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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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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St Michael is the patron saint of Normandy. He’s a Warrior Saint: the one who cast Satan from Heaven. It shouldn’t surprise us that the Normans chose him as their Patron, since they started as Vikings and evolved into the world’s most dangerous polo team. Mont Sant Michel, and its daughter house in Cornwall which…
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This is your monster of the month. It’s from “The Diary of Mr Poynter” pointer by M. R. James. There have been a series of James episodes previously on the podcast, and I left this monster out because it wasn’t suitably challenging for magi in the Ars Magica role-playing game. Now that I’m writing for…
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This week a brief episode containing an infernal regione. The story that’s following is called Crimson Flowers and it’s read into the public domain by Ben Tucker through LibriVox. Thanks to Ben and his production team. *** John Carew was working in his garden. Far away over the distant hilltops, the dying Sun hung like…
Read MoreI do apologise for the delay. I have been quite unwell. Missing transcripts will be added to the blog over the next week.
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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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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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