These transcripts are from the two episodes originally published in the January microepisode week. There was a third episode that week, and it has a separate transcript.
Microepisode week is to allows me to use up plot ideas that have been sitting in my notebooks for a while. I’ve noticed that ideas that go out to the community and circulate around a little tend to come back in better forms. That is when you look at Ars Magica it’s often the second or third attempt that we make it something that’s the good one. So this lets me get the primary idea out into the ether, so that any of you have some ideas can connect together ideas you have and, hopefully in a week or a month or a year, I’ll see them reflected back in some more beautiful form. This is far better than if I just left them in my notebooks but it does lead to a slightly disjointed episode so if you’re new to the podcast choose pretty much any of the other episodes.
Rossini’s wigs
A little trivia can lead to a plot hook. Recently on “No such thing as a fish”, which is a podcast run by the people who do the research for the television program QI, they mentioned that the composer Rossini was terribly embarrassed by his baldness so he had ten wigs made, each slightly longer than the one before, and he wore them in a weekly sequence. He made sure to comment to people that he was going to visit the barber and then switch back to the shortest.
In thinking about this I was immediately struck by the idea that this prevented you from having your hair used against you as an Arcane Connection. So as a plot hook: the covenants stables have burst into flame! Once you control the fire, and save most of the horses and supplies, you discover one of the animals is dead. Basic divination makes it the source of the fire, but how is that possible? Horses don’t just explode. One of your senior mages wears a horsehair wig. His enemy cast a pilum of fire using hairs from that wig as an arcane connection. This struck the horse and incinerated it, setting the hay in the stables to flame. How can you keep the elder magus safe while tracing his attempted murderer, and how do you deal with them, given that they must have a great skill at magic to open an intangible tunnel?
Looking a little more, I discovered that his work-space was oddly geometric: everything had its precise place, including his wigs which were kept in their order on busts. People who visited him were astonished, because back then opera composers were Libertines. If you’ve seen the movie “Amadeus”, people were expected to live like that: in a sort of squalor that only the truly rich can manage. I like that he was so persnickety, partly because I have OCD and we like to claim every historical genius as ours, and because it makes him sound more like a magus. A Twilight scar could have caused his incurable baldness.
Tycho Brahe’s Nose
Tycho Brahe lost his nose during a duel at University so he wore a prosthetic one. I won’t be able to stop myself until I call this a prosthetic proboscis, so I’ll get that out of the way now. He had several: he had a brass one for everyday wear and he had a court nose which was gilded, for when he was swanning about with royalty. A long time ago I considered faerie prosthetic limbs, but now I’m trying to write up Stellasper, a covenant housing an astronomical sept of Criamon magi, and I can’t help thinking that cutting off your nose to use a prosthetic nose that previously belonged to a great astronomer might be some sort of initiation ritual. Criamon magi tend to be aloof from human contact at best, so making changes to their faces might not count as a flaw. Nevertheless the nose of Tycho Brahe is one of those things that if I were to write it up people would think I was being silly and that makes me want to write it up even more.
That nose has been next to every telescope that has made every famous discovery by Tycho Brahe. If it’s a spirit of artifice it should be a powerful one and to make the best use of it you might have to cut off your nose. Worse, he has two noses for different purposes: one for serious work as an astronomer and one for when he was with noblemen. What if the two noses are rivals? What if they force their two wearers into competition?
Minor notes on fairy feasts
This is a tiny bit of color for fairy feasts, from a study by the Institute of Making. Most fairies don’t use iron in Ars Magica. They tend to use bronze or brass weapons instead. That was particularly the case in the 2nd and 3rd editions – now instead they use faerie iron, which is a substance that looks like iron only to people who don’t really know anything much about iron. Their faerie iron is made out of glamour and ambient matter rather than real iron.
The inability to use iron is a particular difficulty when eating. In the modern day we use stainless steel in our eating utensils because it doesn’t interact with the acids in foods or with saliva. Eating food off brass or bronze implements tastes terrible. Similarly silver dining utensils, although they have been popular historically, taste horrible. Faerie iron and faerie silver may have other flavors – it’s possible they’re even positive. Some people report that copper utensils make fruit taste sweeter. The Institute suggests that you haven’t lived until you’ve eaten off gold implements, as these have the pure flavor of the food, with nothing added, as gold is all but unreactive. Frankly if you have the fluorine in your mouth required to make the gold react you have bigger problems than listening to my podcast. Get to a hospital immediately. The paper I’m reading doesn’t consider wood or ceramic utensils which, particularly in the latter case, can have a similar flavorlessness, because they’re not reactive.
Many Europeans carry an eating knife with them so this would be one easy way of telling if a person is a faerie. You would look at their knife, or you would let them use your knife to eat with.
