This is a chunkier chapter, so the temptation is there to break it up into sections to meet the requirements of a post a day. I’ll give it complete, but can’t promise the other 29 posts will all be of this length! For this post, I’m working from notes, not directly from Hunt, so there’s an extra level of boiling down. This should make the material more game-ready.
Ghostly Warders
Ghosts of drowned sailors in Cornwall often appear as men with seaweed in their mouths. They follow home people who talk to them. They do not seem to do any particular harm, but their presence is disconcerting. A character with a Ghostly Warder might have someone who, similarly, looks drowned. I’ve always kind of thought of Ghostly Warders as looking like the person imagined themselves. This doesn’t need to be the case, though. A ghostly warder could take an animal shape, or a damaged one.
If I was going gobbet by gobbet, I’d stop there. Let’s continue…
St Ives Ghost Ship
There’s a story from St Ives of a ship that was seen foundering in the bay. Many fishermen rowed out to it, to try and l;end aid, and there was some jockeying to be the first aboard. There may be some legal right involved there. When the first man set foot on the ship, it vanished and he tumbled into the sea. A few days later, a ship broke up nearby, and the corpses washed up on the local shore.
What’s the mechanism here? This seems to be a ghost, the locals call it a “ghost ship” but that requires the ghost generating the ship to go back in time. The ship is kind of like a prophecy or warning, but its message can’t have been delivered to the people who were about to die. Was it to the local church warden, to get him ready for the care of the bodies about to be deposited on the beach? It’s a Vision, in the game sense, but without the chance to change or profit from what is seen, so it would be bad storyguinding in the real world.
Did the first man on the ship cause it to vanish, so that in future, people could learn from his actions? Was he carrying a cross, or whistling or something, so that his knowledge is a treasure the player characters can seek?
Jack Harry’s Lights
Jack Harry’s Lights are a sort of naval will-o-the-wisp. They look like ship lights, or even known ships. People who follow them never seem to catch them, and it causes them time and trouble, although it does not seem to lure directly onto rocks. It is generally seen before great squalls, so some sailors take it as a warning.
Wisps are the sort of small faeries some magi take as familiars. They have a lot of uses to a magus, like illumination, signalling and scouting. Could a magus tame Jack Harry’s Lights? There’s no explanation of the name in Hunt’s book, by the way. I presume “Jack” means a sailor.
The Lady with the Lamp
In Saint Ives Bay, sailors look out for lights on one set of rocks and, seeing them, head home, for they know there will be squalls. The light is carried by the ghost of a lady who was on a ship that broken on rocks. She leapt from the damaged vessel to a rescue craft, but missed her footing and fell in the water. In surfacing, she lost her hold on the baby that was in her arms, and before storms, her shade goes to look for it.
Player characters could draw her child from the sea, or harvest her for Mentem vis. If they do that, do they need to warn the fishermen that the weather forcaster is gone?
Hailing by the dead
There are certain wrecks that Cornish fishermen will not go near, particularly at night, because the ghosts of the sailors hail their friends by name. Magi can harvest these ghosts pretty easily, unless something else is making the noise. A faerie that feeds on fear, for example, might take the form of the ghosts, allowing the player characters to ritually clip it after each wreck, providing a vis source and a moral quandary about how safe they should make this harbour.
Tregaseag Lights
There was a pirate turned off his ship on the Cornish coast, for being too terrible for his crewmates. He settled at Tregaseag, and made his living as a wrecker. He hobbled his horse to that its head was near its forefoot, and put a lantern on its neck, so that when he lead the horse along the cliffs. The horse’s bobbing gait made it look like a ship’s light. Other ships would follow and be wrecked. The pirate waited above the cliff with a hatchet, to cut off the hands, or stave in the heads, of sailors who managed to climb the cliff.
When the wrecker had reached a ripe age, a ship of black wood, with black sails, appeared in the harbour and the words “The time is come, but not the man” floated on the breeze through the town. A storm appeared, but only above the wrecker’s cottage. People raced to his house, and it was filled with the sounds of the sea. He was screaming and begging. “The Devil is tearing me with his nails, like the claws of a hawk.” he cried. He asked his friends to send away the “bloody-handed sailors” who were threatening him, but no-one else could see what terrified him. The earth quakes, his friends flee the house, and it is struck by lightning.
