms of game mechanics, and more simplistic in moral terms. There was an emphasis on always playing the hero (e.g. no more half-orc PCs, and all mentions of demonology expunged) but worst of all, a profusion of books. Like Games Workshop, TSR were following a good marketing strategy: find a new, younger audience and produce a wide range of products, so there’s plenty for people to keep on buying. Under the old system, only a Dungeon Master would own multiple books; as a mere player you simply had to get yourself a Player’s Handbook and you were done. With the 2nd Edition came multiple books detailing complex skills and abilities that only a teen nerd or a ‘rules lawyer’ could love.

What had been a game requiring improvised characterisation and storytelling became one of increased game mechanics. Our lot opted out, and stayed with the previous edition, expanded via certain house rules. (Maybe I should write about ‘The Tides of War in Oerth’ sometime: a swan-song that was our last sustained effort at classic fantasy roleplaying…)

The games we knew were changing; going after the big bucks. Perhaps the player community was changing as well. It seemed that many people from the first generation of roleplayers, the ‘Old Guard’ from the late 1970s, had moved on to new things. Garry’s the best Dungeon Master I’ve ever experienced, but he’d tell you he learned his craft from somebody older. Trouble is, by the late 1980s our forbears seemed to have moved on to new things… or maybe they simply didn’t want a whole lot to do with a bunch of teen dweebs who mostly thought that slogging through one of TSR’s adventure modules was the epitomy of fantasy roleplaying. (We’ve all been in a truly bad roleplaying game at some point in our lives, right? I’ll write about that another time…)

Unfortunately, a bad roleplayer probably thinks he’s good at roleplaying, because he has levelled up his character and amassed an impressive stock of magic items. Equally, a bad game master probably thinks he’s a good game master because he’s giving bad players what they want: fights in which to get experience points and win magical items. At its worst, AD&D offers a system that rewards all the wrong behaviour. Imagine the first time your character sees an animated corpse lurching towards him… the guy who flees screaming gets no experience points, while the bad player who fails to think about what his character actually ought to feel in this situation gets an easy kill (he’s read the rulebooks and knows the stats for the undead…)

Something had to change, and the big-name publishers were no help at all. They wanted the players buying and using more and more official rules, and weren’t really in a position to encourage people towards make-believe. Furthermore, they had a strong commercial interest in giving the majority of their customers what they wanted… and if that meant lengthy, combat-centred campaigns that allowed players to become powerful lords of battle, so be it.

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As I’m sure you know, many people call the kind of player who doesn’t really ‘get’ roleplaying and focuses only on their stats and die rolls a “munchkin”. It was originally a term originally used to describe younger gamers, although later it would be applied to the immature “amass power and kill everything in sight” sort of players, regardless of age.

But here’s a funny thing… faeries are the most muchkinesque creatures ever. They’re short; many of them have squeaky little voices, and they exhibit childlike innocence. Some of them live in hollow trees, for goodness sakes! But where are the munchkin players? They’re off playing a 17th level multiclassed demi-human, dripping with magic weapons and armour, and leading a sizable army of henchmen… because that’s what munchkins do.

Maybe that’s the way it ought to be: roleplaying gives you a chance to play something you’re not, so we shouldn’t act too surprised if younger players want to become all-powerful warlords, dripping with treasure. Faerie wood simply didn’t appeal to munchkins, and they stayed away. (For which, thank you.)

In creating a game that was the antithesis of the power-based gaming we saw in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Garry had found a route out of the ‘rat race’. If you’ve never played Faerie Wood, you might expect it to be some kind of AD&D/Runequest hybrid with different races and new ‘monsters’ resulting from the change of scale. This is incorrect. It’s very difficult to be a conventional sword-swinging hero if you’ve ended up with your nose turning into a twig with an apple bomb growing on it, or if you’re being chased by a giant set of bagpipes on chicken legs. It’s a game that demands not to be taken seriously – beginning with the fact that most folk don’t recognise the existence of currency, and none need to eat or drink in order to survive.

