Roleplaying games from historical research
An excerpt from the writings of Pliny the Younger. Our leisure furnishes me with the opportunity of learning from you, and you with that of instructing me. Accordingly, I particularly wish to know whether you think there exist such things as phantoms, possessing an appearance peculiar to themselves, and a certain supernatural power, or that…
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One of the earliest controversies I can remember from Ars fandom is this: given that magic can’t affect your essential nature, can it change your gender? The generally given answer is no, and this is because the way gender is affected by magic in other roleplaying games is so terribly, terribly juvenile. Basically being transformed…
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Monster manuals are taxonomic. That is, they divide monsters by type so that you can get the statistics of the creature based on similar creatures. Medieval bestiaries didn’t work this way at all. Medieval bestiaries worked on the idea of significatos, that is, when you are reading about the creature the most important thing is…
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Strange Stories From a Chinese Studio: Volume One was the ten thousandth free audiobook recorded by Librivox. One of the reasons I’m fascinated with Chinese folktales is that towards the end of the Ars Magica setting. we started to run out of things that people hadn’t seen before and so to cheat we would harvest…
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I was recently listening to a radio interview about the Paralympics, where the interviewee noted that you should expect, at some close date, the prosthetics of the athletes to push their performances beyond those of non-disabled athletes. He noted that there were already concerns about Olympic marksmen having their eyes improved with LASIK, or power…
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In Ars Magica we have four elemental arts. The one which fits the magic system least well is Aquam, and because it doesn’t fit the system particularly well, there have been very few Aquam specialists designed during the game. The story of the Founders didn’t explain where Aquam came from: the druid Diedne perhaps, so…
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In one of Lord Dunsany’s stories, a merchant caravan pauses in the desert. They ask a man in rags to join them at the fire, and offer him food and drink. He tells them stories of the luxuries of the city to which they travel: ancient Babbulkund. In time they leave him behind, but because…
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In the Kalevala, the people from the village of the heroes are tormented by the curses of a witch. One is that she sends among them a terrible bear, to harass their herds. He is reffered to as Otso, and the people flatter him in the most extraordinary and duplicitous way. Vainomoinen, the chief wizard,…
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During the recent anniversary for Librivox, when we were pushing to create out ten thousandth freely available public domain audiobook, I did some reading for the Kalevala, which is some epic poetry from Finland. Essentially it is about three wizards who have a feud with a witch from Lappland. During the, slightly convoluted, story one…
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This is a transcript of the most recent episode of the podcast. Travel magic doesn’t work very well in Ars Magica, at least in the core rules. As the line has progressed many of the authors, me included, have found ways to sabotage that and allow your party to get whatever they want to go,…
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Games From Folktales 