Troy Town (RPG All)

A delightful air of romance and mystery surrounds the whole subject of Labyrinths and Mazes.

MAZES AND LABYRINTHS, W.H. Matthews, 1922 Longmans

I was recently reminded of this and thought it would repay a revisit.

Most of you know what hedge mazes are. They can be used to good effect in horror. Stephen King famously used one in the Shining, with Torrance stalking through it in search of his boy Danny. King has his version patrolled by peculiar hedge creatures, but in the film it's just an evocative location - probably the better fit, TBH, though I doubt King would agree.

However, that's not the kind of maze I'm talking about.

A Troy is a turf maze. There are no walls. The pattern twists in upon itself, straight to its center like Ouroboros. There is only one way forward. Nobody knows why they were made, but at one time there were Troys across Europe and some still exist, in forgotten little places. 

There are several examples in England. Most of the survivors are on private property.

A true Troy is cut to what's called a Greek, or sometimes Knossos, pattern, after the markings found on Greek coinage. It's possible those old coins were used as a direct reference, or perhaps the design survived in books, but however it came to be the people who made the mazes tended to follow that pattern. 

Nobody knows for certain why these mazes came to be. It's said that the original patterns were used for horsemanship games practiced by the Greeks and revived by the Romans. There are any number of folkloric reasons for the mazes; fishermen in Sweden, for example, used to march the Troy to throw off wicked spirits who might otherwise follow and bedevil them. Or they might have been fertility rituals, or tied to the legends of Ariadne, Fair Rosamund, St. Julian of the Hospice, Theseus' crane dance or any of a dozen other tales and legend-bearers.

From Mazes & Labyrinths

However, they exist and have done since memory forgot, and only the dead now know how they came to be. 

They were in use for a considerable period. Right up until the Great War, more or less, there would have been seasonal rituals, fetes, or more private marchings of the Troy. Like so many other bits of lore, the Troys tended to die out with the great withering on the Western Front.  

From an RPG perspective the great thing about a Troy is, because nobody knows why they were made or how they came to be, you as Keeper (or whatever the term may be) can use them absolutely anywhere.

The most logical-seeming fit is in a fantasy setting, of course. Serpentine, Ravenloft, any one of a host of others: any and all can benefit from peculiar rituals practiced in the dead of night or in the heart of some forgotten moor, with creatures or entities flitting the Troy in a dance that seems deceptively simple and in fact is tied to the soul of the universe. Or summons Cthulhu. Or whatever the case may be.

Night's Black Agents and similar supernatural settings could make good use of the Troy. In Night's the obvious uses are Damned or Supernatural but the thing about a hypnotic pattern is it could as easily be used in Mutant or Alien games. 

Quatermass and the Pit

But it could as easily be Cyberpunk, or Mutant City Blues. A neo-pagan movement captures the imagination of Night City and the desperate, the helpless, homeless, forlorn, dance the Troy. Why? Nobody knows. Or a bunch of bangers and gangers devise Troys as a non-combat means of settling disputes, with each side (or sides) nominating a team to dance the Troy, winner take all. The Troy becomes a modern dance movement. The Troy is a means of contacting alien life.

The Troy is, and is, and is. 

I've made frequent references to Rome and its Fourth Thing. A Troy is a pretty good match for that Fourth Thing. It's sufficiently mysterious and alien-seeming that it could be a stand-in for almost anything from fairyland to Leng. It's easily created by one person, cutting turf, but it could as easily be graffiti, or a complex of patterned lights, or a dozen other things besides. 

There's something about a maze that calls the eye and mind. 

That's it for this week. Enjoy!