Timothy Ferguson's Blog

Cheshire: Notes from Christina Hole

The folklore for the Cheshire book is feeling a bit sparse. Leigh Egerton’s Ballads & Legends of Cheshire from 1867 claims that Cheshire lacks folklore because it has no mountains. Cornwall had enough folklore for a book, so I thought this was silliness. That being said, the richest folklore I’ve found has been in Longdendale, which is a mountain pass into the Peak District, so he may have a point.

The following pieces come from Traditions and Customs of Cheshire by Christina Hole. Note that even short pieces can be suitable for gaming, because we need colour for our Virtues, Flaws, Boons, and Hooks. So, if I say “In Cheshire people think pigs can see the wind”, as an example, that’s a hint that a magus with an Auram specialty might have a boar as a familiar.

Vis source / plot hook: Alabaster is used as a panacea for sickness in sheep. The easiest way to get it is to steal it from the tombs of rich people. They use it as a cheaper substitute than for marble. It seems an odd choice to steal tomb decorations, powder them, and then stuff them in sheep. At the least this may annoy ghosts, but it could also tainjt the wool, milk and meat of these sheep.

Background / plot hook: Servants in Cheshire are hired at annual fairs. By tradition a servant who changes employers departs their old job on December 26 and begins the new one on January 2. Covenants seeking servants may be drawn into this system.

Bells are rung at at 8 pm. From Michaelmas to Lady-Day the bells also rings the date, as well as the hours.

The pancake bell begins the feast of Shrove Tuesday. Shrove games include football, footraces, a ball of silk thrown into the crowd for people to scrimmage over, and an archery competition with a silver arrow as a prize. They also play tip cat and prison bars, which are cricketish wide games.

Minor magical item / Curse? : When the wheat is almost harvested, the final little piece is twisted into a sheaf and tied with a ribbon. People pitch sickles at it to “cut the neck”. The person who hits it gets a small prize from the landowner, and keeps it as a luck charm for the next year. After the neck is cut the farmhands go to a high point and make a loud declaration “Oyez! Oyez! Oyez! This is to gie notice that Mr X has gin the seck a turn, and sent the t’owd hare into Mr Y’s standing corn. Wow! Wow! Wow!” Note that “corn” in this sense is the main grain crop of the farm, not maize. The last person to cut their crop has the old hare for the year, which seems unlucky or shameful.

Marler rituals: Marl is a mix of clay and lime that is used as fertilizer. It is dug out of pits. The marlers only dig marl for the part of the year when spreading it is useful, so they have an annual celebration as they close the pit. They bull-bait in the pit itself and beg money. They sing the praises of their benefactors The traditional cry is led by their festival captain, the Lord of the Soil: “Oyez! Oyez! Oyez! This is to give notice that Mr X has given us marlers part of 100 pounds and to whomever will do the same we will give thanks and praise!” His retinue then yell “Largesse! Largesse! Largesse!” Note that if they are given a sixpence or more, they say “part of 1000 pounds” Note that’s a story, so a faerie might steal their thousand pounds, even though it doesn’t really exist. Sacrificing bulls in pits seems ritualistic.

Flaw: Looking into an owl’s nest causes lifelong melancholia.

Familiar / vis source: At Urkinton Hall is a walled garden filled with blackbirds. The ancestor of these was a blackbird into which a group of priests had forced a ghost. This makes some of them oddly tied to the art of Mentem and to necromancy. Exorcising ghosts into animals, even dead animals, is common in Cheshire. These exorcisms are usually performed in teams that make the ghost smaller and smaller until it can be shoved into an animal or, in one case, a bottle.

Creature: The Gabrel Ratchets are flying hounds that haunt the night. “Gabrel” in this case is a dialectic word for “corpse” not a reference to the archangel Gabriel, although I’ve seen that link made in some other areas. They are led or followed by a flying hunter who is variously stated to be the Devil, a local squire of great wickedness, or Odin (according to Hole but I’m not sure where she gets that last one from). You’ll be left unmolested if you lie face down in the road until they are gone.

Plot hook: “Chowlering” is the local name for the Autumn custom of boys roaming the fields with stones to throw at birds, scaring them off newly planted seeds. They hit something odd.

Dragonflies dislike snakes and hover over them to warn people.
Cats can sense the coming weather.

The Eager River takes three lives per year. Hole says it is named after the Aegir, the Norse gods. That seems a stretch. The Dee River is, in contrast, holy, and creates lights to aid the recovery of corpses.

If you find a drowned corpse you will be haunted if you do not bury the person in the proper fashion. This is an oddity: elsewhere there’s a feeling that stealing corpses from the sea might be unlucky. It’s also odd given that there are wreckers active on the Wirral: why they aren’t haunted is not all that clear. Perhaps they bury corpses properly after stealing their goods?

Favours source: the Lady of Reedsmere is accused of being unfaithful, and her husband says he won’t believe her innocence unless the island floated around the lake. Fortunately for her, the island was mass of peat and a storm broke it off from the floor of the lake. It moved about the lake randomly for the next few decades. The weather and severing of the peat island’s link to the lakebed are relatively simple with Hermetic magic.

There are a lot of saint’s wells in Cheshire, including the well used for water by Cheshire monastery. Many are also wishing wells. These oddly don’t need coins: many accept pins, rags or stones thrown in special ways. Well dressing is a common practice, generally annually.

