Roleplaying games from historical research
This is your Monster of the Month, and this month I’m cheating. The creature is a vampire and the reader is Newgate Novelist, who’s one of my favourites from LibriVox. I’m including it because this is one of the few English sources I can find for the work of Vasile Alecsandri, who was a Romanian…
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This week an experiment I’ve been participating in #Dungeon23, or the #City23 variant, which is a challenge where people write a dungeon room (or in the city variant a chunk of a city) each day, at about a paragraph length for the entire of 2023. For the dungeon 23 people each month is a level…
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A quick Librivox recording to give us our monster of the month. We have a werewolf, a witch and a Faustian bargain. I wondered why I’d not seen this one before. Eleanor Smith-Dampier was a translator of Danish sagas, so I thought I’d missed it because it’s from the area to the north of the…
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Regina Block was a London-based, Jewish, poetess who worked in the 1920s. Strangely, her work is filled with Christian allegory. She also wrote a biography of one of the first Sufi masters who became widely known in London. Her representations of what he believed are relatively accurate compared to some of the stuff that had…
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Back in the satyr episode of the Magonomia Bestiary Kickstarter I mentioned Gabrinus as the creator of beer. In this story, a less powerful Gabrinus, with a touch of faerie, is playing the an ancient game against painters, to steal the fruits of their creativity. Readers at the time would know that schiedam is a…
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I’ve been loking forward to reading this for you, because it’s a lovely example of an infernal regio for Ars Magica. Clearly its the work of Architectus from Realms of Power : the Infernal. It also works for Magonomia, but as a particular creature, not a thing that a Realm of Power does as a…
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This poem, which the author claimed as autobiographical, contains angels or demons of the hours, which are progressively more terrible as the night continues. They sap the man’s ability to sleep, such that he becomes like a ghost. Death in life is one of Thomson’s core artistic preoccupations. One note on the contents: “Malebolges” mentioned…
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Satyrs are a problem. We wanted them for Magonomia., because they turn up in the folklore. They are, however, really rapey. That’s also considered a bit humorous in some period work. So, we wanted satyrs, but without any of the baggage. I took it three ways to get there. Satyrs change form over time. The…
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When I had COVID, my “use it or lose it” style of podcasting plan led to me recording three episodes. I have virtually no idea what’s in them, except that I swept a history of English haunted houses for stories that are Elizabethan and before. Thanks to the Librivox recording teams. Usually I script in…
Read MoreI’ve prepared and uploaded these early, so that I have the decks clear for the Magonomia Bestiary Kickstarter in late October 2022.
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Games From Folktales 