Nature
Beyond the edge of the woods, the world is not waiting for us.
Nature is the Horizon of what lives without us: the forest, the beast, living water, the people of the hills. We come from it, we live from it, and we no longer know how to live in it.
Every age has seen it differently: a forest full of spirits, a creation given to humankind, a clockwork, a stock of resources, a fragile ecosystem. The modern world supposedly disenchanted it — iron, electricity, maps. But the korrigans never quite left the moors, and the wolf is coming back.
The return of the seasons belongs to Time. Nature is what lives within those seasons.
Why Agents
The difference of scale. Nature is not above us but all around: it precedes us, feeds us, and speaks no human language. Between the village and the forest lies the edge of the woods, and neither can cross it without becoming something else. There must be beings who come from beyond it and return there.
What each side experiences. Through Agents, humans rediscover what they left behind: panic fear, wonder, instinct, the debt owed to the living. Through them, the Powers of Nature encounter what they do not contain: the name, the garden, the fence, domestication, care, the law.
What is transformed. A shapeshifter who has lived among humans no longer hunts in the same way. A Power that welcomes what they bring back changes what wild means.
Powers
The Beast
The animal at its most ancient: the Great Wolf, the Cave Bear, the Master of Animals painted by hunters.
- Hunts or is hunted
- Does not lie
- Follows instinct
- Fears fire
The Wild
The deep forest and what guards it: Pan, whose cry scatters the herds and gave its name to panic; Cernunnos the horned; the Leshy of the Slavic forests.
- Has no paths
- Leads astray those who venture in
- Takes back what is abandoned to it
- Cannot be possessed
The Hollow Hill
The people who live beneath the hills: the Irish sídhe, the korrigans of the Breton moors, the pixies of Cornwall. Neither dead, nor angels, nor beasts: other.
- Keeps its word, to the letter
- Nothing is given without return
- Time passes differently there
- Fears cold iron
Living Waters
Springs, rivers, lakes: the nymphs of fountains, the Lady of the Lake, Melusine at her Saturday bath.
- Always flows
- Keeps what falls into it
- Heals or drowns
- Cannot be held back
Families of Agents
The suggested traits are Bond traits: each comes from the relationship itself or from the Attribute shown. The Agent's Anchors belong to them and remain to be written.
Shapeshifters — the Beast
Werewolves, selkies hiding their sealskin, the fox-women of Asian tales. The Bond is a skin.
- Takes the shape of their beast, from the skin itself;
- Smells fear, from Hunts or is hunted;
- Speaks to beasts of their kind, from Follows instinct.
What the figure lets us think: the beast within us; belonging to two worlds through the body; what civilization holds back in us.
Sylvans — the Wild
Dryads bound to their tree, green men, satyrs. The Bond is a tree, or a whole forest.
- Dies if their tree dies, from the tree itself;
- The forest hides them, from Has no paths;
- Leads pursuers astray, from Leads astray those who venture in.
What the figure lets us think: being unable to leave; a vegetal time; what the forest thinks of us.
Fae — the Hollow Hill
Pixies, korrigans, brownies, sprites — and changelings, left in human cradles in place of a child. The Bond is a birth beneath the hill.
- Charms with a word, from Keeps its word, to the letter;
- Invisible to those who do not believe, from the birth itself;
- Cold iron burns them, from Fears cold iron.
What the figure lets us think: hospitality and its rules; the given word; being a stranger at the heart of the familiar.
Raised among humans, changelings are the most torn Agents of this Horizon.
Undines — Living Waters
Naiads, undines, nixies, the Lorelei, Melusine and her daughters. The Bond is a spring.
- Breathes underwater, from the spring itself;
- Their voice draws people in, from Keeps what falls into it;
- Must return to the water, from the spring itself.
What the figure lets us think: love between two worlds, and the taboo that makes it possible; what one promises to someone who is not human.
What appears
- the dog, the first companion, and the herd;
- the field, the hedge, the fence;
- iron, and the church bells that drive the fae away;
- the mill, then the dam;
- the botanical garden, the zoo, the national park;
- genetics, which reads the beast without seeing it;
- the returning wolf, the forests left to grow back, the urban fox.
An Agent
- Bond: a skin. Traits: Takes the shape of their beast, Smells fear.
- Anchor Shepherd in the Alps, where the wolf has returned: Guards the flock, Knows the valley's wolves.
- Anchor Breeds herding dogs: Knows what a dog protects.
The Beast knows only two places: it hunts or is hunted. Ana, she-wolf and shepherd, knows a third: to guard. Is the dog not a wolf that chose? If she gets the guarding of the flock recognized as belonging to the Beast, Guards the flock can pass into the Bond. The Beast will know alliance between species — and other shapeshifters will learn to keep watch rather than hunt.
Situations
Bringing a novelty. A dryad discovers grafting, which makes two trees into one; a fae discovers electricity, and wonders whether it is iron.
Contending for a novelty. A valley is flooded by a dam. Living Waters see a new lake. The Wild loses a forest, the Beast a territory. On the side of the Collective, the City demands the power. Their Agents contend over what the valley will become — and the drowned village whose bells can still be heard.
Transforming one's own Power. A changeling grew up among humans, in a city where everything is iron. They want the Hollow Hill to stop fearing cold iron: so that the people of the hills can return to where humans live.
Other situations:
- a selkie has found her sealskin again, and must choose between the sea and her children;
- a sylvan watches the forest whose tree they are being felled;
- a traveler ate at the fae's table, and someone has come to collect what is owed.
Tones and time
Nature lends itself to fairy tale, the marvelous, folk horror, ecological stories.
It joins Dreams, since beneath the hill time passes as in a dream; Death, since the fae are sometimes the dead; Time, through the Cycle of the seasons.
It also suits campaigns across the ages: the same forest can be cleared, planted, abandoned then returned to the wild, and its Agents remember it.