Nantwhich’s brine wells, which are used in salt-making, are blessed annually. They are freezingly cold: the pits in which the wells are found are so cold many women can only stay in them for half an hour at a time. These women, wych-wallers, are known for their swearing, and perhaps cursing in the mystical sense.

In Neston, each Easter Monday, there’s a festival called the Riding of the Lord. A man rides along the main street on a donkey. He is jeered at and pelted with rotten food. He is paid for this, but why no-one seems to know what the point of it is beyond custom. Is he a scapegoat? Does this give a Tormenting supernatural being as a flaw?

There’s a May Queen or Queen of Roses in many areas.

In Cheshire the spirits of the dead were expected to be more present for the two days of All Souls and All Saints. Children go souling, which is going from house to house singing a traditional song, and being given small spiced cakes or coins in exchange. In Ars Magica terms this is a Feast of the Dead, but it is gathered by children…or things pretending to be children. THey are folllowed by the hoddening horse, which is a huge, simple puppet with a horse’s skull. Mummers also do plays on these days, which are called “soul-caking plays”.Apple bobbing, apples on string and bonfires all occur.

Mistletoe is called “all heal” and thought broadly curative. People don’t kiss under it: instead they use “kissing bushes”. These are iron rings threaded with evergreens and ribbons, with apples and candle hanging underneath. If they are not taken down they turn into goblins on Candlemas Day.

People stage fake funerals in the Wirral to carry coffins full of salt past customs collectors.

In Tabley Old Hall there was a dinner of local magnates where one man though another was being too familiar with his wife. They fought, and the husband was killed before his wife, who then committed suicide on the spot. The host, who must have had ice in their viens, swore everyone to secrecy and sealed the bodies in a windowless room. The ghosts of the couple are often seen.

A ghostly procession bring home a dead crusader. It is followed by a weeping woman, who might be either his wife or mistress. Why they do this repeatedly is not clear.

There’s a haunted sand-hole in Knutsford. A tax collector was murdered by his inn’s landlord, who stole the money that had been collected and buried the body in the sand. He saw a corps walking toward him whenever he passed the sand hole.

Around Knutsford, on special occasions, they use pale sand to draw patterns in the streets, which are beautiful and used for festivals, and may have reog vis in them.

The bridge at Faradon has two child ghosts, of boys thrown over the side by their uncle to claim their property.

In Brereton all of the ghosts of the area come once a year to process to the churchyard, filling the streets. They seem to treat this as a festive event, but the humans stay away.

There’s a knightly crusader who promises to come back dead or alive, and returns to terrify his wife with his retinue of skull-faced cavalry.

The Wiirral: one day there’s a huge spinning pillar of smoke, twenty yards cross and high as a church steeple. It makes a terrible noise. Is this a Fury?

St Werburgh caused magical sleep to allow her relics to be taken from the people at the [lace where she died.

There’s a monk whop sells his soul to the devil for three wishes. These as much pork as he can eat, as much wine as he can drink, and ten bales of hay from a particular place. The place is a beach, so the Devil can’t deliver, and the tenants of the monastery plow the beach each year in commemoration.

Cheshire : Three Vis Sources

Moston Dragon

I wanted to wrote up the Moston Dragon as a a monster of the month, but the folklore surrounding it is not detailed enough to extend it past variation on the generic stats given in Realms of power Faerie (page). It is suitable for a combat encounter. The creature’s lair was at Dragon Lake. It had three layers of fangs, six claws on each foot, and had a tail strong enough to crush a bear. As dragons go this one was on the smaller but more ferocious end of the spectrum. A local nobleman weakened it by showering it with arrows, then finished it with a sword-thrust. It was a scaled dragon, and these are usually sufficiently armoured that arrows are little trouble for them, but not in this case, arguing for a lower Soak score.

One variant of the story I saw, from Tom and Sue Hughes, indicated that Motram’s population lived by harvesting marvelous apples from a field that the dragon took possession of. The apples were as large as a human head and particularly flavorful. This may be a modern evolution because I’ve only seen it on their site. It works as a vis source regardless.

