Roleplaying games from historical research
This is your Monster of the Month. This week we revisit Sir John Mandeville, an entirely fictitious author, whose travel journals in the 14th century gave the Christians great hope that there was a great Christian Emperor in India who was going to rescue the Holy Land. Mandeville talks about how he goes to Prester…
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Algernon Blackwood is easy to underestimate for roleplaying material. When I first read this story I left it alone because I thought it was just a ghost, not much use for roleplayers. I was wrong. If you look at this, is this not a psychopomp? A fairy border guardian?Now over to Dan Gurzynski, thanks to…
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This is, thank whichever divine you follow, the final research episode for the Venice material. It isn’t that I’ve researched all of the things that were on the shopping list that I put in a previous episode, it’s that you get to a point where the research begins to make you want to give the…
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I had thought that the book I’ve just gone through for material would be the last one for the project. It’s “Venetian ships and shipbuilders in the Renaissance” by Frederick Lane. I haven’t been posting these daily on X (as was Twitter) because they removed the feature that allowed me to do it automatically, and…
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This week, we return to Venice. I’m taking part in #City23, which is a writing challenge. Participants try write some material for a city for a role playing game each day. I’ve been using Venice. I’ve reached the stage in the project where I’m going back through a shopping list of material that seems necessary…
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Clark Ashton Smith is one of my favourite fantasy authors but I haven’t been able to use much of his material here on the podcast. He died slightly too late for his material to be available to us in the public domain. Also TSR bought the role-playing rights to his material at some stage and…
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One of the largest battlefields in Mythic Britain is missing. Could it be hidden with magic like “The Shrouded Glen” to allow a covenant to dwell on a site filled with summonable dead? Never, before this, were more men in this island slain by the sword’s edge–as books and aged sages confirm–since Angles and Saxons…
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This week we return to the works of Lady Dilke, an early feminist, socialist, and horror writer. The following story I think is a useful parable, perhaps to be told to apprentices in the Ars Magica game to convince them to remain at the Covenant rather than going to University Thanks to Ben Tucker and…
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It’s always a pleasure to discover new, early, female, horror authors and today I’m bringing you a mystery cult initiation by Lady Dilke. Lady Dilke married a couple of times so her surname changes a bit, but essentially she was an early feminist and horror author. She died just after the turn of the 20th…
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In case you missed the previous episodes in the series, Dungeon 23 is a writing challenge, once a day for a year. These are my notes for a Mythic Venice setting for Ars Magica as recorded in May. My entry for May the first was included in the April episode because it was connected with…
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Games From Folktales 