Games From Folktales

I’ve been trying to find a way of modelling mask magic for many years. There’s an arena in Istria, in the Transyvanian book, which has an ancient Roman theatre, for example, where if you pick up the actors’ masks you are possessed by faerie spirits and gain their powers. It was a way of bringing…

A brief one this time – another little poem. My plan for this one is to imagine a scribe or Bonisagus magus that has haunted or possessed an ink bottle so that when the player characters (or anyone) uses it they have the Inventive Genius Virtue. It’s earned using a virtue initiation (travel, story) The…

This week a ballad from “Westward Ho!” by Charles Kingsley. One of the very first things I wrote for Ars Magica was a fairy queen with a courtship based on a series of impossible tasks. I’d stolen it from a folk song called Scarborough Fair. I’ve been looking for a way to bring that back…

This week we continue the embarrassment that is our series of episodes about W B Yeats. To summarize from last episode W B Yeats was part of a literary movement which led to the style of fairies that we mostly saw in Ars Magica: Second Edition. The problem with that for us was that it…

Oh that it would come to this! 250 episodes in and we’re finally doing some WB Yeats. Yeats is a hereditary enemy of Ars Magica authors, because he was part of the Celtic Twilight, the late 19th century / early 20th century movement which made our fairies all twee and weird. However some of his…

I was listening to  Dragons of the Air: An Account of Extinct Flying Reptiles by H. G. Seele and a vis source emerged. In Bavaria, near Solenhofen, there is a layer of white, lithographic limestone which is deep within the earth. It contains the bones of small wyverns, perhaps three feet across. Their wings contain…

I was listening to Journeys to Baghdad by Charles S Brooks, and it reminded me of an idea I had for Ars Magica. In 1220 there are no modern, topographic maps. There are way-maps, which look, to me, a little like the route maps of subways, and there are portolans, which are sailing angles and…

There’s the fragment of a story – barely a folktale – about a kingdom on the shore of the Black Sea called “England”. It’s an odd little saga kernel. Basically, in the 11th Century, a group of Saxons fled the Norman invasion of England by putting to sea. They raided their way through the Mediterranean,…