All articles filed in Podcast transcripts

For this post to make sense, you need to be familiar with the idea of moral luck. You can watch an excellent Youtube video by Hank Green, or listen to my ten second version of how Thomas Nagel uses of the term. Imagine two people, with two identical cars, who leave two identical parties, and…

This podcast covered the first two chapters, the Introduction and the Hemetic culture in the Greater Alps. Future Sanctuary episodes will each be a single covenant. Ars Magica was a very different game 15 years ago. it was low fantasy and the historical research was, if not worse, then deliberately less detailed. The level of…

There are three techniques for whaling in Mythic Europe. Covenants might participate in each. Whales beach themselves, or die in the Atlantic and are washed onto the western shores of Europe. Beached, living whales can be eaten. Sometimes the frigid sea keeps dead whales fresh enough to harvest their meat and oil. Often they have…

We know where magic comes from. When the Nephilim fell, they had children with humans, and taught them useful arts. One of these was magic. God drowned all of the children of the Nephilim in Noah’s Flood, although rumours persist that one of the wives on board had tainted blood, and magic continued through her.…

Medieval Europeans knew that China existed…well, they knew there was a place out there that silk came from, and they called it “Seres” or “Serica”, both meaning “silk”. There are records of several groups attempting to make contact between the two empires. It might be said fairly that the Chinese had better information about the…

Each community in Europe has a slightly different story about who brings gifts to children at Christmas time.   Let’s not review them when David Sedaris has done such a brilliant job. If you haven’t listened to “Six to Eight Black Men” go do that now. Seriously. Pause this.  Actually, no.  Don’t.  His work’s a…

Time travel stories are scarce in Mythic Europe. They are a mainstay of our genre fiction now, but they were revolutionary when, in the Nineteenth Century, they became popular. Folklore does allow a limited form a time travel, in that the faerie-led can be held far from home for centuries, effectively moving forward in time…

Do you know where you are right now? A better question is: do you know how you know where you are right now? What’s happening is that your body is providing haptic feedback to your brain. That is, you have a sensation of touch from your skin, and your joints are also sending signals to your…

Let’s talk dowries, and bargaining, and let’s use the Bard. The following passages are modernisation of Shakespeare, from “The Taming of the Shrew”. To set the scene: Baptista is a medieval merchant, who has no sons and two daughters, Kate and Bianca. Bianca has four suitors. Kate has none, because she’s a shrew. Bianca cannot…