Roleplaying games from historical research
This traditional ballad could serve as a background for a player character or a pair of covenfolk. I’d make one little note: the word “daughter” and “after” are rhymed here. There are dialects of English in which the word was pronounced “dafter”. Slaughter, similarly, was said “slafter”. It was collected in Ancient Poems, Ballads, and…
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I remember having a discussion at a writers workshop about 30 years ago, when I suggested that if all you did was respond with aphorisms you were less a person than the sewn together bits of other people. I was insufferable back then. Anyway, I thought of that because in this poem there’s a bibliophile…
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Thanks again to Thomas Copeland whose Librivox read I’m making comments on. My initial plan was to add the rules for the Green Chapel mystery cult to this episode. My health being what it is, instead next month you’ll get the variant of the story that contains a Faerie-raised lady as the motivator for the…
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This is an English folksong that has a boar I’m choosing to read as infernally-possessed. It’s a simple sort of monster, but suited for low-combat sagas. The song is often called Sir Robert Bolton had three sons because the trend at the time was to use the first line for indexing. Some performers call it…
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In Ars Magica, magi of House Jerbiton value beauty, but only when created by nature or humans: never faeries. As a plot hook, I’d suggest this has a historical cause, and it’s the Mythic European version of AI model collapse. To define terms, model collapse is caused when the outputs of an algorithm are fed…
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This is one of the rare episodes where I haven’t written up a script, so you’ll pardon me ifI’m very rambly. This week I had hoped to present to you the episode which involves The Fairy with the Blue Hair, also known as the Blue Fairy, from “The Adventures of Pinocchio”, but having just halfway…
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This week: another monster. I originally was writing this up, I wasn’t sure how to approach it. Is it a vampire with a very complicated way of mesmerizing and then consuming you? But then I thought, no. Maybe this is an infestation. Rather like the maggots in Realms of Power, The Infernal or like a…
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Yellow water filled the ditches by the roadside. Yellow clouds drifted lazily through tranquil webs of darkness and obscured far, glimmering stars. Horror and misery stared out of sodden eyes, and the night was filled with voices. Men with packs made vivid, grotesque gestures against the yellow sky and swore in their beards. Men ambled…
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The following very curious story is from the Eyrbyggja Saga, one of the oldest and noblest of the Icelandic histories. As it results in an action unique in its way,—a lawsuit brought against a party of ghosts who haunted a house,—it well merits attention from all lovers of curiosities. In the summer of 1000, the year…
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This is a sort of ghost story from 1907. It’s also how I intend to cheat slightly for the 30 monsters in May thing on the Atlas Games Forum. Bwahahahah. Statistics at the end. *** Our cat Thomas was very sensitive. I never knew such a sensitive cat as Thomas was. The slightest harsh word…
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Games From Folktales 