Roleplaying games from historical research
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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The idea for this episode came from an episode on Not Just The Tutors, which is a podcast. It was discussing a display about the role of books in gift-giving during the Middle Ages and in the Renaissance, and held at the Bodleian Library. When this podcast was released, some of the digital assets are…
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This week, The Phantom Town, recordedinto the public domain by Colleen McMahon through LibriVox, thanks to Colleen and herproduction team. This is a piece of Irish folklore that was originally written into a newspaper in the late 19th century. Clearly useful in other Ars Magica or Magonomia. *** Sir, the following story is founded on…
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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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Games From Folktales 