Roleplaying games from historical research
Kipling is an odd author: a fervent imperialist who, at the same time, felt pity for the soldiers who died to create his country’s global dominance. Here are some of his poems of use in Ars Magica games. The first poem is a hymn written to Mithras. It’s not genuine to the game period, but…
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The following ballad has a bit of a faerie tale feel about it, in that a young man faces a challenge and wins a rich bride. The odd thing is that Bell, who collected this in Ancient Poems, Ballads, and Songs of the Peasantry of England, insists it’s based on a true story and gives…
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This, rather long, episode is a retelling of the story by a Victorian Era translator from Yale. I’m including it because it has some ideas we can rework for Ars Magica. Thanks to Jerome Lewis, whose reading I’ll be interrupting occasionally, although I won’t repeat clarifications from previous episodes. This version does move away from…
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There’s a plot hook for us in this little piece of Dartmoor folklore. Peasants and monks play capture the flag with Luke Skywalker’s corpse. As a note a “partisan” here is a polearm from after the game period. Thanks to Phil Schemp and his Librivox production team for this reading. *** Fox Tor has always…
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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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