Roleplaying games from historical research
“All right, one story, but none of your lies and obfuscations!” “Lies? Me? No! You can check with her.” “Leave me out of this, old man. I’m going to make some supper while you tell her her story.” “Really? Such cowardice. All right. How do we begin?” “I believe “Once upon a time” to be…
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Marco the unreliable redcap was first introduced to Ars Magica in Covenants, where his role was to let us explore ideas without making them canonical in the setting. While setting up for National Gaming Design Month this year, I was asked to provide some more game fiction, so I’ve bought Marco back, with a series of short…
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Note from Magic in Ancient Egypt, by Geraldine Pinch Possibly two types of magic coexisted in Ancient Egypt: an intuitive, improvised magic, transmitted orally: and a literary tradition in which the formulae became fixed so that their exactness and antiquity were thought to give them power.
Read MoreThis is the cover for Antagonists, which is scheduled for early 2013. A group of us have another book coming out before then, but I wanted to share this. I like it, although the technique is very different to the woodcut style of many other Ars covers. Just a quick note about the upcoming books.…
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What were Trianoma’s ancestresses doing before they joined the Order? Here’s a quote from the Golden Ass, in which the witches do many other magical things. The text comes from Project Gutenberg. When I was a young man I…fortuned in an evil hour to come to the City Larissa, where while I went up and…
Read MoreBrace youself for some seriously cool art.
Read MoreSome spare material, and thoughts on the writing process, for my newest book. Basically, when I was designing this, I hit a roadblock which stopped my initial plans, but recovered from that. I think the work I did the second time around is better than the first. It suits the setting better and doesn’t need…
Read MoreSo, I had this idea for a convention one-shot scenario. I’m writing it up here because there’s no chance I’ll work on it this year, and I don’t want to forget the elements which have started to congeal in my mind. The background of it works like this: the Criamon cosmology contains a couple of apocalyptic…
Read MoreI mentioned an upcoming event on a webpage for an Australian convention, and I’ve had some questions in the various fora I participate in, so: Yes, Linda and I are expecting our first child soonish, and so I have not volunteered to run anything at AusCon in May. If it turns out that fatherhood is substantially…
Read MoreWhile writing Covenants, and describing the laboratories of magicians, some of us wanted to include a bonus for having a stuffed crocodille hanging from the ceiling. That didn’t come through, but now I can prove it comes from a public domain source, which means you can use it in your games, and if told you…
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