Blood Tragedy Blood Tragedy is an entry for the 2011 Game Chef competition. My inspiration was the desire to not rewrite Measure For Measure. It also owes not a little to MC Lars’s “Hey There Ophelia” from the This Gigantic Robot Kills album. Thanks to the Librivox Shakespeare players for a crash course in the…
Read MoreNow that its crashed and burned I can discuss this project
Have you ever wondered what might have happened to Ars Magica’s faeries if the old style of thinking (“The Celts Were Right!”) had continued, and been coupled with our modern research techniques? I was trying to do a “two great tastes which taste great together” thing, mixing my Ars Magica writing and Librivoxing by recording…
Read MoreArs Magica Note: Nettles
According to Mick on Time Team, nettles are attracted to potassium, which is found in some areas as a result of ancient dung heaps or toilet pits. This means you can find a lost settlement in a forest by looking for nettles. For Hermetic magi, finding nettles is ridiculously easy: Hunt The Wild Herb, for example,…
Read MoreWhat Freebie Next?
Bar a little tidying up, I think Escape to the Tin Islands is done, and so its time for a new poll to see what new freebie people want. The winning option from last time (intro adventures for cons) has been taken out, because I don’t want ot write the same sort of stuff over…
Read MoreDecline and Fall of the Roman Empire : odd little note I’ll be using for Ars Magica
In Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire there are two little pieces I tthink will be very useful for Ars Magica. The first is this: some ancient Romans apparently had cloaks made of the beards of shellfish. Ars has always lacked an Aquam founder, although one pre-Hermetic maga who was a water specialist was…
Read MoreEscape to the Tin Islands shudders forward
I need this done for Auscon, since I’ll be running it twice, and so I’ve made many additions to Escape to the Tin Islands. Stats for grogs, and outlines for scenes two and three have been added. The sessions are four hours long, so I think I may need an additional scene. As it lies now the…
Read MoreArs Magica is looking for new authors
Over at Atlas Games’s site, there’s an open call for a book of story hooks. I’d encourage fans of the game to throw their ideas into the pot, because it makes the game world richer for everyone. Once you have an approved submission, ask around, because many of the authors, myself included, are very happy…
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The Literary Taste Lists: How Complete is Librivox? The Nineteenth Century
This is the third, and likely last, post which compares the Librviox database of free audiobooks with the lists provided by Arnold Bennett, a Nineteenth Century literary critic. So far Librivox has been sparse on the Seventeenth Century, and solid on the Eighteenth Century. How will it do in this, final*, list? As before, items in…
Read MoreThe Literary Taste Lists: How Complete is Librivox? The Eighteenth Century
A second post analysing Librivox’s completeness, from the perspective of Arnold Bennett’s Literary Taste: How to Form It. Librivox doesn’t have a lot of Seventeenth Century coverage, but I think it may do somewhat better in the Eighteenth. Let’s see, shall we? As before, black is for unrecorded works, orange for partially completed works, and green…
Read MoreThe Literary Taste Lists: how complete is Librivox? The Seventeenth Century
This month the Librivox book club is listening to Literary Taste: How to form it, by Arnold Bennett. In that book, among other things, he lists 339 works which he believes are essential to having a sound library. The obvious question was asked: how many of these books has Librivox recorded? Can you grab your MP3 player…
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Games From Folktales 