I didn’t use the frame narrative for the Petamerone, because its racist, and not just “Well, in their time..” racist, but full on speaking-in-pidgin caricature racist. In the story the main character, our heroine, is a princess who cannot laugh of smile. In the list of things that cannot make her grin it includes the…
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The 300th episode just went live. It’s not numbered 300, because I’ve mucked up the releases at various stages, but that’s where we are. It’s not a big celebratory episode, because this is a sombre year filled with exhaustion. This has been a tricky year, and in terms of Games From Folktales, it still hasn’t…
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Pentamerone 1
The Pentamerone is an early collection of Italian fairy tales, that was used as source material by the Brothers Grimm and Charles Perrault. It interests us, for Ars Magica, because its fifty stories are tied to a particular place where we’ve not done a lot of work: southern Italy. Also, because it was written earlier,…
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The King of Elfland’s Daughter 3
The next couple of chapters have a lot less action, but have useful little bundles of folklore in them. Jason from the Forums has a great set of statistics for the witch, that I hope he’ll include in the comments. Back to Earth After Many Years Back through the guarding wood went Alveric and Lirazel,…
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The Cormorants of Andvaer by Jonas Lie
A magical practitioner or a faerie? Treasure and tests await…. The creature here is reminiscent of the choughs who turn into knights in Cornwall. Stats eventually. Thanks to Daniel Davison for the recording, via Librivox. *** Outside Andvær lies an island, the haunt of wild birds, which no man can land upon, be the sea…
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Venice: A banshee
It’s useful for us when a monster reskins itself. This is basically the origin story for a banshee-like creature, but found in Venice. We can just shift the stats across and change the appearance. It also describes an instance of Venetian love magic, which is useful to us. *** It was in the dogado of…
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Walter De La Mare 6
We finish our little season of poems by De La Mare with this episode, Six brief pieces, with a mixture of monsters and locations. A couple of minor notes in explanation. The first peopm is called “The Gage”, and it seems to have been read as “The Cage”. presumably because it was thought a spelling…
Read MoreFollow this link to Podcast transcripts for September to December 2020
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King of Elfland’s Daughter 2
The second chapter of the King of Elfland’s daughter is a slow start, with little we can harvest for roleplaying games. It’s going to be included here because it sets a baseline which Dunsany calls back to later, to show the effects of the powers of the King of Elfland. I hope listeners will, therefore,…
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Walter De La Mare 5
This week, five poems from the spooky world of Walter De La Mare describing two locations and three creatures. The Librivox recording I’m using for these episodes is, sadly, missing three poems out of the collection. I’ll drop back in at the second and fourth poems. Eventually I’ll stat up the Queen of Night, the…
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