Roleplaying games from historical research
A bugaboo, or bugbear, is a variant of the faeries that scare parents into seeing to their children. In Realms of Power : Faerie this would be a variant of the ogre Gello. Thanks to Ann and her production team for the recording. *** THERE was an awful Bugaboo Whose Eyes were Red and Hair was…
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For the Venice material I’ve hit a couple of additional plot hooks, based on the two most popular masks at Carnivale. The most popular male mask isn’t a character: it’s just a plain white mask, without a mouth. The chin bows forward sufficiently for the person to eat and drink in the mask. The mask’s…
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Padraic Colum was an Irish author who translated the Thousand and One Nights, although his translation is not much used anymore. In his book “The Boy Apprenticed to an Enchanter” he spends some time remixing material from other stories, and making it more palatable for readers of his time. For this episode I’ve extracted three…
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A brief one this time. This poem demonstrates what, in Ars Magica, we’d call oppression. That’s when a demon attaches itself to a victim and removes their sources of joy. It’s a paradigmatic version of clinical depression. Thanks to Anne and the Librivox production team for the recording. *** I see the broken bodies of…
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It’s the first week of April, so indulge me with this Australian ghost story for your Monster of the Month. Your Librivox reader this time is me from fifteen years ago. Odd how had my voice has changed. A few explanations: Geebung is a fictional place. There is a suburb of Brisbane called Geebung, but…
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This may well be the longest episode Games From Folktales has hosted. It’s a very early vampire novella with at least one, but perhaps two, monsters of the month. It’s a 19th Century story from Germany and was recorded into the public domain by Louise J Belle. Thanks to Louise and her production team. As…
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We’ve been getting a heap of useful material out of decadent and romantic poets, so let’s continue. John Merivale was part of Lord Byron’s social circle, and this poem is about a vampiric plague in Pest, which is one of the three cities that merged to form modern Budapest in Hungary. The following recording was…
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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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This is your Monster of the Month. The story we’ll be listening to is Schalken the Painter by J. Sheridan Le Fanu, as read for Librivox by Tony Addison. Thanks to Tony and his team. Le Fanu was an early Irish fantasy author who was very influential on Poe and Lovecraft. His family, ancestrally, were…
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