Beyond the Greenwood

Beyond the Greenwood is a set of notes for a romantic fantasy game built on the Freeform Universal System by Nathan Russell and The Shivering Circle by Howard David Ingham.  It was inspired by the multi-hued fairy books of Arthur Lang, Arthurian legends and modern interpretations such as David Lowery’s The Green Knight and even George Romero’s Knightriders, Lloyd Alexander’s Chronicles of Prydain (specifically Taran Wanderer), and other works.  You will need some paper and pencils, a few six-sided dice, and a tarot deck to play. 

Tone & Safety 

Fairy tales and folklore shaped the development of the game.  The characters in Beyond the Greenwood live in a world where adventurers are noble of heart, spirits speak to passersby from old trees, and subtle magic plays a role in daily life.  There is evil in the world–rising from sources such as fearful and thoughtless rulers, natural disasters, or warped elements of the supernatural–and common folk and adventurers sometimes pay a high price to keep others safe. 

Your group should spend time before making characters discussing the types of stories you would like to tell and the general tone you would like.  You can give novels or movies as examples, or set ratings for different topics.   If there are any topics that the group absolutely does not want in the game you can discuss them now. 

You must discuss in-game safety tools before the game begins.  Your group can use X-cards, cut and brake, or any other tool. Just make certain that everyone is familiar with the practice before you begin. 

Character Creation 

Players and the game master work together with one another and the game master to create characters by answering a series of questions. 

“What is your name?”  You can write your character’s true name, a name given to them by strangers, or a colorful name they’ve given themselves as they set off into the world. 

“Who are you?”  Describe the character in a brief phrase.  “Minotaur warrior.”  “Elven sage who sometimes weeps when spying the moon.”  "Uncanny herbalist.” 

“What do others notice about you?”  This question defines the character’s key value or trait–the aspect of their personality that shines like a light to others.  The four core traits are: 

Compassion reflects how much you care about others. 

Courage reflects your ability to face fear and danger. 

Dignity reflects your sense of self worth and character. 

Hope reflects your ability to carry on and dream of a better tomorrow. 

“What can you do?”  List one or two skills or unique abilities.  Your answers can help refine your description of who the character is.  Maybe you can hear trees singing or see in the dark.  You might be a skilled chess player or a talented archer. 

“What inspires you?”  What ideal or goal drives the character to explore the world? 

“Whom do you love?”  What person (or even place) is always in your character’s heart? 

“What do you carry with you?”  Describe one or two unusual pieces of gear your character carries on their journeys. 

“What do you fear or what makes you feel ashamed?”  This can be a deep secret, or something you’ve shared with the other characters. 

Note your answers on a piece of notebook paper. 

A character might look like this: 

Emeris Fairbriar 

Who am I?  A gnomish woodcarver 

What do other notice about me?  My sense of Hope 

What can I do?  I can make toys for children and sing reasonably well 

What inspires me?  Seeing a streaming brook, and imagining it joining rivers and the sea. 

Whom do I love?  My parents 

What do I carry with me?  A carved cedar badger that appears in my dreams, a stout hiking staff 

What causes me shame?  I travel the world while my brother and sister remain in our village 

Actions

When the outcome of a character’s action is in doubt, frame the action as a question and roll 1d6 to see if they succeed: 

6: Yes, and. . . . 

5: Yes 

4: Yes, but. . . . 

3: No, but. . . . 

2: No 

1: No, and. . . . 

“And” and “but” results add complications or twists, giving partial successes or failures or pushing results beyond what the character expected. 

Roll two dice if the character has an advantage in the situation due to their skills or characteristics.  The player picks the result they would like.  If the character faces a disadvantage–such as someone acting while injured or frightened–the player rolls two dice and the GM picks the result.  Depending on the tone of the story and the way you want things to unfold, the GM could pick a higher number for the outcome or the player could pick a lower one. 

The Winter Phase

If you are a player, draw a tree at the top of your character sheet along with five small bubbles or boxes.  More artistic folks can work five leaves into a tree motif.  If your character faces a situation in which they must betray a key value or spurn something they love, or fails to meet a source of fear or shame in a mature way, fill in a bubble, briefly noting the nature of the challenge they faced.  Your character must withdraw from the story to heal and reflect on the challenges they’ve faced when the final bubble has been filled. 

