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CHAPTER VIIIThe Arrival of the Rune On a sunny May morning in Erl the witch Ziroonderel sat in the castle nursery by the fire, cooking a meal for the baby. The boy was now three years old, and still Lirazel had not named him; for she feared lest some jealous spirit of Earth or air…

This went live in a slightly garbled way – if this was a professional podcast with a budget, I’d replace it, but…such is not our lot. The three stories this week survive much of the bowdlerisation found in the others. Goat Face is much the same. In Parsley, the child has a tuft of parsley…

We spend a lot of time with the King of Elfland in these chapters. Here we discover he’s like the faeries in Ars Magica. The king is, in a very real sense, his land. CHAPTER VIThe Rune of the Elf King On the high balcony of his gleaming tower the King of Elfland stood. Below…

When we were going through Lord Dunsay’s short stories we missed one, because it was connected with a couple of others we could not use in a single larger frame story. I’ve chopped that top bit off, because I love how the end of it is a completely confused Realm Interaction Table. Stats aren’t necessary,…

The Pentamerone is an early collection of Italian fairy tales, that was used as source material by the Brothers Grimm and Charles Perrault. It interests us, for Ars Magica, because its fifty stories are tied to a particular place where we’ve not done a lot of work: southern Italy. Also, because it was written earlier,…

The next couple of chapters have a lot less action, but have useful little bundles of folklore in them. Jason from the Forums has a great set of statistics for the witch, that I hope he’ll include in the comments. Back to Earth After Many Years Back through the guarding wood went Alveric and Lirazel,…

It’s useful for us when a monster reskins itself. This is basically the origin story for a banshee-like creature, but found in Venice. We can just shift the stats across and change the appearance. It also describes an instance of Venetian love magic, which is useful to us. *** It was in the dogado of…

We finish our little season of poems by De La Mare with this episode, Six brief pieces, with a mixture of monsters and locations. A couple of minor notes in explanation. The first peopm is called “The Gage”, and it seems to have been read as “The Cage”. presumably because it was thought a spelling…

The second chapter of the King of Elfland’s daughter is a slow start, with little we can harvest for roleplaying games. It’s going to be included here because it sets a baseline which Dunsany calls back to later, to show the effects of the powers of the King of Elfland. I hope listeners will, therefore,…