Most of all, Faerie Wood simply presents an appeal that players should be good sports, of the old-fashioned kind. There is nothing in the game rules that prevents a suitably burly character from going around the place in a full suit of armour if he really wanted to… except for ridicule. (I can imagine an endless succession of meetings in which other faeries ask, “Is there is a fancy dress competition today, or something?”) The simple fact is, though, you wouldn’t need it: just bring a good sense of humour, and quick wits.

That’s the promise of Faerie Wood, as our manifesto explains: a chicken in every pot… and a knee in every groin.

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by | December 11, 2013 · 3:13 pm

Faerie gold

OK, it took me more than a year to get around to providing this, but here’s the first ever public mention of Faerie Wood, reproduced from an article in ‘Ug!’ Magazine, courtesy of the Southeast London Wargames Group (SELWG) where we used to spend our Friday nights, ankle-deep in orc guts and funny-shaped dice.

The task of typing the whole thing in was one that I didn’t fancy at all… so I didn’t get round to it, but then I happened upon a lovely little iPhone app called Pixter that performs optical character recognition upon anything you point the iPhone’s camera at. The result was entirely satisfactory, and needed very little fixing up…

Fairy Wood: A Field Guide to the Little People

How many of you have ever wanted to be fairy? Not many I bet. But just pause to think of what it would be like to be a 2′ Pixie on your own in a huge unending forest in which are Evil Fairies, Dragons and: “The most fabulous object in the world.”

This is a game I’m running with 3 Players outside SELWG. Its based on the D&D rules (as everyone is at least familiar with them) but instead of being in a party, each player travels in Fairy Wood by himself, a kind of solo adventure played with the DM. The player writes out a set of things he wants to do in each week ie: movement and actions. Then during a “normal” game session the DM (Me) takes the player through a series of encounters which can range from a simple meeting with an Elf in his cottage by the stream, or exploring a vast network of dark, eerie caves. As the DM I have a large map of the wood, which is divided into lots of smaller sections, in each are people to meet and many encounters.

As the player travels through the wood he learns of Myths and hears tales of old mysterious places, meets other people and while looking after himself, builds up his own picture of Fairy Wood. The idea first began as an experiment to see how players cope with problems when there by themselves, and see how far they assume the part of the character they are roleplaying.

I’ve always found that in groups many players held back, not really wanting to feel silly, and so not really playing there character as well as they might. The “Solo game” situation with Fairy Wood also lets me, as the DM roleplay more than I could by just rolling the dice for the monster’s attacks. But of course, being by yourself in a potentially hostile place makes you vulnerable and I have included non-player characters who can join the player. So it is quite possible for someone to acquire a “party” of 2 to 3, during there travels. To compensate for the vulnerability of a lone character I have adjusted the rules of D&D. All skills and abilities such as “To hit” and “Saving Throws” now have an experience value. Eliminating levels and allowing the player to spend experience points earned during an adventure on increasing his skills and to buy spells and increase his hit points. (To keep the game balanced there are limitations on increasing all things.) At first I wasn’t sure how it would accepted. But the players I asked quite liked the idea. Some of the races available are:

Pixies

Sprites

Baby dragons (3′ long)

Leprechauns

2′ Centaurs

and many others.

There are no classes such as fighter or wizard. Each race has their own skills and everyone can use spells. Alignment is decided by race, ranging from Good through Neutral to Chaotic, but NOT evil. Although a character can’t start with an evil alignment it can change during the course of the game. Each player has his good and evil acts recorded as coloured squares on a grid. If black (Evil) vastly dominates the grid or “Fairie Sparkle” as I call it, then the character undergoes a physical change and may eventually turn into it’s evil counterpart. Sprites turn into Willo-Wisps, Pixies become Goblins and Nymphs become Hags. This change can mean losing certain abilities or spells, but sometimes others are gained.

The game is a strange concept, although probably not an altogether new one, but it’s certainly a change from the usual swashbuckling, swordflashing, Dragon Slaying adventure.

