I hope people will pardon a cut and paste from my blog this once. I'm still recovering from surgery and so I'm not up to much physical effort...
Thanks to all of the Ars Magica fans who voted for the Grimgroth Awards.
I’d like to thank CJ and his henchpeople for all of the effort involved.
I’d particularly like to congratulate Ben McFarland for the Dragon Abbott. I remember reading the draft of it and thinking “This is brilliant and I have never thought of anything like this.” We then swapped some jokes about Chinese food on the Silk Road, I think.
Going in I knew I was a lock for most improved House, since the two nominated Houses were Criamon and Tremere, so you had a choice of voting for me, or a slightly later version of me. 8)
I’m really happy for Covenants dragged itself up to favourite supplement. I’m surprised, because it was very early in the line, and the line style had not really set back then.
It’s a real honour to be voted Favourite forum poster, and to say thanks, I’d like to unveil the idea I hope everyone will rally around this November (or earlier), as we did for the Vanilla Covenants, and other earlier projects.
I’m a huge fan of Nick Bantock, who did the Griffin and Sabine Trilogies. One of his books, though, I thought perfect for an Ars style rework. Well, two of his books. I’d like to do an Ars SG version of The Trickster’s Hat, but that’s a digression, my main focus for this is The Museum at Purgatory. In this book, Nick makes up odd backstories for his art pieces, and strings them together with a frame narrative. I thought we should do the same.
Now, here’s the bit where it gets (what I hope is) clever. The Metropolitan Museum of Art has just released 400 000 high quality images of artefacts free for non-commercial use. I’d like each of us to pick one, two or however any you can, and we can generate stories and statistics for each. These can all then be filed in a central blog, which will be an enduring, free, resource for the Ars community. I’m going to cheat and start sooner than November because (ahem) Linda and I are expecting a visit from a Stork of Virtue.
I think we should get a frame narrative together on it, or multiple frame narratives, but that can wait until we start getting material together. Hopefully themes will emerge.
(By coincidence, the photo that’s heading the article I saw on this is the original of a duplicate I photographed in the British Museum, hoping to do something like this, so I’m one up already.)
I'll now go an make a different thread for us to kick around ideas for the Hermetic Museum.
