Roleplaying games from historical research
This episode went live early. Here’s a transcript of the episode as recorded. I may take a second bite at the cherry and write up the mystagogic path for the monthly collation. Why do faeries teach Mysteries? I was reading a story the other day which suggested that it was because it makes the acolyte…
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This week another story from E.F. Benson. E.F. Benson has only provided one story for this podcast previously: it was “The Room in the Tower” which provided the revener of Julia Stone. I wanted to share with you a different Benson story that would link into our Cornwall material. It’s been in the public domain…
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Poison maidens occur in Indian folklore, where they are called visha kanya. They are assassins. Perhaps they are based on a real tradition of women taught to seduce and then poison the men to whom they are sent as gifts, but that seems almost entirely theoretical. In the more developed form, the maidens are raised…
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This is a tiny episode, recorded sometime ago when I was doing all the Duunsany material. It’s only about a minute long but it’s his take on the armies of ghosts which we covered in one of the previous books. I remember a Criamon magus putting on the cap of their leader. Now for a…
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These transcripts are from the two episodes originally published in the January microepisode week. There was a third episode that week, and it has a separate transcript. Microepisode week is to allows me to use up plot ideas that have been sitting in my notebooks for a while. I’ve noticed that ideas that go out…
Read MoreArs Magica’s combat system has always been a bit of a problem. The current one doesn’t let a nudist with a sharpened stick dependably defeat a knight, or require that your character’s actions be subsumed into a small tactic unit roll, but there are obvious problems with it, and these make the game difficult to…
Read MoreThe night after I put the Cornwall gazetteer out as a finished draft, I received a “like” on the blog from a Cornish folklore and photography site, called The Cornish Bird. I’d like to recommend it, because its writer has walked to many of the places described in the gazetteer, and her photographs are great…
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Merry Christmas! A little ghost story for the Noel. *** The King of Duntrine had a daughter when he was old, and she was the fairest King’s daughter between two seas; her hair was like spun gold, and her eyes like pools in a river; and the King gave her a castle upon the sea…
Read MoreIs there any point in these sorts of “stats only” collections? Can you use the monsters without the fiction that they are drawn from, which gives them context? The attached file says it is for Episode 175 – that’s still the plan, with more monsters, and possibly the source stories as well.
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I originally wrote this story up as two elementals, feuding for status, but I think they are likely faeries, as they are interested in the death of humans. Is the fog a sort of meteorological vampire? Can you set it on your enemies? Protect your own ships? Does the Old Winter have a court with…
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Games From Folktales 