In the Hedge, a traveler can see echoes of human world analogues. If she wanders the Hedge of Detroit, she’ll see hints of buildings, cars, and factories even as brambles cover and consume them; or perhaps the brambles are busybody salesmen and surly factory supervisors, all sporting long red noses and voices like shrill whistles. Some objects and places directly correspond to things on the other side, especially closer to the mortal world. But more often, objects in the Hedge reflect the way the traveler thinks of them when she’s feeling fanciful or frightened. If she always thought the city’s skyscrapers looked like looming guardians closing in on her, they’re exactly that here: taller and more sinister, inching closer moment by moment. If she loves riding the train and wishes trips would take longer, the tracks in the Hedge stretch out to the horizon, letting her ride as long as she likes. Places long gone and forgotten in the mortal world may still have reflections in the Hedge, if someone who enters remembers them or has looked lovingly on their black-and-white photos in old newspapers.
Trods (p. 201) are not the only paths through the Hedge, though they are the only ones that remain in place. Most people who travel the Hedge do so on less reliable roads, through valleys beneath a flight of witches mounted on giant owls, and then through a shopping mall beset by living mannequins animated by a little girl’s longing for her long-dead sister. It takes a wanderer in circles even while moving him closer to his goal (or to the Fae), and it takes him on a long, straight boulevard under trees full of enchanted paper lanterns. Time has a strange bent here. Every little corner, every path, every room, has a different concept of time. In some places, it passes quickly. In some, it doesn’t pass at all.
The Hedge shapes itself around a traveler according to a few factors: what’s nearby on the other side, in the mortal world; what has been in a particular place before; the traveler’s own needs, fears, and feelings, and those of others around him; and the strength of a traveler’s Wyrd. The first two factors are up to the Storyteller. Each place in the Hedge should have its own personality, and while things shift often, returning to the same place and recognizing it as such works unless a character has deliberately changed it drastically.
To do anything other than wander aimlessly, characters must make navigation rolls inside the Hedge. They begin by stating a goal, which could be a specific location — “I want to take a shortcut to San Francisco” or “I want to find the nearest Goblin Market” — or a more general objective, like “I want to find an Icon” or “I want to get away from this loyalist.” Navigation inside the Hedge works just like a chase, using the rules on p. 195. Even if the characters are unopposed, the Hedge itself works as an “opponent,” representing the myriad dangers and temptations that face all travelers there.
The characters must engage in a new chase whenever they have a new goal.
Terms of the Chase
When the characters have clear opposition, such as outrunning a Huntsman or chasing down a thieving gob-lin, determine the terms of the chase as normal, but the Hedge itself also always counts as a “character” and has its own turns and dice pools. Its goal is always to lure travelers off the path into the Thorns, or closer to Arcadia, and the Storyteller should determine where the characters end up if they lose and the Hedge wins. This doesn’t preclude someone else from winning, too — just because the Hedge lured them into a cave, that doesn’t mean the Huntsman lost their trail.
Note that getting “closer to Arcadia” is a matter of relative distance. The Hedge is too fluid and psychoactive to have a firm sense of space — no one could map, for instance, how far a particular glade is to the gates of Faerie. But routes do exist, and those routes lead through places with identities of their own and along paths a traveler could remember and try to repeat, assuming no one shaped away the Whistling Tree Bridge and its swamp trolls in the meantime and forced the route to change. Characters who fail a chase in the Hedge usually end up in a place where one wrong move could open a door that leads straight to the Others.
The Hedge has an effective Speed of 10, or 15 in the Thorns. On a trod, its Speed is (10 – trod rating). Its Initiative modifier is equal to (10 – the highest current Clarity among the characters), to a minimum of 0; if no changelings are present, its modifier is 10. The Hedge begins with a base pool of five dice for all rolls (including to determine the Edge), regardless of the Attribute + Skill the characters roll. Modify the pool based on the following table:
If a single character has both a positive and a negative relevant Condition, the bonus and penalty cancel out for that character. The Storyteller may add or subtract dice due to other appropriate circumstances, as well. The base number of successes needed for a given character to prevail in the Hedge is eight, rather than five. Use the chart on below to determine modifiers to this number, as well as the following additional modifiers:
Resolve the chase as normal. Success means the characters achieve their goal within the time limit (if there was one), and any direct opposition failed to achieve its own. It’s possible for some characters to succeed and some to fail, though, so sometimes changelings give up their victories to help out companions left behind or whisked away. Failure with direct opposition usually means a fight or some other confrontation. Failure without direct op-position means the characters ended up somewhere the Hedge decided they should be, rather than wherever they were trying to go. If the Hedge beats everybody involved, they all end up wherever the Hedge was herding them. Any character who doesn’t succeed gains the Lost Condition (p. 342).
