Roleplaying games from historical research
This will be an odd episode. Claus Stamm is one of those authors who writes a few children’s books and a poem or two, but is hard to track down electronically. I’m not sure why his work was focused on Japan, or which yokai he thought he was writing about here. The name he uses…
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Count Stenbock was a 19th century nobleman of Swedish descent who held a domain in what is now Estonia. His father died when he was a boy, as did his maternal grandfather, so he was incredibly wealthy for much of his life, although his property was administered for him by his paternal grandfather during childhood.…
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The Byland ghost stories were written into a 12th or 13th century book. They refer to the reign of Richard II as having completed. They take up the afterpage and some small gaps on the pages within the volume, and they are presumably written with the consent, or perhaps encouragement, of whoever looked after the…
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A ghost story for your monster of the month. Over to Ben Tucker. Thanks to him and his production team at Librivox. One cool October evening—it was the last day of the month, and unusually cool for the time of year—I made up my mind to go and spend an hour or two with my…
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This year I’m participating in Dungeon 23, which is a writing challenge where people write each day to build up a series of rooms for a megadungeon. In the City 23 variant, which is what I’m doing, a mass of material to be used to write a gazetteer for Ars Magic or Magonomia about the…
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I’ve thought about doing this poem before but I’ve excluded it for two reasons. It’s far later than the medieval period, although it is in the Magonomia period Well it’s Georgian theoretically. The other reason is it’s a very popular poem here in Australia: pretty much every school child learns it. It may have taken…
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St Michael is the patron saint of Normandy. He’s a Warrior Saint: the one who cast Satan from Heaven. It shouldn’t surprise us that the Normans chose him as their Patron, since they started as Vikings and evolved into the world’s most dangerous polo team. Mont Sant Michel, and its daughter house in Cornwall which…
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This week a brief extract from Tales of the Mermaid Tavern by Alfred Noyes. Some of you will already know Noyes’s work: he wrote The Highwayman. If you don’t know it, it will be an episode later in the month. He’s making reference to a tradition here that Shakespeare moved to London because he’d been…
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This week a brief episode containing an infernal regione. The story that’s following is called Crimson Flowers and it’s read into the public domain by Ben Tucker through LibriVox. Thanks to Ben and his production team. *** John Carew was working in his garden. Far away over the distant hilltops, the dying Sun hung like…
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This year I’m taking part in #Dungeon23 which is a challenge where people write a small chunk of a dungeon each day. There is a variant, called #City23, which I’m using to collect ideas for a Mythic Venice supplement. The January episode is already up and none of you told me to stop so this…
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Games From Folktales 