Into the Court of the Fairy Queen
My first published RPG, created for PocketQuest 2024
A Game of Fairy Tale Beauty, Romance, and Horror
I participated in the PocketQuest game jam run by DriveThruRPG this year and my new game In the Court of the Fairy Queen, along with all of the other entries, is out today.
One of the rules of PocketQuest is that you must use an original system. While there may be some exceptions it was enough of a prompt for me to create a new lightweight ruleset, which I am calling the Fate & Fortune System (after all one of the main etymologies of “fairies” involves “fate”). I had two goals for the ruleset:
Playing with these rules should feel like a fairy tale.
They should leave a clear path for roleplaying and player ideas.
I based the rules on elements I have ended up house ruling into my games. My working title for these rules was the X-in-Y system. Unlike B/X D&D and its X-in-6 rolls, the 6 can be replaced with other dice. A greater number of sides makes the roll harder. A lower number of sides makes the roll easier. Its a simple and fast system and a referee has more options because it requires Zocchi dice like d3, d5, d7, d14, d16, d24, and d30. I also made all the task rolls player facing. NPCs can affect the difficulty of a roll but do not roll themselves. The only rolls the referee makes are for procedures.
Players characters only have four stats, which are attributes. I removed attributes representing charisma, wisdom, resolve, and general intelligence. My thinking is that these can signal to a player how they should roleplay their character and how much they should try to be clever. Players will say, “I don’t think my character’s intelligence is high enough to do this but…” So I wanted to avoid that.
The theme of this year’s PocketQuest is heists and for some reason that led me to thinking of stealing from fairies. For a while, I’ve noticed a number of games avoid giving direction to referees for PCs entering the fairyland itself (I realize WOTC and Kobold Press have done this in at least one adventure each, and before them White Wolf did it in Changeling, but I’m thinking more of games with OSR design principles). Dolmenwood takes you right into the paths between fairyland and Dolmenwood but not farther. In the Gardens of Ynn you explore the ruins of a fairy realm. Maybe because to OSR designers, the fairy realm needs to be too bizarre. I wanted to take a plunge into fairyland while keeping its strangeness in tact.
A Procedure for Dreamlike Time
I think I came up with a fun dreamlike procedure for time in fairyland. Its inspired by films like Jim Henson’s Labyrinth, Coraline, Pan’s Labyrinth, The Adventures of Baron Von Munchausen, and less fairy-inspired films with dreamlike journeys like 12 Monkeys. Its also heavily inspired by written fairy tales and folk tales. Folktales of Norway edited by Reidar Christiansen and translated by Pat Shaw Iversen was one of my favorite books as a teenager, especially the stories of people going to live with the huldre-folk, and memories of those stories were in my mind while writing, along with Grimm’s Fairy Tales and many more sources of fairy tales from picture books to films. Time works different in fairyland and often that that is mainly shown with the amount of time that has passed by the time a character returns home. I wanted to go farther.
The solution uses a fair amount of randomness. Each day is a random number of turns. It begins at a random point in the ordinary day-night cycle. Days can end abruptly like scenes in a dream and immediately shift to a new day and a new place.
The dreamlike nature of fairy makes stealing from the fairies all the more challenging.
Is it an NSR game?
I don’t know but I was mainly influenced by OSR principles and layout. I tried to adhere to control panel design as much as possible but didn’t succeed on every page, in part because I wanted to fit as many ideas into the allowed 25 pages as possible. I took out a fair number of ideas that I liked and am saving them for an expansion.
The game can be adapted to other rulesets, especially rules-light and OSR/NSR games. The one mechanic that might require adding an equivalent is the Blessing attribute and how it interacts with fairy. Luck in the Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG could be adapted.
One element that exists in OSR games that I wanted to bring out and emphasize much more is what I wrote about in the post, “When do characters define themselves in RPGs?” While I feel like its almost a happy accident in old D&D games that characters end up being differentiated more by magic items and the effects of magic pools than by any decisions during character creation, this definition-through-play element still often ends up a smaller part of the game than it could be. In the Court of the Fairy Queen allows character attributes to change dramatically through their deeds in fairyland. If you win a race in fairyland, even if by luck (everyone else tripped on an animated vine), your Swiftness attribute rises by 1. Achievement precedes improvement because practice is not the stuff of dreams and fairies don’t have time for it.
While I didn’t mention it in the text, if a character’s attributes greatly improve in fairyland, when they return home I was thinking they could still keep some of that but may not all of it. Like whatever is their new highest attribute stays that high but the others return to where they were before they entered. I’m still thinking about it and I’m open to ideas.
This is my first published RPG so I can’t wait to hear more feedback. I’m really curious whether players feel like they are in a fairy tale (the playtest was positive!) and whether they like the dice mechanic. I hope it prompts players who haven’t discovered Zocchi dice to pick some up (although you could easily do without them, but it’d make for bigger jumps in the degrees of difficulty).
To try it, you can find In the Court of the Fairy Queen here.
3 YouTube channels that really deserve more subscribers:
Sword Coast Soundscapes (76K subscribers)
My go-to fantasy RPG ambience channel. A wide range of biomes and other environments, and practical sounds for RPing such as the sound of a cart or wagon or the sound of horses on a long journey, taverns of varying crowdedness, and dungeons with levels of moisture or wind. He is a DM who creates ambience for his games. When he finds a situation he doesn’t have the right ambience for he makes it and puts out a video. 2 hour and 55 minute videos with no ads. He also has a Patreon.
Owen Edwards (1K)
Owen’s videos cover RPGs, including reviews like this one of S2 White Plume Mountain, but he makes videos about an eclectic range of media such as novels he’s read recently (for instance Tolkien’s Unfinished Tales) or Franco-Belgian comics. I find his reviews to be thoughtful and based on a depth of knowledge and experience.
Fabr1s (63K)
This channel probably has the largest collection of Romanian and other Balkan dance music on YouTube. The recordings are older but no less invigorating. Balkan dance music is among the most distinct in the world, due in part to the use of compound time signatures. Like the music of the Tool, Balkan dance music is often in 5/8, 7/8, or more complex time signatures like 13/8, so if you like Tool’s music or the music of Philip Glass, check it out. You might discover that you’re a fan. In college I took a class for phys-ed credit in International Folk Dancing, which has a big focus on Balkan dancing. It was one of my favorite classes, enough so that I joined a Balkan dance group after college as well. Along with Latin dance (salsa, bachata, merengue, cha cha cha, etc.), Balkan dance is my favorite (Balkan might win out slightly). The recordings may be older but it’s still a great find. Balkan and other dance changed how listen to and experience music. If you’re a musician this music will probably improve your ability to count and play complex rhythms. Jovano Jovanke is the most popular and probably most famous song on the channel. A more typical song.