All articles filed in Ars Magica

This week, the second half of a pair of episodes dedicated the poetry of Sara Teasdale: a melancholy American poet whose writings I’m mining for monsters (well, spirits). Helen of Troy is still believed to be active in Mythic Europe. Many Greeks believe that she’s on one of these small islands in the Black Sea,…

This week, a lengthy poem from an American poet, Sara Teasdale. I’ve been looking at Teasdale’s work because in the Cornwall material I’m collecting together I have the Infernal Saint of Sorrow, but for her to be effective she can’t go around constantly being Dolores of the Seven Sorrows. She has to fool people by…

I’m sending this live a few weeks early, so that people can have it to slap together adventures during the Coronoavirus lockdowns. It’s 83 monsters from previous episodes of GFF – all linked to the original episode and the bit of folklore they were stolen from, if any. It covers up until the end of…

This week, perhaps, the last of our Cornish episodes. It’s the last of the material from Scilly and Its Legends by Henry Whitfeld. There’s an island called St Agnes and next to it is an area called “St Warna” but pronounced “Saint Waound”. It’s the home of a cult of wreckers, where it was considered…

This week a quick episode it contains a poem by Thomas Randolph (based on a translation from the Latin by Leigh Hunt) that was published in the Nineteenth Century. It could be a clue as to why your characters keep losing their Herbam vis sources. On LibriVox, where, Jason released this into the public domain,…

This is one of those occasions when followers of Games From Folktales just need to let me have my little enthusiasms. I was going to cut this piece out because it’s a comic aside, but it’s easy to ignore physical comedy in roleplaying games, so I hope you find it useful. The readeris Ed Humpel…

This week, Zoolvisia, which is an Armenian folk tale. The story is split into two distinct parts and the first half would be a great origin story for a covenant. The second half is a sort of jailbreak adventure story that the characters may take the role of the lead character in. Plot hooks will…