By Shane @shane_marble
Fate of the Faerie Queen was a light reskin of Fate of Cthulhu that I ran from January to March this year. I really liked the game’s central idea—time travellers have to stop four key ‘events’ that feed into a looming apocalypse—but I’m not really familiar with or excited about Lovecraftian cosmic horror. When I thought about what could replace it, I remembered Grant Morrison’s Seven Soldiers comics (now sadly out of print), where a futuristic fey army cyclically attacks the world and destroys human civilisations. That was a concept I could work with.
What follows is effectively a Timeline for Fate of Cthulhu, replacing the mythos with fairy-tale horrors and the terrible Queen of the Fey. The only mechanical change to the core game is that Corruption was renamed as Enchantment, but otherwise everything works the same. Below is the timeline I handed to players at the start of the game, showing them what they already knew about the future. If you’re thinking of playing in a Fate of the Faerie Queen game you should stop reading there. After that in the ‘GM Only’ section I talk about what’s really going on and what sort of trouble the characters are getting themselves into, exactly.
I should acknowledge that two of the events (The Gingerbread Church and The Wild Hunt) were inspired by old Delta Green scenarios, although nothing in them could count as a spoiler. My other main sources of inspiration were classic fairy tales and contemporary takes on them, especially Angela Carter, Naomi Novik and Laird Barron, and the artist Maya Pen, whose weird, creepy costumes inspired some of the game’s monstrosities and menaces. You can check out her work at https://www.instagram.com/mayapen/.
Thanks to Lowell, Kyle, José and Matt for making this such a fun game!
For everyone:
The arrival of the Faerie Queen
In a year and a day she arrives, manifesting in all her glory at what was once a rundown New York hotel. The building grows impossibly, swallowing surrounding city blocks. Across America and the world, cursed victims of the ‘dancing plague’ leave bloody footprints as they wind their way to sacrifice themselves in her worship. Those who had bargained with the fey—for power, love, fortune, whatever—shrink in dread as they realise the terrible prices they must now pay.
With few exceptions, all who see her fall in love, and surrender to their own bloody destruction. Soon she keeps popes and presidents alike as pets. Her impossibly powerful enforcers crush every sign of resistance. Even the merest faeries of her court establish their own local circles, ruthlessly subjugating towns, cities, continents. Cruelty and caprice are the only law. The very concept of freedom fades from human consciousness.
Within ten years, her domination is complete and final. Unless…
What Brought This Upon Us
Future historians have identified the following events as pivotal moments in the timeline linked to the Queen’s rise. If you can interrupt or prevent these events, perhaps you can prevent her rise or weaken her reign.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Timeline aspect: What fools these mortals be
Person: ??
Place: The Met Gala
Thing: Unpublished Grimm Brothers manuscript
Foe: ??
The Wild Hunt
Timeline aspect: The Queen’s servants are ruthless and powerful
Person: ??
Place: Owlshead Mountain, West Virginia
Thing: The Owlshead Devil
Foe: The Queen’s Huntsman
The Red Shoes
Timeline aspect: Resist anything, except temptation
Person: DJ Bug
Place: Die Rote Schuhen
Thing: ??
Foe: ??
The Gingerbread Church
Timeline aspect: The enemy of my enemy is my… friend?
Person: Sofia Oniani
Place: Lake Chimagua in the Catskills
Thing: The Gingerbread Church
Foe: Alexander Koschei, Russian mob boss
GMs Only Beyond This Point
I’m gonna run down these events in the order my group decided to play them, and starting with some general background info.
Beyond the specific events, the big secret revealed through this game was that the Faerie Queen had conquered Earth before, ruling for centuries until a group of four brave heroes struck a blow against her so powerful she was banished from our world for a thousand years. A vast conspiracy (mortal? fey? who knows) erased all records of her existence and concealed this secret fey history. Now her millenia of exile was ending and she was gearing up for a vengeful return.
This was inspired by reading about The Tartarian Empire, a conspiracy theory that holds that all the really nice old architecture on earth is left over from a futuristic empire that once spanned the globe but has now been hidden because… I don’t think they’re real clear on why, actually. This seemed like a cool idea so I stole it. The players put it together largely during The Red Shoes and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, but basically I just wanted this to come out about halfway through the campaign and would have gotten there whichever order they tackled the events in.
The Gingerbread Church
Timeline aspect: The enemy of my enemy is my… friend?