Amalfi paper
One day one of us will write a Venice book. It’s obvious. They’re the rising power in 13th century Europe. They’re the crossroads where everything meets. In the setting, Venice hasn’t yet risen to the heights it will reach in the Renaissance, but it has been set up as a place where covenants from all over Europe have chapter houses. Someone will write Venice and that means that someone should write Amalfi. Amalfi is the first of the merchant city-states that trade through the Mediterranean, and thereby get money to hire mercenaries, build ships, and develop banks. They fall. They fall to Venice and to the Normans who invade southern Italy.
Venice is built on services transport banking but it has some unique luxury good: glass. Particularly in mythic Europe as described, that’s overemphasized. When I was describing the glass trade in “City and Gild” I got that bit wrong. I mistook fine glass for all “quite good” glass. At some point I need to do an episode about forest glass, to explain what the rest of Europe was doing for glass, because it’s probably what your covenant mates are doing. In my defense everyone who’d written about Ars Magica glass previously had also been tied into the Venetian magic of glass.
Amalfi’s great treasure, the thing that it made no one else could make as well, was paper. Paper is one of those evocative things that we know that Magi want. In some ways they need it, because it would allow their apprentices to study faster, from disposable books. It’s a population growth tool and a military preparedness tool.
So Amalfi, the great merchant state, surrounded on all its mountains by water driven mills pounding cotton fibers into paper, has neve3r been written up. I think perhaps it’s that it’s very difficult to find materials about Amalfi in English. It is certainly easier to write about Venice. It is certainly easier to write about Norman Sicily and the splendours of the court of Frederick II. When we do write about Frederick II’s court, and we’re doing Venice and we’re doing Rome and we’re doing Magvillus, it would be very easy to forget little Amalfi. I think it would be a perfect place for a covenant/
Belgian whetstones
The best whetstones in Europe come from Belgium. There’s a particular mine there. The stones aren’t particularly large. They’re a sort of blue marbled substance and the Romans made sure that they kept quite a tight hold of that spot while they were in that part of Europe. I keep thinking that one of the local covenants should control that place.
Clearly it’s something that everyone wants. Everyone wants sharp swords. Everyone wants sharp knives. Everyone wants sharp agricultural tools. I like the idea of it because when we talk about what covenants do for a living, tying them down to a single commodity can force stories. That’s why I suggested in Covenants that there is one that makes its money by mining custard.
Cauldrons
Your covenant probably doesn’t have a cauldron. The structure of a cauldron is basically a pot with little legs underneath, so that you can pack fuel in. It can be suspended over a fire. Sometimes if it doesn’t have the little legs, but basically it’s got the rounded shape because it doesn’t sit upon a flat surface. Flat-bottomed saucepans, which I’m told by Wikipedia Americans may call stockpots, occur because you’ve got an oven underneath. The fire in the oven is heating the element and the element is heating the pot.
In the kitchens of many covenants they have a simple magic item which causes a stone or a piece of a metal to heat up. If you have that sort of magic item you don’t have cauldrons: you would have something that directly contacts across the entire surface like a saucepan or a stockpot. So, because they have invented ovens, the way that hermetic magicians produce food might look entirely different to the way that contemporary people produce food. You could still have some of the dry heat applications – like spit roasting for example – but if you have ovens cauldrons make less sense. Baking makes a lot more sense and not just for bread. Most of the roasts we now eat aren’t actually roasted from a medieval perspective, they’re baked. When you go into a covenant kitchen you’re likely to see something far more like a Victorian kitchen, simply because magi have accidentally invented the oven element.
This also affects what they cook. It’s easier to make omelettes on an element for example. It’s easier to make pancakes on an element. It’s easier to get closer to the element, so it’s easier to manipulate the food. This means you can fry food in smaller individual pieces. The cuisine of the order of Hermes may seem strange to cooks from that period
Wine Slush
Ice cream hasn’t been invented in Europe yet but it’s getting close. In period there is some reference to people eating wine slush, which is the dregs from wine mixed with snow. This creates a delicacy which is a little bit like shave ice. I imagine that Magi use this is a festive food, because they can produce ice easily. They don’t have to import it (and that was a business that made certain people very rich somewhat after the medieval period) because they can produce ice simply, Turkish sherbet is not yet known in Mythic Europe I know that it enters English through French where it’s called sorbet
Hot Crust pies
The pies which are baked in period are hot crust pies. They are made by shaping a dough up around a wooden form, which is called a dolly, blind baking the pie, then stuffing the pie. The fats which go into the pie tend to be things like lard and it is unusual to eat the outer case of the pie in period. In later periods, less salt is used and more butter is added, so that the case itself becomes edible. We now call it a crust: in period it was called a coffin, a word which at the time just meant “box”. You would pop the top off and scoop the contents out of the coffin, then eat them.
