Happy new year!
A few interesting things in the community. Darkwing has a thread on the Atlas Forum where people are discussing his ideas on materials they’d like authors in the community to work on. May I ask you to seriously consider participating in this? https://forum.atlas-games.com/t/30-days-of-product-ideas/176549
Mythic Europe Magazine
Submissions are open and I’ve accepted and laid out five articles. Currently it’s 29 pages including art and covers, so it’s smaller than the first one. I hope to have it out in April 2026. I also have a few other authors whose pieces are yet to arrive. Regardless, the price will be set on a cents per page basis, so if it’s smaller the price will be lower.
I’ve not written a piece myself. My earlier hope, to write a piece based on the Island of Doctor Moreau and stat up all of the creatures, won’t be possible because I have just finished a sprint for Ars Magica Monsters Volume 2 and need a break before I (hopefully) catch up on my backlog with AMM3 as an “Every Day In May” sprint. I’m thinking of an article where I replace the covenant finance rules in ArM5:DE with the Ordeal rules from Mystery Cults or the Labor point rules from City and Guild.
Cheshire
I’m going to move to the drafting stage on my Cheshire material. It hasn’t given me a coherent theme like the Cornwall research did, so it’s likely to be a set of possible covenants with nearby adventures. It won’t have the gazetteer feel of Cornwall. Chester itself is strangely devoid of the sort of folklore I usually find by this stage of the research.
You’ll still be getting some episodes of the rough research but there’s a definite end to the process of burrowing into books in sight. I have a couple of books still in note form that have not become episodes, because I’m keeping them to one a month. I have three books still coming from secondhand dealers on various other continents, and they may add to the folklore pile. Those aside the only other books I’m still wanting to digest for this are Sir Gawain and the Green Knight which is from the Wirral, and the Alice books, which I’ve been rereading and I’m once again sure they have surprisingly little to offer beyond monsters and free art.
The ideas for covenants which I’m working on are:
On the salt road through Longdendale, up through the mountains
At Beeston Castle, which starts being constructed in 1220
Saga frames would include
The Sleeping King under Alderley Edge. (Possibly with a route to Becoming as a character death alternative.)
The Green Knight (with the beheading game as an Ordeal). One of the authors I’m following is very heavily influenced by the Celtic Cult of the Head, but I’m old enough to remember when every roleplaying game had guys with trench coats and katanas, so I’m shy of going there.
The Court in Wonderland. One of the authors I’m following suggests that Carrol’s characters are based on a local guising troupe and that has potential as a mystery cult.
In terms of costs, I don’t see a way to do this properly without at least two maps, and that’s paid art, which means this will eventually be a paid supplement rather than “pay what you want”.
Other things
I literally don’t know what I’m doing after that. Returning to Venice? Rewriting Sanctuary of Ice for ArM5DE, complete with the missing covenants and the one I added since? My focus is to keep building my skills so that I can eventually do something the size of Venice again.
Games From Folktales 