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Hi All.

I'm seriously considering running a Vaesen campaign using the Mythic Britain setting, but have a major concern. In Swedish Vaesen it is obvious that in the mid 1800's the population density was such that wild and untouched areas were plentiful (Uppsala pop. was under 8000 in 1850), but in Britain at the same period, I cannot see how the same sense of remoteness or "untouched" wild can be achived. London has a population of 2.3million (the same as the whole of Sweden) and all the land of Britain was parcelled up and owned by somebody by this time. (The 1069 Doomsday Book shows only 15% of England was woodland, and all of that had an "owner" of some kind).
Has anyone hit on similar discontinuities, and how did you square the problem ?
I thought about bringing the setting earlier in British History, i.e. 1750-1790 which would be pre-railway/steam - does anyone have a view on this and could it work?
Thanks
Ric

Yes the British Isles were more densely populated but that doesn't in any way detract from the richness of Vaesen there. The fay folk abounded, and indeed thrived close to, and within, human settlement. Many of the Vaesen require domestic human activity to exist.

Perhaps read Yeats, or even Robert Burns's Tam O Shanter, for a taste of rural folk tales in rural Britain and Ireland.

There are many places the Vaesen can (and do) exist: wooded islet in the laughs, stone circles, old haunted castles, abandoned mines, the cellars of mansion houses.

In the British Isles some wild places and Vaesen exiseted in the 19th C. The Cairngorms (the grey giant of Ben MacDuie for example). Also the folklore of probably everywhere in rural Britain had its own tales. The Fens, Dartmoor, The Pennines and lots of other places like Snowdonia. In Shetland, folklore there is very Scandinavian in tone.

In terms of population density (for reasons I'm not going to talk about here) rural Ireland and the Highlands and Islands of Scotland lost huge amounts of people during the 1800's leaving empty glens and abandoned townships.

Urban areas expanded; wild areas diminished. Society changed hugely. These changing times are the very essence of Vaesen RPG and are equally applicable to Scandanavia and Britain & Ireland.

Thanks for the info.

As a Brit living in Sweden I'm very aware of the similarities and differences, and I appreciate that the Fens and Dartmoor etc. are all great places fro Vaesen. Abandoned castles and villages are great and there are plenty of them too. I think my main concern was how to stop the investigators hopping on a train back to London to use the British Library or other resouces (as Sherlock Holmes had a habit of doing). I would like to instill the "alone-ness" for the investigators, and there are only so many weather events and railway failures you can invoke .
But thanks for the encouragement, I will reconsider my approach.

Dartmoor today is like an untapped wilderness, you can get easily lost in it. Bleaklow moor iss an elevated moorland where pea-soup fog can come down in an instant (before the invention of radar planes used to crash into bleaklow with alarming regularity as they tried to drop under the cloud cover)

There’s potential, which I plan to explore for mystery much nearer to London than just the moors and the mountains.

The villages of the Sussex and Surrey Downs nestle in wooded valleys and are not nearly as connected to London as they are today. Equally the Cotswolds still has an air of an older time now, so far more back in the 1860s.

The idea that the fey are lurking in Wychwood, or on Leith Hill are not hard to stimulate.

Make the clues dependent on speaking to locals and searching local churches rather than being answered by the Rose House Library. Advantage social interaction and observation over learning. The ‘gothic’ is everywhere in rural England.

The cities and hinterlands of Britain & Ireland are just great for Vaesen adventures.

Planning an "Old Glasgow" campaign involving bogarts, bogles and hags hiding in the attics, middens and back-closes of the densely populated tenements.

The narrative will then expand westward, to the Hebrides, to a world of glaistigs, selkies and sea serpents.

I'm sure any city and its surrounding countryside can be used as a setting; enhanced by the local folklore.