Roleplaying games from historical research
I was listening to a recording of The Crimson Fairy book by Andrew Lang, recorded by Jenny Lundak for Librivox, and struck a colony of the malkins I wrote about in the Medieval Bestiary for Magonomia. I haven’t really used Lang for much. His spider-headed man turns up in Ars Magica, but other than that…
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I originally planned to string Lud-in-the-Mist across months, commenting on each episode, the way I did with “The Erl-King’s Daughter” by Lord Dunsany. I shan’t, because although I still think its an excellent book full of material which Ars Magica Players can, and should, steal, it doesn’t need an explanation. A secret passage is a…
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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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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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This week I come to you with a plot hook from a most unlikely source: the book “Little Women” by Louisa May Alcott. Louisa May Alcott was a 19th century author and in addition to the novel, which has been turned into a movie several times, she also used to write what she called “blood…
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I’ve thought about doing this poem before but I’ve excluded it for two reasons. It’s far later than the medieval period, although it is in the Magonomia period Well it’s Georgian theoretically. The other reason is it’s a very popular poem here in Australia: pretty much every school child learns it. It may have taken…
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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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When Maurice Lavelle is discussed people oversimplify by saying he’s France’s answer to Edgar Allan Poe. He’s similar to Poe in that he has atmospheric, spooky stories. In the same way that most of Poe’s stories aren’t suitable for Games From Folktales because they eventually come down to a rational explanation, similarly most of Level’s…
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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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Games From Folktales 