Moston Dragon

The Moston dragon is unusual for an orm, in that it is not poisonous. It lacks the acidic blood, corrosive slime or venomous saliva of other orms. It compensates for this by being stronger than average, and having more claws and teeth than usual.
Faerie Might: 20 (Animal)
Characteristics: Cun 0, Per –2, Pre –6, Com –6, Str+4, Sta +2, Dex +2, Qik -1
Size: +1
Virtues and Flaws: Large, Faerie Beast; Faerie Sight, Incognizant, Increased
Characteristics, 3 x Increased Might (adjusted with size increase or decrease).
Personality Traits: Hungry +3
Combat: Fangs: Init –2, Attack +14, Defense +3, Damage +10
Constriction (one target maximum): Init 0, Attack +9, Defense +5*, Damage +10
Claws: Init –1, Attack +11, Defense +10, Damage +7
*+6 to Defense against grapple attacks
Size +2
Soak: If using the version where the creature is weakened with arrows, +3, if using the version where it is immune to arrows so the knight engages with his sword +8.
Wound Penalties:–1 (1-7), –3 (8-14), –5 (15-21), Incapacitated (22-28), Dead (29+)
Powers:
Constrict:: When successfully struck with a constrict attack, the character is encoiled by the dragon’s tail and unable to use mêlée weapons. The dragon automatically does damage in
each subsequent round, without requiring an Attack roll. The victim may still Soak damage. At the end of each round, including the round in which the constriction attack succeeds, the character may attempt to break free by an opposed Strength roll. To do this, the victim rolls
Strength + a stress die, and compares it to the orm’s Strength + a stress die. Success indicates the victim is free, and may attack normally in the following round. For each character assisting a victim to break free, add +1 to the Strength roll, but an assistant is unable to attack the orm in that round. A character unable to break free for 30 seconds (6 combat rounds) needs to make deprivation rolls, as described on page 179 of ArM5.
Pretenses: Area Lore 3 (watering points for prey), Athletics 5 [Swim), Awareness 3 (prey), Brawl 7 (crushing), Hunt 4 [children), Stealth 3 (stalking prey)
Equipment: None
Vis: 4 pawns, in a snakeskin.
Appearance: Oddly cat-like head. Often drawn eating a baby.
Source: based on the Orm statistics in RoP:F 99-100.

Image from “Ballads and Legends of Cheshire [Collected and edited by E. L, with illustrations.] L.P” / Leigh, Egerton. (British Library CC0]

The Hunting of the Wren

On St Stephen’s Day young men kill a wren, dress in motley, then tour about asking for money to bury the wren. As a personal aside I’ve previously been told the Jenny Wren was a sort of pagan survival in Cornwall, perhaps a celebration of the Queen of Birds, which would make this a Rego or Auram. The wren becomes king, the story says when the birds agree that whoever can fly highest will be their ruler. When the eagle reached his apogee the wren, who had hidden in the eagle’s feathers, took off and flew slightly higher. I have been told this is a Cornish story but I suspect that it’s Irish. That’s likely not the approach here. Some Christians believed that wrens would tell their hiding places to viking raiders. They also believed that a wren had betrayed St Stephen to his pursuers. This could imply that wrens house infernal spirits or dark faeries. This could explain why its bad luck for the men to bury the wren on your doorstep. In Irish stories there’s also a spirit that lures men away, and she can take the shape of a wren. She’s a variant of the queen of the banshees of one region of Ireland, as I distantly recall. I’ve not seen a Cheshire repetition of this idea, but it gives an extra option of a demon or dark faerie.

Demonic Wren

Infernal Might:5 (Animal)
Characteristics: Cun -1, Per +3, Pre -7* , Com 0, Str -10, Sta +2, Dex +1, Qik +7
* +6 when attempting to scare or intimidate, due to the Corrupted Beast Flaw.
Size: -5
Confidence Score: 1 (3)
Virtues and Flaws: Corrupted Beast, Ferocity (attack), Keen Vision, Fragile Constitution, Lesser Infernal Power, Tainted With Evil
Qualities: Accomplished Flier, Keen Eyesight.
Personality Traits: Nosy +6
Reputations: Enjoys betrayal +3
Combat:
Talons: Init +8, Attack +4, Defense +10, Damage -8
Soak: -3
Powers:
Crushing the Will,* 2 points, Init 0, Mentem: This Power saps the courage and vitality of its target, leaving them afraid, tired, and withdrawn. All Personality Trait rolls suffer a -3 modifier, and the target may not spend Confidence Points to increase other rolls. Each use of this Power
lasts until the victim has slept for at least six hours.
Protection of the Close Friend, 0 points, Init +3, Mentem: The chosen victim of the wren cannot act directly against it without extreme provocation; it would be akin to attacking one’s own mother. The victim may be as angry as they like with the demon, but actually physically opposing it requires a huge effort of will, which must be repeated every time the victim wants to renew their attacks.
Where you gonna run to? 1 point, Mentem: The wren draws attention to itself, and any concealed object nearby, with its song. All characters within Sight range gain +3 on Perception-based rolls to find the wren or the thing it is drawing attention to. The wren’s song can last for a Diameter, and it may move while it sings, following a fleeing victim.
* Swap this out for something that does damage if a combat encounter is desired.
Fatigue Levels: OK, 0/0, -1, -3, -5, Unconscious
Wound Penalties: -1 (1), -3 (2), -5 (3), Incapacitated (4), Dead (5+)
Abilities: Area Lore 6 (Hiding places), Athletics 5 (swift flight), Awareness 4 (spotting prey), Brawl 1 (talons), Hunt 9 (hiding people), Survival 6 (forest)
Equipment: None
Vis: 1 pawn, body. Tainted.
Source: based on the falcon statistics from Book of Mundane Beasts, made less dangerous and smaller, then run through the Corrupted Beast rules in RoP:I (pp.77-8). The Crushing the Will Power comes from RoP:I page 60. The Protection of the Close Friend power comes from RoP:I p 57.
Appearance: A small, brown bird with a needle beak designed for catching insects. Distorted by demonic possession: flaming eyeballs, oddly mobile growths, or shedding rotting plumage as examples.

Speedwells

The speedwells I know best are Veronica longiflora, which have tall spikes coated in a cone of flowers. I’m used to them being purple, but there are other cultivars around in the modern day. Their scientific genus is Veronica. I presume the Cheshire speedwells in 1220 are a little less glamourous, because the Veronica family includes a broad range of plants. If you pick a Speedwell of Virtue, it causes thunder. presumably this is an Auram source.

