Unmellow fruitfulness

Sweeter than honey from the rock,

Stronger than man-rejoicing wine,

Clearer than water flow’d that juice...

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.)

Strange encounters on Surrey lanes

"It was true that there were fences and gates to be seen, so someone must have been by to place and repair them. However, apart from these tokens, if one faced the right direction, the land was free of life, and looked fit to remain so forever. The motorway had cut off these fields from what they had been before and turned them into obscure borderlands. Now they were visited only with difficulty, by those with strong reason to go there -- or else flotsam and jetsam of the road like me.

"I considered what strange things and evil deeds might be hidden in such a landscape - as remote and unwalked in its way as any Scottish mountain. There were great caverns of darkness amidst the trees capable of holding any enormity, just a few yards from Mr and Mrs Average, driving from normal A to normal B."

 
There is no greater author of English weird tales alive today than John Whitbourn, and "Waiting For A Bus" is perhaps the eeriest of all his short stories. It has won a slew of awards and if you read it on Christmas Eve with the lights turned low, I think you'll see why. And after that, when the goosebumps go down and you can steel yourself to get up from your chair, take a look at the rest of the Binscombe Tales series.

I'm glad to see that the Binscombe Tales are winning a whole new following in the States -- particularly in the South, perhaps because of the strong roots connecting our American cousins there to the old country. A case in point: this in-depth review by a lady in Alabama, but beware spoilers. And you should read John's own account of the landscape we love and which inspired the stories. I grew up nine miles away from Binscombe, in much the same ambience and environment, the main difference being that Binscombe admits to being overlooked by the Domesday Book whereas my own village, Mayford, lays spurious claim to a mention. (My roots there, or even in Surrey generally, are by no means as deep as John's in Binscombe, though it's nonetheless the foundational territory of my imagination.)

And in the same vein of goosebumps and cold grue, take a look at Tanya Kirk's collection of seasonal ghost stories for British Library Publishing, Haunters at the Hearth, with contributions by D H Lawrence, A M Burrage, James Hadley Chase, L P Hartley, Mildred Clingerman and others. If only she'd included a Binscombe Tale it would have been perfect.

Binscombe Tales can be bought in the US from Amazon or Barnes & Noble,

and in the UK from Amazon or Blackwell's.