Roleplaying games from historical research
This is the second in series of posts designed to flesh out Cornwall as a setting for Ars Magica troupes. . It uses as its core text Popular romances of the west of England; or, The drolls, traditions, and superstitions of old Cornwall by Robert Hunt. Hunt divides Cornish faeries into five types: small people, spriggans, piskies, buccas…
Read More
Sometimes the Thames freezes over. It was more common in the Eighteenth Century, when temperatures were a little colder than now, and the bridge over the river had pylons more closely placed. People held markets on the frozen river. During the final frost fair in 1814, a book was printed on the ice. I’ve gone through it…
Read More
Let us continue our supposition that the works of Lord Dunsany are the reminisces of a redcap recorded, perhaps, in The Book of Places You Must Not Go. First, the story: the version given in the podcast was released into the public domain through Librivox by Sandra Cullum When the nomads came to El Lola…
Read More
Announcing a new column for Games From Folktales. Once a month, you’ll get some Cornish material. At the end I hope it’ll assemble into something like a gazetteer you can plug into Heirs to Merlin and the Vanilla Covenant project. For those wanting to play along my source text is Popular romances of the west of England;…
Read More
One of the cognitive fallacies which fuels real-world conspiracy theories is proportionality bias. This suggests that large effects need to have large causes. At the most extreme, Descartes suggested a God was necessary because there were minds, so something greater than a mind need to cause the mind. Hermetic magic says that there needs to…
Read More
My podcast plan is a “use it or lose it” fifty minutes a month. What do I do with the tiny spare minutes at the end of each month? I save them up as microepisodes. This week three very brief episodes, instead of one long one.
Read More
I was listening to the MonsterTalk podcast, and Blake Smith mentioned his examination of the SS Watertown ghost photograph. You may know the story: two sailors were buried at sea, and their ghostly faces followed the vessel for weeks. Smith arranged to receive deck plans of one of the Watertown’s sister ships, and took photographs from…
Read More
Games From Folktales 