Prevent the fey-aligned mob boss from completing the Gingerbread Church where he will sacrifice hundreds of victims to the Queen.
Person: Sofia ‘Baba Yaga’ Oniani
Place: Lake Chimagua in the Catskills
Thing: The Gingerbread Church
Foe: Alexander Koschei, Russian mob boss
What the players don’t know:
Of course, Koschei is Koschei the Deathless and Baba Yaga is that Baba Yaga, both figures from Russian folklore. Koschei is in love with the Queen and was one of her most loyal servants during her previous reign on Earth. When she was vanquished, he fell into a deep depression and lay down at the bottom of the sea for hundreds of years, only recently dragging himself out to try to prepare for her return. He’s a powerful mob boss and sorcerer with the traditional Koschei gimmick that he can’t truly be killed unless you destroy his soul, which is hidden inside a needle that’s inside an egg that’s inside a duck that’s inside a dog that’s inside a chest that’s hidden on an island. In my game he also had multiple bodies, and a stunt that let him start a scene with two free invokes on his Always Has A Plan aspect.
Koschei had traded the secret of hiding one’s soul in a needle with Baba Yaga, and in return she had taught him the magic of gingerbread architecture. He was therefore building a gingerbread church in an old, rundown holiday resort on the Catskills, with a frozen lake full of angry selkies nearby where he dumped the bodies of his enemies. He planned to use the church to sacrifice hundreds of victims to the glory of the Queen on the day of her Rise. After dark, dozens of shadowy witches appeared to bake and build it. What the powers of the gingerbread magic were, exactly, was never made clear; presumably something pretty terrible.
As much as she wanted to hide her soul in a needle, Baba Yaga was no real friend to the Queen—she’d also lived through the previous reign, had a lousy time, and was preparing to flee this plane of existence before the next round. She turned up in Washington Square Park with a small cohort of chicken-legged huts and loudly refused to help the Queen’s enemies while casually letting the characters know what was going on and conspicuously turning her back so they could steal some of her magic stuff. In the fiction, she hoped they’d defeat the Queen, but couldn’t risk saying so or openly supporting them. Out of the fiction, I hoped they’d use the magic she gave them to rack up some Enchantment and bend the timeline toward human destruction.
The Red Shoes
Timeline aspect: Resist anything, except temptation
Figure out how the murder of a DJ in Germany is tied to the faeries’ plans, and prevent or mitigate the spread of the dancing plague.
Person: DJ Bug
Place: Die Rote Schuhen
Thing: ?? [The Red Shoes]
Foe: ?? [Rumpelstiltskin and her red caps]
What the players don’t know:
When I started thinking about this game, my first idea was that it would be cool to have an event take place in the Berghain, the infamously exclusive Berlin techno club (back in the news as I write this after hilariously and correctly refusing entry to Elon Musk). Sadly when we played out this event the characters never actually set foot in the club, but maybe yours will?
What’s actually happening in this event is that Rumpelstiltskin is hanging out in Berlin, tormenting the descendants of one of the heroes who vanquished the Queen during her previous reign. Specifically, this is DJ Bug (she has promised to make him famous in return for his youth, but the fame she plans to deliver is his shocking, headline-producing murder) and his mother (author of a popular series of young adult novels based on family legends about an ancestor who defeated a fairy queen, but unwittingly bargained the life of her firstborn for this success).
Rumpelstiltskin has a gang of redcaps doing her bidding (yes, Rumpelstiltskin was a woman in my game, and no, I can’t quite remember why I decided that). They are headquartered in Spreepark, an abandoned communist-era theme park in East Berlin, full of rusting and decaying rollercoasters and other rides. This is a real place, and very creepy; you should google image search it if you haven’t seen it or been there.
My intended climax for this event was a showdown with the fey forces in the club, which I pictured having a kind of backroom sex-maze that would open onto Faerie. As it turned out, the climax instead involved the characters rescuing two of Rumpelstiltskin’s prisoners from her Spreepark base: one, the fey lover of one of the PCs, and the other, the older, lost, time-travelling self of another PC, who had pricked his finger on a spindle and fallen into a magical slumber. You probably won’t have these specific figures if you run the game yourself, but it did make for an exciting ending, so maybe think about what equivalents you have to work with.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Timeline aspect: What fools these mortals be
Steal a priceless Grimm Brothers manuscript from the most exclusive party on Earth.
