Podcast news

Games Discussion Ars Magica
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Hi,

The backers files have been edited to rework something. Basically the Urban Diana Cult and Isaic Cult at Saint Zachary's have been made two parts of the same thing, like the greater and lesser Eleusinian Mysteries. I've added in a beat I laid down a while ago in Hedge Magic. The Lady of the Game there and the Dogaressa In Stone are Aspects of the same being, which is why there's a nightwalker battle above Saint Mark's Square regularly. These give me the three elements of Elesuian Mysteries (Descent / Search / Rise and making Norea explicitly a Divine emanation buried in Faerie before the Titanomachy lets me simplify everything, Realm-wise.

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Eleusinian Mysteries in Venice? Shouldn't that be in Thebes? Or are you working on several projects?

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Even the original mysteries had multiple cult centres, but yes, that's a simplification. I'm using the Lycosuran Mysteries, really.

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Podcast News:

This weekend two episodes went live, well three if you could last week;s which was delayed.
Magonomia: Historical Witch Trials. This is the first of three monthly episodes. Basically I'm fishing for demons in legal records.
The Awful Bugaboo (a Gello variant)
Annual Report 2024: Time for Summer. This last one is basically my response to the Anno Magica and a discussion of my plans. Usually I put out an annual report in late May. Basically, it's all good but I'm doing an experiment with asking co-authors to contribute.

The following episodes are coming up.

May
9: Angela Black's Divine Methods and Powers. Games From Folktales welcomes its first guest author.
16: Venice update. Discusses the additions between Venice Draft Zero and the current document. May be swapped out as a bonus episode.
23: Goethe - The Bride of Corinth (very early vampire story from Ancient Greece)
30 Witch Stories - The Ghost and the Succubus (two extracts from court documents. Infernal ghost, demon.)
June
6 The Cranes of Ibycus from Friedrich Schiller (return of the Nubicuculian Birds from RoP:M)
20 Goethe - The Erl-king (a faerie psychopomp for children from Germany).
27 Witch stories - the headless bear and the lady on the plank (a demon and just a weird court case.)

Then there are a series of linked Goethe stories, one episode per month. The treasure seeker and the magicians apprentice (magicians), the seven sleepers and the castle on the mountain (regiones), the water-man and the false lover (predatory faeries), the minstrel and the king of Thule (plot hooks). Also I'm going to do the Cavalier's Choice, but I haven't found a pair for it. I may tie it to The Erl-King depending on how the writing on that one goes. I have the vague idea that I've already done The Riddles of King John in a previous episode so I can't quite tie it in yet.

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I've paid a cartographer to do the first map for the Venice e-book. If he turns out to be good, I'll get him to do the second map, which is Venice proper. Even cheap art is expensive so the two maps will probably cost me AUD100.

I haven't asked anyone to do a cover yet: I'm hoping some digital assets like a license mark will come out from Atlas as part of the Kickstart, so I'll wait for that.

I'm editing the book myself, which I know is a fool's errand, but professional editors cost money. Quite commonly they charge US 3 cents a word, which on a book this length is USD180. If I'm selling it for "Pay what you want but I'd like $10" and Drivethru takes off 30% that needs 24 sales just to pay for itself, plus another 10 for maps, plus another 10 for cover art. It just drifts off into the impossible.

I won't be Kickstarting it, because the upfront costs of a Kickstarter are huge. You need a professionally done book trailer and a heap of full-colour art for the Kicstarter page. It's actually more likely to break even with lower editing quality, simpler art, and sales through places like Drivethru and itch.io. I regularly back things on Kickstarter and you'll see people kvetching at a $20 pdf that has, in a recent example, 224 pages, 120 of which are full colour art (Floral Dragons from Hit Point Press). so there's not a lot of play there for a scrappy first timer.

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So, a big episode:

This is a the player chapter (of the ashcan draft) of the Venice book I'm working for when the Definitive edition comes out. It's also read into audio, so if your players don't want to read it they can listen to it.

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Beautiful, simply beautiful. I need to listen to the Stones Of Venice again.

Two minor points (I note your point about this all being you IP, and agree)

Page 3:neighbourhood: First mention of shrouded glen, but no context (if this is for newbies, might be worth a more detailed definition here?), also subsequent mentions of Shroud inconsistently capitalized.

Page 8: Major domo section: mistake ->mistaken?

Bob

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Good thing that you defined what an Ashcan is, i was not familiar with the term.

