I’m unable to sleep because I’ve been bedridden for days with influenza, so I’m writing this up a week in advance. I apologise if I’m not entirely lucid: my wife has noticed that I’m extremely absent minded on flu medication.
The podcast celebrates its fifth birthday on May 25th. It has about 40 people who listen to it immediately on release, and about 120 who listen to each episode in the three months following release. This may seem like a small number, but if we could get forty of us in a room every week, it’d be an astonishing thing, so I’m happy with the numbers. They are gradually rising, which is contrary to my expectations. Partly its because I’m picking up some extra listeners due to the Spanish edition, and partially the Pentamerone run has bought in some people from outside the Ars Magica sphere who are here for the folklore, but are willing to listen to the other stuff.
The Patreons, without whom this would not be possible, are:
John Robotman
Eric H
Benjamin Gratch
The Ranting Savant
Thomas Stewart
Ben McFarland
Anonymous
Jason Tondro
Daniel Jensen
Dan Casar
Jason Italiano
Pantelis Polakis
I’m well behind on the monthly pdfs of the blog, for which I apologise. The way the podcast plan works, it’s “use the space or lose it” and so I’ve been storing up lots of extra episodes. Once that’s done, I’ll catch up on monster stats and transcripts.
Thank you all, so much.
Their combined contributions are $19 a month, about $2 of which goes to Patreon and PayPal. This lets me afford the basic hosting cost (roughly $5 for 50 minutes) and it’s just below the next step up ($15 for 250 minutes, but minus more for Patreon and PayPal), so I save it up and splurge it every so often. That’s how I’ve been able to have episodes longer than an hour in some of the recent series.
The Mystery Man from Outer Space has done some sterling work with corrections on the Cornwall pdf. The latest version is on his page. Thanks also to the proofreaders – Saulot, particularly put in a lot of painstaking work.
In terms of the health of the podcast, it seems fine, but I can tell I’ve overstretched myself, so things will settle down to smaller episodes once this month’s uploads have run through the system. The state of play for the near future looks like this. Bold items have already been recorded and uploaded. In March last year I let all six the episodes I had in backlog loose at once, so people would have a moment of brightness in lockdown. I’ve finally rebuilt that back-up.
May
20 The King of Elflands Daughter 9
27 Venice – The Stupidest War
June
3 Pentamerone 8
10 Was Pendule a student of Plotinus?
17 The King of Elflands Daughter 10
24 Venice – The Place of Saint Mark
July
1 Pentamerone 9
1 Pentamerone Bonus Episode (note 2)
8 The Vampire of Croglin Grange
15 The King of Elflands Daughter 11
22
29 (Venice)
August
5 Pentamerone – the censored tales 1 – This is probably “The Flayed Old Lady” in Sir Richard Burton’s translation.
12 Black Spirits and White – The Succubus
19 The King of Elflands Daughter 12 (conclusion of series)
26 (Venice)
September
2 [Pentamerone]
9 Black Spirits and White – Count Albert
In general looking ahead we have the following things:
The King of Elfland’s Daughter series was a bit of an indulgence for me, and it’s complete come August. One day I might make an Ars Magica annotated version of the text, but I’m so far behind other things it’s not worth promising.
Similarly, the Pentamerone tales which were allowed in the bowdlerized edition come to an end in July, but that series will continue in some form with the Burton translations. It’ll never be a whole annotated book, because the frame narrative is really, really racist, as are some of the stories, and I don’t want to read pidgin Black voices into the podcast.
The Venice series is open ended. Originally I started the Pentamerone to get ideas for Venice, but its headed off into the wilds and become its own thing. Now that the book we are following, “The Dogaressa of Venice” is getting into the Renaissance, we will head off in other directions. “The Place of Saint Mark”, in June, is from a travel guide. We also have not yet walked into the absolutely lovely “Daughters of Alchemy” by Meredith K. Ray. It’s too modern for me to record, but the Books of Secrets it refers to are not.
Magonomia, the other project I’m working on, seems likely to hit its mark of June 30. There’s information over on the publisher’s page, and a lovely review. It’s a FATE based game of Elizabethan wizards and it was a pleasure to write. I did fly a kite on the idea of either having one episode of Magonomia a month, or splitting it off into its own podcast, but I think the sensible thing is to catch up on this project before I commit to any others.
And that’s the state of the podcast. Thank you for your support for these five years.
Games From Folktales 