It's almost upon us. The start of autumn. My own gaming group like to mark the seasons with one-shots or mini-campaigns, and in that spirit here's a three-part roleplaying campaign based on Hope Mirrlees's 1926 novel Lud-in-the-Mist, which must have been written as a riposte to Dunsany's The King of Elfland's Daughter, published two years earlier, but whose most obvious inspirations are Christina Rossetti's poem Goblin Market and Aeschylus's The Eumenides.
Some historical background might help if you're not familiar with the story, which takes place in the fantasy republic of Dorimare, formerly a duchy with a strong lacing of fairy influence. Dorimare’s modern history is defined by a revolution that overthrew the hereditary dukes, the last of whom was Duke Aubrey, a "hunchback with a face of angelic beauty" who was a "laughing demon of destructiveness." His reign represented a synthesis of high art, wild romance, and sinister caprice.
The merchant class, seeking to remove barriers to trade (the "damming of the Dawl"), eradicated the nobility and the priesthood in a three-day battle. Post-revolution, the state established a strict taboo on all things "fairy." Fairy fruit, once a ritual offering for the Duke, was labeled a "loathsome and filthy vice."
The republic operates on a code of jurisprudence that uses "legal fictions" to manage reality. In the eyes of the law, Fairyland does not exist; consequently, the smuggling of fairy fruit is prosecuted under the fiction that the fruit is "woven silk."
Dorimare is bounded by the sea to the south and the Elfin Hills to the west. There are two rivers. The Dawl is the river of commerce, making Lud a city of wealthy merchants. The Dapple, however, has its source in Fairyland. It is a "humble little stream" that plays no part in commerce, yet an old maxim warns that "the Dapple flows into the Dawl."
The Elfin Marches are foothills that are considered fraught with physical and moral danger. In the two centuries since the overthrow of Duke Aubrey, no mortal is known to have crossed them and returned. But that's exactly what the player-characters may have to attempt.
Some readers have compared Lud to Rye in Sussex. I don't know if Hope Mirrlees was familiar with the town, but you could do worse than use its picturesque streets as a visual springboard, along with the Ballantine Adult Fantasy cover art by Gervasio Gallardo. More probably Mirrlees based Lud on Godalming, not far from where she lived at Shamley Green, in which case the fairy lands might correspond to Binscombe.
The game uses Powered by the Apocalypse rules and is structured in three acts involving investigation, adventure, and cunning. Players must be subtle, treading a fine line between truth and fiction. The campaign will end with their world fundamentally changed - but whether towards the exciting unpredictability of fairyland or the illusory stability of mortal laws is up to them.
I worked with Claude Opus 5 to design the game. Claude is very smart, but does have a laboured and unlovely prose style. Normally I wouldn't let an LLM get involved in actually writing the words, but for a free game created just for a blog post I've made an exception. If you play it, let us know how you get on in the comments. (If you habitually use the term "AI slop", feel free not to comment, and have a nice day.)
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