Cornwall : Graveyard of Giants
Announcing a new column for Games From Folktales. Once a month, you’ll get some Cornish material. At the end I hope it’ll assemble into something like a gazetteer you can plug into Heirs to Merlin and the Vanilla Covenant project. For those wanting to play along my source text is Popular romances of the west of England;…
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Proportionality bias and the creation of faerie roles
One of the cognitive fallacies which fuels real-world conspiracy theories is proportionality bias. This suggests that large effects need to have large causes. At the most extreme, Descartes suggested a God was necessary because there were minds, so something greater than a mind need to cause the mind. Hermetic magic says that there needs to…
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The Arcadian Experience Machine
Enormities: a new class of ghosts
I was listening to the MonsterTalk podcast, and Blake Smith mentioned his examination of the SS Watertown ghost photograph. You may know the story: two sailors were buried at sea, and their ghostly faces followed the vessel for weeks. Smith arranged to receive deck plans of one of the Watertown’s sister ships, and took photographs from…
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Acedia: the shattered mirror plague
Gaze no more in the bitter glass The demons, with their subtle guile, Lift up before us when they pass, Or only gaze a little while; For there a fatal image grows That the stormy night receives, Roots half hidden under snows, Broken boughs and blackened leaves. For all things turn to barrenness In the…
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Dunsany fragments : The Distressing tale of Thangobrind the Jeweller
Let us continue the thought experiment that the stories of Lord Dunsany are tales told by a retired redcap. This episode was accidentally released ahead of schedule, so there are two Dunsany stories this month. When Thangobrind the jeweller heard the ominous cough, he turned at once upon that narrow way. A thief was he,…
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Dunsany fragments: Miss Cubbidge and the Dragon of Romance
An episode went live before it should have, so there are two Dunsany fragments this month This tale is told in the balconies of Belgrave Square and among the towers of Pont Street; men sing it at evening in the Brompton Road. Little upon her eighteenth birthday thought Miss Cubbidge, of Number 12A Prince of…
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