Person: ?? [Whatever celebrity or celebrity stand-in you think would be fun]
Place: The Met Gala
Thing: Unpublished Grimm Brothers manuscript
Foe: ?? [Delta Green]
What the players don’t know:
My basic idea here was that Delta Green, the secret government conspiracy that fights the occult in the game of the same name, knew there was something weird and magical about the manuscript on display at the Met Gala, and planned to steal it. The players would need to steal it first, or from them. Meanwhile, goblin waiters were feeding the celebrities (and one undercover PC) glamoured fey food that was being produced by a massive, invisible, monstrous tree.
To run the heist scenes, I used the scene aspect, I Knew This Would Happen, which characters could invoke to have prepared for an otherwise unexpected eventuality. This worked pretty well, although we ended up running the whole heist in one session, which was a faster pace than I’d intended. Oh well. The players all said they wanted a session with a more relaxed pace at this point, so after the successful heist I let them have a more laid back, roleplay-heavy session where the only problems where being hunted by the FBI and Delta Green, the PC who’d eaten the fey food beginning to turn into a donkey, and the Faerie Queen herself unexpectedly manifesting in Central Park.
The value of the manuscript turned out to be that the Brothers Grimm had incorporated some illuminated pages transcribed by a monk centuries earlier. These recorded the reflections of one of the heroes who had defeated the Queen, and spent the rest of his life researching ways she could be truly and permanently beaten if she returned. I asked the players what they’d prefer: for me to tell them how the text said she could be defeated, or to let them tell me how it said she could be defeated. They asked for a mix of both, so we left it open for them to come up with other ideas, but I told them two that it mentioned: either finding the Fisher King and the Holy Grail to use against her, or that the Queen would become powerless if someone she had wronged truly forgave her. The immediate glowering and shaking heads of the players at this possibility was extremely satisfying.
The Wild Hunt
Timeline aspect: The Queen’s servants are ruthless and powerful
Find out what the Huntsman was doing in a small West Virginia town in the 2020s.
Person: ?? [Evelyn, the Queen’s illegitimate daughter]
Place: Owlshead Mountain, West Virginia
Thing: The Owlshead Devil
Foe: The Queen’s Huntsman
What the players don’t know:
This was really the event where the players took things in the most radically different direction than I had planned. My idea: the Queen had an illegitimate daughter at some point. Because she didn’t want a child emerging as a rival for the throne, she had her most loyal servant, the Huntsman, take the child away to kill her. But the Huntsman couldn’t bring himself to kill an innocent child, so he hid her in a small town on earth where he figured the Queen would never notice. Now, he’d realised the Queen was about to come back and conquer earth, so he came back to find the kid (now 18) and protect her, somehow. The Wild Hunt would follow, to punish the traitor and kill the child.
My set up was that it would seem like the Huntsman was their enemy, and they may or may not work out he was a potential ally before the real villains arrived. As it turned out, they didn’t, and they killed the Huntsman just in time for the Wild Hunt to arrive. Then they blew up the truck stop to cover their escape, and met the Owlshead Devil—actually, the father of this royal child, hiding out in exile and pretending to be a weird cryptid. (In my original plans for this section, I’d intended the Owlshead Devil to be purely a local rumour based on weird fey happenings, and that there’d be no individual Devil. But during the earlier events, the characters latched onto this figure and kept telling enemies they were working for the Owlshead Devil, so it became clear that someone of that name had to turn up for them to deal with.)
I had intended all this to help set up a possible ending where, in the final Rise of the Queen event, they would use this child’s potential claim to the throne to overthrow the Queen. My players weren’t gonna wait that long, and as soon as they realised she could be an heir, they found a portal to Faerie and started whipping up a rebellion. This was such a great idea that I had to let it play out, and with the help of some Challenges that took in vast swathes of their politicking and an insurrectionary faerie war, they succeeded. This meant the final event of the campaign switched from The Rise of the Faerie Queen to the Revenge of the Faerie Queen, as the fallen monarch targeted the PCs’ families and loves ones. But that’s another story!
The Rise of the Faerie Queen
Timeline aspect: No more happily ever after
The Queen resumes her throne in the building that was her palace during her previous earthly reign.
Like I said, I didn’t really get to play this one out. Our climactic sessions involved the Queen’s plans for revenge: targeting the PCs’ loved ones, trying to bargain with cosmically powerful allies like Nyarlathotep and Satan for enough power to conquer the world despite being deposed, and then baiting the Earth with strange eldritch worms so an impossibly vast cosmic leviathan would come and swallow the planet. (Luckily, one of the PCs was able to make a heroic last stand and sacrifice herself to close the portal just in time.)
