Roleplaying games from historical research
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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This week, The Phantom Town, recordedinto the public domain by Colleen McMahon through LibriVox, thanks to Colleen and herproduction team. This is a piece of Irish folklore that was originally written into a newspaper in the late 19th century. Clearly useful in other Ars Magica or Magonomia. *** Sir, the following story is founded on…
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This is your Monster of the Month. This week we revisit Sir John Mandeville, an entirely fictitious author, whose travel journals in the 14th century gave the Christians great hope that there was a great Christian Emperor in India who was going to rescue the Holy Land. Mandeville talks about how he goes to Prester…
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Algernon Blackwood is easy to underestimate for roleplaying material. When I first read this story I left it alone because I thought it was just a ghost, not much use for roleplayers. I was wrong. If you look at this, is this not a psychopomp? A fairy border guardian?Now over to Dan Gurzynski, thanks to…
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The manners in the court of Queen Elizabeth the First are a difficult thing for most modern Magonomia players, because our various countries now see them, rightly, as repressive. Why this is varies a little: I’m an Australian, and the manners that they are using were, for a long time, used as a racial marker…
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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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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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Games From Folktales 