Roleplaying games from historical research
I’ve been listening to The London and Country Brewer, which was an anonymous book completed in the late 19th Century. It’s fascinating, in that it describes an industrial process which is still followed today by craft brewers, but to which I’d had no real exposure. Given that brewing, at least to the level of creating…
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One of the advantages that Australian authors have writing for American audiences is that we get to see many of the more popular products of their culture, but the converse is not true. This means that things which are, to us, commonplace, are, to them, surprising. I first noticed this when I wrote a brief…
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One of the great puzzles of medieval economics is why it works at all. Essentially the European economy, if you are standing at the border of China and looking westward, is an elaborate method of shipping gold and silver to China in exchange for spices. Medieval European understood this. What they did not understand was…
Read MoreEpisode 52 went live early. I have the stats for Hlo-hlo in Canva for the PDF, but not for the blog. It’ll go live when it was meant to, lo these many months from now. I’ll put an extra episode in to fill the gap. It’s about Miss Cubbage and the Dragon of Romance. You…
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I continue to be struck by the idea that Lord Dunsany’s work seems like the stories of a redcap, long weary of the road. Let’s try another. Be warned, there is a little antisemitism in this one. The Bureau d’Echange de Maux by Lord Dunsany I often think of the Bureau d’Echange de Maux and the wondrously…
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This is another of those posts which just reads better in pdf, so please check out the monthly digest. Photo credit: A Gude via Foter.com / CC BY-SA
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How do magi know what to read? Your magus helps out another covenant and, in thanks, they let your character study from their library for a season. In the real world, the Storyguide hands you a sheet of titles, each marked with level and quality, and you pick the one you’d like your magus to…
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I have a theory that Lord Dunsany’s tales are the reminiscences of a redcap, perhaps recorded in “The Book of Places You Must Not Go”. Over the next few months, let’s test that theory. If you have a favourite Dunsany story, comment on the blog. The Fall of Babbulkund was in an earlier episode. The Bureau d’Change will be…
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An overheard discussion of Marco the Redcap, recorded by his grand-daughter. “It is against the law to believe the story I am about to tell you. It breaches the damnatio memoraie applied by the Quaesitores after the War. You may not, must not, believe what I am about to say to be true. Fortunately I’m widely…
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Games From Folktales 