Roleplaying games from historical research
I’m doing some practice vloging, with an Ars Magica sort of theme. My current plan is to load one of these a week, on Friday, Australian time. The current plan is Introduction (which is up) Cookbook (which is about the writing process for Covenants, and is recorded) and then some material suggested by commenters. The…
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Longevity rituals are kind of the ugly ducking of the Ars Magic item design process. Initially they used a Creo Corpus total, but that was boring because it meant any sane magus eventually became a Creo Corpus expert. Now it has the odd effect of making most magi look younger than me, and so you…
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I was watching a documentary the other day about the ancient Olympics, and was struck by a few things which seemed useful for Ars Magica play. The first is that if you had a great bard like Pindar in your service, and you won at the Olympics, he could convince people you were so amazingly skilled…
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Two months after I planned to finish the project, I’m drawing a line under what’s been done. It’s over 10 000 words of starter information for new troupes, including setting, statistics, mystery initiations and plot hooks. The piece is coherent, although it could be expanded in several ways, and underdevelops the Welsh material. I’m glad its finished…
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So, Another thousand words on the vanilla covenant page. The additions for today are another map of Bristol, some myths about the islands, and the story of the nymph of the River Severn. I also set up the next update, which is a Mystery path based on the Cult of Nodens. My free time is really constrained right…
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I’ve been collecting books for years. In part this is because I’m a librarian, and so I’m trained to see the value in written things. In part it’s because I’m an Ars Magica author, and so I have a tendency to pick things up and think :”One day I may need this for a book…
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It’s still fermenting away on its own page. New this week: complete stats for the other three Companion level characters. Next week I’ll be skipping for the holidays, then returning with some grog kits, and the beginning of the serious folklore work. You might think the 5 000 words of folklore you see there now…
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Over on the Ars Forum, people have been suggesting we don’t have enough material for new players, and so I’ve decided to write some material which is based on making the obvious design choices. It’s about a covenant which is a castle on a hill by a faerie forest. It’s in Summer, and has senior…
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So, listening today to Kate Bush and “Wuthering Heights” I was struck by a few questions. Why does the ghost have to keep telling Heathcliff it is Cathy? Surely he knows what Cathy looks like. It’s not an amorphous blob. It looks, if we are to believe the film clip, rather like a woman in…
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I’m wanting to give strong direction to new players here, so the virtues can’t just be “Divide by 2 rather than 5 for spellcasting totals”. I’m looking to give a serious twist to the characters, and put in some Victorian steampunk pseudoscience too. Here are the basic virtue sets Monkey Testicles Your character has eight monkey…
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