The Queen’s Agenda
Ambition
To restore her reign over the Earth: The Queen ruled Earth once and wants to again—not only because she sees our world as hers by right, but because the boundless human suffering she will impose is amusing to her and her court.
Goals
Abolish human freedom: The only appropriate responses to the Queen’s majesty are surrender, submission and love. She will ensure these are also the only possible responses, grinding the concepts of sovereignty and self-determination out of human souls.
Make her enemies suffer: If anyone defies the Queen’s will, her vengeance will be brutal beyond measure. A thousand years ago a handful of humans hurt her, and she’s still tormenting their descendants over it. But defying the Queen’s will could mean almost anything: actually defeating her, sure, but also, like, if her mirror told her someone was more beautiful? You know someone’s suffering for that.
Goals? Ha!: Above all, the Queen is capricious, and she is driven far more by whim than by ‘goals’ in any sense humans could understand.
Tactics
Bargain: Faeries love to bargain: to offer something in exchange that is freely accepted, but portends impossible suffering and doom. Fey bargains are often remarkably generous in what they offer, but what they take in exchange is invariably greater and worse.
GMs can use this tactic to:
Stories: The Queen and her court draw much of their power from stories and folk tales. They love to be spoken of, and to wind together truth and fiction to their own benefit. They talk about themselves endlessly and treat their stories like powerful gifts they offer their mortal pawns. But they are also bound by these stories, and can rarely escape them.
GMs can use this tactic to:
Brutality: The Queen is not just about the intangible cruelties of contract and chronicle; she loves violence and bloodshed and all the fascinating ways you can hurt and mutilate a human body. She’s not afraid to inflict violence herself, but generally prefers to leave it to her servants, mortal and otherwise.
GMs can use this tactic to:
Servants
The Queen’s servants include whatever your favourite flavours of threatening fey or related horrors are: pixies, impossibly beautiful elven courtiers, goblins, redcaps, big bad wolves, evil witches, etc, etc. If you have a favourite fairy tale villain, they should definitely turn up as a servant at some point. Flipping through any edition of collected Brothers Grimm stories is a great source of inspiration for both enemies and just the general uncanny weirdness you want in a game like this.
Her mortal pawns certainly include violent criminal gangs (like Koschei’s), but as part of her preparation for her Rise she has bargained with humans. Really, anyone might be a servant of the Queen. All kinds of politicians, entrepreneurs, artists and influencers are effectively in her thrall and might use their power on her behalf. But it also amuses the fey to bargain with the powerless, and any angsty teen or service workers might suddenly reveal the sorcerous power the fey have gifted them.
If anyone does end up running this game, I’d love to hear about it. You can find me on the Gauntlet Forums or @shane_marble on Twitter.
Fate of the Faerie Queen was a light reskin of Fate of Cthulhu that I ran from January to March this year. I really liked the game’s central idea—time travellers have to stop four key ‘events’ that feed into a looming apocalypse—but I’m not really familiar with or excited about Lovecraftian cosmic horror. When I thought about what could replace it, I remembered Grant Morrison’s Seven Soldiers comics (now sadly out of print), where a futuristic fey army cyclically attacks the world and destroys human civilisations. That was a concept I could work with.
What follows is effectively a Timeline for Fate of Cthulhu, replacing the mythos with fairy-tale horrors and the terrible Queen of the Fey. The only mechanical change to the core game is that Corruption was renamed as Enchantment, but otherwise everything works the same. Below is the timeline I handed to players at the start of the game, showing them what they already knew about the future. If you’re thinking of playing in a Fate of the Faerie Queen game you should stop reading there. After that in the ‘GM Only’ section I talk about what’s really going on and what sort of trouble the characters are getting themselves into, exactly.
I should acknowledge that two of the events (The Gingerbread Church and The Wild Hunt) were inspired by old Delta Green scenarios, although nothing in them could count as a spoiler. My other main sources of inspiration were classic fairy tales and contemporary takes on them, especially Angela Carter, Naomi Novik and Laird Barron, and the artist Maya Pen, whose weird, creepy costumes inspired some of the game’s monstrosities and menaces. You can check out her work at https://www.instagram.com/mayapen/.
Thanks to Lowell, Kyle, José and Matt for making this such a fun game!
