Games From Folktales

The last mile problem was first discussed in communications but it also has applications in logistics. The redcaps in the early versions of the game were basically a postal service, but they are now essentially a logistical service: they spend a lot of time buying stuff for magi. They own merchant ships, for example, and…

This episode went live early, so here’s the text!  Sorry if it turned up twice in your podcast schedule. *** I’ve been listening to Saga Thing, a podcast about Icelandic sagas, recently and there are some ongoing tropes.  One is this fun little power: if the character sees a sword, the sword becomes blunt. Let’s…

This year, once the pdocast is done with the works of Lord Dunsany, we’ll be heading off into the works of MR James. One of his stories is an apology where he gives the brief details of stories he has tried to write, but failed to conclude. I suppose every Ars Magica author has some…

This post went live before I intended it to, so I’ll briefly outline what I want this for. In Heirs To Merlin, it starts the Corruption of House Tytalus with a fallen covenant in Cornwall. I need to address that, and my first question was: given that demons lack any virtue, and thus cannot plan,…

So, fans of Westworld can skip this next 15 seconds, but when discussing philosophy and Mythic Europe, I need to lay out the ground.  In 1976 Jaynes published a book called The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. It was popular in the science fiction community. The core premise is that before…

Wittgenstein is one of my favorite philosophers, regardless of what his philosophy actually was. At one point, he thought the primary task of philosophers was to stand in the corner of other people’s lectures and yell ‘Semantics!”at them whenever they suggested  metaphysics was worth considering. Maybe you need to be me to think that’s really,…

Phyllo pastry (or Filo to our American friends) has a disputed origin. The name means “leaf” pastry, which I’ll come back to later. If you accept that the earliest modern dish using it is baklava, it first appears in the Thirteenth Century, in the the Eastern Roman Empire. Baklava is basically interlayered flaky pastry and nuts,…