Every Man His Chimera: demons from Charles Beaudelaire

When I originally wrote these monsters up I was considering the chimeras as adulterations which could be seen before the person fades into Twilight. Adulterations are the parts of a person that won’t get through the filter into Criamon’s Pure Land. Some are as a small as a little spirit, while others are….well, enough of Flambeau that it can be mistaken for him in entirety. I was also working on the idea that heartbeasts are adulterations. Then I realised it could be done far more simply: I mentioned those ideas so you can use them in your game if you prefer that interpretation. In Realms of Power: Infernal (p.72) there are tiny demons called “maggots” that burrow into the ear and influence the infected person’s mind using their Evocation power. These chimeras seem to be a huge variant of the maggot. We may assume the narrator has Second Sight, allowing them to be seen.

***

Beneath a broad grey sky, upon a vast and dusty plain devoid of grass, and where not even a nettle or a thistle was to be seen, I met several men who walked bowed down to the ground.

Each one carried upon his back an enormous Chimera as heavy as a sack of flour or coal, or as the equipment of a Roman foot-soldier.

But the monstrous beast was not a dead weight, rather she enveloped and oppressed the men with her powerful and elastic muscles, and clawed with her two vast talons at the breast of her mount. Her fabulous head reposed upon the brow of the man like one of those horrible casques by which ancient warriors hoped to add to the terrors of the enemy.

I questioned one of the men, asking him why they went so. He replied that he knew nothing, neither he nor the others, but that evidently they went somewhere, since they were urged on by an unconquerable desire to walk.

Very curiously, none of the wayfarers seemed to be irritated by the ferocious beast hanging at his neck and cleaving to his back: one had said that he considered it as a part of himself. These grave and weary faces bore witness to no despair. Beneath the splenetic cupola of the heavens, their feet trudging through the dust of an earth as desolate as the sky, they journeyed onwards with the resigned faces of men condemned to hope for ever. So the train passed me and faded into the atmosphere of the horizon at the place where the planet unveils herself to the curiosity of the human eye.

During several moments I obstinately endeavoured to comprehend this mystery; but irresistible Indifference soon threw herself upon me, nor was I more heavily dejected thereby than they by their crushing Chimeras.

***

Chimera statistics

Order: Tempters (Greater Maggots)
Infernal Might: 15 (Animal)
Characteristics: Int +2, Per 0, Pre -1, Com +2, Str +3, Sta +3, Dex -1, Qik -1
Size: -2
Virtues and Flaws: Weak Willed
Reputations: None
Hierarchy: 0
Personality Traits: Selfish +5
Combat:
Barbed Beak: Init +1, Attack +6, Defense +6, Damage +5
Hooked Claws: Init +1, Attack +5, Defense +5, Damage +8
The chimera prefers to command the victim to fight on its behalf. In a round when it attacks with its beak it cannot also whisper thoughts in its mount’s ear. It does not get its Strength scores added to the beak’s damage because its neck is thin and spindly. It cannot fight with both claws unless it releases its victim. Once it hooks a victim it can do automatic damage each round, but this can be resisted by successfully grappling with the chimera, to unhook its claws from a victim’s flesh.
Soak: +4: uses the body of the victim as armor. Players who do not care if they hit the victim reduce this to +2, and may hit the victim on fumbled Attack rolls.
Fatigue Levels: OK, -1, -5, Unconscious
Wound Penalties: -1 (1-3),-3 (4-6), -5 (0-12), Incapacitated (13-)
Abilities: Brawl 5 (barbed beak)
Powers:
Endurance of the Walker, 0 points, Init +1, Mentem: Any creature hooked by a chimera is oblivious to pain caused while walking, or from the claws of the demon. They still suffer any Wound or Fatigue penalties caused by their injuries or malaises, but they are not aware of them.
Possession, variable points, Init +2, Mentem: See Chapter 4: Infernal Legions, Demonic Powers. Can only be used on hooked victims.
Coagulation, 1 point, Init -1, Corpus: See Chapter 4: Infernal Legions, Demonic Powers. Obsession, 1 to 3 points, Init -5, Vim: Pilgrimage. See Chapter 4: Infernal Legions, Demonic Powers. Can only use this power on victims which it has hooked with its claws.
Weakness: Abhorrent Material (fennel)
Vis: 2 pawns of Vim vis, in claws
Appearance: A creature like a deformed ostrich that rest on the bowed back of its victim and lays its head over the skull and onto the bridge of the nose..

A ramble about the Magic Realm

The core text for Sanctuary of Ice is The White Mountains by Karl Felix Wolff. It entered the public domain recently, so I could record it or do Ars Magic annotations. I’ve been thinking about why I haven’t started work on a 25th anniversary update for Sanctuary, and I’ve decided its because the Magic Realm doesn’t seem to work and I don’t want to fix it.