For everyone:
The arrival of the Faerie Queen
In a year and a day she arrives, manifesting in all her glory at what was once a rundown New York hotel. The building grows impossibly, swallowing surrounding city blocks. Across America and the world, cursed victims of the ‘dancing plague’ leave bloody footprints as they wind their way to sacrifice themselves in her worship. Those who had bargained with the fey—for power, love, fortune, whatever—shrink in dread as they realise the terrible prices they must now pay.
With few exceptions, all who see her fall in love, and surrender to their own bloody destruction. Soon she keeps popes and presidents alike as pets. Her impossibly powerful enforcers crush every sign of resistance. Even the merest faeries of her court establish their own local circles, ruthlessly subjugating towns, cities, continents. Cruelty and caprice are the only law. The very concept of freedom fades from human consciousness.
Within ten years, her domination is complete and final. Unless…
What Brought This Upon Us
Future historians have identified the following events as pivotal moments in the timeline linked to the Queen’s rise. If you can interrupt or prevent these events, perhaps you can prevent her rise or weaken her reign.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Timeline aspect: What fools these mortals be
Person: ??
Place: The Met Gala
Thing: Unpublished Grimm Brothers manuscript
Foe: ??
- The Met Gala is usually the most glamorous event in the celebrity calendar, but in 2022, something was wrong. The glamour had become somehow twisted and uncanny.
- The Gala’s theme was ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream’, in connection with an exhibition of fairy-themed art and artifacts from antiquity to the present day; a tempting target for the fey, or a product of their inscrutable schemes?
- Many of the celebrities in attendance emerged changed, somehow, their work becoming uncharacteristically despairing and melancholy over the months that followed; the ‘summer of lost hope’ that presaged the Queen’s rise. Can you intervene to save human optimism?
- A priceless Grimm Brothers manuscript—said to contain oddly prophetic annotations the Brothers never published—was stolen from the exhibition during the gala. Was it always you that stole the manuscript, or will you be interrupting someone else’s heist?
The Wild Hunt
Timeline aspect: The Queen’s servants are ruthless and powerful
Person: ??
Place: Owlshead Mountain, West Virginia
Thing: The Owlshead Devil
Foe: The Queen’s Huntsman
- Mill Creek is a small town at the foot of Owlshead Mountain in West Virginia.
- In 2022, locals reported strange lights in the sky, grave robberies, and a hulking figure clad in antique armour and wielding an enormous broadsword who claimed to be ‘Her Majesty’s Huntsman’. Elsewhere, the Queen’s servants took care to avoid being seen before her rise; what made Mill Creek different?
- The region has a long history of disappearances, disasters, unexplained phenomena and even sightings of a cryptid called the Owlshead Devil; are these somehow connected to the fairies’ plans?
- What power lies untapped on Owlshead Mountain, and what monstrosities protect it?
The Red Shoes
Timeline aspect: Resist anything, except temptation
Person: DJ Bug
Place: Die Rote Schuhen
Thing: ??
Foe: ??
- Who killed DJ Bug? DNA and other evidence confirmed the decapitated body found in a Berlin squat was Bug, but the body was that of a 50 year old, while Bug was in their early 20s.
- Bug’s last known location was the notoriously exclusive techno club, Die Rote Schuhen, on a night that would become infamous after dozens of attendees died and many others were institutionalised. Were these really drug casualties as the authorities claimed?
- The dancing plague that originated in Berlin would soon spread around the world, killing and institutionalising countless victims and reducing the survivors to helpless servants of the Queen. How is the plague linked to Bug’s death?
The Gingerbread Church
Timeline aspect: The enemy of my enemy is my… friend?
Person: Sofia Oniani
Place: Lake Chimagua in the Catskills
Thing: The Gingerbread Church
Foe: Alexander Koschei, Russian mob boss
- Maxim Solonik promised to testify against the Koschei crime family in exchange for immunity and protection, but his evidence was garbled and nonsensical, including claims the family ‘consorted with witches and fairies’ in a ‘gingerbread church’. Was New York’s Russian mafia truly in league with the fey?
- Were fairies involved in the strange, unexplained deaths of Koschei rivals Marat ‘The Butcher’ Kolonov and Sofia ‘Baba Yaga’ Oniani?
- Alleged mob boss Alexander Koschei claimed to be an unfairly persecuted real estate developer, and hoped that the clinic for the terminally ill he would soon open in the Catskills will help improve his reputation. Did the clinic hide a sinister secret?
