Roleplaying games from historical research
This week I come to you with a plot hook from a most unlikely source: the book “Little Women” by Louisa May Alcott. Louisa May Alcott was a 19th century author and in addition to the novel, which has been turned into a movie several times, she also used to write what she called “blood…
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This year I’m participating in Dungeon 23, which is a writing challenge where people write each day to build up a series of rooms for a megadungeon. In the City 23 variant, which is what I’m doing, a mass of material to be used to write a gazetteer for Ars Magic or Magonomia about the…
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Ars Magica and Magonomia players are interested in how other wizards comport themselves, and how they arrange their laboratories. While I was reading through the biography of John Dee, I found a section about how his lab was laid out. He upgraded it by adding extra furniture and equipment, some of which comes from a…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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Games From Folktales 