YORKTON - I could not tell you exactly how old I was, but at least at an age where I was allowed into grandma’s basement on my own.
In one corner was a smallish wooden cupboard, in a sort of weird purplish colour. I recall the colour well because I have never repainted the cupboard and it sits in my game room upstairs still.
The cupboard has a door, and a bit like The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, when I opened it, I was transported to a whole bunch of truly magical worlds for inside were a bunch of books that were my dad’s when he was a youngster.
There were Hardy Boy mysteries, and years later I would interview Brian McFarlane whose father wrote many of the mysteries under the pen name Franklin W. Dixon, which is just too cool not to toss in here.
Then there was the classic Three Musketeers, a copy that still resides as one of the ‘green-cover’ books on our coffee table.
And there was a copy of Robin Hood, likely the first book I read among those found, and I was hooked. I played Robin and his merry men with neighbor kids, and alone on the farm as I traipsed the creek bed with a stick in hand – an imaginary bow ready to fend off the sheriff’s men I imagined hidden in the trees.
This was years before the first pong video game, and yet was better than any video game created since. The imagination is a wonderful thing when allowed to roam free.
So let’s jump ahead about 50 years, and I am an avid gamer, and I come upon the role playing game Sherwood.
As you might have guessed by now, “Sherwood is a game about outlaws. Like the earliest outlaw stories, it takes place in an England of chivalric romance, so the outlaws may encounter aristocratic sorcerers and mythical beasts or wield strange magic of their own. Like the later outlaw stories, the outlaws are not waiting for a true king to return and grant pardons, but have gone to the woods to pursue justice and rescue people from predatory powers that be.”
Imagine role playing in Sherwood Forest – where my grandfather always said he played as a child – although whether that was a tale for a small boy clutching the aforementioned book in his hands, or actual reality I never did learn – not that it mattered for I believed every word he said between puffs on his pipe.
So with Sherwood you become an outlaw.
“Even if a sheriff never declared your character a wolf ’s head, you do not need to worry about what a typical medieval villager or aristocrat would do or think. The forest is too grand a place for polite society’s petty anxieties about sexuality, gender, and propriety. Make your character whomever you want them to be,” details the intro to the game.
“Struggle for justice, scheme for revenge, plot for personal gain. Set some goals for your outlaw and your band that are bigger, wilder, and more wonderful than your character’s former, respectable world allowed.
“While the traditional Robin Hood ballads do not foreground the magical and mysterious, plenty of Robin Hood novels, movies, and television shows have, and many other medieval outlaw’s stories included curses, prophecies, spell craft, fey spirits, and even dragons.”
To say the mythos is one that is ideal for an RPG would be obvious, and to say it intrigues this writer is rather obvious too I would imagine.
It is very much a Dungeons & Dragons game pared down to a more human story, overlaid on one of the most iconic and classic of takes; Robin Hood.
So I had to catch up to game creator Richard Ruane via email for more insights into this one.
“I'm a regular gamer and am currently in two campaigns other than playtesting my own stuff: Big Eyes Small Mouth (using the current 4th edition) and Trail of Cthulhu,” he began.
“Over the past couple of years, I've run Romance of the Perilous Land, Whitehack, Old School Essentials, So You Want to Be an Adventurer, 2400, Troika!, World of Dungeons, Solar Blades and Cosmic Spells, Nights Black Agents, and a homebrewed mashup of the Cepheus and Classic Traveller rules. I've also gotten to play a good bit of Undying, Monster of the Week, Good Society, Into the Odd, and The Black Hack.
“The game I'm currently most obsessed with is Liminal Horror, though Psi*Run is probably my all-time favorite.”
So how did Sherwood come to be?
“When I finished work on Enoch's Wake last year, I wanted to make a game that used the same core rules in a different context,” said Ruane. “At that time, I'd recently finished reading Robin McKinley's Outlaws of Sherwood and rewatching most of ITV's Robin of Sherwood (from the 80s) and BBC's Robin Hood (for the 2000s), so doing a quick game on Robin Hood seemed like a good place to start.
“But then I started digging into novels, scholarship, and the original 15th century ballads, and the focus of the game kept shifting.”
Ruane said he ended up wanting to create a game where the players focused more on the ‘story’ of their characters.
“I'd love to get people to think about both the romance around outlawry but also where people who've been exiled and outlawed came from and how they got there,” he offered. “I'm less interested in trying to make a game that simulates the Middle Ages and more interested in capturing the feel of being part of the outlaws in Sherwood that you might get from the early ballads or the fiction from the 19th and 20th centuries.”
In that regard Sherwood is a player-driven system.
“GM's don't roll, but they do respond and assign consequences when a player fails a roll,” said Ruane. “They'll also notice that Session 1 will run heroically, with the PCs usually having the resources they need to succeed. After that, though, their resources get tighter and sessions involve making tougher decisions.”
The game core happened rather quickly, the depth of lore less so.
“Since I already had the core mechanics, most of the work was digging deeper into the Robin Hood legend,” said Ruane. “I took a deep dive into movies, fiction, historical legends, and a handful of scholarly books, which took about six months, with another month for editing and getting the manuscript through editing and into layout.”
When asked what the most difficult aspect of designing the game was Ruane had an interesting reply?
“Knowing when to stop the research,” he said.
“Over a few months, I watched a lot of television episodes (from the Hannah Weinstein-lead Adventures of Robin Hood in the 50s to Robin of Sherwood in the 80s to BBC's Robin Hood in the 2000s), watched over a dozen movies (from the famous 1938 Adventures of Robin Hood to low-budget films from Hammer and the Taron Eggerton-lead Robin Hood from 2018), and ballads and novels from the over the past 600 years.
“The research was energizing and a lot of fun, but knowing when it was time to stop and really start working on the manuscript was tough.”
Of course this is not the first Robin Hood-themed RPG, so what does this game offer that others don’t?
“There are more than a few Robin Hood-inspired games out there, several of which I love -- especially the story game approach used by Shannon McMaster in Forest Outlaws and Scott Malthouse's Romance of the Perilous Land,” said Ruane. “The distinctive aspect of Sherwood is the character creation system that looks at where the outlaws came from socially and what drove them to leave everything behind and flee to the woods.”
You can find Sherwood at r-rook.itch.io/sherwood
