I'm going to go ahead with that, thanks for the push, Darkwing.
A slight change of pace and an update.
The Cornish material is pretty much ready to push into a draft, although I need a touch more about Lyonesse and Richard of the Romans. Then
I discovered that a book has just come out about the folklore of Bodmin Moor. Bodmin is really not handled well in Hunt and Carew, so I want to look at this before I cut my material down any further. The book is described at troybooks.co.uk/from-granite-to-sea.html I've ordered a copy, and they claim a two week delivery to the far side of the world, so...we'll see. It alos makes me glad I didn't get the map done after I was finished with the research phase. So...the plan to have an ashcan of the Cornwall book together in May is off the table. I still have the vacation days in May set aside for writing it, so I'm hoping the book will get here in time to be part of a serious push toward an ashcan draft for Cornwall.
In my Dunsany stories from 51 Tales, I've been putting a lot of them together into tight little bundles on a single theme. For example "The Exhausted World" went live early, but it was four stories. I find that when I put them together like this I don't have time to stat the creatures up, so I'm going to slow down, do single, brief stories and stat things as I go. As another expression of this, the Dunsany story that goes live in the first week of May (Sacnoth) should have stats for a heap of things, but I have not done any of them beyond the two published months ago in Sub Rosa #12, and don't see myself doing more than one at most. If I slow the pace of it down, I'll get more stats done, and meet my vague personal goal of having one statted monster per month. After Cornwall is done (I probably mean late 2019) I hope to publish a free supplement which is a series of Dunsany annotations and statistics, with Sandy Syme art. The more work I do on the individual episodes, the easier that collation will be.
A19 Cornwall Death Tokens
A26 Angels with lead feathers: a Verditus mystery
A26 Cornwall Misc Stories (last bonus Cornwall episode)*
*I've said repeatedly that this is the last Cornwall episode, but that's not true. I'm currently working on a set of plot hooks about recovering the Sword of Tristram so that your characters can travel to Lyonesse, and when the book above arrives, Bodmin Moor may get an episode.
M3 Dunsany: Sacnoth (this may need a supplemental, which I've yet to do. My notes say its uploaded, but I think it's a basic sort of thing where I have not really dug into it.)
M10 Heraclitus the Obscure
M17 Dunsany - Stories of Three idols
M24 Simplified magi creation (the text for this has already gone live on this board).
M28 (Two year anniversary: nothing planned for now. Possibly a poem called "Octopus" written to mirror "Dolores".)
M31 Meinong's Jungle is the Magic Realm.
J7 MRJ: Canon Alberic's Scrap-book
J14 Was Bonisagus an Epicurean?
J21 Dunsany - Death (The exhausted world went live early - replaced)
J28 Cornwall: Sword of Tristram
J5 MRJ - Lost Hearts
J12 Covenant design : Why your Aura number is boring and does not matter.
J19 Dunsany: The Worm and the Angel
J26 The Golgotha Dancers Honestly, not sure on this one...but it seems likely.
A2 MRJ: The Ash Tree
A9 CD: conscious space
A16 D: A moral little tale
Pink items are scripted to some degree, but not complete. Black items are loaded and ready to go live, although they have fewer statted monsters than I'd like.
I'm continuing to enjoy the Cornish and Dunsany episodes. I just learned last week that there's a RPG in development based on Jack Vance's Lyonesse trilogy: http://thedesignmechanism.com/resources/Press_Releases/Lyonesse%20RPG%20Press%20Release.pdf
Thanks for the tip!
I splurged on a larger data plan for the month, so the current state of play is:
Colour key:
Black titles are recorded as a podcast and have complete write-ups on the blog. These are all loaded for automatic delivery.
Pink titles have completed, loaded podcasts, but they tend to be monster stories, where I say "and the monsters will be on the blog". I've not written the blog posts yet.
Blue titles are ones where I have recordings of a story ready to process, but I have not yet added my own podcast elements, or written the stats for the creatures.
Empty titles have not yet been written up, although I have a list of ideas for them. I've cut them for clarity here.
M3 Dunsany: Sacnoth (this may need a supplemental, which I've yet to do. My notes say its uploaded, but I think it's a basic sort of thing where I have not really dug into it.)