A few braver souls go back inside and find his body. After coffining, they carry it to the churchyard, and are followed on their way by a black pig. When they rest for a moment, either at the stile of the church or when the coffin is lowered inot the gorund (my notes are incomplete) lightning sets the coffin on fire. The pig and ship vanish, but the wrecker’s light is still seen on the clifftop to this day.
Is this an Infernal ghost? Does it make an infernal aura? Are the lights other people using the aura, swapping wrecks for demonic favours.
The Hooper of Sennen Cove
The Hooper is a fog bank that stretches across thew bay, to warn sailors not to venture out. It is rarely seen in modern times, because a man who was desperate for money ignored it, led a crew through it, and they died in the squalls.
That it appears less often when ignored argues to me that it’s a faerie. Can the players get it to come back?
Notes on pilchards
If you eat pilchards head to tail, rather than tail to head, it damages the fishing for everyone. The mechanism of this is not clear. I’m guessing there’s a merrymaid at the bottom of it, though. Pilchards seem so inoffensive, but a magus who could use them is like a bee or ant magus: you’d see everything and would have swarms of workers.
If you are loading pilchards in your boat and they make a particular noise, it is a good sign that your catch will be bountiful that day and you should delay going home. The sound is caused, in the real world, by the rupturing of the swim bladders of the fish. The Cornish say the pilchards are “calling for more”. That is either a natural property of pilchards (they are mildly psychic after death) or that’s a piece of subconscious folk magic, or its a cover story for actual folk magic.
There is a person called a “heva” who watches for pilchard schools from the cliffs, and when they spot them, they give out the “hue”, a great shout. They use a system of white sheets draped on bushes to signal the location of the fish to the boats. These sheets seem to be a primitive semaphore. A turn of grogs trained in flags might spark the invention of the Hermetic telegraph.
The Spectre Ship of Porthcurno
There’s a little bay called Raftra, where St Leven’s Church was going to be built. Each night the Devil stole the stones and moved them to where the church now is, so people stopped fighting him over this site. The manor built here was the largest west of Penzance for a time. and was so expensive that the family who built it were forced to sell all of their lands before it was complete. They lost the house also, before they could move into it. As a stroyguide this seems like a powerful infernal Aura, that is wrecking the lives of people who live here. Hunt notes that this valley is a “melancholy spot”. Long ago when St Leven lived at Bodlean, high up the valley, and it was a garden of great beauty. It’s odd for the Infernal to overcome the sacred ground of a saint (at least in the current edition).
The Spectre Ship appears at nightfall out of the sea, and sails over the land. It’s ill luck to see it. It’s usually a single-masted square-rigged ship, with a black sail and trailing a boat, but this sometimes varies. It was not crewed, or they were beneath decks, the hatches of which were battened down. It sailed to Chygwiden, then vanished .
Time for some Hunt: The ship is “somehow connected with a strange man who returned from sea, and went to live at Chygwiden. It may be five hundred years since it may be but fifty. He was accompanied by a servant of foreign and forbidding aspect, who continued to be his only attendant ; and this servant was never known to speak to any one save his master. It is said by some they were pirates…Whatever they may have been, there was but little seen of them by any of their neighbours. They kept a boat at Porthcurno Cove, and at daylight they would start for sea, never returning until night, and not unfrequently remaining out the whole of the night, especially if the weather was tempestuous….when the storm was loudest there was this strange man, accompanied either by his servant or by the devil, and the midnight cry of his dogs would disturb the
country.
This mysterious being died, and then the servant sought the aid of a few of the peasantry to bear his coffin to the churchyard. The corpse was laid in the grave, around which the dogs were gathered, with the foreigner in their midst. As soon as the earth was thrown on the coffin, man and dogs disappeared, and, strange to say, the boat disappeared at the same moment from the cove. It has never since been seen ; and from that day to this, no one has been able to keep a boat in Porthcurno Cove.”
So, a ghostly pirate ship which voyages upon the land. Could magi destroy it? Better, could they command it?
End notes
During this month I’ll make some attempt at statistics for the many creatures mentioned here. It seemed unsporting to start the month with a lot of posts already written, so I’ll try to get ahead enough to give me the time to work on stats.
I write a lot of GFF well before it comes out: the standard episdoes until the end of December are already queued at Libsyn for example, but the November process gives me a deadline and a need for a lot more material, so if you have low-hanging fruit, mention it in the comments.
I’m not going to be able to work up posts of this size each day. I don’t want to raise expectations too high, but we’ll see how we do. Welcome to November in the Ars community, where there’s a heap going on.
Games From Folktales 