Roleplaying games from historical research
I’ve thought about doing this poem before but I’ve excluded it for two reasons. It’s far later than the medieval period, although it is in the Magonomia period Well it’s Georgian theoretically. The other reason is it’s a very popular poem here in Australia: pretty much every school child learns it. It may have taken…
Read More
St Michael is the patron saint of Normandy. He’s a Warrior Saint: the one who cast Satan from Heaven. It shouldn’t surprise us that the Normans chose him as their Patron, since they started as Vikings and evolved into the world’s most dangerous polo team. Mont Sant Michel, and its daughter house in Cornwall which…
Read More
This week a brief extract from Tales of the Mermaid Tavern by Alfred Noyes. Some of you will already know Noyes’s work: he wrote The Highwayman. If you don’t know it, it will be an episode later in the month. He’s making reference to a tradition here that Shakespeare moved to London because he’d been…
Read More
This is your monster of the month. It’s from “The Diary of Mr Poynter” pointer by M. R. James. There have been a series of James episodes previously on the podcast, and I left this monster out because it wasn’t suitably challenging for magi in the Ars Magica role-playing game. Now that I’m writing for…
Read More
This week a brief episode containing an infernal regione. The story that’s following is called Crimson Flowers and it’s read into the public domain by Ben Tucker through LibriVox. Thanks to Ben and his production team. *** John Carew was working in his garden. Far away over the distant hilltops, the dying Sun hung like…
Read More
This year I’m taking part in #Dungeon23 which is a challenge where people write a small chunk of a dungeon each day. There is a variant, called #City23, which I’m using to collect ideas for a Mythic Venice supplement. The January episode is already up and none of you told me to stop so this…
Read More
This is your Monster of the Month, and this month I’m cheating. The creature is a vampire and the reader is Newgate Novelist, who’s one of my favourites from LibriVox. I’m including it because this is one of the few English sources I can find for the work of Vasile Alecsandri, who was a Romanian…
Read MoreI do apologise for the delay. I have been quite unwell. Missing transcripts will be added to the blog over the next week.
Read More
When Maurice Lavelle is discussed people oversimplify by saying he’s France’s answer to Edgar Allan Poe. He’s similar to Poe in that he has atmospheric, spooky stories. In the same way that most of Poe’s stories aren’t suitable for Games From Folktales because they eventually come down to a rational explanation, similarly most of Level’s…
Read More
This week an experiment I’ve been participating in #Dungeon23, or the #City23 variant, which is a challenge where people write a dungeon room (or in the city variant a chunk of a city) each day, at about a paragraph length for the entire of 2023. For the dungeon 23 people each month is a level…
Read More
Games From Folktales 