Roleplaying games from historical research
I’m still cleaning up after the Cyclone Alfred, so here’s a story I though I’d already written up for Ars Magica, but find that I have not . I haven’t put the stats here yet, but basically it’ll be a possessed statue from Lands of the Nile, with the difference that the possessing spirit will…
Read MoreI’ll likely be offline for a few days. I’m fine, but my city is going to be hit by a cyclone tomorrow night, so I’m likely to lose power. I know that sounds blasé, but I was raised in the north of my state so I’ve been doing cyclones since I was eight. This one’s…
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Our second ghostly visitant from Lanacastrian Ballads: this is a pair of ghosts, of which the unnamed lady is the more interesting. She’s linked to a lightning tree, which are sometimes sought out by magi as useful for enchantment. She may have powers related to the weather or may be strangely transformed into a dryad,…
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This week and the next, two ghost variants from a collection of Lancastrian Ballads by John Harland. Ghosts take many forms, but one of the more frightening ones is to appear with the wounds of their death upon them. In Fair Ellen’s case, this means she can appear as a large pie. She’s the guardian…
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This poem contains a Herbam, or even Corpus, vis source created by a race of faeries that are being driven to extinction by the invading humans. Robert Louis Stevenson collected this story in Galloway, and added a note to make sure his readers knew this was an older, and false, historiography. The Picts were not…
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This week a note on the Lancashire witches. In earlier episodes we’ve covered some of the folklore concerning the Lancashire Witch Trials, so when I heard that there was a ballad of the Lancashire witches I thought we would be going in for Tales spellcasting, familiars, trials, and late repentances. Instead I found a plot…
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For only the second time, Games From Folktales welcomes a guest author. Tom Nowell is one of the presenters for the other Ars Magica podcast, Arcane Connection. This article has been purchased for the new Mythic Europe Magazine, which is still accepting submissions. Before reading you Tom’s piece I want to flag a couple of…
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There doesn’t seem to be a clear, copyable text of the The Wolf Woman by Grace Morgan anywhere easily accessible, so here’s a link to a scan of the issue of Weird Tales magazine where it appeared. “Bassett” was her pen name, because, like many authors in her period, she hid her gender to make…
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A note from Ambrose Bierce that seems to have a person falling into regio Thanks to the Librivox recorder and their production team. *** James Burne Worson was a shoemaker who lived in Leamington, Warwickshire, England. He had a little shop in one of the by-ways leading off the road to Warwick. In his humble…
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Fragment weeks are where I use up ideas that I know have value in Ars but can’t quite land. Sometime others in the community find excellent ways to use them. Here I’m presenting some of the poems from The Flowers of Evil by Baudelaire. As I think about them I keep circling back to the…
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Games From Folktales 