All articles filed in Ars Magica

The first of two short episodes for the week. This is a statue found in Venice that I’ll be redesigning as a demon. Stats eventually. The description comes from William Dean Howell’s “Venetian Life”. *** There would be nothing to say, after Mr. Ruskin, in praise or blame of the great monuments in San Giovanni…

This is the second episode of Lucian’s “True Story”. My comments on it are at the beginning of yesterday’s episode. One trigger warning: it being an ancient Greek text there’s a brief mention of child sexual abuse. Thanks again to Terry Kroenung and his Librivox production team. *** Upon this we began to be weary…

This being the week that the podcast celebrates its sixth anniversary I am allowing myself the luxury of two, long, perhaps pointless, episodes. I started playing Ars Magica decades ago and the second thing I tried to rework as source material was Lucian’s “True Story”. It doesn’t work because its fantasy level is far too…

The last time we visited Mythic Venice we found a representative of the Infernal, so perhaps its fitting that this time we add a saint. He’s not one of the great saints, like Mark, or a locally potent but slightly pagan-seeming saint like Giustiana. He seems to be a folk saint, supported by a bishop.…

Time for our monster of the month. Hume Nisbet was an English writer who lived for a while in Australia, and it affected much of his fiction. This story, though, when I think of it, seems better suited to England, with its gloomier light and shingle roofs. The recording was released by TypicalJax through Librivox.…

A couple of quick comments, beyond the usual reminder to look at how many times Cellini tells you that he is better than other people, including you, We have some characters who, for context, need a little bit more description. The angel of death he meets is not the Jewish angel of death covered in…

I’m disappointed. I thought I’d found a fantasy author who used the areas around Devon as his canvas, and I had. This would have let me push the free material for Ars Magica further east, to join up with the Cornwall and Bristol channel material already available. The problem is that now I’ve discovered that…