When you open a book of Cheshire folklore, Alderley Edge immediately looms. It’s like Sherwood in Nottingham folklore. Time for us to head on in. Here’s a version of the core story.

There was a farmer headed to market at Macclesfield to sell a fine, white mare. As he passed Thieves Hole on Alderley Edge, he was stopped by a man in a robe. He offered a price for the horse, but the farmer thought he could get higher at market. The robed man said he wouldn’t, and that he’d see him on the way back. He was proven right: it was a busy market, but the farmer just couldn’t land a buyer for his horse. On the way home the man again appeared and offered him his price.

The farmer accepted, and the man led him to a set of open iron gates, leading into a cave. Inside he told the farmer to take a fair fee from the piles of gold lying about. In the middle of the cave were knights and horses, fully armoured, and sleeping. The wizard explained that he was one horse short as he led the mare away. The man left with pockets of gold, and told all of his friends. They scoured the area but were unable to find the cave. Sometime people see the wizard in the distance.

England has a vast number of sleeping warrior sites. They aren’t all King Arthur, although he does get top billing. These armies are often said to be waiting for England’s darkest hour, but given the horrible things that have happened that foretold time must be pretty dire. Some writers say that he’s waiting for an invasion, and that England hasn’t been invaded since 1066, but that’s not true. It’s just not been conquered successfully. The Scots regularly pop over the border to wreck the countryside and drive off the cattle. Prince Louis of France landed with an army in 1216. None of these sleepers woke up to do anything useful in the real world, but in your campaign, 1216 might have been a heck of a year for guys in crowns waking under barrows and killing Frenchmen.

Could guardianship of the sleepers be an inherited duty? The player characters, instead of hunting for the buried Arthur, are in charge of dusting him occasionally and working out where the horses keep disappearing to. The common claim that the wizard of Aderley Edge of Merlin is difficult to reconcile with the idea that Nimune trapped him in a thorn bush or crystal cave. There are stories that put Thomas the Rhymer under a mountain with a sleeping king. His tendency to leave prophecies about could prove useful as a saga hook. The characters are storing up warriors and materiel to defend Mythic Europe from a terrible, distant, but inevitable, threat. The guardians of the sleepers could be a mystery cult. that supports the coming of the Mab Darogan, a sort of Welsh messiah.

The kings of England took a couple of bites at claiming they are the great Welsh (later English) messiah, by naming their kids Arthur. Princes named Arthur seem unlucky, though, so the royal house abandons it as a primary name. Arthur of Normandy gets murdered by his guardians to the advantage of his uncle Richard The Lionheart. Arthur Tudor dies before taking the English Crown so his wife, Catherine of Aragon, is handed over to Arthur’s brother, Henry VIII. You’ll notice they stopped calling heirs “Arthur” afterward. Partially this is because the monarchy started using names in tightly repeated patterns: so tight that Queen Victoria’s parents were told off for picking such a German sounding name, and the current king, Charles III, claimed his regnal name would be “George”. Enough of this diversion.

The main source I’m suing for this is Cheshire Ghosts and Legends by Frederick Woods .Woods makes a leap I can’t follow here, but the best game adaption I can patch in here is to say that the prophecy that these forces will be necessary came from the oracular head of Bran the Blessed. He was the mystical defender of Britain until King Arthur dug him up. Arthur claimed only his arms should defend his kingdom. In the Welsh Triads this is commemorated as one of the Three Tragic Uncoverings as it destroyed the magic defences maintained by the head, which prevented the Saxon invasion. The head, we may suggest in game, knowing that Arthur was going to wreck his first plan, could have set up a mystery cult to create this cache as a second line of defence.

It’s hard for me to go on here, because being a gamer of a certain age I was around when every game wanted to use the cult of the Cult of the Head, and suddenly the place was filled with broody guys in trenchcoats that concealed katanas. It does give us interesting options. The simplest way to design the magic of the cult is to let a head-taker use a virtue from one of his victims, so it becomes a more versatile version of the mask magic in Mythic Venice. It give us the Beheading Game in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight as an initiation script. Also, the green sash Gawain gained in that story became the mark of investiture for Knights of the Round Table, so we have the beginning of a cultic iconography. The sashes worn by hoplites might be related in game. I made up the sashes for hoplites in Sanctuary of Ice, I believe and knew I was pinching Gawain’s sash.