- Can these names be mere coincidence, or is Sofia Oniani the Baba Yaga of legend? Is Koschei in fact Koschei the Deathless, the Queen’s most powerful and terrifying servant?
GMs Only Beyond This Point
I’m gonna run down these events in the order my group decided to play them, and starting with some general background info.
Beyond the specific events, the big secret revealed through this game was that the Faerie Queen had conquered Earth before, ruling for centuries until a group of four brave heroes struck a blow against her so powerful she was banished from our world for a thousand years. A vast conspiracy (mortal? fey? who knows) erased all records of her existence and concealed this secret fey history. Now her millenia of exile was ending and she was gearing up for a vengeful return.
This was inspired by reading about The Tartarian Empire, a conspiracy theory that holds that all the really nice old architecture on earth is left over from a futuristic empire that once spanned the globe but has now been hidden because… I don’t think they’re real clear on why, actually. This seemed like a cool idea so I stole it. The players put it together largely during The Red Shoes and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, but basically I just wanted this to come out about halfway through the campaign and would have gotten there whichever order they tackled the events in.
The Gingerbread Church
Timeline aspect: The enemy of my enemy is my… friend?
Prevent the fey-aligned mob boss from completing the Gingerbread Church where he will sacrifice hundreds of victims to the Queen.
Person: Sofia ‘Baba Yaga’ Oniani
Place: Lake Chimagua in the Catskills
Thing: The Gingerbread Church
Foe: Alexander Koschei, Russian mob boss
What the players don’t know:
Of course, Koschei is Koschei the Deathless and Baba Yaga is that Baba Yaga, both figures from Russian folklore. Koschei is in love with the Queen and was one of her most loyal servants during her previous reign on Earth. When she was vanquished, he fell into a deep depression and lay down at the bottom of the sea for hundreds of years, only recently dragging himself out to try to prepare for her return. He’s a powerful mob boss and sorcerer with the traditional Koschei gimmick that he can’t truly be killed unless you destroy his soul, which is hidden inside a needle that’s inside an egg that’s inside a duck that’s inside a dog that’s inside a chest that’s hidden on an island. In my game he also had multiple bodies, and a stunt that let him start a scene with two free invokes on his Always Has A Plan aspect.
Koschei had traded the secret of hiding one’s soul in a needle with Baba Yaga, and in return she had taught him the magic of gingerbread architecture. He was therefore building a gingerbread church in an old, rundown holiday resort on the Catskills, with a frozen lake full of angry selkies nearby where he dumped the bodies of his enemies. He planned to use the church to sacrifice hundreds of victims to the glory of the Queen on the day of her Rise. After dark, dozens of shadowy witches appeared to bake and build it. What the powers of the gingerbread magic were, exactly, was never made clear; presumably something pretty terrible.
As much as she wanted to hide her soul in a needle, Baba Yaga was no real friend to the Queen—she’d also lived through the previous reign, had a lousy time, and was preparing to flee this plane of existence before the next round. She turned up in Washington Square Park with a small cohort of chicken-legged huts and loudly refused to help the Queen’s enemies while casually letting the characters know what was going on and conspicuously turning her back so they could steal some of her magic stuff. In the fiction, she hoped they’d defeat the Queen, but couldn’t risk saying so or openly supporting them. Out of the fiction, I hoped they’d use the magic she gave them to rack up some Enchantment and bend the timeline toward human destruction.
The Red Shoes
Timeline aspect: Resist anything, except temptation
Figure out how the murder of a DJ in Germany is tied to the faeries’ plans, and prevent or mitigate the spread of the dancing plague.
Person: DJ Bug
Place: Die Rote Schuhen
Thing: ?? [The Red Shoes]
Foe: ?? [Rumpelstiltskin and her red caps]
What the players don’t know:
When I started thinking about this game, my first idea was that it would be cool to have an event take place in the Berghain, the infamously exclusive Berlin techno club (back in the news as I write this after hilariously and correctly refusing entry to Elon Musk). Sadly when we played out this event the characters never actually set foot in the club, but maybe yours will?
What’s actually happening in this event is that Rumpelstiltskin is hanging out in Berlin, tormenting the descendants of one of the heroes who vanquished the Queen during her previous reign. Specifically, this is DJ Bug (she has promised to make him famous in return for his youth, but the fame she plans to deliver is his shocking, headline-producing murder) and his mother (author of a popular series of young adult novels based on family legends about an ancestor who defeated a fairy queen, but unwittingly bargained the life of her firstborn for this success).