[That sounds disgusting and necromancers should probably do that]
Pies are designed to prevent their contents from going off. The whole point of the crust is to act as clingfilm. It prevents air reaching the middle of the pie so that the things inside don’t rot. American settlers used to be able to fill a barn with pies during harvest season and just thaw one out each morning. It doesn’t matter how dirty it gets. It doesn’t matter if stuff grows on it, so long as nothing gets inside. In this it would be assisted by the resistance to rot and decay that magic items have.
In many pies, particularly pies with meat in them, it was necessary to exclude the air further. They did that with a thick layer of gelatine. This is called aspic. Aspic pies are those slightly terrifying ones you see in period British dramas. They would make a really decent form for single use magic items, because the problem with potions is you can spill them. I’ve often thought potions should be in the form of boiled sweets: that way if you drop them it doesn’t matter
Shock Quartz
Shock quartz has a lamellar structure (that is, it’s in sheets) rather than in the traditional crystals. It was discovered in the blast craters of nuclear weapons, then people started finding naturally-occurring shock quartz. It turns out that this shock quartz is caused by meteoric impacts. We’ve only discussed meteoric impacts seriously in one Ars Magica supplement. That’s the “Fallen Fane”. It’s the one with which I’m, perhaps, least familiar with because it’s an adventure and I don’t believe I’ve run it. It’s interesting that these stones that fall from the sky have the ability to transmute the rock that they strike. Hermetic magicians may have some vague idea that this is possible because lightning does metaphorically similar thing to silica. It creates great webs of fused glass that are called thunderbolts.
Shock warts may prove the MacGuffin for all kinds of original research. Now when you’re looking for it in Mythic Europe there is a particular place that’s of value. It’s in Bavaria, around the town of Nördlingen. Nordlingen is in a meteoric impact site and there is so much of this shocked quartz that the people used the quartz to build the foundations for their houses. They have an entire village built on this mystical stuff. Does does it create an aura does it call down astral spirits? Does it make aerial demons feel more comfortable in the place?
Shattercones
Another interesting material that magicians may wish to use for their laboratories, or to enchant as forms for magic items, are shatter cones. When a meteorite falls, if large enough, it causes a pressure wave. This creates shock quartz and then, beneath the ground, it creates shatter cones.
The pressure flows away through the ground creating cones of compressed soil or pseudostriated stone. If there are multiple cones that are connected to one meteoric crater, their tips all point toward where the meteor struck. Shattercones vary in size.
The smallest are microscopic and the largest known one is about 10 meters long. I’d like to see a magician who wants to collect all of the shatter cones from a single crater and use them as a laboratory piece, to control lightning, or draw down airy spirits, or call down lightning to reanimate corpses.
Phosphorous
Phosphorus was discovered by an alchemist called Henning Brown in 1669. He took a large amount of urine, left it sitting around for until it became a black powder, burned it with sand, and then ran the vapors and oils that came off the mass through water to condense them. (You might be wondering why someone has that much urine lying around. Up until the 17th century urine was used in laundry.)
Henning Brown called his new substance phosphorus, because it glows in the dark. He was very interested in the Philosopher’s Stone and people thought that a cold substance that a cold fire was just the kind of mystical thing that may lead to being able to live forever or turn led to gold. Brand is the first named person to discover an element.
Elements don’t exist in Ars Magica in the conventional sense, but we may finally have found an elemental more dangerous than the published one full of toxic white lead. An elemental made out of phosphorus is explosive and toxic to the touch. The main forms of phosphorus are white phosphorous, which is the one that would be discussing so far, and red phosphorus, which is what happens when you take white phosphorous and, in the absence of air, you heat it to about 300 degrees. The advantage of red phosphorus is that it’s not toxic to touch. Similarly white phosphorous will just burn on its own when left in air: red phosphorus is slightly more stable. Having mentioned phosphorus I’d like to draw your attention back to an earlier episode of the podcast called Playing The Ghost in which I discussed the early Australian custom of people covering themselves in phosphorescent paint and jumping out to scare other locals, That episode also deals with the Spring-heeled Jack phenomenon
Dragees
In the window of the oldest chocolate shop in Adelaide there’s an explanation for where dragees come from. Dragees have various forms, but what I’m talking about here are sugared almonds, which in Australia are used as wedding favors. The sign said that they were invented in Paris at the start of the 13th century and they were made by coating almonds in a toffee made out of honey. Paris is significant in that it’s the start of the Grand Tour for House Jerbiton. Who’s making these honeyed nuts?
I’d like to suggest that it’s a demon who wants to appear affable and friendly, so he gives these things out. He seems weak, and it encourages the young apprentices to underestimate him and call him “Old Honeynuts”. The bear-leaders of the Grand Tour insist that they don’t do that, but forbidding actions makes people want to do them. The young magi steal his nuts, and underestimate him, but he doesn’t mind, because it allows him to entrap them in one of the later places where demons have greater power, for example the demonic bridge that crosses St Bernard’s Pass in the Alps
Games From Folktales 