Easter Eggs

Retired Play by Post Campaigns Ars Magica 5th Edition: Shores of Albion
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The October Daye books by Seanan McGuire

  • Liliana is based loosely on Lily.
  • There is a completely independent Court of Cats, led by an incredibly sexy King of Cats, named Tybalt.
  • There is a changeling Countess, November Nighte :stuck_out_tongue:

Emma Bull's "War for the Oaks":
Most of the ideas I have on how Faerie works, comes from Emma Bull. This is one of my favourite books and I love it too much to incorporate any direct Easter Eggs from it, because I don't think I could do any of her characters justice. A lot of the other faeries are ganked from the Alex Craft novels, for which I confess a certain weakness :slight_smile:

The yellow robes worn by provisional members is a nod to an old Ars saga run by Chris Van Horn; requiescat in pace.

Most of the Tremere NPCs came from Paul Briscoe's De Domo Tremeris, which was released under the Creative Commons License and is free, so if you want it I can send it to you. It is 500 pages of both crunch and cream, and contains tons, TONS of great stuff on House Tremere. And as a meta-egg, Nyyrikki was Paul's longest-running character. (I was sad there was so little of Nyyrikki in De Domo. Ah well.)

The Duos Flumen saga featured four grogs, the Knights of Liverpool: John, Paul, George, and Richard, who were all musicians of the enchating music variety. (Yes, yes I did that.) You can probably guess, from there, who this saga's grogs, Michael and Keith of Kent, are supposed to be. Oh, and on the topic of grogs-- Marcus the Turb Captain is a real person, he was the DM of a 3E D&D game I played in, years ago :slight_smile: The NPC Marcus is married to a shield grog named Devorah; the real Marcus is married to a woman named Debra.

The vis sources are from all over. The Intellego source is from a 3rd ed game that fithelere ran, which was my first introduction to Ars. Merlin's Well and the Winter King' vis came from a saga I played in run by a guy named Dave. The Herbam source came out of a book somewhere, and the Musician's Festival I designed while I was thinking about how much I missed the Bedlam Bards :slight_smile: The Perdo source is straight out of Historia Brittonum (which is a work of fiction, despite its name).

Speaking of Historia Brittonum-- California universities have all sorts of weird requirements. Even as a science major, I had all kinds of requirements for humanities courses, so I took a bunch of courses on medieval mythology. Had to read the Mabinogion, Historia Regum Britanniae, Historia Britonnum, the Ulster Cycle, the Leinster Cycle, and the Fenian Cycle. That will probably become a lot more obvious as the saga progresses :wink:

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I'll take a copy...I'm all about free stuff.

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It's a huge file, so if you have a Dropbox account that would be the fastest transfer method.

Otherwise I'd have to mail a usb key, and until Snowmageddon clears up there's no way I will make it to a post office :slight_smile:

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I do now. What do you need to send it? Email addy (cuteolpuddytat (at) yahoo (dot) com )?

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It's a good read, it's about how I thought of the Tremere. Bibracte in my aborted tabletop incarnation was going to be a Tremere House in Normandy, since so many of the PCs were looking to play Tremere. I think it gives too much experience to gauntleted Tremere, without a discussion of experience other Houses might provide.

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If there's some petition we could sign to convince David Chart to let Paul Briscoe draft all the House supplements for 6th edition... and maybe 6th edition itself? I would sign it until my hand broke.

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This link should work:
dl.dropbox.com/u/14699818/De%20D ... emeris.pdf

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The first three times I tried it, it just loaded a blank page. The last three, I got an I/O error has occurred followed by an Adobe Acrobat has crashed. I'll try again after work in the morning.

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It's 23 megs. Try right clicking the link and selecting Save File, then it'll go straight to your browser's download manager instead of trying to parse it as html.

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Chaching. Thanks, Arya.

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Thanks for the link! :smiley:
Too bad I probably won't have the time to read this, ever :frowning:

How did you came upon this?

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Dave was one of the two best gm I ever had, and one of the things I miss most about Austin is being in his game.

I seem to recall Lucanidus/Bug-boy as being from his campaign, and I would like to think that Father Alexander was, too.

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Holy shit. Are you Ray?!? And why are you not in Austin anymore?

Did you ever know Marcus "Greywalker"? That's the Marcus our turb captain is based on :slight_smile: He's friends with Dave; it was Marcus who'd told me about Dave's game originally.

