Roleplaying games from historical research
A welcome to Games From Folktales’s first guest author, Angela Black. *** In the default conception of Mythic Europe, miracles of Faith are rare. Whether this is for game balance or simply due to our modern sensibilities, it doesn’t exactly fit the medieval mindset on divine intervention. Miracles – while still wondrous – were relatively…
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A bugaboo, or bugbear, is a variant of the faeries that scare parents into seeing to their children. In Realms of Power : Faerie this would be a variant of the ogre Gello. Thanks to Ann and her production team for the recording. *** THERE was an awful Bugaboo Whose Eyes were Red and Hair was…
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Dear listener, this was the least pleasant of the many things I’ve worked through to find you historical material. This book is a summary of witch trials written by an early English antifeminist author. It’s a long litany of people killing aged and neurodivergent women. That being noted there’s material for three episodes here. This…
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You’re getting your annual report early this year. There are some changes coming because of the Anno Magica. For those not up to speed, Ars Magica is going to enter a new season later in the year, when Atlas Games crowdfunds the Definitive Edition. As part of that project, parts of the Ars Magica system…
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For the Venice material I’ve hit a couple of additional plot hooks, based on the two most popular masks at Carnivale. The most popular male mask isn’t a character: it’s just a plain white mask, without a mouth. The chin bows forward sufficiently for the person to eat and drink in the mask. The mask’s…
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Padraic Colum was an Irish author who translated the Thousand and One Nights, although his translation is not much used anymore. In his book “The Boy Apprenticed to an Enchanter” he spends some time remixing material from other stories, and making it more palatable for readers of his time. For this episode I’ve extracted three…
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A brief one this time. This poem demonstrates what, in Ars Magica, we’d call oppression. That’s when a demon attaches itself to a victim and removes their sources of joy. It’s a paradigmatic version of clinical depression. Thanks to Anne and the Librivox production team for the recording. *** I see the broken bodies of…
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It’s the first week of April, so indulge me with this Australian ghost story for your Monster of the Month. Your Librivox reader this time is me from fifteen years ago. Odd how had my voice has changed. A few explanations: Geebung is a fictional place. There is a suburb of Brisbane called Geebung, but…
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This may well be the longest episode Games From Folktales has hosted. It’s a very early vampire novella with at least one, but perhaps two, monsters of the month. It’s a 19th Century story from Germany and was recorded into the public domain by Louise J Belle. Thanks to Louise and her production team. As…
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The Exeter Book is an Anglo-Saxon collection of puzzle poems. Riddle 47, which I’d like to focus on for this episode is one of the more famous, Thanks to the Saga Thing podcast for reading it on a recent episode about the lacuna in the saga they are following. A moth ate words. I thought…
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