Roleplaying games from historical research
This didn’t go live on time: happy belated New Year! Plot hooks at the end. Night on the bloodstained snow: the wind is chill:And there a thousand tombless warriors lie,Grasping their swords, wild-featured. All are still.Above them the black ravens wheel and cry. A brilliant moon sends her cold light abroad:Hialmar arises from the reddened…
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An origin story for a reskin of the pirates in “Tales of Power”.
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CHAPTER VIIIThe Arrival of the Rune On a sunny May morning in Erl the witch Ziroonderel sat in the castle nursery by the fire, cooking a meal for the baby. The boy was now three years old, and still Lirazel had not named him; for she feared lest some jealous spirit of Earth or air…
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This went live in a slightly garbled way – if this was a professional podcast with a budget, I’d replace it, but…such is not our lot. The three stories this week survive much of the bowdlerisation found in the others. Goat Face is much the same. In Parsley, the child has a tuft of parsley…
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We spend a lot of time with the King of Elfland in these chapters. Here we discover he’s like the faeries in Ars Magica. The king is, in a very real sense, his land. CHAPTER VIThe Rune of the Elf King On the high balcony of his gleaming tower the King of Elfland stood. Below…
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When we were going through Lord Dunsay’s short stories we missed one, because it was connected with a couple of others we could not use in a single larger frame story. I’ve chopped that top bit off, because I love how the end of it is a completely confused Realm Interaction Table. Stats aren’t necessary,…
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This section doesn’t have a lot of folklore, because it doesn’t need it. This is the point where real history and Mythic European history diverge. The Doge, one of the richest and best connected men in the world, offers anything to save his wife, who is rotting to death. In the real world she dies.…
Read MoreI didn’t use the frame narrative for the Petamerone, because its racist, and not just “Well, in their time..” racist, but full on speaking-in-pidgin caricature racist. In the story the main character, our heroine, is a princess who cannot laugh of smile. In the list of things that cannot make her grin it includes the…
Read MoreThe 300th episode just went live. It’s not numbered 300, because I’ve mucked up the releases at various stages, but that’s where we are. It’s not a big celebratory episode, because this is a sombre year filled with exhaustion. This has been a tricky year, and in terms of Games From Folktales, it still hasn’t…
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The Pentamerone is an early collection of Italian fairy tales, that was used as source material by the Brothers Grimm and Charles Perrault. It interests us, for Ars Magica, because its fifty stories are tied to a particular place where we’ve not done a lot of work: southern Italy. Also, because it was written earlier,…
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Games From Folktales 