Roleplaying games from historical research
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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I thought this story was folklore, but it turns out it’s fiction by Washington Irving. Statistics for the creature at the end. *** On a stormy night, in the tempestuous times of the French Revolution, a young German was returning to his lodgings, at a late hour, across the old part of Paris. The lightning…
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Looe Island is a potential covenant site that will be added to the material which is gradually being collected for a Cornish gazette for the Ars Magica roleplaying game. Much of this material comes from Alex Langstone’s book “From Granite to Sea” or from the Cornish folklore journal he edits “Lien Gwerin”. Looe Island has…
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The Grim Reaper doesn’t get much of a look in in Mythic Europe: he’s a later artistic contrivance. The Romans had a God of Death, but the god of the process of dying, sadly for the order, was Hermes himself, in his role as psychopomp. I’ve split off a third story, “Death and the Orange”,…
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The Bayeux Tapestry was a piece of monarchical propaganda produced by the Normans after 1066 to explain to their side of the conflict to illiterates. It was made in England somewhere: although precisely where is not clear. We know this because structurally it is not a tapestry at all: it’s an embroidery, and the techniques…
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One of the earliest of MR James’s stories. This is interesting as an apprentice story, or as a plot hook about a Bonisagus who keeps losing apprentices. I’ll be spoiling this story on the way through with plot ideas. It was, as far as I can ascertain, in September of the year 1811 that a postchaise…
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I was listening to Rusty Quill Gaming, and a character they have, Sir Bertram MacGuffin, reminded me of Bertrand Russell. I have no idea why, but let’s charge on…Russell said some interesting things about the meaning of sentences, which may have effects in the spoken component of spellcasting. So, Russell starts off being big on…
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This short story by Lord Dunsany is a character study of a ghost. It demonstrates the tragedy of that type of undeath in Mythic Europe. Ghosts do not learn, and that means that sometimes their task cannot be completed. They linger on pointlessly: senselessly suffering. Imagine your covenant has a similar sort of ghost. Should…
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Games From Folktales 