Ars Magica’s combat system has always been a bit of a problem. The current one doesn’t let a nudist with a sharpened stick dependably defeat a knight, or require that your character’s actions be subsumed into a small tactic unit roll, but there are obvious problems with it, and these make the game difficult to…
Read MoreCornwall: The Cornish Bird Blog
The night after I put the Cornwall gazetteer out as a finished draft, I received a “like” on the blog from a Cornish folklore and photography site, called The Cornish Bird. I’d like to recommend it, because its writer has walked to many of the places described in the gazetteer, and her photographs are great…
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The Song of the Morrow by Robert Louis Stevenson
Merry Christmas! A little ghost story for the Noel. *** The King of Duntrine had a daughter when he was old, and she was the fairest King’s daughter between two seas; her hair was like spun gold, and her eyes like pools in a river; and the King gave her a castle upon the sea…
Read MoreLittle Demons ashcan
Is there any point in these sorts of “stats only” collections? Can you use the monsters without the fiction that they are drawn from, which gives them context? The attached file says it is for Episode 175 – that’s still the plan, with more monsters, and possibly the source stories as well.
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Dunsany short stories : Wind and fog
I originally wrote this story up as two elementals, feuding for status, but I think they are likely faeries, as they are interested in the death of humans. Is the fog a sort of meteorological vampire? Can you set it on your enemies? Protect your own ships? Does the Old Winter have a court with…
Read MorePlans for 2019
So, the plan for 2019 is to have weekly podcast episodes and blog posts. The blog posts will be collected into monthly pdfs, and then collected into an annual. The big plans for the year? I’m going to collect the demons into a single document I’m going to collect the Lord Dunsany stories into a…
Read MoreGames From Folktales 2018 numbers
Hi, Every so often, it’s useful to look at the podcast project and see if its worth the work. Originally I was going to do an annual check-in, but I lost that chance this year because of some playing about that Patreon were doing. So, time for the semiannual audit, as part of the planning…
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A note on a treasure that is a monster: Hercules Epitrapezios
I’ve been listening to a book on the history of art forgery, and it mentions that there are several marble copies of a famous bronze statue, which seems likely to house a Spirit of Artifice or a minor Faerie god in Mythic Europe. An epitrapezios is a statue which, in Classical Greece, was meant to…
Read MoreGames From Folktales 2018
So…178 pages of Ars Magica goodness. Note that this is a collection of the episodes as originally published. I’ve since gone through and statted out quite a few of these, but those are going to be collected in new little booklets in 2019. So far they are going to be a Dunsany book and a…
Read MoreGames From Folktales December 2018!
Why, yes, it is really early… I regret that the air elementals don’t have stats, but all air elementals are basically the same guys. Except this one is a sociopath.
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Games From Folktales 