Roleplaying games from historical research
In Ars Magica, places that are old develop Magical auras. This is particularly true of places that have been used for arcane practice, like temples, but more generally, if you find a ruin, and it goes back to the Roman era, it may well have a Magical aura. The question is, can that process of…
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I heard this poem and was developing it as a monster. I was preparing a sort of Frankenstein’s monster figure, a revener that, when you killed it, turned out to just be a vessel for a demon that was sitting in its chest cavity. Then I realized I’d seen something directly similar: this is the…
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This is more of a puzzle than a story. The magi want the confession under the hand of the skeleton of Lord Lovel. An influx of air will destroy the pages. How do they use their magic to read or transcribe them? Thanks to Shrimpfish and their Librivox production team for the recording. ***Francis Lovel…
Read MoreNow that Mythic Europe Magazine Issue One is out, its time for me to buckle down and put some podcast episodes in the can. Much as the Cornish and Venice episodes eventually collated into a book, the larger series of episodes may eventually cohere into a larger work. The three broad series in the upcoming…
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Cheshire is a traditionally English county that’s just to the north of Wales. Its county town is Chester, which is in the far west of the county. Chester was a Roman fortress used to pacify the people in what’s in modern north Wales. In 1220 Cheshire is a different shape to what you’ll see on…
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There’s an idea in Ars Magica, stolen from period texts, that sometimes demons attach to a person and cause all joy to be sucked out of their life. This is called “oppression”. The following story is set far after the game period, but it shows how simple oppression can wear a person down by stealing…
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Now that there has been an explosion in creativity due to the open license, and now that I’m editing a fanzine, it’s time to give quick tips to beginning, commercial authors. Some of the advice that follows is coloured by my preferences as a reader. There’s no need to point out that there isn’t one…
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Procopius was a senator in the reign of the Emperor Justinian, and his writings are the core primary source when studying him. He was the legal advisor to Belisarius, Constantinople’s most skilled general, and wrote about his military campaigns. In secret he also wrote a second history, parodying how tacky the emperor, the general, and…
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We had one of Edith Nesbit’s ghost stories last week, so this week one of her tales for children. This comes from The Book of Dragons, which I compulsively re-read in primary school. I waited for it to hit public domain in the United States, planning to grab it the first weekend it was available,…
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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…
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Games From Folktales 