Roleplaying games from historical research
Ars Magica and Magonomia players are interested in how other wizards comport themselves, and how they arrange their laboratories. While I was reading through the biography of John Dee, I found a section about how his lab was laid out. He upgraded it by adding extra furniture and equipment, some of which comes from a…
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This week a brief extract from Tales of the Mermaid Tavern by Alfred Noyes. Some of you will already know Noyes’s work: he wrote The Highwayman. If you don’t know it, it will be an episode later in the month. He’s making reference to a tradition here that Shakespeare moved to London because he’d been…
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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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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 took a few liberties with the history of street cries here. Let’s step back for some context. The biggest market in London during the reign was Stocks Market. If you’re looking for its historic site, due to one of those twists of history, it is underneath Mansion House, the formal residence of the Lord…
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Kenidjack, the demon who oversees the wrestling in Cornwall, has been briefly mentioned on the blog before, as a minor character in some Ars Magica material, but here’s his complete story from Hunt’s “Popular Romances of the West of England”. It starts with a quotation from an older work, where our fellow is mentioned, in…
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This is a short piece, compared to some of the others for the Bestiary series. My goals for the wisps were straightforward, so I got there without a lot of surplus material. When I wrote the urban wisps for the Magonomia Bestiary I wanted to introduce the Royal Exchange and suggest that the creatures were…
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In the Magonomia bestiary I’ve introduced you to Grim, the Ghost King, so in this episode I’d like to give you the source documents and illustrations which led to his inclusion. I’m not a singer myself, so here are three versions of the song he appears in. I’d note each varies the title a little.…
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Now that Andrew has mentioned the Laidly Toad, and shared some art from the forthcoming bestiary, I can talk about the folklore used to design it. The Laidly Toad is the villain from “The Laidly Worm of Spindlestone Heugh” which is a story from the English Borders. I’ve also mixed in a little from a…
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Games From Folktales 