Roleplaying games from historical research
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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This week and the next, two ghost variants from a collection of Lancastrian Ballads by John Harland. Ghosts take many forms, but one of the more frightening ones is to appear with the wounds of their death upon them. In Fair Ellen’s case, this means she can appear as a large pie. She’s the guardian…
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This poem contains a Herbam, or even Corpus, vis source created by a race of faeries that are being driven to extinction by the invading humans. Robert Louis Stevenson collected this story in Galloway, and added a note to make sure his readers knew this was an older, and false, historiography. The Picts were not…
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This week a note on the Lancashire witches. In earlier episodes we’ve covered some of the folklore concerning the Lancashire Witch Trials, so when I heard that there was a ballad of the Lancashire witches I thought we would be going in for Tales spellcasting, familiars, trials, and late repentances. Instead I found a plot…
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For only the second time, Games From Folktales welcomes a guest author. Tom Nowell is one of the presenters for the other Ars Magica podcast, Arcane Connection. This article has been purchased for the new Mythic Europe Magazine, which is still accepting submissions. Before reading you Tom’s piece I want to flag a couple of…
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There doesn’t seem to be a clear, copyable text of the The Wolf Woman by Grace Morgan anywhere easily accessible, so here’s a link to a scan of the issue of Weird Tales magazine where it appeared. “Bassett” was her pen name, because, like many authors in her period, she hid her gender to make…
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