Roleplaying games from historical research
Thinking about stories of spycraft in Elizabethan England, there’s a question that needs to be discussed at each gaming table. Are your agents more like George Smiley or like James Bond? Either’s a fine choice, ands so long as you flag it properly, players can mix these types, but it needs to be discussed. Let…
Read More
So, this audio went live six months early. The episode that I meant to schedule will come out next week in audio. The Face Burton’s faux-Jacobean on this story is “Renza is shut in a tower by her father, it having been foretold that she would die through a big bone. She falleth in love…
Read More
Taking this poem literally, there’s a woman here with a regio inside herself, and the things people do in there affect her personality traits. I love this as an idea for a non-player character, and it seems similar to the Dream Magic rules we have for people who are turned into memories. Thanks to Andrew…
Read More
A missed transcript. This is a cutdown of a story from Black Spirits and White. Thanks to the Librivox team! Statistics eventually. *** The last room fell to me, and I looked it over carefully. It seemed innocent enough, a commonplace, square, rather lofty Parisian sleeping-room, finished in wood painted white, with a small marble…
Read More
E.G. Swain wrote a series of ghost stories set in a fictional parish called Stoneground, in England. He was a colleague of M.R. James’s, and one of the attendees of the fireside readings which have been collected as his complete works. The following story has a poltergeist in a library, which communicates through its texts.…
Read MoreThe collated transcripts are now available.
Read More
In The Ballad of the Harp Weaver, we see a magic item which uses, what in Ars Magica terms is, Drudic magic that allows you to spend life energy instead of vis. This sort of blood magic is also sometimes practiced by Cthonic magicians, but here we just see Fatigue and Wounds poured out to…
Read More
This week, two poems linked by the theme of hearts eaten away. I was going to save this for Halloween, but I’m sure something else will appear. The first was recorded for Librivox by Devorah Allen, and could be reskinned from the Miser’s Pot in Realms of Power: Infernal. Stats eventually. For where your treasure…
Read More
Time for the longest poem in GFF history. This creature has turned up at least twice in Ars Magica. In the first version of The Mysteries we are told about Apollonius. In Realms of Power: Faerie, I give this story as an example of a ghula that is not from (modern) Arabic countries. Keats, though,…
Read More
The Burton version of this story is, in his own words, summarized as “Nardiello is sent three times by his father to buy some wares with an hundred ducats each time. The first time he buyeth a mouse, the next a large crab-louse, and then a cricket, and being expelled by his father for this,…
Read More
Games From Folktales 