Hi. I am wanting to run an OSR game set in a medieval England. I'm planning to use Lion & Dragon and Dark Albion, alongside Graeme Davis' Vaesen: Mythic Britain & Ireland (but in this setting the spirits have been disturbed by cosmological and seismic events rather than modernity).

I want magic to be frightening, uncanny, and disturbing in this game. I like what Lion & Dragon does with Clerics (miracles, not spells) and magic users (Magisters) but I want to have a well-developed folk magic tradition of the British Isles. A female-led tradition of ritual magic attuned to the elements and the natural world. e.g.

Nature focused - connected to seasons, life transitions etc. So that includes things like healing, divination, fertility etc. It's not comfortable stuff - nature is unsentimental. If you know it, the crone in Karen Maitland's Company of Liars embodies this tradition well in my mind (a phenomenal book by the way, and very much the mood of the game I want to run).

A darker path in which some practitioners interact with fell beings (alien, dark faerie with little regard for humanity). Which superstitious folk believe to be demons.

I've have looked at Baptism of Fire and I see it has expanded into folk magic and that looks promising. But I want to really develop this side of the setting for the atmospherics, mood and for NPC's in particular. I wondered if any of you know of any good sources - in any RPG system  - that have developed the traditions of crones, witches, cunning folk etc. Thanks.

Quote from: Green Demon on February 18, 2025, 04:50:00 PMI wondered if any of you know of any good sources - in any RPG system  - that have developed the traditions of crones, witches, cunning folk etc. Thanks.

The Mythras system has hedge magic, which might be exactly what you're looking for.

Thanks. I'll take a look.

Quote from: Green Demon on February 18, 2025, 04:50:00 PMI wondered if any of you know of any good sources - in any RPG system  - that have developed the traditions of crones, witches, cunning folk etc. Thanks.

There's _Way of the Witch_ for D20, which is a detailed look into specifically wiccan-ish female-centric magic for 3E D&D and other D20 systems. I felt like as a whole it didn't hang together very well, but it is a good source to mine for ideas.



https://www.amazon.com/Way-Witch-Janet-Pack/dp/1929474393

Back a little earlier, there's a supplement on Hedge Magic for Ars Magica. I don't have this but I've skimmed it in the past. It was decent as I recall.



https://www.atlas-games.com/product_tables/AG0289

Thanks very much for those ideas. Really appreciated.

You might want to have a look at Ghastly Affair. (I just wrote up a review of it in the Reviews section of this forum).

It doesn't have a designated "hedge magic" system, but there's a lot of very on-theme spells and the entire magic system is more inspired by folk magic than a normal D&D system. It's also basically an OSR game, so it'll be easy conversion to adapt it to Lion and Dragon.

Quote from: Green Demon on February 18, 2025, 04:50:00 PMI want magic to be frightening, uncanny, and disturbing

I think you might find your goals in conflict here, tbh. Real-life folk magic tends to be kind of unimpressive when compared to fantasy magic. Partially, that's because it has to be vague enough for keep it plausible, but mostly because it concerns the kinds of things peasants care about: personal health, livestock and weather. Things that are scary to farmers, but not to D&D players. You can do interesting things with it, but it's never going to have the flair that magic in cosmic horror or sword and sorcery has.

Something that might be useful for information is "Fantasy Wargaming" by Bruce Galloway, from way back in 1981.  As a disclaimer, this is the worst excuse of an RPG it has ever been my misfortune to encounter. I tried to figure it out as a teen, and concluded that it must be some kind of parody.  Nonetheless, chapter 2 and the magic section of chapter 7 have a lot of ideas along the lines you describe.  The actual spells, notably, do not.  You can safely ignore those; they appear to be cribbed from D&D.