Oh, my! It’s the GFF May 2018 transcripts!
The Magical Realm is Meinong’s Jungle
If I were to say “Unicorns have wings.” you might reply “No, Timothy: that’s Pegasus. Unicorns have horns.” A third person, listening in would agree with you. Unicorns have horns. Pegasus has wings. The problem is: there are no unicorns: so how can that statement “Unicorns have horns” be more true than the statement that…
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M.R. James: Canon Alberic’s Scrap-book
There’s a little Dunsany left to do, from his short story collection called 51 Tales, but that will wait for a post-a-day challenge. To replace him, it’s time for a new author. M.R. James James wrote about one ghost story a year, to tell to his friends in a circle around a fire, as part…
Read MoreThere are good reasons why pyramids seem like entry points to regiones in Mythic Europe
For my higher math nerds, please see this https://youtu.be/KYaCtHPCARc It’s a Youtube video from Infinite Series, in which they demonstrate that if you take a hypercube, and cut a hpyerplane across it, the three-dimensional object created is always either a tetrahedron or an octohedron. There are other, higher dimension objects, but each of these, if divided…
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Cornwall: The Sword of Tristram
I was listening to a novel from the St Mary’s Chronicles, and a plot hook linked to Cornwall emerged. Let’s harvest it for the gazetteer. Curtana, the sword of Tristram, Prince of Lyonesse, was in the English royal treasury until 1215 when it was lost, along with most of the portable wealth of King John,…
Read MoreCornwall: Story hooks from “Lien Gwerin ~ A Journal of Cornish Folklore” issues 1 and 2
Lien Gwerin is a magazine that retells Cornish folk stories, so a lot of the material has already been claimed for the gazetteer project through its trawling of Victorian collectors of Cornish material. Similarly, its editor is Alex Livingstone, and there’s some crossover of material with his book, which has already been harvested for story…
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Dunsany : the unpasturable fields
This is a bonus episode that is using up some spare minutes in my monthly podcast plan. It is unscripted, so apologies for the incoherence. I’ve just got home from Adelaide, a city in the far south of Australia. I took my children on a plane for the first time, and as I did, I…
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Octopus: a bonus episode
Thanks to all of the Patreons and listeners who have kept the podcast going for two years. This is a brief, bonus episode to celebrate the anniversary. For the 100th episode of Games From Folktales I posted a poem by Charles Swinburne that contained the initiation script for Dolores, the Infernal Saint of Sorrow. When…
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Magus design for new Ars Magica players
Hi, and welcome. I’m Timothy Ferguson, and I was one of the most prolific authors for the last edition of Ars Magica. Here are some hints to designing a character you’ll enjoy. Play style Get your group to decide if they are going to do the suggested thing, which is that each story has one…
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Cornwall: “From Granite to Sea” notes
Alex Langstone recently published a book of folklore focused on eastern Cornwall. It uses some of the same sources as the Cornwall Project, so there’s some repetition of material, but I’ve managed to pull four pages of notes out of it. Most of them are going to just slot into the previously done material, adding…
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