Roleplaying games from historical research
This week we start a new series of posts by a particular author. For the last few years we’ve been doing the works of Lord Dunsany, which I hope eventually to collect together into a vast annotated omnibus. Since then we’ve had some M.R. James, some Benson but for the next six or seven months…
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This week, Major Weir’s Infernal regio in Edinburgh. LibriVox is a community group which records books that are in the public domain into the audio format. I believe this recording is by Colleen McMahon and I thank her for putting it in the public domain. It demonstrates something interesting about folk tales – things which…
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I started writing up a magus with a tool belt, and went back to look up their history. We’ve had one in a game supplement before, but it was disguised, because the wearer, like many at the time, was a woman. Western tool belts begin with female roman slaves. They carried a little tool pouch…
Read MoreI’m trying to work through the backlog of monster statistics, so here are a batch for this month. Thanks to jason72 and Ignes Fesitvus for reminding me where these statistics were, and for the suggestion to use a mongoose as the base for ferret statistics. Srendi Vashtar – Tiny Faerie God Faerie Might: 5 (Animal)…
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This is a story by Lucy Clifford which reminds me of a faerie, lacking a soul but having enough cognisance to know that she’s not fitting her role. *** She wandered about in the sunshine all the day long, over the fields and in the woods, picking the flowers and listening to the birds, and…
Read MoreHere’s the link for the February 2018 transcripts. One episode went live early, so there’s an extra in there.
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Scilly was one of the last holdouts of the Priscillian heresy. It was linked to Manicheanism, sorcery and astrological demons. A covenant of Criamon astrologers disappeared from the islands after a great magical event. These things seem to be connected. Let’s look at the history of the heretical community. In this post, I’ll be using…
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This is a traditional story, retold here by Lucy Clifford. It was a source for Neil Gaiman’s “Coraline”. It has two faeries contesting for a pair of feral children. The first mother has a series of prohibitions and she vanishes when they are broken, like a selkie wife, so the temptation to say she is…
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The Worm and the Angel As he crawled from the tombs of the fallen a worm met with an angel. And together they looked upon the kings and kingdoms, and youths and maidens and the cities of men. They saw the old men heavy in their chairs and heard the children singing in the fields.…
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What follows is the text of a pamphlet published in 1674, probably in London. It is usually called “A Full and True Account of the Strange Monster: or, Wonderful Fish Lately taken in Ireland.” but because I love how different this is to the modern day, indulge my quotation of the full title A true…
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Games From Folktales 