As I go into Hwaet, I've been struggling a little with figuring out how exactly I want to handle the storytelling elements.
I'm not a huge fan of scripted experiences; the whole point of a tabletop game is to allow as much improvisation as is helpful or necessary.
On the other hand, my personal experience is that people tend to be fairly conservative storytellers, especially if they don't have specific experience in doing this.
I've been reading a lot of Carl Jung recently (I just finished the section of Man and His Symbols which was written by Jung himself), and I've been struck by the importance of dreams in Jungian analytics and wondering about how to apply that to games.
One way that I've already handled this is by having it be explicit that the GM chooses mystical symbols to represent elements of the setting, encouraging a tie between the known world that players occupy and the unknown world that the GM should be creating.
Challenges to Exploring the Unknown
There are really three ways you can handle the unknown in tabletop games: be intentionally obtuse, rely on the GM, or build it into the mechanics.
Hwaet doesn't have a defined setting, and I don't like being obtuse even if it did (though I did it for velotha's flock), so the first is out.
The GM's section is a great tool for new players. However, I want to be careful with how I develop the GM's guide section of the rulebook.
First, you can't really count on GMs to follow your directions. This may be projection: I sure as heck don't follow the rules in the GM's guide, but I probably read them. This means that while I can include a lot of advice for how to run the game it would be just a mite hypocritical to expect people to really follow advice that I would rarely follow myself, the hard-headed fool that I am.
Second, when I've seen some games that really go into detail about following a certain path of narrative, I've found that they almost always wind up shooting themselves in the foot. Golden Sky Stories is an example of this; it confounds the matter by having mechanics that don't permit any flexibility, but the real issue is that there's no room for players to defy expectations.
Mechanically speaking, the unknown is difficult to represent by definition.
Of course, you can use lots of randomness to get unexpected results, but the unexpected and the unknown are entirely different affairs. A car accident is unexpected, but being lost in a foreign country is unknown (hopefully).
Putting too much of a structure on things causes problems.
Balancing the Mechanisms of the Unknown
This section title would work well for a surreal/absurd rock song.
Hwaet has two mechanics that really help pull us into the unknown. The first is the wyrd mechanic.
Basically, each character has a destiny declared when they are created. This can change later, but the general idea is that the character will always be pushing toward this goal, and it's something that is at least difficult and perhaps impossible.
The wyrd is handled like a power-source and a risk at the same time. As characters go too far from the liminal space that links the known world and the unknown world of the hero, they suffer harm that impedes their destiny.
If they never leave the known world, their destiny fails because they are unprepared for it, but they also can be devastated by encounters beyond their capability if they dash ahead (fools rush in where angels fear to tread).
However, the counterpart to the wyrd is the nemesis.
The nemesis is the part of the unknown world that poses a threat to the hero's destiny, and it can intrude against them. This plays a role in fallout, which happens when the character takes stress; any extreme fallout can turn the nemesis into a threat for the whole party.
If the nemesis is destroyed or incapacitated, it is replaced with an even greater threat. It may also damage the hero's wyrd, if this is done in a way that doesn't force the hero to grow, leaving them with a worse possible outcome.
In the case of Beowulf, this may be a sort of natural progression; defeating one evil may lead to another until eventually the hero perishes in conflict: as an avatar of the known world, they annihilate themselves as they destroy their counterpart from the unknown.
Illustration of Beowulf fighting the dragon by J.R. Skelton, in the public domain due to age.
It's worth noting that this replaces normal death mechanics. Heroes can suffer loss throughout the course of their adventures, but they never die or become permanently incapacitated.
After all, part of confronting the unknown is bearing the scars you carry with you.