Roleplaying games from historical research
Let’s keep running around with a butterfly net through the folklore of Cheshire, grabbing things to use in a setting. There’s a local magical tradition of multi-form shapeshifting witches. Thanks to Brian Fullen and his production team for this recording. This is a pretty simple style of magic to create statistics for: the person gets…
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One of the team from the other Ars Magica Venice book reached out to me and asked if I could support their Backerkit campaign with a podcast episode, and I’m happy to. I’d like to quickly note this isn’t a paid advertisement and I don’t have any access beyond my status as a subscriber to…
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For our monster of the month, two merfolk variants. One is a vicious triton similar to the Daughter Summoned To the Comb in Mythic Europe Magazine #1, with an added power to enthrall via eye contact. The other is a faerie seducer. These recordings were made for Librivox by Dale Grothmann and Alan Mapstone. Thanks…
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I heard this poem and was developing it as a monster. I was preparing a sort of Frankenstein’s monster figure, a revener that, when you killed it, turned out to just be a vessel for a demon that was sitting in its chest cavity. Then I realized I’d seen something directly similar: this is the…
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This is more of a puzzle than a story. The magi want the confession under the hand of the skeleton of Lord Lovel. An influx of air will destroy the pages. How do they use their magic to read or transcribe them? Thanks to Shrimpfish and their Librivox production team for the recording. ***Francis Lovel…
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Cheshire is a traditionally English county that’s just to the north of Wales. Its county town is Chester, which is in the far west of the county. Chester was a Roman fortress used to pacify the people in what’s in modern north Wales. In 1220 Cheshire is a different shape to what you’ll see on…
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There’s an idea in Ars Magica, stolen from period texts, that sometimes demons attach to a person and cause all joy to be sucked out of their life. This is called “oppression”. The following story is set far after the game period, but it shows how simple oppression can wear a person down by stealing…
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Procopius was a senator in the reign of the Emperor Justinian, and his writings are the core primary source when studying him. He was the legal advisor to Belisarius, Constantinople’s most skilled general, and wrote about his military campaigns. In secret he also wrote a second history, parodying how tacky the emperor, the general, and…
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We had one of Edith Nesbit’s ghost stories last week, so this week one of her tales for children. This comes from The Book of Dragons, which I compulsively re-read in primary school. I waited for it to hit public domain in the United States, planning to grab it the first weekend it was available,…
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Our second ghostly visitant from Lanacastrian Ballads: this is a pair of ghosts, of which the unnamed lady is the more interesting. She’s linked to a lightning tree, which are sometimes sought out by magi as useful for enchantment. She may have powers related to the weather or may be strangely transformed into a dryad,…
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Games From Folktales 