In Houses of Hermes : Mystery Cults, I mentioned Gorgias a lot, as his descendants were designed as an escape chute for players wanting to design classic Criamons. Turns out Gorgias used to annoy the followers of Socrates. Hank Green has the story here:
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Dressing like a murder hobo
Clothing isn’t really a matter of choice in much of historical Europe. What you wear isn’t so much fashion as a method of telling people how you deserve to be treated. Many games don’t deal with this at all: people wear whatever, mechanically, gives their characters the biggest bonuses. Their clothes don’t look like a…
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A theory of colour for roleplaying games
William Gladstone was a British prime Minister, who did the various sorts of things leaders of Empires do, but for the purposes of gaming his most interesting feature is that he popularised the idea that the classical peoples were colourblind. Now, we know this wasn’t true, but he thought their colour-blindness was the only explanation…
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So…my new book is out.
I know you were expecting Lands of the Nile, but I haven’t received it yet. I wrote The Tomb of Cleopatra back when we were doing Lands of the Nile. I noticed an interesting intersection between period folklore and Whovian lore, and ran with it.
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A Simplified Version of Ars Magica
Here are my initial thoughts
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A Difficult Decision
So, I’ve been doing the research work on a 1050AD Ars Magica setting, involving the invasion of Italy by the Normans. It’s the extension of all the Sicilian stuff you’ve seen on this site if you’ve rummaged around. I’ve put, perhaps, twenty hours into it recently, so not a lot but,cumulatively, dozens of hours over…
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Thomas Piketty and Getting Around Ursury Laws: a note for Transforming Mythic Europe.
Piketty notes in Capital in the 21st Century that one of the main ways to get around usury laws was to loan money to a noble, not against interest, but against the future production one of a nobleman’s holdings. The creditor then gets into the tax farming business, which we have discussed in Lords of…
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So, thinking about a podcast…
I have this idea that game communities are more stable when you have the chance to have good, brief experiences in that game’s world. Many computer games are striving for this now: you can play for half and hour and get something concrete done, then save and come back to it for another meaningful session.…
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Thomas Pikkety meets the Order of Hermes: The Missing 4%
In Capital in the 21st Century, Thomas Piketty notes that the reason that all of the nations of the Earth can be in debt at the same time is that about 4% of the world’s production disappears from the calculations. This money is basically filtering into a shadow economy. Some of it eventually resurfaces as…
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Thomas Piketty Meets the Order of Hermes: The 1%
In Piketty’s book he notes that from the medieval period onward, the wealth in society has never been more evenly distributed than after the Second World War, where the vast destruction of capital flattened out many fortunes based on investments. At that point, if I’m reading him right, the top 1% of people owned 50%…
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Games From Folktales 