Roleplaying games from historical research
I’ve seen at least four of them in the last two days, as I’ve been walking around the streets catching Pokemon. They all have worms in their beaks. They all seem to be watching me. Being a modern person I know that’s because it is spring here, the magpies are having babies, and they need to carry…
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Adventure ideas can come from anywhere: this one comes from a podcast I was listening to. A farmer in South Africa mentioned that because his orchards are in the mountains, his apples ripen two weeks earlier than everyone else’s, and this gives him a price premium. Seasonal fruit is a brilliant as treasure, because it…
Read MoreTranscripts 11- 16 are now up in pdf at http://wp.me/aVOkQ-1el In future, transcripts will likely be monthly collections. The software I’m using (Canva) has trouble with the larger file sizes.
Read MoreHank Green explains Meinong’s Ontology in a clever and concise way. Basically Absistence is Faerie, Subsistence is Magic, and Existence is Mundane. Meinong’s Jungle is Arcadia.
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An excerpt from the writings of Pliny the Younger. Our leisure furnishes me with the opportunity of learning from you, and you with that of instructing me. Accordingly, I particularly wish to know whether you think there exist such things as phantoms, possessing an appearance peculiar to themselves, and a certain supernatural power, or that…
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One of the earliest controversies I can remember from Ars fandom is this: given that magic can’t affect your essential nature, can it change your gender? The generally given answer is no, and this is because the way gender is affected by magic in other roleplaying games is so terribly, terribly juvenile. Basically being transformed…
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Monster manuals are taxonomic. That is, they divide monsters by type so that you can get the statistics of the creature based on similar creatures. Medieval bestiaries didn’t work this way at all. Medieval bestiaries worked on the idea of significatos, that is, when you are reading about the creature the most important thing is…
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I was listening to a lecture on Romaticism by Alain de Botton the other day, and it struck me how significant it was for the design of Mythic European characters. The video is at https://youtu.be/sPOuIyEJnbE is you’d like to check it out yourself. De Botton suggests that certain features become connected to the concept of love…
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Strange Stories From a Chinese Studio: Volume One was the ten thousandth free audiobook recorded by Librivox. One of the reasons I’m fascinated with Chinese folktales is that towards the end of the Ars Magica setting. we started to run out of things that people hadn’t seen before and so to cheat we would harvest…
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I was recently listening to a radio interview about the Paralympics, where the interviewee noted that you should expect, at some close date, the prosthetics of the athletes to push their performances beyond those of non-disabled athletes. He noted that there were already concerns about Olympic marksmen having their eyes improved with LASIK, or power…
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Games From Folktales 