Do you play tabletop roleplaying games? If so Alex's project is definitely one for you, if not, then what better time to start! Read on for Alex's description of his journey in the archives....

As I riffle through boxes of alphabetically sorted index cards, newspaper clippings and once-private letters, it occurs to me. This whole experience — in which I find myself engaging with Special Collections for the first time — is a kind of tabletop roleplaying game. Special Collections: Choose Your Own Adventure. Or possibly Dungeons & Dewey Decimal Systems. For the uninitiated, tabletop roleplaying games (TTRPGs) are the cool/weird cousin of board games, and one of the precursors to modern video games. You get together with friends, create a character, collaborate in telling an ever-evolving improvised story, and roll dice of varying shapes to see what happens. Occasionally you spend three hours arguing about how to open an imaginary door. The most famous TTRPG is Dungeons & Dragons, but there are many hundreds of others.

On this sodden February morning, I’ve driven up from Cornwall to Exeter, and I’m now sifting through a mere fraction of the esoterica contained in the Theo Brown Archive…

Devil: conjured

Vampires and unrestful graves

“I don’t know the exact address, but our friend Mr Richards might be able to help.”

Skull May Hold Key to Mystery of Exmoor Beast

Just like a TTRPG, the experience is tactile, investigative, imaginative, it requires no small degree of luck, and I’m only allowed to make notes in pencil. My character is an intrepid Lovecraftian investigator — albeit one with a rather mundane backstory where he’s concerned he’s going to get a parking ticket because the payment machine near the campus isn’t working, but still. The attendant did have an air of Cthulhu about him. This realisation is pleasingly meta, you see, because by this point in the project, I’ve settled on writing a system-agnostic non-player character guide for TTRPGs. I have not, however, identified a sexier combination of words to describe this intention to anybody else.

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"Everything within these pages is system-agnostic, so you can use it in any game you like. Except Monopoly. Your family will be confused if you use it in Monopoly."

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When I was awarded a Ronald Duncan Stipend for Southwest Writing in late 2025 (my wholehearted thanks again to all responsible), I had the lofty and vague idea that I would write a stage play or a game or some monstrous, chimeric form that possibly nobody wants to exist. I wanted to honour the potential for exploration offered by this opportunity. To respond to the material, rather than force the material to respond to any preconceived plan. My first visit to the Special Collections in Penryn put paid to that. Stewarded though I was by the amazing team there, the idea of simultaneously having limitless source material to draw inspiration from and no boundaries to what I might create with it was immediately overwhelming. As a writer, I don’t like being put in a box. I just like to know that there is a box available, somewhere nearby, in case I need to jump in it and hide. Honing in on tabletop games gave me a lens to parse the material, a way to gauge my progress. A method for mapping the dungeon.

As I pored over retellings of West Country folklore and history (including a VHS recording of Kneehigh’s spellbinding 1989 production of Tregeagle at the Minack Theatre), my plan to adapt some of the recurring figures, locations and legends into NPCs for fantasy TTRPGs gradually took shape. Actually, let’s speed run the creative adventure that took me nearly a year. If you happen to have a six-sided dice to hand, roll it and consult the table below. If however you are a normal person, you can just roll your eyes instead…

D6 Table: Unexpected Joys & Challenges of a Creative Writing Project Inspired by Archive Research

1. Joy! There’s no phone signal in the Special Collections basement, and the wifi login procedure is fiddly so you don’t bother. These happy hours are between you and the books.
2. Challenge! You grapple with the balance between adaptation, inspiration and pure invention. Many of the canonical characters you encounter feel too rigidly established or, conversely, not substantial enough for your purposes.
3. Joy! You find ways to incorporate and grow many smaller sparks of inspiration, using them to add depth and nuance to your emerging characters. Others may find a home in a D20 table of rumours, superstitions and whispers.
4. Challenge! You send out an early draft and ask for honest feedback. You get some. No, it’s all great, really. This is what you needed. Honestly. You’re fine.
5. Joy! You enlist an illustrator to join your adventuring party. You are once again reminded, in this age of AI-slop, that there is nothing more fulfilling for a writer than seeing your words interpreted by a talented human (or possibly half-orc) artist.
6. Challenge! Will you survive another encounter with Cthulhu Parking Solutions Ltd? Roll for Persuasion.

Did you make it through mostly intact? Great, me too. As we emerge blinking from the dungeon/Special Collections basement, let’s see what we have to show for it…

Strange Folk of the Southern Isle is a 24-page book. Booklet. Zine? Pocket archive, let’s go with that, of ready-to-use NPCs and adventure hooks for any fantasy roleplaying game, inspired by the folklore of Cornwall and Devon. At its core, there are five character profiles. Each one lays out the personality, motivations, secrets, combat style and more of a quirky stranger that players might encounter in a game. Two of them are Jan Tregeagle. The man simply cannot be contained. The other three skew harder towards the original invention end of the adaptation spectrum. Then there’s the randomised table of intriguing snippets of dialogue — the kind of thing you might overhear in a fantasy tavern full of shady individuals (or really any pub in modern Devon). As a modest whole, it’s heavy on detail and flavour and, I hope, offers immediately usable inspiration for tabletop RPG’ers, while still being entertaining for casual readers. If any actual folklorist or historian happens to take a look, I’m sorry. My handling of any story or character you may recognise isn’t so much faithful as it is frankly heretical. But I can assure you, this was heresy committed with love. Let’s be honest though — the first thing anybody will notice is the gorgeous illustrations. These are all the work of artist, fellow TTRPG dork and West Country folklorist, James Calderbank.

If you want to read Strange Folk of the Southern Isle — or, even better, take it for a spin in your own games — you can do so right now, for free. One of my guiding principles from the very beginning of this project, when I first applied for the Ronald Duncan Stipend, was that I hoped to create something that would, in turn, help others create a communal experience. I hope it serves you and your gaming table well.

Download Strange Folk of the Southern Isle and/or contact Alex here: https://www.alexmjsmith.com/strangefolkofthesouthernisle