The Winter Phase of the game represents the time the character spends recovering and healing, and has two parts.  As a group, choose three key moments from the list of crises.  Draw a tarot card for each, and discuss how the character reflected on the experience and eventually moved toward healing.  The player then makes a change to the character, such as adding a new detail to one of the questions they answered during creation or replacing their key trait with another (such as replacing Dignity with Compassion) to reflect how they have evolved. 

The second part of the Winter Phase continues the main story and focuses on the other characters, detailing their activities until they are reunited with their missing friend.  The player whose character has withdrawn becomes a co-GM, with the two dividing duties however they like. 

If you are playing a game with a single player and a GM, your Winter Phrase will only include the first part. 

Notes 

Oddly enough, Beyond the Greenwood began as an idea for a gritty sword-and-sorcery game.   I’d wanted to use The Shivering Circle for a gloomy fantasy adventure, with characters moving one step closer to an unnatural or ill-omened doom each time the player marked off a stone.  As I was toying with the idea, though, I started thinking about the idea that a character’s fate could be positive or more mixed in tone, and began to focus on healing and rest as part of a process of change. 

In addition to The Shivering Circle and Freeform Universal, inspiration came from story games played on the late Google+, as well as Jackie Tremaine’s Wanderlust and Paul Taliesin’s Thus Began the Adventures of Eowyn. 

The public domain image below the title is by Virginia Frances Sterrett. 

Please share any questions or comments with me at shae.davidson@gmail.com. 

Feel free to expand or rework the game in any way. I’ll be adding more over the course of time. The game is available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0). 

 

 Buy Me a Coffee

Anirac

 

Anirac is a board game for two players.  You'll need a reversi set to play.

Players are trying to build a chain of pieces of their color connecting opposite sides of the 8x8 board.  Black is working to connect the top and bottom of the board, while white hopes to connect the left and right sides.

Each turn, a player can place one of their pieces on the board or flip two adjacent pieces as long as one is black and one is white.  For example, a player could flip A and B in the top diagram to begin forming a path made of white pieces:

⬤	◯
	⬤	A
◯	B

⬤	◯
	◯	A
⬤	B

The first player to build a continuous path of pieces connecting their edges of the board wins.  Pieces can connect diagonally.

Note:  sometimes I get stuck when coming up with names for board games.  Anirac is Carina spelled backwards.

Prime Rummy

Prime Rummy is a game for two to four players. The object of the game is to create sets of cards whose total values equal prime numbers.

You will need a French-suited deck with no jokers. For a two-player game, the dealer gives each player ten cards. Each player receives seven cards if three or four are playing. After dealing the hands, the dealer places the remainder of the deck face down in the center of the table and turns over the top card to start the discard pile.  

Play follows the general rules of straight gin rummy.  At the beginning of each turn, a player can draw from the deck or take the exposed card at the top of the discard pile.  Players end their turns by discarding a card. 

Players are trying to create hands in which the sums of values of the red and black cards are prime numbers.  The color totals are counted separately.  Aces are worth one, and face cards are worth zero. 

For example, player has these cards in their hand:

♢A, ♤4, ♡9, ♢8, ♡Q, ♢4, ♧K, ♡10, ♡3, ♤J

Grouping them by color, the player has 

♢A, ♡9, ♢8, ♡Q, ♢4, ♡10, ♡3 for a red total of 35.

and

♤4, ♧K, ♤J for a black total of 4.

When a player has prime numbers in their hand, they can go out by discarding a card and revealing their hand.

A player who only has cards of one color in their hand can go out if the value is prime.

The Tower and the Oracle

In the Tower and the Oracle, players race to create a connection between two arcane pieces.  You will need an 8x8 board to play, eight stones of one color along with a taller piece of the same color (the tower), and eight stones of another color along with a matching oracle piece.

In the diagram below white is playing the oracle and black is playing the tower.  The game begins with the tower and the oracle in opposite corners and one stone of each color placed near the center of the board.  The remaining stones begin the game off the board.

⬠
					⚫
		◯
							☗

On your turn, you can place a stone of either color from the reserved pieces, or move a piece of your own color that is already on the board (including the tower or oracle).  Stones, towers, and oracles move one space diagonally or orthogonally.  They can jump over pieces of either color, and can change direction as they jump.  Pieces are not removed after jumps. 

