All articles filed in Ars Magica

It’s useful for us when a monster reskins itself. This is basically the origin story for a banshee-like creature, but found in Venice. We can just shift the stats across and change the appearance. It also describes an instance of Venetian love magic, which is useful to us. *** It was in the dogado of…

We finish our little season of poems by De La Mare with this episode, Six brief pieces, with a mixture of monsters and locations. A couple of minor notes in explanation. The first peopm is called “The Gage”, and it seems to have been read as “The Cage”. presumably because it was thought a spelling…

The second chapter of the King of Elfland’s daughter is a slow start, with little we can harvest for roleplaying games. It’s going to be included here because it sets a baseline which Dunsany calls back to later, to show the effects of the powers of the King of Elfland. I hope listeners will, therefore,…

This week, five poems from the spooky world of Walter De La Mare describing two locations and three creatures. The Librivox recording I’m using for these episodes is, sadly, missing three poems out of the collection. I’ll drop back in at the second and fourth poems. Eventually I’ll stat up the Queen of Night, the…

A story from Edgecumb Stanley that magi might intervene in at any point. It may sound familiar… The love-story of Gerardo Guoro and Elena Candiano is as touching as any in the gentle annals of romance. She was the daughter of Doge Pietro Candiano IIL,—a girl in whose veins coursed the bluest of noble Venetian…

This week a lengthy episode based on the poetry of Walter De La Mare. Previously I was sending out one poem a week, because the written notes usually contain a monster, which takes a great deal of time to stat up. The problem is that it makes tiny little podcast episodes. In future I’ll be…

Thanks to Eva Davis from Librivox for the recording, which is from her version of Elizabethan Demonology. Statistics eventually. Spenser has clothed with horror this conception of the appearance of a fiend, just as he has enshrined in beauty the belief in the guardian angel. It is worthy of remark that he describes the devil…

Games From Folktales has been working its way through the early stories from Lord Dunsany for several years now. Due to the vagaries of US copyright law “The King of Elfland’s Daughter“, his masterpiece, only became available to us this year. I was planning to record it myself, but one of the other Librivoxians beat…