Roleplaying games from historical research
We’ve dealt with extinct familiars before in the fanzines, by talking about folklore and its link to fossils, but the idea here is a bit different. There are several species which are living in Mythic Europe and have gone extinct since. These add odd colour to the game without changing the power level. A few…
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We’ve been getting a heap of useful material out of decadent and romantic poets, so let’s continue. John Merivale was part of Lord Byron’s social circle, and this poem is about a vampiric plague in Pest, which is one of the three cities that merged to form modern Budapest in Hungary. The following recording was…
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This week Mystery Cults and Nympholepts. Time for some more Swinburne, the excellentdecadent author who gave us the Lady of Pain and her cephalopodus servants. A nympholept is a person who is inducted into a religio-magical mystery by a powerful spirit. The name comes from The Odyssey where Odysseus is taught transformations by Circe. I…
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For our Monster of the Month, we’re returning to the works of J. Sheridan Le Fanu. Weirdly, I’m starting this story halfway through. The reason I’m doing that is because Le Fanu was an Irish author writing for an English audience, and he spends the first half of his story explaining that you can keep…
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This is your Monster of the Month. The story we’ll be listening to is Schalken the Painter by J. Sheridan Le Fanu, as read for Librivox by Tony Addison. Thanks to Tony and his team. Le Fanu was an early Irish fantasy author who was very influential on Poe and Lovecraft. His family, ancestrally, were…
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This week, The Phantom Town, recordedinto the public domain by Colleen McMahon through LibriVox, thanks to Colleen and herproduction team. This is a piece of Irish folklore that was originally written into a newspaper in the late 19th century. Clearly useful in other Ars Magica or Magonomia. *** Sir, the following story is founded on…
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When I was writing up the fauns for the Magonomia Bestiary I missed a trick. The player characters discover they can make faun-like creatures with different alcoholic beverages. I missed an important one: cider. Cider and beer are rivals for English drinkers over centuries, but cider is in the ascendant in the Ars Magica period.…
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Algernon Blackwood is easy to underestimate for roleplaying material. When I first read this story I left it alone because I thought it was just a ghost, not much use for roleplayers. I was wrong. If you look at this, is this not a psychopomp? A fairy border guardian?Now over to Dan Gurzynski, thanks to…
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This is, thank whichever divine you follow, the final research episode for the Venice material. It isn’t that I’ve researched all of the things that were on the shopping list that I put in a previous episode, it’s that you get to a point where the research begins to make you want to give the…
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I had thought that the book I’ve just gone through for material would be the last one for the project. It’s “Venetian ships and shipbuilders in the Renaissance” by Frederick Lane. I haven’t been posting these daily on X (as was Twitter) because they removed the feature that allowed me to do it automatically, and…
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Games From Folktales 