Roleplaying games from historical research
Lionel Johnson was a decadent poet, and we’ve had some luck with those before, which is why we are fishing in his waters. He was part of Oscar Wilde’s set, indeed. He was the person who introduced Oscar Wilde to Lord Alfred Douglas, the young man who legally speaking, he debauched, leading to Wilde’s imprisonment,…
Read More
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…
Read More
I missed this one. I went through the backlog of Librivox material, looking for monsters and I missed this one because it had a non-European setting. But if you look at it, this is just Beowulf but with more samurai. You can turn this into a role-playing scenario for a wide variety of fantasy games.…
Read More
The idea for this episode came from an episode on Not Just The Tutors, which is a podcast. It was discussing a display about the role of books in gift-giving during the Middle Ages and in the Renaissance, and held at the Bodleian Library. When this podcast was released, some of the digital assets are…
Read More
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…
Read More
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…
Read More
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…
Read More
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.…
Read More
This is your Monster of the Month. This week we revisit Sir John Mandeville, an entirely fictitious author, whose travel journals in the 14th century gave the Christians great hope that there was a great Christian Emperor in India who was going to rescue the Holy Land. Mandeville talks about how he goes to Prester…
Read More
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…
Read More
Games From Folktales 