Devils In The Green

An adventure for PCs based in London, possibly working for the Phantasmological Society.

A village fete in Lydney, a coal port on the Severn Estuary by the edge of the ancient Forest of Dean. Children play among the gravestones. The slate-grey spire of St. Mary’s Church looms over the colourful tents. Farmers try to guess the weight of a pig.

A short man in a porkpie hat offers you a sample of Doctor Silencio’s Revitalising Health Tonic. Deep green in a brown bottle, milky and viscous. Tastes like bitter moss. Clears the mind and gladdens the heart, according to Doctor Silencio, who seems very quick on his feet and will not let you take his hat.

You will find the Reverend Arthur Prynne doing his best to operate a Punch and Judy show, patiently enduring the insults of a gaggle of small boys. He’s not at his best. He’s invited you here for a reason. His parishioners keep seeing the Devil, and asking him theological questions about it that he finds difficult to answer.

Two girls, Anne and Sally Brown, ten and fourteen, spotted fairies playing in the rosebush at the bottom of their garden. The fairies had horns, and sharp teeth. By the time Dad came home, they were gone. He wanted to dismiss it as the product of a recent fever but the girls wouldn’t shut up about it. He’s been giving them a glass of Silencio’s each before bedtime.

Fergus Wright, a railway worker, usually considered by his fellows to be a bit soft in the head, saw a ten-foot-tall emaciated figure with antlers striding through the woods late at night. Two days later a herd of soft, pulpy creatures were grazing on the rhododendrons on his front lawn. He keeps a bottle of Silencio’s tonic by the bathroom sink, for use as mouthwash.

Jeb Motley, owner of the White Stag pub, normally a taciturn man, saw a vast round head emerge from the Lydney Canal one misty morning. He knew it was real because his dog barked. It spoke to him in low guttural tones, and since then he’s been having doubts about how do you know the Devil isn’t God. He denies using the tonic, since he needs it to satisfy his wife.

Sometimes when he’s up late browsing through his books the Reverend has heard the green men, the foliate faces carved from stone in his chapel, vines sprouting from their eyes, begin to whisper to each other. They talk about how ridiculous his sermons are, and how easily they could be made better. He’s taken their advice, to great effect.

Tom Davenport, farmhand and occasional poacher, two convictions for trespassing and one for lewd conduct which was not upheld, told his mates he was heading out into the woods one sunny afternoon “to spy on the girls”. He refused to say which girls. Three days later he was found on the mudflats of the Severn, naked and insane, trying to “swim to Hell.”

He is being held in Lydney’s one police cell until more suitable lodging can be found. He fears all women now, and claims he can see through their skin. He tells you that he followed a sun worshipper back to Lydney Park, where she took off all her clothes “and everything else as well! Ha ha ha!”

If he escapes, he’ll start trying to kill women. He has a shotgun and is very stealthy. So keep an eye on that.

The manor and gardens of Lydney Park are invisible from the main road. A tall yew hedge shields them from spies. Anyone driving up the path to the house will be stopped by servants at the gate and brusquely informed it’s private property. Guests admitted by invitation only.

Go round the back of the house and you can get into the garden through the woods. Must be a dozen people there. Bright young things playing croquet in the shadow of grand magnolia trees. Matrons taking tea in the gazebo, fat colonels practising their calisthenics on the lawn.

All of them nude. Lydney Park is a naturist resort.

Somewhere on the grounds lie the ruins of an ancient Romano-Celtic temple, dedicated to the healing god Nodens. It is currently being excavated by a pair of married archaeologists, Mortimer and Tessa Wheeler, who’ve discovered a set of Latin inscriptions referring to a “secret medicine” from “underneath the world”. They believe that pilgrims in Roman days may have flocked here from all across Britain to be cured by the god’s holy doctors.

Their friend John Tolkein, professor of Anglo-Saxon literature at Oxford, is staying in town at the White Stag. He’s dining with the whole crew in the manor tonight, and he can probably get you in.

Some years ago, two men were cutting pine in a remote valley in New Zealand. 

One of these men was Benjamin Buckley-Wynter, heir to a fortune and the Lydney Park estates, slumming it on a trip around the world. The other man was a Polynesian vagabond named Dennis Takaroa who happened to look a lot like Buckley-Wynter. The two men noticed the resemblance and got to chatting.

They struck up a friendship. One day, Wynter showed Dennis a small bottle he kept on a string around his neck. A medicinal tonic, supplied to his family since ancient times by special agreement with the inhabitants of the forest. He told the story of his distant ancestor, William Wynter, who was persecuted for devil worship by the New Model Army and leapt to his death in the Wye Valley gorge.

