Through the Hedgerow: a Deep Dive

Per usual, I overprepared stuff for RinCon this year. I set myself up to run six things! But what I did get to play all turned out terrific for different reasons. I’ll talk about one each week.

Let’s get into it. First up is Through the Hedgerow by Jonathan Rowe, out of Osprey Publishing.

This game of “rustic fantasy” from Osprey is an odd duck. I think of Osprey as the company that does little illustrated booklets about, like, one specific gun. Or Hittite battle dress or whatever. Of course they’ve been doing RPG books for a while: Gaslands, their Car Wars-esque mini game, is a notable example.

Through the Hedgerow is by Jonathan Rowe, a UK based writer and editor. He has written a few games under Fen Orc and is an editor at Valkyrie Magazine. The premise of Through the Hedgerow that there’s an existential battle across time between Light and Darkness. The characters are all Briar Knights in service to the Light, mortals and fay drawn across time to battle Darkness wherever it appears. There’s a time travel element, but the game is more about experiencing the same small, isolated bit of the world throughout the centuries.

Setting and Premise

Through the Hedgerow focuses on four eras. The first, the Age of Swords, is the 800s. Dark Ages, Danes invading the countryside, feudalism, the works. The second is the Age of Plagues, the 1600s, with disease and witch-hunters and Roundheads. The third is the Age of Steel, early Victoriana with proper gentlemen and tea breaks and all that. Finally there’s the Age of Thunder, WWII with strong Pevensie-kid vibes from The Chronicles of Narnia. In every case, the setting is always a quiet corner of the world that outsiders have forgotten about. A safe place for fairy folk to withdraw to, and weak places for Darkness to attack.

The character options are all very English-folklore-y, a mix of fairy and mortal and rationales of what each version looks like through the four eras. The fairy types are an animated scarecrow, a spider-person, a bird-shaped fay noble, and a turnip-headed ogre that can eat literally anything. The human types are pre-Christian priests of ancient spirits, champions of Light cursed with immortality, holy fools/mad people, waifs, and warlocks. Every character has a set of special abilities, special advancements, the usual traddy stuff. They also all have a Doom, a tarot-inspired ending they are fated to meet.

Facing off against the Briar Knights are four factions of Darkness that evolve with the eras they’re attacking, but maintain a thematic continuity. There are evil hags bent on abducting children and replacing them with soulless changelings, a spirit of death and warfare, fanatical witch-hunting mortals, and decadent fay lords and their shapeshifter servants. Each adventure is focused on one of these factions, although I suppose you could mix and match and have a wild time dealing with both witch-hunters and death gods, evil hags and obsessive immortal pleasure-seekers.

Tone and Delivery

The tone throughout the game is decidedly dark folklore. In the intro scenario I ran straight out of the book, for example, our Knights travel to the early 800s version of their village. The players just happened to have chosen one Knight from each of the four eras, so I gave them a little taste of how the place had changed.

We started with the most recent character, a Motley (a holy fool), trying to steal a cow in a town in 1941, with a bomb factory on the outskirts and noisy bombers in a nearby field taking off for an attack. Then we moved back in time to a fay spider-person Victorian mortician dealing with a not-dead-enough client. After that, we found ourselves in a village swept up with witch hunts and an animated scarecrow trying to pass as a barmaid saving a witch. Finally, we went all the way back to the manor of the feudal lord living atop Roman ruins with Danes war parties camped where those bombers would eventually be refueling, a turnip-headed ogre living on the outskirts of the manor passing as a weirdo fisherman. The problem the Briar Knights were gathered and sent to deal with had to do with releasing a wraith from an old Roman crypt being dug up.

The Sacred Grove, by Pierre de Chavannes.

Every adventure opens with an interesting ritual. As the Knights pass through time they enter the Hedgerow, a liminal space between eras filled with trees, clearings and barriers. When the Knights enter, the Light presents them with highly symbolic imagery explaining their goal and what they’re facing. But the Light is not God, and it can’t communicate directly. It’s up to the players to take in all this imagery and try to piece together what their goal is and what may stand in their way. The intro adventure spells it out, so I assume it’s actually expected the GM will also spell it out. I’d be interested in leaving it an interesting exercise in puzzle-solving and apophenia.

The British folklore is absolutely top notch, at least as far as my own knowledge of the subject is concerned. It’s at least as on-target as Under Hollow Hills in how fay/fae/fairies are represented.