Lucanidus is the grown-up Bugboy (I am terribly predictable about names -- just go for the obvious and change it to Latin :p). But Father Alexander is based on my friend Alex, a Russian p-chem professor who looks about half his age and is way too cool to be as nerdy as he is.

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I kinda figured a maga named Cygna who had the Fury flaw and was haunted by the ghost of a Bonisagus would have been a dead giveaway, but yeah sheepish

Moved to Pennsylvania summer of '08 to be with my parents, especially Dad who wasn't doing so well and was going down hill. She-who-must-not-be-named thought it would be a good idea, and I had already been thinking about it anyway, so I saved up, sold a bunch of stuff I didn't want anymore on eBay, and came up here. Except for the whole "not having a full time job" thing (and the not having any gaming groups and not being able to go out and do stuff anymore whenever I want) I don't have any real regrets about it.

And I'm going through the threads again (for my Hermetic Census project) and I'm seeing a few familiar names, too. Brings back some good memories.

And I thought nerdy was cool :smiley:

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What would be a giveaway about "Cygna"? That's what I'd have named a Bjornaer with a swan heartbeast :stuck_out_tongue: I don't see what's a giveaway about Fury, either. Or a dead Bonisagus, for that matter.

The first few times I tried GMing, players were constantly catching me off guard because they wouldn't do the things I thought they would. So all the things I prepared for, the NPCs I'd actually given personalities to, were never the ones they'd interact with, and I was stuck trying to make things up on the spot. And while I am good at making things up on the spot, it's very difficult to remember who's who, and stay consistent.

That's when I decided that the next game I ran, the world would be populated with characters I've played before, or based on real people. So no matter where the PCs go or who they talk to, everyone has a distinct personality.

You recognize Aislinn and Justinius of course. Leona is a character I played in Erik Dahl's northern frontier saga a few years ago. Lucia Jerbitonis is a character I played in Angus MacDonald's Sicilian saga, at around the same time. Lydia Jerbitonis is a character I played in Chris Van Horn's saga. Fredegisa has exactly Laetitia's personality and motivations. Stellaluna Bjornaeris, Ariel of Flambeau, those are all characters I played in various PBPs.

It is to us, but that's why we're not cool :slight_smile:

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Oh-- and Scintilla is based on my grandma, whose spelling wasn't anywhere near as bad as that, but she never wrote with any punctuation and her handwriting was awful enough that she could have been a doctor.

Sanno is my ferret Sanosuke.

And Llamrei is a conglomeration of two magical animal companions that raccoonmask's character had in the first incarnation of this saga-- an adventurous horse whose name I can't remember, and a bookworm of a cat named Bremen.

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Wait. Was Katerina Mikhail's niece?

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Yep. Her Gift manifested in one of the early bandit raids, she ReMe'd one of the bandits and had him attack the other bandits when she was like 8 or 9. Riversedge is basically Riverborne Glade, tweaked, renamed. Vucar ≈ Mikhail, Grus ≈ Litha (had to make her Cygna's mater because of the aspect changes in apprenticeship they did with 5e), Adorjan ≈ Aiden. I still need to figure out how to write Draag when I do Cygna's Epic Diabolic Backstory of Dooooom, since I don't think he'll have the same voice/personality as Mikhail.

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I remember her! I don't remember her being Gifted though. It must have manifested after I got swamped with PT (you remember when I got pegged by that Grand Am, right?), and then I had a big fight with Sam, after which he decided to reset my password, so I lost access to my email... those were fun times :confused:

I had remembered Aiden as a Flambeau. Probably why I didn't recognize him :slight_smile:

Draag is VERY different from Mikhail. He's based on a Russian postdoc I worked with. He's loud and blustery, politically motivated but not terribly savvy, achieving his goals through brute force. He can be kind at times, but he's always, always loud. That personality difference might make it a lot easier to see why he didn't take Katerina himself... she fit Mikhail much better than she does Draag.

Duos Flumen is Riverrun, from A Song of Ice and Fire. (Gallus Florensis is Deepwood Motte, Cad Gadu is Casterly Rock, and Burnham is Winterfell. In the tabletop version of the saga, I wanted the covenant to be Winterfell, but I got overruled.) Anyhow, Grus will be much easier for me to play, now :stuck_out_tongue:

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Dammit. Since Peregrine's been playing so many female characters, I had been managing to maintain a comfortable sort of ambiguity about his real-life gender until now. It was sort of a Schrodinger's Genitalia thing.

Now I know you're a dude. Ah, well.