I know that sounds a bit like Carl Sagan baking an apple pie from scratch by first constructing the Universe, but hear me out. The two Doma Magnae in the Greater Alps are meant to hold up the two ends of the Order’s view of the secrecy of magic so discussing them requires a Magic Realm that makes each work. Our current magic realm has never really worked for me as a place to tell stories. It, and the magical creature construction rules, are wonderfully intricate world-building that I’ve not really wanted to use because they are, numerically, heavier than I like. Note that Realms of Power : Faeries is also heavier than I’d like and I did some of that crunch, so I’m not criticizing the other authors. I’m talking about my, personal, response to the material, not making any claim as it if it is good or bad in some universal sense.

House Jerbiton believes many things, but let’s look at the least mystical view of magic. One view is that humans have been given dominion over the Earth by God, and are permitted to create things from the earth as subordinate creations. Magic is a literal Gift, a charism, given to some humans to do this. The human sense of beauty is the aptness method of measuring the way magic is being used. This idea does slightly post-date the setting, but it makes the Jerbiton the opposite of the Crimon. Where magic comes from is simple, and how magical actions can be judged is innate to all people. Jerbiton’s philosophy is why Bonisagus called magic an Art.

The Magic Realm to a Jerbiton, is where the Forms are. These are the underlying structures on which human creativity drapes matter. You might want to go there because there are things you have not seen in the real world, or which cannot yet be rendered in matter. It’s where dreams are said to come from. There’s a place for a Realm in their cosmology, in the sense that God has an attic, but it’s not of itself as interesting as, say, going to a neighboring country is likely easier and where you will also see things you’ve never seen or thought about..

House Criamon was a mess when I wrote it up. It was a pastiche of Zen Buddhism and carried the weird White Wolf idea that mental illness was a fun thing for ables to play tourist in. A previous book had tied them to Empedocles. They also liked to stab their Primi for reasons not entirely clear. Their domus magna is named after Socrates’s allegory of the cave, but in a way not connected to any of the other bits. I’m not criticizing using allegories as direct statements, by the way, that’s at least half the episodes of this podcast. My desire was to make this all come together into a single philosophy and I used Greco-Buddhism because it let me hold as many of these bits together as I could.

Criamon’s pretty clearly a Pure Land Bodhisattva. To explain what that is, a bodhisattva is a teacher who could become a buddha and pass permanently from the cycle of suffering, but has chosen not to, as an act of compassion toward those still trapped in the world. A pure land bodhisattva is a teacher of this type that has created a spiritual land where people, usually the dead, can go to avoid rejoining the cycle of suffering through reincarnation. Additionally the Pure Land might be the perfect place for spiritual study. I’d note that some of these lands are not entirely pure: some bodhisatvas allow people who are really morally compromised into their lands. Similarly, in their lands, there are things the inhabitants can do which push them further from enlightenment. This is generally to allow the bodhisattva, who resides there, to teach.

To House Criamon, magic is complicated: arguably it is so complicated that its discussion requires not only a specialist jargon, but a series of intuitive leaps that a student can be guided toward, but not carried through. To a magus dancing on the far edge of Criamon’s obscurantism, arguably the Magic Realm doesn’t exist at all, or is so poorly defined as to be a pointless thing to discuss. Certainly Twilight exists, but are we sure that any of the stuff around it is truly separate? Deep Twilight, Final Twilight – the places from which no-one returns, aren’t necessarily different from the rest of the Pure Land in a fundamental way. The Mediterranean Sea, which is relatively easy to sail in, and the Atlantic Ocean, which is notoriously not so, are connected parts of a whole. The distinction between them is a human one. Similarly the Realm of Magic might just be the Pure Land viewed by people who are, to stretch the metaphor, inexperienced sailors.

There’s an argument that Magic doesn’t have a Realm because magic isn’t actually a thing. Let’s look at this from the metaphor of physics. Centrifugal force isn’t a real force, it’s an apparent force. You’ve experienced it if you’ve ever been on a playground ride that spins, or if you’ve ridden in a car that takes a sharp corner, but that’s because your frame of reference creates the illusion of centrifugal force. What’s happening is a mixture of your inertia and your frame of reference moving without it being obvious to you. The reason I’ve mentioned this is that in special relativity, gravity is an apparent force. When you fall off a roof, are you falling toward the ground or is the ground rising up to hit you? The argument under Newton is that you’re moving toward the Earth because it is bigger, and because to a person watching you sees the Earth as stable and you as moving. The thing is, what if there were five of you falling toward the ground? You could look at that witness and say “Why is he rising up to meet us?” Consensus is convenient, but it’s not decisive because all you’re doing is comparing the frames of reference of the observers, not the underlying truth. This is one of those intuitive leaps that Criamon like so much: gravity is something you use every day and it’s not actually real.

In special relativity, gravity is the movement of an object in a straight line through curved spacetime. You, on Earth, are in an non-inertial frame of reference, which is to say you are moving, much as the roundabout is moving in the centrifugal example. If you’re ever in an inertial frame, like space, the apparent force disappears. Why am I mentioning this? Because you can argue magic in Mythic Europe is like this.

House Criamon says the washing tides of vim that coat the Earth are a result of the universe’s decay into complete chaos. This is also why Creo needs vis and Perdo doesn’t. What this means is that if you’re sitting outside the cycle of decay and integration, in Criamon’s Pure Land. You might discover magic isn’t a real force, its just an observable effect of the decay. When you drop a ball, you aren’t controlling gravity: you’re setting the ball on a straight path through spacetime. Similarly when you casting a spell, you aren’t controlling maqic, you’re just letting a thing (called a daimon by some mystery cults, unhelpfully, do what it does in through the vim aura. Looking from outside, magic may not be a thing and its Realm might an emanation of Criamon’s spirit.

