Roleplaying games from historical research
I started to write an article on trick gadgets for Magonomia, but I need to step back a little and give some basic information. Much as I’d need to explain what a cummerbund was if writing up James Bond’s gear, I need to define some terms as we go through, so the potential of clothing…
Read MoreThe transcripts for final quarter of 2021 are available. Once again, they lack graphics. Sorry about that. It’s been a heck of a year.
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Let us start with Burton’s faux-Jacobean summary of this story: Cecelia. ill-treated by her stepmother, is well entreated by three fairies. Her envious stepmother sendeth her own daughter to them, and she is scorned by them, for which reason she sendeth her stepdaughter to watch pigs. A great lord falleth in love with her, but…
Read MoreA quick little ghost story for this time. This poem mentions “Nodier” and he’s one of the authors we will be dabbling with next year. Charles Nodier’s Infernaliana was one of the earliest French collections of vampire stories. The poem below was released through Librviox. Thanks to Alan Mapstone, and the production team. In Spain,…
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Another avatar of our old friend the Infernal Saint of Sorrow. Thanks to Winston Tharp for the recording. Dark as a demon’s dream is one I love—In soul—but oh, how beautiful in form!She glows like Venus throned in joy above,Or on the crimson couch of Evening warmReposing her sweet limbs, her heaving breastUnveiled to him…
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Another little episode for Christmas Week 2021. For the last year or so we’ve worked through The King of Elfland’s Daughter by Lord Dunsany. In an odd coda, we find the unicorn horn from it turn up in the biography of Benevenuto Cellini, which is the replacement for next year. Thanks to David Lazarus and…
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In this brief section, Cellini suffers what may be a miracle for his murders, or it may be a spell effect. Note his travelling companion tries the Miserere, which we’ve discussed in an earlier episode. Thanks to Joyce Martin and her team for the recording. We were one day distant from Lyons, and it was…
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Fitz-James O’Brien monsters are great for Ars Magica, but he was extremely racist. In this story, for example, goes after Jews, Romani and Neopolitans, and that’s just in the first four sentences. That means I can’t record them for Librivox, because we have a policy of not bowdlerising the text we are recording and I’m…
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You’d be be amazed how bad tradecraft is in Elizabethan England., Seriously, some of the techniques they used are now games for children. Let’s think about what they were doing, and what your character can do about it. The basic technique of sigint that Walsingham uses is interception of mail. There’s no postal system as…
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Sapia the Glutton, as Burton calls it, has the following faux Jacobean summary “Sapia with her ability maintaineth herself in all honour, in spite of the bad example of her sisters, their father being away. She laugheth at her lover, and foreseeing the danger which overshadoweth her, she surpasseth it; and at last the king’s…
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Games From Folktales 