Garry Robson

That’s the magazine piece, in its original form, complete with spelling mistakes. (Garry and I had worked together on a few things, but I had yet to become his regular in-house editor/grammar Nazi.) I remember this article, which came to me in the post, as part of the 7th edition of ‘Ug!’, edited by Mark. Much of the magazine was given over to a ‘horror special’ featuring some interesting pieces such as a guide to outfitting your party for adventures in Call of Cthulhu… but for me it’s the Faerie Wood article that stands out. Where the Cthulhu article is a guide to increasing your chances in combat against manifestations of the hideous Great Old Ones, the Faerie Wood article is a complete change of pace. It’s not about winning but about playing your character. It’s not a campaign report as such; more of a teaser, expressing an opinion that Garry had been harbouring for some time… that we’d grown beyond conventional heroic swords and sorcery games.

Garry and I shared all sorts of ideas back then, and I had been aware that the game was taking place; not at the club itself but in the series of one-to-one games that Garry describes. If I had still been living in London, no doubt I would have been involved as one of the early players: instead I was busy with my studies, and my involvement in the game was purely vicarious. The single-player nature of the first campaign is an interesting genesis, because nowadays I can’t imagine Faerie Wood being anything other than a highly social game. It also represents a massive effort for Garry, although he didn’t let his players down, and saw the campaign through to the end.

(If we’re nice, perhaps Garry will tell us more about those early adventures, and remind us which of the three players it was who succeeded, and claimed the Most Fabulous Object in the World. And what it was, as that eludes me.)

Garry had previously run a large Warhammer (fantasy battle) campaign in which each player had a small army, and would declare what parts of the map they were going to explore. If they found something or encountered a rival the player(s) would be summoned for a game to play out the skirmish that resulted, ideally winning treasure to obtain more troops and equipment. If you think about it, Garry wasn’t merely a referee, nor writer of scenarios, but developer and facilitator, and player of the NPC forces as well. If you think that sounds like a heck of a lot of work, you’d be right. There were seven players in the Warhammer campaign, each having an adventure every two weeks or so.

In a sense, early Faerie Wood uses a similar model: Garry draws up the map in advance, and puts on a personalised mini-game based on the player’s choices. He sets out his reasons for this within the article; a more intimate relationship between player and game master, in which each is able to engage in more roleplay than is otherwise possible.

In those early games, Tony Brotherton played a mini-centaur, Mark Cook was a leprechaun, and Alistair Austin was a baby dragon. None of them knew anything about the geography of the Wood, but had to pick their way by asking for directions, following clues or hitching a ride. It says something for the game’s flexibility and balance that a single adventurer can survive the rigors of these adventures whether they choose to be a thieving leprechaun, reliant on magic, or a relative bruiser such as the centaur or baby dragon.

Some things changed after this 1991 article, and not least the name of the game, which changed from ‘Fairy’ to the more rustic ‘Faerie’ – although perhaps that was already in a state of flux, as can be seen in Garry’s spelling of “Fairie Sparkle” in the article. (What’s in a name, anyway? It’s far better than one of my own working titles of the era, ‘Warlocks and Wheellocks.’)

Although it mostly existed as handwritten notes at this stage, the essence of the Faerie Wood game is clearly in place. In fact, although pixies are now half the height they’re stated to be in the article, the game mechanics wouldn’t change in any significant regard after this. Evil counterparts, the linear alignment scale, lack of classes or levels and a points-based buying of skills and abilities: it’s all here in the 1991 version of the game. (The ‘Ug!’ article also included some illustrations of the kind that would later grace our published material.) Basically, I believe it was offering something new in the world of fantasy roleplaying, and Garry was being far too modest.

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Filed under One from the vaults, Retrospective

by | December 6, 2013 · 5:52 pm

Good out of bad

Unless you have been hiding behind a particularly substantial sofa, you’ll know that the BBC recently put out ‘The Day of the Doctor’, 799th episode of the franchise and a celebration of fifty years of those naughty Daleks and whatnot… complete with a reunion of former Doctors.

