All articles filed in Podcast transcripts

One of the great puzzles of medieval economics is why it works at all. Essentially the European economy, if you are standing at the border of China and looking westward, is an elaborate method of shipping gold and silver to China in exchange for spices. Medieval European understood this. What they did not understand was…

I continue to be struck by the idea that Lord Dunsany’s work seems like the stories of a redcap, long weary of the road. Let’s try another.  Be warned, there is a little antisemitism in this one. The Bureau d’Echange de Maux by Lord Dunsany I often think of the Bureau d’Echange de Maux and the wondrously…

How do magi know what to read? Your magus helps out another covenant and, in thanks, they let your character study from their library for a season. In the real world, the Storyguide hands you a sheet of titles, each marked with level and quality, and you pick the one you’d like your magus to…

An overheard discussion of Marco the Redcap, recorded by his grand-daughter. “It is against the law to believe the story I am about to tell you. It breaches the damnatio memoraie applied by the Quaesitores after the War.  You may not, must not, believe what I am about to say to be true.  Fortunately I’m widely…

In early versions of Ars Magica, the pawn of vis was a quantum: you wither had a pawn, or you did not. There were no fractions of a pawn of vis. I can’t recall how early this was broken, but I certainly recall a vis source being given which was a cave of bats, with…

Labyrinth of Lanes is another of those episodes which is best represented as a text which has inserts. So, please find it in the February 2017 pdf.

In Mythic Europe, faeries are drawn to stories, and to transgressions of boundaries. In the real world, people like to play at being ghosts. How do these two ideas combine? Can pretending to be a ghost cause a haunting? I recently listened to an episode of the Folklore podcast by Mark Norman, in which he interviewed Dr…