The first player to create a continuous path of stones between the tower and the oracle wins.  The path can include stones of both colors.

Dream Ticket

Dream Ticket is a playful art project.  You and your friends will need to gather several small slips of paper.  On each one, write a short blessing, prophecy, or cryptic message, such as:

the faceless brood sings for you.

the bone tree remembers

whither the abomination of the sands?

meet me at the cenotaph, oh darling blue eyes

Try to write inscriptions that are weird and arcane, and avoid violence and vulgarity.  If you're looking for inspiration, the generators at Seventh Sanctum are a wonderful resource. 

Divide the prophecies among the players and stash them in your pockets.  Over the course of the day, randomly pull notes from your pocket and leave them where others will find them.  Slip one between the pages of a library book.  Hide some in the pockets of clothes as you go shopping for a new cloak.  Leave one tucked away with the camping gear at your local sporting goods store.  Follow your heart.

I'd like to offer a special chant of gratitude to Bucky Cutright, who helped birth this game during a lovely spring drive along I-79 and who suggested that I write the words "dream ticket" on a small scrap of paper. 

Buy Me a Coffee

Hoard

My two best friends and I spent the summer between kindergarten and first grade collecting things.  Actually, we spent the summer collecting and caching things.  We buried bottle caps, bullet shells, bits of glass, and anything else that caught our eye.  Our little hoards dotted the landscape, but over the years they have been overgrown and forgotten.

Hoard is a story game about the childhood urge to collect things.  Four players take turns introducing items, describing them from the perspective of the child who gathered them and discussing their history before a final round that explores the notion that some of the items might be a bit more special than imagined.

As the game begins each player should find three small items to bring to the table.  These can be odd knickknacks from your house or apartment, or things that caught your eye on a walk.  The objects are the artifacts your young character wants to add to the hoard.

When the group meets, the players should decide where the children are hiding their hoard.  Where would six, seven, and eight-year-olds hide their most valuable treasures?  The players can pick a real location they know--a particular old barn or clump of bushes, for example--or work together to create an imaginary hiding place.

Each round, the players each introduce a new item.  The player should describe it from the perspective of a young child, giving a grand account of where it was found, its possible origins and uses, and an overview of its most appealing traits.  

After everyone has introduced an item the players go around the table and narrate another facet of the object's history.   For the first item, the player to the left of the player who brought it to the table describes an episode from the artifact's history from the perspective of the item itself.   A player could describe waiting on a shelf in a store, for example, or the experience of jostling around in someone's pocket or purse.

The players then introduce the next objects they chose, again describing them from the perspective of the child who found them.  For the second object, the player to the right narrates a scene from the point of view of the artifact.  After the third item has been introduced, the player across the table creates an episode from its history.

The tokens and knickknacks the children have gathered aren't just bits of forgotten rubbish or shiny trinkets that caught some child's magpie eye.  Whether through some process of creation or the value ascribed by the children, some of the items in the hoard have magical powers.  During the final round of the game, each player picks one of the items they brought to the table.  The player across the table then describes some wondrous effect of the talisman.  Perhaps touching it as it was being hidden in the cache sparked some bit of luck, or years later an adult dream featuring the artifact had some prophetic value.

Show & Hell

A sunny Monday morning finds students beaming with excitement as they wait to share childhood treasures. This morning’s show and tell, though, is a bit off.  Unsettling photos, strange artifacts, and items best left in a police evidence locker wait to be displayed.

One player serves as the teacher, who opens a photo from a random image site at the beginning of each player’s turn.  The player then launches into an excited discussion inspired by the photo she has received, going on and on with all of the wondrous excitement of a first grader as her macabre tale unfolds.  No matter how innocent the image seems, it always inspires some gruesome memory or anecdote from the enthusiastic student.

The teacher and the other students get to ask questions about the object.  Does the teacher try to glean the shocking truth about the object or desperately try to find some way to shift?  Are the other students overly enthusiastic and curious, or do their innocent questions show that they are just on the cusp of understanding the full horror of the object?

The game goes on until all of the students have had a turn sharing with the class.