Roleplaying games from historical research
In the Republic, there’s a thought experiment that a faerie or demon might make real in Mythic Europe. A shepherd named Gyges finds the grave of a king, after an earth tremor, and removes a ring from it. When he places the ring upon his finger and twists it, he becomes invisible. He uses this…
Read MoreThank you to everyone who has supported Games From Folktales for 150 episodes! Here’s a little gift: the first edition of the Cornwall gazetteer I’ve been promising. Click to access cornwall-edition-1.pdf I call it the first edition, because at some point I hope to extend the section on saga seeds, and have a map professionally…
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This folktale by Lafcardio Hearn was used to create the minions of an enemy published in “Antagonists”. Mujina, by Lafcardio Hearn. On the Akasaka Road, in Tokyo, there is a slope called Kii-no-kuni-zaka,—which means the Slope of the Province of Kii. I do not know why it is called the Slope of the Province of…
Read MoreA reconstruction of the medieval Tintagel Castle is on English Heritage’s web page.
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Bottrell was one of the researchers that Robert Hunt used to flesh out his book, so his material has been already fossicked over, at one remove. Bottrell uses a lot more of the local dialect, and his colour text is better than Hunt’s. For example, all the descendants of Jack the Giant are shaggy because…
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This week I’ve been thinking about Hermetic applications of Wittgenstein’s ladder, but to get there, I need to take three steps back. I hit upon the idea in Terry Pratchett’s books, where it’s called lie-to-children, which is taken from Cohen and Stuart. An example I can think of is when Neil Gaiman wrote a Doctor…
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A quick Lord Dunsany story. The Puritanical Devil is a sort of inverse of the Merry Devil which I wrote up for Realms of Power : Infernal (p.73). It is likely hated not only by the angels, but a lot of faeries as well. A Moral Little Tale There was once an earnest Puritan who…
Read MoreSound the bells and lock the gates! It’s the July 2018 Games From Folktales pdf!
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A few weeks ago the blog discussed the weeping philosopher, Heralcitus. His parallel, the laughing philosopher Democritus, doesn’t have a lot of surviving work, but one of his followers was Epicurus, and he seems to have been a Hermetic magus before his time. Epicurius gets a bad rap in history. His name is used for…
Read MoreThis week, I’m going to beat to death the idea that this blog is designed to make Ars Magica easier for outsiders to understand, by taking the deepest dive yet into Mythic Europe’s cosmology and escatology. In vanilla Mythic Europe we have the following features: The magi who best understand how the clockwork of reality…
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