Now, I’m not suggesting in Mythic Europe either of these are true. What I am saying is that if I want to expand out what Primus Andru and Prima Muscaria are doing, I need to find a way to link ideas like these into the Magic Realm book, and it doesn’t give me a lot of good points to hook in, or at least I haven’t seen them.

This is paralyzing as an author, because I’m not good at mechanics compared to the other authors, and it really does feel like when I’m looking a a Sanctuary redone to 5th edition rules, what I’d need to do first is fix the Magic Realm.

Venice’s Faerie Market: The Master of the Bridge of Fists

Petrus Pontium is a bridge troll who has adapted to Venetian custom. He runs a stick-fighting and wrestling school near the canal end of the Merceria. He rarely defends the bridges during official mob-style matches, but will meet challengers for single combat. When fighting or teaching Petrus wears armor, and carries a shield, weaved from wicker. Combined with gloves and boots, these disguise him, so his tall, masculine silhouette and his raspy voice are the only clues to his identity.

There are rumors about that Petrus is really one or another stick-fighting champion who staged a fatal accident during the Battle of the Bridge of Fists. Characters may be asked to investigate his identity, or bring him to justice under the misapprehension that he is one of these men. In truth, Petrus has copied their signature combat maneuvers. He is one of the unusual faeries who has duplicated human abilities rather than Pretenses. His skill at teaching is poor: he usually defeats his students repeatedly while they struggle to counter his techniques.

Petrus looks unusual for a troll. His eyes are human and blue. His skin might be mistaken for odd armor. Once he localised to Venice, it thickened and divided into small squares reminiscent of the city’s cobblestones. During the time of rising waters, the aqua alta, Petrus also leaks seawater from between the plates of stone on his skin. This is not injurious, but it is inconvenient on social occasions. Fortunately his armor is not damaged by seawater.

Oddly, Petrus floats. He does not know why: generally people made partially of rock sink. He has no need to breathe so it would not trouble him if he had to walk out of canals into which he fell during fights. Note that although he floats he can’t walk on water: he falls over just a like a human would.

His School of Stickfighting lends out gear to its students, so they are well-armed during the battles of the bridges of fists. He attends, as a coach and enthusiastic audience member. Sometimes he offers prizes, or engineers bouts with champions whose abilities he wishes to copy.

This faerie is the special protector of the bridge his school is near. Damage to the bridge is reflected on his body, but the respective sizes of the two are taken into account. A foot long scrape on the rail of the bridge is little more than a tiny scratch on Petrus. Harm to Petrus appears magnified in the stonework of the bridge. He knows whatever the bridge would know, as if he constantly had a communication with it. Bridges don’t notice many human things: use the spell Stone Tell of the Mind That Sits as a guide. If Petrus is alerted in advance he can rouse the bridge’s senses to look out for a particular person or boat. The bridge, through long habit, tells him if is damaged by supernatural forces, if a body is dropped off its side, or if the unquiet dead walk its length. Statisitcs will be posted on the blog that accompanis the podcast. They are cut down from the Ogfewe who lives beneath a bridge in Faint and Flame.

Petrus Pontium

Faerie Might: 20 (30) (Terram)
Characteristics: Int +1, Per +1, Pre 0, Com +1, Str +3, Sta +3, Dex +2, Qik +1
Size: +2
Virtues and Flaws: External Vis (wicker helm, grants Tough), Increased Might; Faerie Sight, Faerie Speech, Feast of the Dead, Hybrid Form, Improved Characteristics, Increased size, Place of Power (Bridge), Tough; Monstrous Appearance, Incognizant, Unique Ward (embodies bridge)
Personality Traits: Protective +3, Enjoys combat +2,
Reputations: Excellent stick fighter 3 (Venice), Actually that guy who faked his death 1 (Venice)
Combat:
Wicker sword (basically a weird mace): Init +2, Attack +14, Defense +12^, Damage +11
Punch: Init +1, Attack +11, Defense +11*, Damage +5
* If Petrus has his shield in his off hand, add +2 Dfn.
Soak: +7 stone skin, +1 if wearing wicker armor
Wound Penalties: –1 (1–5), –3 (9–16), –5 (17–24), Incapacitated (25–32), Dead (33+)
Pretenses: Awareness 4 (pedestrians), Bargain 4 (travelers), Brawl 8 [boxing), Concentration 4 (during fights), Faerie Speech 5 (sounding intimidating), Guile 3 (bluffing), Single Weapon 8 [wicker sword]. Venetian Lore 3 (bridges), Survival 4 [urban).
Powers: None. Yes. None. Check it out! Isn’t that weird?
Encumbrance: 0 (0)
Vis: There are four pawns of Terram in Petrus’s helm. Characters wearing it will find it fits automatically, and grants the Tough virtue.
Appearance: A humanoid troll with stone dermal plates.
Source: Based on The Ogre Who Lives Under the Bridge in Faith and Flame (p. 121).