M10 Heraclitus the Obscure
M17 Dunsany - Stories of Three idols
M24 Simplified magi creation (the text for this has already gone live on this board).
M28 A poem called "Octopus" written as a satire of "Dolores", from episode 100 and 127. I say 150 in the recording, sorry.
M31 Meinong's Jungle is the Magic Realm.
J7 MRJ: Canon Alberic's Scrap-book
J14 Was Bonisagus an Epicurean?
J21 Dunsany - Death (The exhausted world went live early - replaced)
J28 Cornwall: Sword of Tristram
J5 MRJ - Lost Hearts
J12
J19 Dunsany: The Worm and the Angel
J26 The Golgotha Dancers
A2 The Ebony Frame
A9
A16 D: A moral little tale
A23 Adventures of the German Student
A30
S6
S13
S20 S20 D: Taking up Piccadilly
S27 Mujina
O4
O11
O18 D:The Reward
O25 D: The Mist
N1
N8
N15 N15 Death and the orange
N22 Ancient Lights
N29
D6
D13
D20 D: Wind and Fog
D27 Wolves of Cernogratz
J3
J10
J17 D: Unpasturable Fields This is the last Dunsany story I have to hand, so I may move it forward.]
Hi, I'm fighting a cold so instead of recording, a note about the podcast.
I keep wrecking the sequence of the episode numbers by having stuff go live early. Apple would prefer people didn't put contextual information into titles, so from 2019 I'm just giving up on the numbering system. As it is, there were three episodes this week. Heraclitus seems to have been the most popular, which is worrying because the episodes I've been uploading this week are all in the other style, where I put up a story that's out of copyright and crosslink to the blog for stats, rather than doing serious research myself.
If people hate that style, please tell me, because we are going to be doing that a bit more heavily for a few months. It's sort of the shadow of the Cornwall project - that took up the time I'd use to write new material myself, and so you are getting source material and stats instead of my personal takes on subjects.
The new running order looks like this, but it may stretch out in coming months as I get more recording time and drop new episodes between these.
As a key, if they have a bold name, there's a recording queued for it on my podcast host. On the blog, this is setting me up for a lot of statwork. The only ones done are everything to June 14, Mujina and Lost Hearts.
Again, it feels like the balance of this is off, toward the raw material, so I'm happy to take suggestions for other topics, and slot them in, pushing these down the running sheet into next year. I have some vague plans for ep 200, I have some more Cornish sources to boil down, and I want to follow up on the suggestion to work through the Hooks and Boons in "Coivenants" to provide examples.
I'd like to note that The Golgotha Dancers, The Ebony Frame and The Room in the Tower are all about haunted paintings, and after they are done, a text-only thing will go up on the blog stating out the demon portraitist responsible for the three other creatures.
An asterisk represents planned creature stats.
M17 Dunsany - Stories of Three idols
M24 Simplified magi creation (the text for this has already gone live on this board).
M28 A poem called "Octopus" written as a satire of "Dolores", from episode 100 and 127. I say 150 in the recording, sorry. Bonus anniversary ep.
M31 Meinong's Jungle is the Magic Realm.
J7 MRJ: Canon Alberic's Scrap-book*
J14 Was Bonisagus an Epicurean?
J21 Dunsany: The watch-tower* (The exhausted world went live early - replaced)
J28 Cornwall: Sword of Tristram
J5 MRJ - Lost Hearts*
J12 Dunsany - Death
J19 Dunsany: The Worm and the Angel*
J26 The Golgotha Dancers*
A2 The Ebony Frame*
A9 The Room in the Tower*
A16 D: A moral little tale*
A23 Adventures of the German Student*
A30
S6
S13 D:Return to the fortress unvanquishable.****** This is ep 150, althought you'll notice that happens because I've done weird things with the rest of the numbers.
S20 S20 D: Taking up Piccadilly
S27 Mujina (stats already published)
S30 The Art of Bookmaking* (a comedy bonus story to celebrate the Feast of Saint Jerome).
O4
O11 The phantom wooer (The Ash tree and the 51st dragon both went live in May, and this brief poem is a patch. Stats already published.)
