Little Totterington

In a world where the tides of magick are rising and the supernormal is becoming altogether too common, the village of Little Totterington sits nestled in the English countryside. Nestled, that is, next to a confluence of ley lines, an ancient Faerie grove, and the ruins of a druidic holy site.

Little Totterington is also home to the Totterington Society of the Magical Arts. And lately, the society has been very busy...

The Little Totterington Society of the Magical Arts consists of characters played by the participants in this game while the two GMs play everyone else.

Setting

The world of Little Totterington is very much like our own world with the exception that magick exists and reality is mutable. In this world, the tides of magick ebb and flow. The last few centuries were a period where magick seemed to retreat from the world and the threads of the great tapestry became tightly woven, preventing all but the simplest magick from being performed.

This has all changed in the last decade as gateways to raw magickal energy have opened and the reality has begun regaining its elasticity.

Game System

The game of Little Totterington uses the Storyteller game system with an emphasis on the Mage the Ascension rules. To be truthful, though, we tend to emphasize plot and imagination over rules and knowledge of the Storyteller system is suggested but not mandatory. The players are a small group of 4 - 8 people, changing as members come and go. The game started in August 2002 and ran to 2007. It has now restarted in 2010! It uses a Yahoo Groups site for the games posts.

First: the Alan Carder saga, aka the evil vet

The Little Totterington Society of the Magical Arts originally consisted of: Jeffrey, Grace, Aaron, Miles, Colin, and Minnie.

Miles was killed in Dearlcastle, where he worked as a nurse. He was a Euthantos mage. Minnie was killed in a violent attack in her house several months before the story started. Minnie and Jeffrey Stone were long standing friends and lovers. Helen, Minnie's niece, came to visit to collect some things from her Aunt's house. Helen turned out to have inherited her Aunt's talent for Time magic. Helen was killed in Minnie's old house in a violent, bloody murder. Sara, a gypsy girl, had a vision of Minnie and was given a special golden ring. Detective Inspector Telegraff, from the local police force, investigated these deaths along with burglaries and a case of suspected arson in the village.

Carder was the local vet and a powerful Nephandus mage, with the ability to shape-change. He intended to use an old village tradition, the Furrey Dance, in a ritual to summon a demon to Little Totterington. As part of that, he killed local animals and enchanted the skins to form a vessel for the demon. He hypnotized some of the locals so they would hep with his blood rites. Carder also had connections with organized criminals in Dearlcastle, and he had summoned an unseelie faerie called Aleska to aid these thugs. He also arranged for Miles, a Euthantos mage, to be killed in Dearlcastle, where he worked as a nurse.

Finally, when the Little Totterington had realised what Carder was, he shape-changed into the the form of the child Campbell McInnes. The group stormed Campbell's house while his parents were at a party. The group knocked Carder unconscious after some vicious fighting and barely escaped with their lives. Two of the group, Nap and Sara, died. The demon Carder was working with (an Ayakashel, an ancient Sumerian/Babylonian entity) sucked the house and surrounding yard into the spirit world. The others managed to escape, although the house was burnt to the ground. Carder was sent to a special "prison" by Jeffrey, who used some of his contacts with a powerful group of Hermetic mages at Oxford.

Second: the Time Keepers saga

The storyline revolved around a set of artefacts that were apparently created by tribes before the conquest of Britain by the Romans. The priests of the tribe used the artefacts in conjunction with blood offerings in order to open a time portal to the future.

Their research was prompted by a vision that they had during a Christmas party at Jeffrey's house. The other event at the party was an attack by a group of high-tech mages! The attackers were well-organized and deadly, killing one member of the group and wounding several others. They employed powerful Time magics to speed up their attack. The police arrived, led by DI Telegraff and the mages left for New York.

Once there, they stole the artefacts from a museum and then went to a night club to meet with a mage whom they hoped would help them understand what was going on. Unfortunately, things did not get clearer; they were attacked by vampires at the club, and then caught in a second vision. This ended up opening a portal that brought most of the pre-Roman villagers to modern-day Little Totterington. A few arrived in the 1880s, and founded the New Celtic Church. When the Little Totterington mages got back to the village, they realised that history had changed from they remembered.

They met with the druids, and became uneasy about their intentions. They also discovered that DI Telegraff really worked for an organisation called the Time Keepers that worked to prevent changes to the time-line. The druids had caused an unstable change that the TK's were keen to reverse. Just when things could hardly be more complicated, the mages learnt that Alan Carder had escaped. The finale involved demons devastating the village and the mages opening a second time portal to try to undo all the previous events. They were successful, although again some of the mages died and others were permanently changed by their experiences.

They ended up in the present day, in a world that is essentially the same as the one they always knew.

The mages were taking time to catch up with their lives and getting to know the new members of the group. However, questions remain unanswered: What had happened to the druids and the Time Keepers? Were the vampires from New York seeking revenge? Why did Jeffrey seem so unwell and disinterested in life?

The druids had set up home in the region, travelling around like New Age Travellers. Some settled on the slopes of the Ham Hog. In a power struggle, their leader Oghma was killed and Sioghan became their leader. She somehow became allied with Aleska the fae, who was later killed by Random in a fight in the woods with several of the mages.

There was a vampire in the village, visiting one member of the group with whom he had a relationship. A garou, following the command of his pack, came to the village to rid it of the vampire. Instead, he realised that he had met his life's partner and they returned to her Irish home.

It turned out that Jeffrey's illness was caused by a demon that had been dwelling inside him for years, the result of an earlier encounter with a Nephandus. It all came out (literally) at Grace's birthday party. While several of the group battled the demon in a realm that looked like the Wild West, others countered a garou that had fallen through the roof and anxious neighbours. You had to be there to really appreciate it! Finally, Jeffrey was taken to hospital to recover.

It was on the way home from visiting him, that the mages realised that their troubles were not yet over. They learnt that the Oxford Chantry had been destroyed. When they sought survivors, they met met someone who thought that the Oxford Chantry had been behind the attempt to change the time-line. They also learnt that Carder could not be involved in all these recent events because he was still imprisoned.

It is now 2014, and the polar ice-caps melted two years ago in little over a week. This was clearly unnatural and the mages, in their different ways, have been trying to find out what happened ever since. The story starts two years into this new watery world.

More Information

The Village of Little Totterington

The Characters

Joining the Game

Rules