Rumpelstiltskin has a gang of redcaps doing her bidding (yes, Rumpelstiltskin was a woman in my game, and no, I can’t quite remember why I decided that). They are headquartered in Spreepark, an abandoned communist-era theme park in East Berlin, full of rusting and decaying rollercoasters and other rides. This is a real place, and very creepy; you should google image search it if you haven’t seen it or been there.
My intended climax for this event was a showdown with the fey forces in the club, which I pictured having a kind of backroom sex-maze that would open onto Faerie. As it turned out, the climax instead involved the characters rescuing two of Rumpelstiltskin’s prisoners from her Spreepark base: one, the fey lover of one of the PCs, and the other, the older, lost, time-travelling self of another PC, who had pricked his finger on a spindle and fallen into a magical slumber. You probably won’t have these specific figures if you run the game yourself, but it did make for an exciting ending, so maybe think about what equivalents you have to work with.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Timeline aspect: What fools these mortals be
Steal a priceless Grimm Brothers manuscript from the most exclusive party on Earth.
Person: ?? [Whatever celebrity or celebrity stand-in you think would be fun]
Place: The Met Gala
Thing: Unpublished Grimm Brothers manuscript
Foe: ?? [Delta Green]
What the players don’t know:
My basic idea here was that Delta Green, the secret government conspiracy that fights the occult in the game of the same name, knew there was something weird and magical about the manuscript on display at the Met Gala, and planned to steal it. The players would need to steal it first, or from them. Meanwhile, goblin waiters were feeding the celebrities (and one undercover PC) glamoured fey food that was being produced by a massive, invisible, monstrous tree.
To run the heist scenes, I used the scene aspect, I Knew This Would Happen, which characters could invoke to have prepared for an otherwise unexpected eventuality. This worked pretty well, although we ended up running the whole heist in one session, which was a faster pace than I’d intended. Oh well. The players all said they wanted a session with a more relaxed pace at this point, so after the successful heist I let them have a more laid back, roleplay-heavy session where the only problems where being hunted by the FBI and Delta Green, the PC who’d eaten the fey food beginning to turn into a donkey, and the Faerie Queen herself unexpectedly manifesting in Central Park.
The value of the manuscript turned out to be that the Brothers Grimm had incorporated some illuminated pages transcribed by a monk centuries earlier. These recorded the reflections of one of the heroes who had defeated the Queen, and spent the rest of his life researching ways she could be truly and permanently beaten if she returned. I asked the players what they’d prefer: for me to tell them how the text said she could be defeated, or to let them tell me how it said she could be defeated. They asked for a mix of both, so we left it open for them to come up with other ideas, but I told them two that it mentioned: either finding the Fisher King and the Holy Grail to use against her, or that the Queen would become powerless if someone she had wronged truly forgave her. The immediate glowering and shaking heads of the players at this possibility was extremely satisfying.
The Wild Hunt
Timeline aspect: The Queen’s servants are ruthless and powerful
Find out what the Huntsman was doing in a small West Virginia town in the 2020s.
Person: ?? [Evelyn, the Queen’s illegitimate daughter]
Place: Owlshead Mountain, West Virginia
Thing: The Owlshead Devil
Foe: The Queen’s Huntsman
What the players don’t know:
This was really the event where the players took things in the most radically different direction than I had planned. My idea: the Queen had an illegitimate daughter at some point. Because she didn’t want a child emerging as a rival for the throne, she had her most loyal servant, the Huntsman, take the child away to kill her. But the Huntsman couldn’t bring himself to kill an innocent child, so he hid her in a small town on earth where he figured the Queen would never notice. Now, he’d realised the Queen was about to come back and conquer earth, so he came back to find the kid (now 18) and protect her, somehow. The Wild Hunt would follow, to punish the traitor and kill the child.
My set up was that it would seem like the Huntsman was their enemy, and they may or may not work out he was a potential ally before the real villains arrived. As it turned out, they didn’t, and they killed the Huntsman just in time for the Wild Hunt to arrive. Then they blew up the truck stop to cover their escape, and met the Owlshead Devil—actually, the father of this royal child, hiding out in exile and pretending to be a weird cryptid. (In my original plans for this section, I’d intended the Owlshead Devil to be purely a local rumour based on weird fey happenings, and that there’d be no individual Devil. But during the earlier events, the characters latched onto this figure and kept telling enemies they were working for the Owlshead Devil, so it became clear that someone of that name had to turn up for them to deal with.)