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This was really quite good and I like your vision of Mythic Venice very much!

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So, progress on the Venice thing. I've finished the layout other than getting the Ducal Palace redone as a gaming map and overlaying the legend.. A talented artist is working on it at the moment and I've seen his work for the bottom two floors (out of three) so I feel I have a right to hope it will all be sorted by October 15th or thereabouts.

In terms of the art, I've worked as hard as I could with public domain materials. There were 3 paid art commissions (2 maps of islands you can see in the player chapter, a deck plan of a Venetian galley with and without oars and crew, and the 3 level floorplan of the Ducal Palace) which are going to come out at USD280. That seems alright, but it does mean I've argued myself out of commissioning an extra piece for the one character I can't get good PD art for: the Master of Games. His look is too distinctive to have randomly turned up the way some of the others have, and I don't want to edit his description to suit art I can find, like I did with the demonic cyclops.

There are three obvious extra potential chapters which I'm deliberately not doing, because I know that if I let the project just spiral on and on I'll likely hit one of my periods where writing is difficult and the whole thing will pause until I'm better. The lovely thing about the share-alike license will be that if anyone wants to write a piece that just clips directly onto Mythic Venice they can. The obvious things you aren't getting are Murano written up as a covenant and a source of a mirror magic Hedge tradition, The Storehouse of the Magi written up as a covenant, and the faerie market in the Merceria.

The first one is surprisingly hard for me to research, although some of our Italian friends might manage it easier. The Storehouse might not need to be written: there's a decent chance someone can just reskin a heap of characters from Through the Aegis or similar. The faerie market could be a book in itself. I know one of the other people who took the post a day for November challenge has been working on that sort of thing, and we could come together as a community to do it one of these Novembers. Everyone chips in one or more shops and the whole thing gets hosted on Project Redcap or here. If I had the energy to herd cats it seems like just the sort of thing people could work on together.

Financially, Drivethru takes 35% of the cover price, and there's a tax of roughly 30% here in Australia, so with a "Pay what you want but I'd like USD10" cover price I need to sell 63 copies to break even on art. That falls if I can recut the material as a domain of dread for D&D5E or as a solo RPG journaling game.

Onto the podcast. This week, you'll be getting The Riddle by Walter de la Mare, which is a creepy little story you have to hope is about children being pulled into a regio.Sorry things are a bit behind: I was working on the Venice thing when common sense dictates I should wait for the art and for Atlas to lay out the rules for the next phase of the game of making the game.

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If you are a paid subscriber, there's a preview version of the book, excepting the ducal palace maps, waiting for you in your email, or on the Patreoin page. Everyone else: fret not! A "pay what you want" version is planned for once the sharealike license goes live.

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So annoyed...

I found another book that I thought had stories I'd not seen before. I read it all, with a magnifying glass because its a pocket reference for travellers and so it is in tiny type and spent a day working on that. Then I started adding it to Mythic Venice.

And when I looked up some of the material to get extra detail, it was simply wrong. And then I looked up the next thing, and likewise, I could see in the text it had a pretty basic mistake (It listed Samael as one of the Seven Archangels). So I looked up the next thing and it was a Hindu myth the author has moved to the lagoons (complete with the monster having a name in Sanskrit.)

Fortunately I caught it before I'd added more than a couple of sentences and I could roll it all back.

It's a pity: some of the ideas would have been fun. For example they get the etymology of the Dominican Order wrong and claim it is "Domini canis", which literally ties in to the Hounds of God in Hedge Magic.

So much wasted work.

I was researching in layout and that's foolish, but this has been extra annoying.

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This is quite an old idea, to be fair. I haven't been able to tell if it started as a genuine bit of folk etymology or just a Latin pun, but it wouldn't be totally out of bounds to use it in Mythic Europe imo. It fits the timeline about as well as a lot of the legends about St Francis that get ported back into the setting.

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Of course that's wrong as a literal naming. But if you look in Santa Maria Novella for the Spanish chapel, you find this very famous fresco:

And there you see the domini canes in black and white at work. :sunglasses:

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It's not great for podcasting, but my spreadsheet of all creatures with Might now contains all 5th edition supplements that, alphabetically, are before Realms of Power: Divine.

So, technically I've done 29 and have 11 left to do, but the next 4, the RoP books, are just packed with entries. (The first 29 have given be 284 entries so far).

In hindsight I could have used the Hermetic shipyard and vulgar alchemy rules in Venice...