O18 D:The Reward (not sure about stats).
O25 D: The Mist*
O31 The witch. This is a bonus episode for Halloween. It's a little poem.
N1
N8
N15 Death and the orange*
N22 Ancient Lights*
N29
D6
D13
D20 D: Wind and Fog*
D25: Song of the Morrow (Christmas bonus ep).
D27 Wolves of Cernogratz
J3
J10
J17 D: Unpasturable Fields This is the last Dunsany story I have to hand, so I may move it forward.]
The episodes with more original research are my favourites. I understand that they take longer, and thank you so much for doing them!
Ideas for new episodes are welcome. Tell you new group, Alex!
Thank you very much, Timothy!
For myself, if you're looking for ideas, I'd like to hear your thoughts on how to make a Criamon path based on Catharism. I really liked the Angels with Leaden Wings, it's one of my favourite episodes for how brilliantly it combines various ideas together, and I would be fascinated to hear something similar.
I'll definitely tell my players! One of them knows a lot about the Cathars but very little about Criamon, so this might be interesting for her.
The Provencal guys handled Catharism in some detail, so I'd need ot reread that book before seriously writing about it. My initial thought is that Cathars thought the body was a prison, and there's one of the paths in the HOH:MC, the Path of Seeming, which lets a Criamon transcend reality, basically making more and more of it act as if it were an illusion, until they eventually cease to interact with it at all and fade into Twilight.
Then again, she sounds a bit like a Pious Magus (which were in...was it this version of the Church book or the last version? Sorry, I wasn't in that one and they bleed together a bit for me.) or an ascetic (a hedge tradition from a previous edition).
Hi,
You might have received a classic episode in your podcast feed today: for once this is deliberate, although it still occured because I pushed the wrong button at some stage.
In months when I splurge on a larger download limit, Libsyn lets me see what stats individual episodes have. I looked up the least popular episode, and found that there was one which had not been downloaded since Libsyn started their new stat system in November, and then there were a bunch which had been downloaded 20 times since then. I checked the settings of the odd one out, and found it had been set to expire, which means to hide itself after a certain period of time.
So, i set it to never expire, and republished it.
It's a Lord Dunsany one, called "The Distressing Tale of Thangobrind the Jeweler.". Stats for the spider god Hlo-hlo are up on the blog (and have been up for a couple of years...)
So, sorry to upload a classic episode, but Thangobrind is too good to miss. It's a really great Dunsany story.
(In other news, I'm reworking the running order so that there are less stories from other authors packed together, and I have two new and brilliant Cornish sources, so we'll be delving into them.)
The Angels with Leaden Wings is probably my favorite recent episodes, because it takes an idea and applies it to Ars Magica. The Cornish episodes give me some ideas for adventures, though to be honest, I mostly enjoy the Dunsany episodes for the stories rather than the Ars Magica aspect. I'd like to see more ideas for Companion characters and plots, other mystery cults are going to be always enticing, and possibly fun directions to go with Experimenting and the Story/Special result on the table.
I think the easiest metric for me is that the more Timothy talks, the more likely I'll enjoy the episode.
Well, that's very flattering to hear. I think basically that I went mad when I discovered there was a way of having two voices in the podcast without needing to sucker in a co-host. I'm going to spread them out a bit, though, so each month basically you'll get
Week 1: 1 longer story
Week 2: one of my short episodes
Week 3: a Lord Dunsany short, with stats
Last week: Cornwall material.
In 5 week months, I'll be adding another short by me.
There are also bonus episodes up for Christmas, Halloween and Saint Jerome's Day.
I have to agree that I always prefer the episodes that involve you talking rather than what is basically a librivox recording.
If you're looking for episode ideas I'd love to hear more about some of the house philosophies and the real world philosophies they're based on. The ones that spring to mind is house Tytalus and Criamon. The books have a bit but I'd love to hear your views on them
Tytalus is harder, because it isn't mine, but I can promise you a bit more Crimaon in the future. I've recorded an episode on Wittgenstein's Ladder / Lies-to-children / Buddhist upaya which aims to explain why its both possible to vary initiations scripts, and yet there are schools which clearly do not want you to do so. How can you have Criamon pacifists and guys using Enigmatic Wisdom as their Sword skill in the same house?
