What was your inspiration for Sub Rosa Stories?

I’ve always been fascinated by cults, conspiracy theories, and obscure history, especially focused on the lives of the average person or the daily lives of historical figures, not up on the great deeds they were known for, but the nitty-gritty aspect.

The intertwining of historical elements, such as shown in James Burke’s Connections and subsequent works or of folklore, such as by folklorists like Jan Brunvand, also pulls to me. Even though most myth, folklore, and legends aren’t true in a literal sense, they all give some insight into the people who made the, as well as having a core element of reality. Monsters are often normal creatures seen by people unfamiliar with them, misinterpretations of the bones of real beasts (such as dinosaurs becoming dragons or mammoths becoming cyclopes), or descriptions of other ethnicities (such as centaurs being Scythians).

Similarly, we see history in myth. The Iliad is a merging of the many times Troy has been sacked, and god wars the world over represent one group invading and conquering a preceding nation from the Tuatha de Dannen (Celtic invaders) and the Firbolgs (the Irish, who are still genetically distinct from Celtic populations), the modern Hawaiians (immigrants from Tahiti) and the Menehune (the islands’ prior inhabitants), the Hellenic gods versus the Titans (Mykeneans) and the Giants (Sea Peoples), and even the various disasters in the Bible correspond with real-world mass floods (Noah’s Flood) and seismic events (the destruction of the Cities on the Plain). I have used traditional, pre-Tolkien interpretations of the fey, such as found in both myth and Pratchett, to be very effective.

Teasing out these elements is fascinating.

Now, let us go backward, and assume that there is some element of the divine or arcane to these events. Sometimes a flood is just a flood, but other times, it’s a river dragon turning in its sleep. Sometimes a volcanic eruption is just that, but it could have been caused by an imprisoned god breaking free of a subterranean jail. If we remove the racist elements from Ancient Alien and Lost Civilizations, we can find profitable realms for exploration as well. This isn’t to say the world is run by lizard people, far from it. Again, the key element is that most of the world is as it is in our reality, but that saurians (like Brenda “Pinky” Bly in the introduction) exist as remnants of a pre-human civilization. Even better, let’s move the mythic into the modern day. This is back into the realm of Brunvand’s urban legends, which are just nascent folklore and myth. UFO sightings, cryptids, Men in Black, Area 51, and so on are just the modern version of the same stories of things that go bump in the night. The similarity of alien stories and the stories of elves and of goblinoids like kobolds, goblins, and the aforementioned menehune, has been well established, as well as many of the same themes. Living in an industrial or post-industrial economy does not preclude such stories – if anything, it spreads them faster and farther.

That’s where the game comes in. I built Sub Rosa off of some work I did over twenty years ago that exploited those ideas. Roughly seven years ago, I rehabilitated the idea and produced two alternate history anthologies, where I, my primary collaborator, Elizabeth Kidder, and a few others wrote in what would become the Sub Rosa universe. Seeing a paucity in the market of newer urban fantasy games (both Vampire and Call of Cthulhu were last updated in the middle 2010s), I felt there was a need for such a thing, but without hewing so strongly to the bleakness and nihilism present in those games. Individual campaigns and storylines could be extremely dark, but the system wouldn’t be built from that perspective alone.

There is a need for something like Sub Rosa Stories and 5e is a great way to deliver it.