Games From Folktales

May 7, 2013May 6, 2013

First set of Sicily notes

I’ve been working on some Sicilian material. based on a biography by an author named van Cleve. My notes are on a separate page. I’ve been transcribing these notes for a month or so, but I’ve been stuck on the last chapter for ages. My plan, rather than continuing to plod through the pages and…

May 4, 2013April 29, 2013

Ars Magica note: are some people blind to all faerie glamours?

This is a a brief tale of faerie that inverts some of the usual tropes, from Arthur Machen’s The White People (via Project Gutenberg). I’ll be posting another four excerpts from this book, over the next month. Machen’s narrator is a sixteen year old, writing in a journal. It reminded me of a tale my nurse had told…

May 2, 2013May 4, 2013

Intaglios

Have you ever kept reminding yourself to do something, and then realised, after the day is over, that you forgot it entirely? This happens to one of the knights at the Grail Castle. People keep saying to him “Don’t forget to ask the question!” and three times he says to them “Sure, I’ll ask him…

April 29, 2013April 30, 2013

A quick note

So, the blog has been a little quiet (I’ve been off doing Coursera) but there’s some material upcoming: My Sicily notes. These really are notes: they are some of the raw material out of which I’ll later build story hooks and paragraphs of text. I need more, particularly geography, but we’ll see how far this book takes us…

March 17, 2013

Beating up clowns – an Ars Magica note.

In 1221, Frederick II, the Holy Roman Emperor, passed a law that said in his kingdom of Sicily, no-one was ever to be charged for robbing, or beating up, buffoons and jesters. The laws passed at the time also included the punishment of gamblers who took the name of God in vain, the demand that…

March 9, 2013

Transylvanian Tribunal Timeline

I wrote a timeline for the Tribunal book, but asked for it to be cut, because it was taking up space that could be used for ideas set in 1220. Here it is, for your covenant’s deep history, or play in non-standard time periods. You’ll notice it contains primarily Hungarian material. If it also contained…

March 8, 2013March 8, 2013

Mythic Sicily, a night for setting parameters

I started the reading for my Mythic Sicily project tonight and I find I’ve a bigger task than I imagined. I thought I’d just be covering the court of Frederick II, Holy Roman Emperor and Marvel of the World. There are many reasons for being interested in it, from a roleplaying game perspective. It turns…

March 4, 2013March 4, 2013

Sprinting toward Sicily

I work for the only public library service in this country that doesn’t charge you for interlibrary loans*. This means I can have rather more interlibrary loans than most other people, but it does mean that I get myself into situations like the one I’m currently in. I’m going to be doing a Mythic Sicily…

March 3, 2013

Librivox: Gladstone Colony finished except for the editing: Time to spend a year with Clausewitz

When you decide to solo a really large book, you are giving a huge portion of your life to something. The only reason it isn’t daunting is because you carefully conspire with yourself not to notice what you are doing. I’ve just finished The Gladstone Colony, other than a couple of hours of edits. In…

March 1, 2013March 22, 2013

Collated NaGaDeMon Projects

I’ve set up single page versions of Thirty Objects of Desire and The Stories of Marco the Liar, which were a supplement and a fiction project spurred on by NaGaDeMon.