Roleplaying games from historical research
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…
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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,…
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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,…
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Extending on Ars Magica Simplified I’d like to suggest the following thoughts, to speed up onboarding and play. I’m going to copy these ideas across there. Until you actually use any characteristic on your sheet, it’s nebulous and can be traded around in play. This means that if you bought a few points in various things, and…
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Let’s just jump into it: Despite the advertisements of rival firms, it is probable that every tradesman knows that nobody in business at the present time has a position equal to that of Mr. Nuth. To those outside the magic circle of business, his name is scarcely known; he does not need to advertise,…
Read MoreThe Cornwall working page (not yet complete)
In Heirs to Merlin there are two fallen covenants. Stellasper This one is is Scilly. I suppose I should have looked up more Sicily folklore before I wrote this. Stellasper was a Criamon covenant founded in 1025, and everyone vanished in 1163. The name means “through the stars” or possibly “during the stars”. I presume it’s an…
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I’ve been having trouble getting material on Scilly: enough to go forward, but I’ve written to various people for help finding folklore. Let’s begin. The capital of Scilly in the 20th Century is St Mary’s, but in the C13th, it’s what’s now called “Old Town”. In period I think it’s called Ennor (although that could…
Read MoreNote on nobility. At the end of the C12th, there were three baronies in Cornwall, Launceston, Cardinham and Trematon. Launceston merges with the Duchy when Richard of the Romans takes it over. The previous holder of both titles having died without heirs in 1175, the land returned to the Crown, so that Henry III could…
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Games From Folktales 