Trods
The Hedge has paths running through it, created and maintained by hobgoblins, Gentry, Huntsmen, and the Lost themselves. They are equal parts footpath worn into the fabric of the place by frequent, long-term use, and deliberately laid road. Most freeholds maintain a few trods to useful places, and many changelings have their own private garden paths. Some trods are secret, known only by a few among the Lost and the local Hedge denizens. These are comparatively safe, as far as safety means anything in Arcadia’s borderlands, but a traveler is as likely to see bands of hobgoblins harassing the grumpy old nix living in the well as she is to see a Huntsman leading a pack of harvest dogs, and some are even the private promenades or hunting trods of a True Fae. Which are which, a trod alone does not reveal, so the Lost know to keep an eye out when traveling an unfamiliar route.
Trods have a dot rating from 1 to 5, representing how well-kept they are and how far they go, but not necessarily their safety. Trods have set endpoints, which could exist in the mortal world, within the Hedge, or even in Arcadia. The area in between can shift from journey to journey, though it remains roughly recognizable. The scenery around a trod always maintains some semblance of similarity, but can change its nature — a wall of thorny brambles might turn into a mess of barbed wire, or a forest of razor-sharp ice crystals, or a wall of flame, but will never be open terrain. Certain landmarks remain constant, and the higher the trod’s rating, the less mutable its terrain.
The Storyteller should determine a trod’s rating by starting with the table below, determining how far it reaches, and then modifying the rating up or down de-pending on how well its caretakers do their jobs, or whether it even has caretakers anymore at all. A lovingly pruned trod kept by a meticulous goblin or changeling freehold might be worth +1 or even +2 dots, while a haphazardly attended trod would be worth −1 or −2, and a completely abandoned one might be worth −3.A trod can bridge points in the mortal world, but it also bridges a number of milestones in the Hedge equal to its rating, in addition to its two endpoints. Thus, a two-dot trod passes through two relatively stable milestone locations along its route, such as Madam Thimblestitch’s house or the Philadelphia South Street Goblin Market.
When navigating the Hedge on a trod, players don’t need to participate in chases to reach milestones or their goals (as long as they don’t stray from the path to achieve them) unless they have direct opposition or a time limit.
The Stable Trod Merit (p. 119) grants characters regular access to a trod. Players can define their trod’s mile-stones upon purchasing the Merit, or they may instead introduce them in play according to what makes sense on their journeys.
The Thorns
For all that the Hedge is a liminal place, it reflects the touch of the Gentry’s all-consuming temperament like anything of a fae nature. Those who stray too far from the path find themselves among the Thorns, meta-physical representations of the Hedge’s greed. It chews and swallows, cracks bone and sucks marrow, and takes away precious things. The Hedge is generous with its misery, spreading it out and harvesting it, plucking the apples from wanderers’ eyes and marveling at their beauty. The Hedge is bountiful and gracious, but for everything it gives, it takes something away. Most of all, the Hedge changes people.
To ascribe a motivation to the Hedge is a poetic flourish, though, to give a meaning and a pattern to something ineluctably beyond those who experience it. Though it has literal thorns on rosebushes and impassable fields of brambles, the Hedge also has many other barbs to prick more than just fingers, from razor-sharp icicles lining every surface of a cave’s walls, to swarms of stinging and biting insect goblins, to forests of despair and terrors born of nightmares. Not all Thorns are thorns, and not all of them are tangible threats at all. “The Thorns” is simply the term changelings use to describe the most dangerous parts of the Hedge, where it’s easier to get lost and the things that live there are less friendly.
To the Lost, the Thorns are painful and horrific, a shifting jaunt through memory and fantasy that acts as a constant reminder of their ordeals at the hands of their Keepers. For a mundane human, the effect is subtler, a creeping lethargy and confusion. Her speech grows con-fused and disjointed as she loses the ability to concentrate. Her environs become more nonsensical, reacting in direct proportion to her fear and instability. Any negative mental or emotional Conditions a character suffers here play out in the environment as metaphors and dreams-capes, usually causing breaking points.
When navigating the Thorns, tracking or seeking something or someone specific among them, or otherwise investigating them in such a way that takes a character further from the path, dramatic failures can result in a wide variety of awful fates, ranging from Conditions like Lost or Madness, to Tilts like Insensate or Insane, to stumbling through a door into Arcadia or the den of some hobgoblin that hasn’t seen another soul in years.
from Changeling: the Lost 2E, p. 200-203
