Due to the pandemic and the current necessity for social distancing, my regular gaming group can’t meet in person. We’re switching to an online game, but rather than simply continuing our regular campaign I decided to hit “pause” and run a mini-campaign. There’s a kind of frame narrative: the PCs from the regular game are reading a book of fairy stories round the campfire. The mini-campaign describes those stories, set five hundred years before the present time period in Hex, during the medieval past. The whole thing is going to be set in and around Faerie – or Elfhame, as the Fair Folk call it. I’m hoping for a kind of dark fairytale quality, but with a rollicking, swashbuckling energy as well – gonzo rather than grimdark.
I’ve prepared a primer for the party with suggestions for character ancestries, plus some house rules we’ll be using that grant the players some extra powers over the narrative, and details on how things like time, death, plants and animals, names, oaths, debts, and gods work in Elfhame. Check out the PDF below – it’s a lot more rough and ready than a Genial Jack volume, but it has some art, worldbuilding, and 15 playable species (including several also found in Hex).
As the campaign progresses, to help keep myself occupied during the long days at home I’m going to be polishing up adventure notes and will likely make them available in some form or another in the future, probably as a pay-what-you-want PDF or something similar.
Stay safe everyone!
Anne
The idea of using a frame-story to set up a mini-campaign is neat, as is the idea of game sessions as fairy stories in an old book.
I hope your online gaming sessions go well. When you’re eventually able to meet in person again, maybe the “present day” characters can act on something they learned from the “past”.
Bearded-Devil
That’s a really good idea. I’m hoping to do some easter eggs between the two.
For instance, the characters just rescued an elf woman from vampiric dungeons in Erubescence, but discovered she’s been turned into a harp. The same character pre-transformation is going to kick off their first quest.
dehumanizer
Cool ideas!
What font have you used? It looks great!
Bearded-Devil
Thanks! A font called Annstone.
Tim B.
Middle names, of course! That’s how you make true names gameable without forcing everyone to come up with two character names. Lots of smart little ways to make fairytale logic gameable.
Small question — if one mortal hour is worth seven in Elfhame, wouldn’t that mean time moves faster in Elfhame, not slower? Or am I the one who’s mixed up?
Bearded-Devil
You’re correct, it should say “faster” in Elfhame – Narnia-time. Thanks for catching that, the change will definitely be in the final version of this I’m putting together!
Middle names are definitely not to be mentioned… I think of the Fair Folk themselves as basically having strong passwords/encryption on their names with the use of titles and epithets.