Roleplaying games from historical research
If I were to say “Unicorns have wings.” you might reply “No, Timothy: that’s Pegasus. Unicorns have horns.” A third person, listening in would agree with you. Unicorns have horns. Pegasus has wings. The problem is: there are no unicorns: so how can that statement “Unicorns have horns” be more true than the statement that…
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There’s a little Dunsany left to do, from his short story collection called 51 Tales, but that will wait for a post-a-day challenge. To replace him, it’s time for a new author. M.R. James James wrote about one ghost story a year, to tell to his friends in a circle around a fire, as part…
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I was listening to a novel from the St Mary’s Chronicles, and a plot hook linked to Cornwall emerged. Let’s harvest it for the gazetteer. Curtana, the sword of Tristram, Prince of Lyonesse, was in the English royal treasury until 1215 when it was lost, along with most of the portable wealth of King John,…
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This is a bonus episode that is using up some spare minutes in my monthly podcast plan. It is unscripted, so apologies for the incoherence. I’ve just got home from Adelaide, a city in the far south of Australia. I took my children on a plane for the first time, and as I did, I…
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Thanks to all of the Patreons and listeners who have kept the podcast going for two years. This is a brief, bonus episode to celebrate the anniversary. For the 100th episode of Games From Folktales I posted a poem by Charles Swinburne that contained the initiation script for Dolores, the Infernal Saint of Sorrow. When…
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Hi, and welcome. I’m Timothy Ferguson, and I was one of the most prolific authors for the last edition of Ars Magica. Here are some hints to designing a character you’ll enjoy. Play style Get your group to decide if they are going to do the suggested thing, which is that each story has one…
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Alex Langstone recently published a book of folklore focused on eastern Cornwall. It uses some of the same sources as the Cornwall Project, so there’s some repetition of material, but I’ve managed to pull four pages of notes out of it. Most of them are going to just slot into the previously done material, adding…
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Heraclitus was an ancient Greek philosopher who said everything was made of fire. Why, in Mythic Europe, do the Flambeau not revere him as a spiritual ancestor? As always for the episodes dealing with philosophers, we begin with an infodump. Heraclitus was a prince from Ephesus in modern Turkey who abdicated to follow a philosopher’s…
Read MoreI haven’t had time to write the statistics for episode 147 (The Ash Tree) because it was meant to go live on October 11. I’m sure I’ll have them complete by then. On October 11, you’ll also get a replacement podcast episode. It’s a humorous little story about a grog with a magic word.
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Games From Folktales 