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Hi,

The great spreadsheet of Things with Might is at

I've been catching up on the transcripts, and they are:
Last half of 2023: WordPress.com
First half of 2024: Podcast transcripts for January to June 2024 – Games From Folktales

My current plan was to do July - September and then launch a game jame for November on itch and the post a day page here, but the July-September transcripts, if shorn of material in Mythic Venice are on the short side. So, game jam ahead.

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On a related note: the transcripts for this are likely to be affected by this other thing: Mythic Europe Magazine : Call for Submissions

A difficult month: basically I'd put the cart before the horse on my research so it was a terrible grind. I've spotted what I'm doing wrong now, though.

Let me explain. I've said the next big piece of work will either be based on Cheshire on Sicily. The problem is that when I was reading Christine Hole's book of Cheshire folklore she keeps saying "Just like in Cornwall..." so it is treading ground that's already been done. Similarly my first shot at a Sicily sourcebook is giving a strong Venice vibe. The problem is I've gone in on folklore at the start, instead of local lore. Chester is a great site for a covenant and has some excellent stories near it, but you won't see that in the first half of Christina Hole's book, which instead is basically one little thing after another that will become vis sources.

So, the upcoming episodes look like this.

December 27th: Fragment week. Fragment weeks are when I have a set of ideas I know are useful but can't quite land, so I set them free in the Ars sphere to come back weird. This Christmas it is a series of excerpts from "The Flowers of Evil" by Baudelaire.

January
2: The Wolf-Woman*. (A vampire with dire wolves and a zombie mammoth).
9 Discoverie of Witches (excerpts from a very early book about stage magic)
6 Hart-leap Well (a regio from a poem)
23 Cheshire basics, like why Cheshire is outside the Magna Carta and how a later King Henry can call himself "King of England and Prince of Cheshire".
30 An article about statues carved by angels which I couldn't land for the Venice book but have a solid approach to now.

So, that's the throughline for the year: monster in week one, stage magic from the Discoverie of Witches in week two, miscellaneous in week three and Cheshire notes in week 4. Week 5, in those months that have it, is a second miscellaneous. At some far-distant point Discoverie gets wrapped into a booklet where I write about using stage magic in Ars / Magonomia instead of real magic, Cheshire gets the Venice treatment, and the monsters go in a bestiary.

I'm going to try very hard not to fall further behind on the Monster Blacklog of Monster Statistics. The backlog is now officially 52. If you like you could head over to DriveThru and buy Volume One of Ars Magica Monsters, thereby helping to convince me that I can pay people to help me with the backlog...but no pressure. 8)

Other upcoming monsters
"Heather Ale" - a poem with Pictish dwarves hiding a Corpus vis source.
The demonic Justinian from Procopius
The Manticora from E Nesbit's "Book of Dragons". (not what you expect unless you expect something friendly with a taste for tins of condensed milk). I might also do the ice dragon...
"The Ghost" by Winifred Lettice: an odd sort of revener in the interpretation I'll be giving. A society hostess so trapped by the rules of convention that people don't realize she's dead, so she can't rest.

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Things have gone entirely off-plan, but service now resumes with an article by guest author @darkwing

I know I'd been hinting in some places that I was going to do some War of the Worlds stuff for Mars being in opposition this week, but as I've gone through the text I've found fascinating bits in the story that I'd not recalled, so I'm taking some extra time on that. I didn't recall that there's this series of technological escalations between the human and Martian sides and that matters for when your magi face the invaders. In some movies they are just indestructible from the beginning but in the book this isn't the case at all: their machines are surprisingly fragile adapt to the human defenses.

This means their stat block isn't static: it evolves to suit what the player characters do by adding new defenses and methods of attack. It adds a lot of work to the writing, but it makes it a far more interesting saga because finding one neat trick no longer destroys the fighting machines. They meet ground based resistance to their armoured ground vehicle, and so reengineer it into a tripod with a laser. They lose a machine to camouflaged gun emplacements so they develop gas warfare, so they don't need line of sight. They are having trouble with urban resistance so they develop flying machines. It means that my initial idea, which was just monster characteristics with a timeline for the how quickly the Martians could develop their forces, deeply underplays their danger. The Martians transform their machines to suit the magi: and if the magi have a crystal egg they may even be -expecting- magical resistance and prioritize covenant sites. I thought I was just rewriting Mark's automaton suit stuff and adding a kaiju, but its more complicated.

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