All articles filed in Ars Magica

For this episode we return to the City of Dreadful Night. Rather than popping in so regularly after each section, I’ll give brief comments here. Much of the section is centred on a cathedral where a group of parishioners enter after they give a password, in which they discard their mortal circumstances. The preacher is…

I’d prepped most of this for my “Stories I’ve tried to write week” and then a plot idea emerged. I was discussing things with Andrew, over on a Shewstone planning list, and while we were discussing something else entirely he gave me the key to moving this post to a workable series of scenarios for…

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…