The System

Mechanically, Through the Hedgerow reminds me a little of Cortex. You’ve got pools of different-sized dice, you have options to bump those dice up and down in size, the GM also rolls a die to set the target number, all that. It’s pretty fun but also maybe overkill for what the game needs to accomplish.

Happily the system is not as trad as it looks. For one, the GM can decide on the fly whether something is worth a simple one-roll test (a check) or a multi-roll resource grind (a challenge). One-roll checks almost never miss because players can spend their characters’ universal resource, Resolve, to simply make it pass. Great. Resolve-refreshing sets the game’s entire tempo via short and long rests, tea and cakes, and overnight sojourns for the mortals. If you ever hit 0 Resolve, you’re “defeated” (captured, knocked out, possibly even killed given the fictional positioning).

Challenges are a little trickier in that they feature multiple tests that you can’t spend Resolve to pass. Instead, every roll is soaking the amount of Resolve “damage” the threat is doing to you. And for each additional roll (difficulty gives you a target number, danger gives you the number of times you need to roll), you gain one more “notch”, which is a complication. You offset those by earning “edges,” which are additional benefits.

I’m feeling mixed about the system. On the one hand, given the fairytale vibes, it feels like Too Much. It does drive the characters toward taking lovely little tea breaks, using various abilities to slip in free respites, or stopping out of exhaustion only to have the Nemesis grow stronger. In terms of making the game feel like a ticking countdown, it very much does that. TTH is not a gentle game.

What is it about critters and riddles? I blame R.L. Stine, not Tolkien.

Where it is gentle is the fact that many conflicts can be worked out by talking or riddling, or tapping into ancient magic you pick up along the way. The fae love riddles, the undead can occasionally love riddles, it’s Gollum all the way down. Mortals can be persuaded or negotiated with as well. When it comes down to violence, the same system handles that just as well but with even more options.

The system felt heavy to teach and implement in a one-shot, but I’ll bet most tables would have it all worked out in three or more sessions. There are tons of weird kind of wargame-y sounding acronyms for all the dice (VQd for Virtue Quality, WQd for Wisdom Quality, and so on), and several terms of art for how dice can be manipulated (burned, retreated, advanced, boosted, exhausted, restored, all indicating how permanent or temporary the change is). Honestly you could write it all on an index card.

The index-card cheat sheet thing is something we had to do at my one-shot table for other rules. There are special rules about what happens when a character swears an Oath, because the Light loves Oaths. There are three options to rest, so that got another index card. There are little mini-systems for “Elder Lore” (snippets of songs or prayers that carry ancient knowledge) and how they interact with “Mythic Sites” (hangouts of the Old Gods), special treasures provided by the Light, how Glamour protects the fay PCs from detection, and on and on. Tons of little bits and they add up fast.

One bit I thought was really fun, but maybe impractical, is the Glamour roll. If you’re playing a fay character, you’re protected by the Light via Glamour. If you’re a great huge troll, then you’re seen as a great huge hulk of a person. If you’re a bird-headed fay noble, you appear as a fancy noble appropriate to the era you’re currently in. However, the Glamour isn’t perfect so you have to roll whenever you draw attention to yourself. In our game, three of the four characters were fay and they were constantly having to roll their Glamour to not be spotted as inhuman. The consequences of missing are that NPCs will panic, which is also fun. I thought it was okay but far more rolling than you might expect. And that often meant our fay needed to recover their Resolve more often.

Last Thoughts

The bottom line for me is that Through the Hedgerow seems like a great system for players who like to master their options, paired with a setting that’s maybe lighter than the survival-horror system vibes would suggest. It was a little hard to facilitate our one-shot session because there are so many little mechanical bits, but I think that wouldn’t be a problem for most players after a while.

The folklore, though. Yeah that’s good stuff. Allegedly you could remap Through the Hedgerow to any little corner of the world that time has passed by, but then you’d need to research the critters and forgotten tales of that area as well. It’s tempting! The United States is an interesting case because of our colonial history – there’s all the colorful settler folklore but also so much indigenous history to take into account. Are there equivalent fairy-tale-esque mythologies? Maybe, but it seems like it would be hard to get right without tripping over typical gamer impulses to exoticize and other-ize.

For my money, Through the Hedgerow is beautifully tuned to British and pre-British material just as it is. And taking the time to wrap your head around the fussy system is worth the effort.