“Rose Rose” by Barry Pain

Long ago we discussed Nozick’s Utility Monster and I designed a fallen angel to embody it. I’ve just heard a ghost story by Barry Pain that has a similar feel. Rose Rose is a revener that makes artists work themselves to death. Thanks to Mike Pelton and his Librivox production team for this recording. Statistics for the creature are at the end: they’re a cutdown variant of the Musa Laeta, The Angel That Was Beauty from Ars Magica Monsters Volume 1.

Rose Rose by Barry Pain

Sefton stepped back from his picture. ” Rest now, please,” he said. Miss Rose Rose, his model, threw the striped blanket around her, stepped down from the throne, and crossed the studio. She seated herself on the floor near the big stove. For a few moments Sefton stood motionless, looking critically at his work. Then he laid down his palette and brushes and began to roll a cigarette. He was a man of forty, thick – set, round – faced, with a reddish moustache turned fiercely upwards. He flung himself down in an easy – chair, and smoked in silence till silence seemed ungracious.

” Well,” he said, ” I’ve got the place hot enough for you to-day, Miss Rose.”

” You ‘ave indeed,” said Miss Rose. ” I bet it’s nearer eighty than seventy.” The cigarette-smoke made a blue haze in the hot, heavy air. He watched it undulating, curving, melting.

As he watched it Miss Rose continued her observations. The trouble with these studios was the draughts. With a strong east wind, same as yesterday, you might have the stove red-hot, and yet never get the place, so to speak, warm. It is possible to talk commonly without talking like a
coster, and Miss Rose achieved it. She did not always neglect the aspirate. She never quite substituted the third vowel for the first. She rather enjoyed long words.

She was beautiful from the crown of her head to the sole of her foot ; and few models have good feet. Every pose she took was graceful. She was the daughter of a model, and had been herself a model from childhood. In consequence, she knew her work well and did it well. On one occasion, when sitting for the great Merion, she had kept the same pose, without a rest, for three consecutive hours. She was proud of that. Naturally she stood in the first rank among models, was most in demand, and made the most money. Her fault was that she was slightly capricious ; you could not absolutely depend upon her. On a wintry morning, when every hour of daylight was precious, she might keep her appointment, she might be an hour or two late, or she might stay away altogether. Merion himself had suffered from her, had sworn never to employ her again, and had gone back to her.

Sefton, as he watched the blue smoke, found that her common accent jarred on him. It even
seemed to make it more difficult for him to get the right presentation of the ” Aphrodite ” that she was helping him to paint. One seemed to demand a poetical and cultured soul in so
beautiful a body. Rose Rose was not poetical nor cultured ; she was not even business-like and educated.

Half an hour of silent and strenuous work followed. Then Sefton growled that he could not see any longer.

“We’ll stop for to-day,” he said. Miss Rose Rose retired behind the screen. Sefton opened
a window and both ventilators, and rolled another cigarette. The studio became rapidly cooler.

” To-morrow, at nine ? ” he called out.

” I’ve got some way to come,” came the voice of Miss Rose from behind the screen. ” I could be
here by a quarter past.”

” Right,” said Sefton, as he slipped on his coat. When Rose Rose emerged from the screen she
was dressed in a blue serge costume, with a picture-hat. As it was her business in life to be beautiful, she never wore corsets, high heels, nor pointed toes. Such abnegation is rare among models.

” I say, Mr Sefton,” said Rose, ” you were to settle at the end of the sittings, but — “

” Oh, you don’t want any money, Miss Rose. You’re known to be rich.”

“Well, what I’ve got is in the Post Office, and I don’t want to touch it. And I’ve got some shopping I must do before I go home.”

Sefton pulled out his sovereign-case hesitatingly. ” This is all very well, you know,” he said.

” I know what you are thinking, Mr Sefton.
You think I don’t mean to come to-morrow. That’s all Mr Merion, now, isn’t it ? He’s always saying things about me. I’m not going to stick it. I’m going to ‘ave it out with ‘im.”

” He recommended you to me. And I’ll tell you what he said, if you won’t repeat it. He said that I should be lucky if I got you, and that I’d better chain you to the studio.”

” And all because I was once late — with a good reason for it, too. Besides, what’s once? I suppose he didn’t ‘appen to tell you how often he’s kept me waiting.”

“Well, here you are, Miss Rose. But you’ll really be here in time to-morrow, won’t you? Otherwise the thing will have got too tacky to work into.”

” You needn’t worry about that,” said Miss Rose, eagerly. ” I’ll be here, whatever happens, by a
quarter past nine. I’ll be here if I die first ! There, is that good enough for you ? Good afternoon, and thank you, Mr Sefton.”

” Good afternoon, Miss Rose. Let me manage that door for you — the key goes a bit stiffly.”

Sefton came back to his picture. In spite of Miss Rose’s vehement assurances he felt by no means sure of her, but it was difficult for him to refuse any woman anything, and impossible for
him to refuse to pay her what he really owed. He scrawled in charcoal some directions to the
charwoman who would come in the morning. She was, from his point of view, a prize charwoman— one who could, and did, wash brushes properly, one who understood the stove, and would, when required, refrain from sweeping. He picked up his hat and went out. He walked the short distance from his studio to his bachelor flat, looked over an evening paper as he drank his tea, and then changed his clothes and took a cab to the club for dinner. He played one game of billiards after dinner, and then went home. His picture was very much in his mind. He wanted to be up fairly early in the morning, and he went to bed early.

