Roleplaying games from historical research
Today we cover two of the traditional sports of Cornwall. We know the faeries play at least one of them, for they use monolithic stones as their goalposts for hurling. Again, this episode is wall to wall quotations Hurling THE game of ” Hurling” was, until a recent period, played in the parishes to the…
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In the real world, anosognosia is a symptom of illness, particularly certain degenerative memory conditions. In Mythic Europe, it’s a useful effect of Mentem magic. A person who has anosognosia does not know that they have lost a skill, and avoid the use of that skill. So, for example, a person who had lost the…
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Several Cornish towns elect “sham mayors”. These seem to be similar to Lords of Misrule. When I boil this down, it’s likely to be a mystery, or a possessing faerie power. Today’s just wall to wall Hunt. Mylor “There was a curious custom in the town’ of Penryn in Cornwall, which long outlived all modern…
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Hunt provides us with a series of festivals in this chapter, which he has placed into near- calendar order. That’s very convenient, and it means that this will eventually be the skeleton of a chapter in the gazetter, giving seasonal ideas for the covenant’s life. Some of these festivals just need to be flagged so…
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In the last third of this chapter, Hunt just throws it his research together and hopes it congeals. Let’s fossick it for roleplaying hooks. Fire, Light, and Lightning Hunt has various folktales about fire. These include the spitting test for truth, seen in a previous chapter. There’s a tradition that if people light a bonfire…
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Hunt scatters them a little in this chapter, but there are enough serpent charms to make a decent blog post, so I’ll gather them here. In advance I’ll flag that if you have a serpent Bjornaer magus or a snake familiar: these may refer to your character or your companion. Do charms scale? Hunt notes…
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In this chapter, Hunt begins to just throw miscellany together: a habit he continues for the rest of the book. This makes his work incoherent when boiled down into game notes. In general much of this chapter is made up of Cornish charms specific to a particular illness. Virtually all of them are Christian prayers,…
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This chapter has sections of uneven length, so I hope you’ll pardon that I use a series of long quotes, and then almost point form at the end. The Death Token of the Vingoes A quote from Hunt: “WHEN you cross the brook which divides St Leven from Sennen, you are on the estate of Treville.…
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Another fantastic tale from Lord Dunsany. The Gibbelins eat, as is well known, nothing less good than man. Their evil tower is joined to Terra Cognita, to the lands we know, by a bridge. Their hoard is beyond reason; avarice has no use for it; they have a separate cellar for emeralds and a separate…
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This is a chunkier chapter, so the temptation is there to break it up into sections to meet the requirements of a post a day. I’ll give it complete, but can’t promise the other 29 posts will all be of this length! For this post, I’m working from notes, not directly from Hunt, so there’s…
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Games From Folktales 