Roleplaying games from historical research
For the Venice material I’ve hit a couple of additional plot hooks, based on the two most popular masks at Carnivale. The most popular male mask isn’t a character: it’s just a plain white mask, without a mouth. The chin bows forward sufficiently for the person to eat and drink in the mask. The mask’s…
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Padraic Colum was an Irish author who translated the Thousand and One Nights, although his translation is not much used anymore. In his book “The Boy Apprenticed to an Enchanter” he spends some time remixing material from other stories, and making it more palatable for readers of his time. For this episode I’ve extracted three…
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This may well be the longest episode Games From Folktales has hosted. It’s a very early vampire novella with at least one, but perhaps two, monsters of the month. It’s a 19th Century story from Germany and was recorded into the public domain by Louise J Belle. Thanks to Louise and her production team. As…
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The Exeter Book is an Anglo-Saxon collection of puzzle poems. Riddle 47, which I’d like to focus on for this episode is one of the more famous, Thanks to the Saga Thing podcast for reading it on a recent episode about the lacuna in the saga they are following. A moth ate words. I thought…
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I was first taught this poem in primary school. It was in the standard English textbook, to explain what adjectives were. I thought I knew it. I only knew the first and last verses. The child abduction in the middle verses would have caused parental concern. Children getting lost in the bush is one of…
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We’ve dealt with extinct familiars before in the fanzines, by talking about folklore and its link to fossils, but the idea here is a bit different. There are several species which are living in Mythic Europe and have gone extinct since. These add odd colour to the game without changing the power level. A few…
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We’ve been getting a heap of useful material out of decadent and romantic poets, so let’s continue. John Merivale was part of Lord Byron’s social circle, and this poem is about a vampiric plague in Pest, which is one of the three cities that merged to form modern Budapest in Hungary. The following recording was…
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Lionel Johnson was a decadent poet, and we’ve had some luck with those before, which is why we are fishing in his waters. He was part of Oscar Wilde’s set, indeed. He was the person who introduced Oscar Wilde to Lord Alfred Douglas, the young man who legally speaking, he debauched, leading to Wilde’s imprisonment,…
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This week Mystery Cults and Nympholepts. Time for some more Swinburne, the excellentdecadent author who gave us the Lady of Pain and her cephalopodus servants. A nympholept is a person who is inducted into a religio-magical mystery by a powerful spirit. The name comes from The Odyssey where Odysseus is taught transformations by Circe. I…
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I missed this one. I went through the backlog of Librivox material, looking for monsters and I missed this one because it had a non-European setting. But if you look at it, this is just Beowulf but with more samurai. You can turn this into a role-playing scenario for a wide variety of fantasy games.…
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