Dennis, assuming the bottle contained alcohol, stole it and drank it. He was given a brief, maddening glimpse of the true nature of the universe, and knew he must have more. He killed Wynter, stole his identity and went back to England, where he took up stewardship of Lydney Park. He has been purchasing large quantities of tonic from Doctor Silencio, and attempting to synthesise the mixture, with little result.

Silencio claims to source his tonic from Saint Anthony’s Well, a healing spring deep in the heart of the forest. The exact location is a carefully guarded forester secret. Dennis will pay good money, which he is rapidly running out of, to anyone who can track Silencio into the forest and find out where he really gets it.

Wynter’s aged mother, Angela, who lives with Dennis, is nearly blind, and has thus far been willing to accept the apparent change in her son’s voice as an inevitable consequence of a trip around the world. However, if she drinks the tonic, she will experience a moment of clarity and denounce him in strident tones as an imposter.

The naturists all drink the tonic. They’re attempting to revive the ancient witch-cult, under the guidance of Kitty Fleming, a round-faced anthropologist who Dennis met in Prague. They caught Tom spying on them and convinced that drinking a whole jug of it would be fun and sexy, which is why he’s crazy now.

Doctor Silencio is using the money he gets from Dennis to expand his tonic business. He’s been selling it to everyone in town, which is why they keep seeing the Devil. If it keeps going well, he plans to set up shops in Gloucester, and ultimately London.

The tonic really does cure what ails you. It gives you a kick and probably some bonus points on a dice roll. It also lets you see what’s really there. People drinking too much of it will penetrate reality, spot demons everywhere and come to understand that the Horned King is the rightful ruler of the world. If you can see the demons they can see you, of course.

Silencio lives in the woods, with the rest of the forest gipsies, who are licenced by ancient law as sole purveyors of the forest’s bounty, and entitled to punish those who infringe on this right by any means they see fit. Everything they do is completely legal. The police are powerless to stop them.

If you knock off his hat you will find he has short stubby horns under there. “‘A congenital defect, sir.” He’s extremely fast and the pockets of his coat are full of knives, which he can throw with deadly accuracy. He has access to all kinds of exotic fungal poisons, and sometimes talks to squirrels, though it’s not clear if they talk back.

Follow Silencio. He’s clearly suspicious. First you will see him deliver another van-load of tonic barrels to Lydney Hall. Then he parks by the railway station and vanishes into the woods. If he thinks you’re following him he will set traps.

A cluster of rude huts among the trees. A huge bald oaf with a cudgel, picking at the bones of the last team of explorers sent by Dennis. A terrified detective, begging for his life in Cockney, suspended above a firepit in an iron cage.

Longbowmen in watch towers, clad in muddy green. A heavily pregnant woman with a gun, shackled to a bedpost. A minstrel with a one-stringed mandolin, plucking out a bawdy tune about a man who fucked a horse. A chef butchering a rabbit and squabbling with a midget in priest’s clothing about who gets to eat its heart.

A makeshift copper still. A man in a flat cap and tattered silk dress, one hand withered into a claw, tinkers with it, trying to improve its output.

In the centre of the village, a gigantic oak tree with scraps of cloth and human skin fluttering from its branches. Among the roots of the oak tree, the mouth of a cave. A tight squeeze, though not as tight for Silencio.

An old Roman ochre mine. Pitch black unless you bring light. Propped up and expanded over the centuries. A winding cavern, its clay walls carved with obscene Latin mottos. A stepladder. You can’t make out what’s sprouting from the ceiling in the dark.

Reach up and touch the fungus. It’s heavy, warm, rubbery. Blossoming in pods, with nubbins on the end. It feels exactly, disconcertingly, like a woman’s breast.

Stroke it. Caress it. Milk it. Have a pail with you, to catch the elixir as it spurts.

This is the source of Doctor Silencio’s Revitalising Health Tonic, in its purest form. And as you recoil from this discovery you hear him behind you, whispering in plaintive tones.

“Let go of her. She’s mine.”

Lydney Park is a real place, though not a naturist resort. Nodens is a real god and Tolkein did investigate the ruins there. Look up Puzzlewood to get a sense for what the forest ought to be like, and go here if you want more old photos of Lydney.

The mines are based on Clearwell Caves and there’s a bunch of other cool stuff around the Forest of Dean I didn’t end up using. Someone should go up to the Devil’s Pulpit and see a hulking creature squatting in the ruins of Tintern Abbey, eating the ghosts of monks.

Ramsay Campbell set a lot of Lovecraft stories in the fictional town of Brichester on the other side of the Severn. Here is a map of Brichester. Justin Alexander has built a whole scenario around Ramsay’s tomb-herds and his Revelations of Glaaki, which could be a seed for a Severn sandbox campaign.