I had intended all this to help set up a possible ending where, in the final Rise of the Queen event, they would use this child’s potential claim to the throne to overthrow the Queen. My players weren’t gonna wait that long, and as soon as they realised she could be an heir, they found a portal to Faerie and started whipping up a rebellion. This was such a great idea that I had to let it play out, and with the help of some Challenges that took in vast swathes of their politicking and an insurrectionary faerie war, they succeeded. This meant the final event of the campaign switched from The Rise of the Faerie Queen to the Revenge of the Faerie Queen, as the fallen monarch targeted the PCs’ families and loves ones. But that’s another story!
The Rise of the Faerie Queen
Timeline aspect: No more happily ever after
The Queen resumes her throne in the building that was her palace during her previous earthly reign.
Like I said, I didn’t really get to play this one out. Our climactic sessions involved the Queen’s plans for revenge: targeting the PCs’ loved ones, trying to bargain with cosmically powerful allies like Nyarlathotep and Satan for enough power to conquer the world despite being deposed, and then baiting the Earth with strange eldritch worms so an impossibly vast cosmic leviathan would come and swallow the planet. (Luckily, one of the PCs was able to make a heroic last stand and sacrifice herself to close the portal just in time.)
The Queen’s Agenda
Ambition
To restore her reign over the Earth: The Queen ruled Earth once and wants to again—not only because she sees our world as hers by right, but because the boundless human suffering she will impose is amusing to her and her court.
Goals
Abolish human freedom: The only appropriate responses to the Queen’s majesty are surrender, submission and love. She will ensure these are also the only possible responses, grinding the concepts of sovereignty and self-determination out of human souls.
Make her enemies suffer: If anyone defies the Queen’s will, her vengeance will be brutal beyond measure. A thousand years ago a handful of humans hurt her, and she’s still tormenting their descendants over it. But defying the Queen’s will could mean almost anything: actually defeating her, sure, but also, like, if her mirror told her someone was more beautiful? You know someone’s suffering for that.
Goals? Ha!: Above all, the Queen is capricious, and she is driven far more by whim than by ‘goals’ in any sense humans could understand.
Tactics
Bargain: Faeries love to bargain: to offer something in exchange that is freely accepted, but portends impossible suffering and doom. Fey bargains are often remarkably generous in what they offer, but what they take in exchange is invariably greater and worse.
GMs can use this tactic to:
- Tempt a PC.
- Reveal an NPC as an ally of the Queen or the victim of a bargain they failed to fully understand.
- Make someone complicit in their own suffering or downfall.
Stories: The Queen and her court draw much of their power from stories and folk tales. They love to be spoken of, and to wind together truth and fiction to their own benefit. They talk about themselves endlessly and treat their stories like powerful gifts they offer their mortal pawns. But they are also bound by these stories, and can rarely escape them.
GMs can use this tactic to:
- Reveal lore.
- Treat fairy tales as facts about the world.
- Blur the line between fiction and reality.
Brutality: The Queen is not just about the intangible cruelties of contract and chronicle; she loves violence and bloodshed and all the fascinating ways you can hurt and mutilate a human body. She’s not afraid to inflict violence herself, but generally prefers to leave it to her servants, mortal and otherwise.
GMs can use this tactic to:
- Attack with force.
- Threaten the PCs, their loved ones, or their communities.
- Introduce mortal and fey dangers.
Servants
The Queen’s servants include whatever your favourite flavours of threatening fey or related horrors are: pixies, impossibly beautiful elven courtiers, goblins, redcaps, big bad wolves, evil witches, etc, etc. If you have a favourite fairy tale villain, they should definitely turn up as a servant at some point. Flipping through any edition of collected Brothers Grimm stories is a great source of inspiration for both enemies and just the general uncanny weirdness you want in a game like this.
Her mortal pawns certainly include violent criminal gangs (like Koschei’s), but as part of her preparation for her Rise she has bargained with humans. Really, anyone might be a servant of the Queen. All kinds of politicians, entrepreneurs, artists and influencers are effectively in her thrall and might use their power on her behalf. But it also amuses the fey to bargain with the powerless, and any angsty teen or service workers might suddenly reveal the sorcerous power the fey have gifted them.
If anyone does end up running this game, I’d love to hear about it. You can find me on the Gauntlet Forums or @shane_marble on Twitter.
0 Comments
RSS Feed