Roleplaying games from historical research
Procopius was a senator in the reign of the Emperor Justinian, and his writings are the core primary source when studying him. He was the legal advisor to Belisarius, Constantinople’s most skilled general, and wrote about his military campaigns. In secret he also wrote a second history, parodying how tacky the emperor, the general, and…
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We had one of Edith Nesbit’s ghost stories last week, so this week one of her tales for children. This comes from The Book of Dragons, which I compulsively re-read in primary school. I waited for it to hit public domain in the United States, planning to grab it the first weekend it was available,…
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I’m still cleaning up after the Cyclone Alfred, so here’s a story I though I’d already written up for Ars Magica, but find that I have not . I haven’t put the stats here yet, but basically it’ll be a possessed statue from Lands of the Nile, with the difference that the possessing spirit will…
Read MoreI’ll likely be offline for a few days. I’m fine, but my city is going to be hit by a cyclone tomorrow night, so I’m likely to lose power. I know that sounds blasé, but I was raised in the north of my state so I’ve been doing cyclones since I was eight. This one’s…
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Our second ghostly visitant from Lanacastrian Ballads: this is a pair of ghosts, of which the unnamed lady is the more interesting. She’s linked to a lightning tree, which are sometimes sought out by magi as useful for enchantment. She may have powers related to the weather or may be strangely transformed into a dryad,…
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This poem contains a Herbam, or even Corpus, vis source created by a race of faeries that are being driven to extinction by the invading humans. Robert Louis Stevenson collected this story in Galloway, and added a note to make sure his readers knew this was an older, and false, historiography. The Picts were not…
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There doesn’t seem to be a clear, copyable text of the The Wolf Woman by Grace Morgan anywhere easily accessible, so here’s a link to a scan of the issue of Weird Tales magazine where it appeared. “Bassett” was her pen name, because, like many authors in her period, she hid her gender to make…
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A note from Ambrose Bierce that seems to have a person falling into regio Thanks to the Librivox recorder and their production team. *** James Burne Worson was a shoemaker who lived in Leamington, Warwickshire, England. He had a little shop in one of the by-ways leading off the road to Warwick. In his humble…
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Fragment weeks are where I use up ideas that I know have value in Ars but can’t quite land. Sometime others in the community find excellent ways to use them. Here I’m presenting some of the poems from The Flowers of Evil by Baudelaire. As I think about them I keep circling back to the…
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A lost short story by Bram Stoker was recently rediscovered in an archive. Its from before he wrote Dracula, so his style is there but the story doesn’t conclude in the way his usually do: you’re left at the Jamesian wallop. Ben Tucker has recorded a version into the public domain vis Librivox. Thanks to…
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Games From Folktales 