Roleplaying games from historical research
This week, another episode in which we discuss fairy lovers that destroy their beloved. You will notice the lover sits plotting her hair beneath a whitethorn bush. In Irish mythology particularly white thorn bushes are gathering places for the fairies. It’s considered bad luck to damage or move, particularly solitary, whitethorn bushes, especially if they’re…
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Dorothea Mackellar is one of my favourite poets, and the reason why makes her useful for Ars Magica players. She was a young, rebellious Australian poetess, who wanted to smash through the tradition of idealising Europe. Her best-known poem, My Country, was written when she was nineteen, and was a glove to the face of…
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A brief poem this week. It is the statement of a woman englamoured by a faerie. Note that she is deliberately avoiding the traditional wards which would defend her from his influence. This poem was released into the public domain through LibriVox by Newgate Novelist. It was by yonder thorn I saw the fairy host(O…
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There’s a song recorded in “Ancient Poems, Ballads, and Songs of the Peasantry of England” which details a serial killer. I think he may be a murderous lover, a sort of faerie we’ve described before in “Realms of Power: Faerie”. Plot hooks at the end. The recording which follows was released into the public domain…
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A Manx story about treating elfstroke
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This is a bonus episode. In following months we’ll be moving on from “The Stories of a Chinese Studio” by Pu to “Manx Fairy Tales” by Sophia Morrison. Morrison is kind of like the Brothers Grimm for Manx fairy tales: if you’ve heard manx fairy tales, you have heard her work. She also acted as…
Read MoreI’m trying to work through the backlog of monster statistics, so here are a batch for this month. Thanks to jason72 and Ignes Fesitvus for reminding me where these statistics were, and for the suggestion to use a mongoose as the base for ferret statistics. Srendi Vashtar – Tiny Faerie God Faerie Might: 5 (Animal)…
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This is a story by Lucy Clifford which reminds me of a faerie, lacking a soul but having enough cognisance to know that she’s not fitting her role. *** She wandered about in the sunshine all the day long, over the fields and in the woods, picking the flowers and listening to the birds, and…
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This is a traditional story, retold here by Lucy Clifford. It was a source for Neil Gaiman’s “Coraline”. It has two faeries contesting for a pair of feral children. The first mother has a series of prohibitions and she vanishes when they are broken, like a selkie wife, so the temptation to say she is…
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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…
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Games From Folktales 