I'm also making a callback to third edition in a bonus episode I put out yesterday. I should give it its own post, though.
(Added later - although I did do that Tytalus who was time lost and trapped by a thing based on Tori Amos and Kasey Chambers songs. Hrrrm.)
Bonus episode:
"What I did on my holidays" by Timothy Ferguson, age 45.
Hi guys. I wrote you an episode while I was on the plane with my family, which mixes fluid dynamics, annoyed faeries, Iron Sky, pretty much every Spring Covenant ever and the Lord Dunsany story I kept pushing to the bottom of the pile. The recording is choppy as, but the text version's a bit more coherent and is off in the blog mentioned in my sig file. The whole thing needs a revisit and a write up as an adventure setting, but I have Cornwall and Serenisima to keep me busy, so I wont get to it before 2019. I hope you find it useful.
I also took some photos I wish I'd had for the whaling episode, and found some material to remake a thing I wrote about sugared almonds and their role in the design of Covenants, but that's for another episode. Also, there's a new potential covenant site in Cornwall that will get its own episode, based on the Cornish folklore journal I read on the plane. I've mentioned it before on the blog (but not the podcast) It's Looe Island. This gives me three sites to work with - Tintagel to the north, Looe to the south, and Scilly/Lyonesse to the west - in addition to the site already worked on in the Vanilla Covenant project.
A bit of bad news, gang. My blood work came back pre-diabetic, so I need to sleep more and exercise an hour a day to get my weight down. This is hitting my podcasting time hard. I'm months ahead of the audio side, so that's all fine, but the transcripts may get a bit scrappy. That's why there are no stats for the spirit of the tower this week. Apologies.
We understand.
It's important to give yourself a good health modifier for your lab so you can continue to add your research benefits to the body of work in our Order.
Cornwall gazetteer - complete first draft
timothyferguson.files.wordpress ... tion-1.pdf
I need to work out if I should do large collections like this, or focus my time on creating more audio.
New running sheet:
S20 D: Taking up Piccadilly
S27 C: Botrell vol 2&3
S30 The Art of Bookmaking (a comedy bonus story to celebrate the Feast of Saint Jerome)
O4 Ancient Lights
O11 The phantom wooer (The Ash tree and the 51st dragon both went live in May, and this brief poem is a patch. Stats already published.)
O18 D:The Reward (not sure about stats).
O25 C: Glass eels
O31 The witch. This is a bonus episode for Halloween. It's a little poem.
N1 Wolves of Cernogratz
N8 Everything that rises must converge (the text of this went live early, so I may replace it)
N15 Death and the orange
N22 Combat simpliifcation
N29 ?
D6 Golgothan Dancers
D13 ?
D20 D: Wind and Fog
D25: Song of the Morrow (Christmas bonus episode)
D27 ?
J3 Ebony Frame
J10
J17 D: Mist
24?
31?
F7 Room in the Tower
14?
21 D: Worms and the angel
28?
M7: The New Mother / The Pear Drum
Hi,
I'm planning to try and write a creature per day for November. This will let me catch up on the missing ones. They'll be blog entries, not the podcast episodes.
The running sheet for the upcoming episodes.
Now: All that rises must converge.
O11 The phantom wooer (The Ash tree and the 51st dragon both went live in May, and this brief poem is a patch. Stats already published.)
O18 D:The Reward (not sure about stats).
O25 C: Glass eels
O31 The witch. This is a bonus episode for Halloween. It's a little poem.
N1 The Golgothan Dancers
N8 Ebony Frame
N15 Room in the Tower
N22 Dunsany: Death and the Orange
N29 Cornwall: Artea
D6 Wolves of Cenogratz
D13 Hercules Epitrapezios*
D20 Dunsany: Wind and Fog
D25: Song of the Morrow (Christmas bonus episode)
D27 C: Untitled Cornish episode*
J3 Combat simplification
J10
J17 D: Mist
24
31
F7 The New Mother
14
21 D: The Worm and the angel
- Not yet recorded..