Now that Mythic Europe Magazine Issue One is out, its time for me to buckle down and put some podcast episodes in the can. Much as the Cornish and Venice episodes eventually collated into a book, the larger series of episodes may eventually cohere into a larger work. The three broad series in the upcoming…
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Mythic Cheshire: Basics
Cheshire is a traditionally English county that’s just to the north of Wales. Its county town is Chester, which is in the far west of the county. Chester was a Roman fortress used to pacify the people in what’s in modern north Wales. In 1220 Cheshire is a different shape to what you’ll see on…
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The stinking demon
There’s an idea in Ars Magica, stolen from period texts, that sometimes demons attach to a person and cause all joy to be sucked out of their life. This is called “oppression”. The following story is set far after the game period, but it shows how simple oppression can wear a person down by stealing…
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Notes on writing Ars Magica material – a philosophical guide for new authors
Now that there has been an explosion in creativity due to the open license, and now that I’m editing a fanzine, it’s time to give quick tips to beginning, commercial authors. Some of the advice that follows is coloured by my preferences as a reader. There’s no need to point out that there isn’t one…
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Demoniacal Justinian by Procopius
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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The Book of Beasts by Edith Nesbit
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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Man-size in Marble by Edith Nesbit
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 MoreOffline for a little while
I’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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Ghosts from Lancastrian Ballads: Sir Gualter and his lady
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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Heather Ale by Robert Louis Stevenson
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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Games From Folktales 