Strangely enough, we of the Faerie Wood community just experienced a similar convergence. The complex and far-flung orbits of our grown-up lives achieved a brief perihelion, and just like Doctor Who, it was kind of awesome. I believe it may have been almost twenty years since we were all gathered in one place. (Mostly my fault; the others gather more often.)

The occasion that caused us to reassemble was a sad one, as we were there to mark the passing of Garry’s dad: the bloke I remember principally as gatekeeper and tea-provider. He’d welcome us inside when we went round, and no matter what strange games we were developing or playtesting, he always took an interest, and always encouraged. Some parents would probably have been unimpressed with guys in their early 20’s constructing and painting scenery for games involving faeries… Roy was different, and without his patience and encouragement during those lean times while Garry worked to build up his art portfolio, I can’t be certain that we’d have Faerie Wood in completed form today.

Seeing Alistair and Mark for what might have been the first time this century could have been awkward, but it wasn’t. Not in the least: if we overlook a little bit of hair loss and some greyness, it was as if we’d been apart for just a week or two. I think that shows just how compatible we must be.

This wasn’t just a gathering of four role-playing enthusiasts; I found myself with the only three people on the planet who had been Game Master for Faerie Wood games I’d played in. (Sue wrote a game – I found the notes for it a few months back – but I don’t believe she ever ran it. Other people have run games of course… but not games that I witnessed. So gathered at that wake, yesterday, was the nucleus of the game that once defined me, far more than my job, or my studies.

Nowadays Alistair runs a chain of used Zeppelin dealerships throughout south London, and you probably already know that Mark was instrumental in setting up the Pus Marketing Council. It was good to see that the gang was still on form; Alistair making puns so bad that they should come with hazmat labels, and Mark positing the sandwich monkey – a creature who should always blink into existence at your elbow, with exactly the sandwich you fancy. (We considered whether one would be able to request a Lost Car Keys Sandwich, and have yet to decide if this is not so much a sandwich as an underhanded form of more general wishing, more properly handled by a genie than a sandwich monkey. Demarkation is everything in the supernatural world.)

Garry’s eulogy for his dad was perfect (you can tell why he’s got his own radio show…) and expressed some wonderful memories. I don’t know if laughter is the best medicine, but what could have been a terribly unhappy time turned out to be a bittersweet day that I will remember fondly. It was the day when I learned just how cool Garry’s dad (the drummer, and Star Trek fan) really was… and when I learned that real friendships don’t need the constant information drizzle of Facebook, and don’t need to be wound up regularly like a clock in the hallway: they just are.

Even so, I’m not going to leave it so long, next time.

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by | October 16, 2012 · 7:52 pm

A promise of faerie gold… at the end of the rainbow

A while back, in this article I described how a late issue of ‘Ug!’ magazine included an article by Garry, in which he described a new kind of roleplaying game that he was experimenting with.

He called it Fairy Wood. (And yes; in those days, he had yet to adopt the olde worlde spelling, it seems.)

Well (channelling Professor Hubert Farnsworth…) “Good news everyone!” I had a quick root through the pile of old gamer ’zines that are gathering dust at home, and I struck faerie gold. I propose to reproduce that article here, little piece of faerie history that it is. Although it’s a short piece, it speaks volumes about Garry’s thought process at the time, in terms of his move away from the epic tales of derring-do (and herring poo) that TSR were still churning out, to a simpler and more intimate style of play.

I think you’ll like it.

But.

I’m shipping out to Malawi tomorrow, complete with mosquito net, bug repellent and tablets to ward off malaria. The faerie folk will probably have to wait a couple of weeks until I return, therefore… although I’ve promised myself that I’ll make time to have a look at some game materials on the flight home.

Please watch this space – but not too creepily closely – and we’ll be back with more faerie silliness before you know it.

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Filed under We interrupt this programme...