Roleplaying games from historical research
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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This will be an odd episode. Claus Stamm is one of those authors who writes a few children’s books and a poem or two, but is hard to track down electronically. I’m not sure why his work was focused on Japan, or which yokai he thought he was writing about here. The name he uses…
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Count Stenbock was a 19th century nobleman of Swedish descent who held a domain in what is now Estonia. His father died when he was a boy, as did his maternal grandfather, so he was incredibly wealthy for much of his life, although his property was administered for him by his paternal grandfather during childhood.…
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The Byland ghost stories were written into a 12th or 13th century book. They refer to the reign of Richard II as having completed. They take up the afterpage and some small gaps on the pages within the volume, and they are presumably written with the consent, or perhaps encouragement, of whoever looked after the…
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A ghost story for your monster of the month. Over to Ben Tucker. Thanks to him and his production team at Librivox. One cool October evening—it was the last day of the month, and unusually cool for the time of year—I made up my mind to go and spend an hour or two with my…
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