He was at his studio by half-past eight. The stove was lighted, and he piled more coke on it. His ” Aphrodite ” seemed to have a somewhat mocking expression. It was a little, technical thing, to be corrected easily. He set his palette and selected his brushes. An attempt to roll a cigarette revealed the fact that his pouch was empty. It still wanted a few minutes to nine. He would have time to go up to the tobacconist at the corner. In case Rose Rose arrived while he was away, he left the studio door open. The tobacconist was also a newsagent, and he bought a
morning paper. Rose would probably be twenty minutes late at the least, and this would be something to occupy him.

But on his return he found his model already stepping on to the throne.

” Good-morning, Miss Rose. You’re a lady of your word.” He hardly heeded the murmur which came to him as a reply. He threw his cigarette into the stove, picked up his palette, and got on excellently. The work was absorbing. For some time he thought of nothing else. There was no
relaxing on the part of the model — no sign of fatigue. He had been working for over an hour,
when his conscience smote him. ” We’ll have a rest now, Miss Rose,” he said cheerily. At the same moment he felt human fingers drawn lightly across the back of his neck, just above the collar. He turned round with a sudden start. There was nobody there. He turned back again to the throne. Rose Rose had vanished.

With the utmost care and deliberation he put down his palette and brushes. He said in a loud
voice, “Where are you, Miss Rose?” For a moment or two silence hung in the hot air of the studio. He repeated his question and got no answer.

Then he stepped behind the screen, and suddenly the most terrible thing in his life happened to him. He knew that his model had never been there at all. There was only one door out to the back street in which his studio was placed, and that door was now locked. He unlocked it, put on his hat, and went out. For a minute or two he paced the street, but he had got to go back to the studio.

He went back, sat down in the easy-chair, lit a cigarette, and tried for a plausible explanation. Undoubtedly he had been working very hard lately. When he had come back from the tobacconist’s to the studio he had been in the state of expectant attention, and he was enough of a psychologist to know that in that state you are especially likely to see what you expect to see. He was not conscious of anything abnormal in himself. He did not feel ill, or even nervous.

Nothing of the kind had ever happened to him before. The more he considered the matter, the more definite became his state. He was thoroughly frightened. With a great effort he pulled himself together and picked up the news- paper. It was certain that he could do no more work for that day, anyhow. An ordinary, common- place newspaper would restore him. Yes, that was it. He had been too much wrapped up in the picture. He had simply supposed the model to be there.

He was quite unconvinced, of course, and merely trying to convince himself. As an artist, he knew that for the last hour or more he had been getting the most delicate modelling right from ‘the living form before him. But he did his best, and read the newspaper assiduously. He read of tariff, protection, and of a new music-hall star. Then his eye fell on a paragraph headed “Motor
Fatalities.”

He read that Miss Rose, an artist’s model, had been knocked down by a car in the Fulham Road about seven o’clock on the previous evening ; that the owner of the car had stopped and taken her to the hospital, and that she had expired within a few minutes of admission.

He rose from his place and opened a large pocketknife. There was a strong impulse upon him, and he felt it to be a mad impulse, to slash the canvas to rags. He stopped before the picture. The face smiled at him with a sweetness that was scarcely earthly.

He went back to his chair again. “I’m not used to this kind of thing,” he said aloud. A board creaked at the far end of the studio. He jumped up with a start of horror. A few minutes later he had left the studio, and locked the door behind him. His common sense was still with him. He ought to go to a specialist. But the picture —

***

” What’s the matter with Sefton ? ” said Devigne one night at the club after dinner.

” Don’t know that anything’s the matter with him,” said Merion.

” He hasn’t been here lately.”

” I saw him the last time he was here, and he seemed pretty queer. Wanted to let me his
studio.”

” It’s not a bad studio,” said Merion, dispassionately.

” He’s got rid of it now, anyhow. He’s got a studio out at Richmond, and the deuce of a lot of time he must waste getting there and back. Besides, what does he do about models?”

” That’s a point I’ve been wondering about myself,” said Merion. ” He’d got Rose Rose for his ‘ Aphrodite,’ and it looked as if it might be a pretty good thing when I saw it. But, as you know, she died. She was troublesome in some ways, but, taking her all round, I don’t know where to find anybody as good to-day. What’s Sefton doing about it ? “

” He hasn’t got a model at all at present. I know that for a fact, because I asked him.”

“Well,” said Merion, “he may have got the thing on further than I thought he would in the time. Some chaps can work from memory all right, though I can’t do it myself. He’s not chucked the picture, I suppose ? “

” No ; he’s not done that. In fact, the picture’s his excuse now, if you want him to go anywhere and do anything. But that’s not it : the chap’s altogether changed. He used to be a genial sort of bounder — bit tyrannical in his manner, perhaps — thought he knew everything. Still, you could talk to him. He was sociable. As a matter of fact, he did know a good deal. Now it’s quite different. If you ever do see him — and that’s not often — he’s got nothing to say to you. He’s just going back to his work. That sort of thing.”

” You’re too imaginative,” said Merion. ” I never knew a man who varied less than Sefton. Give me his address, will you ? I mean his studio. I’ll go and look him up one morning. I should like to see how that ‘ Aphrodite’s ‘ getting on. I tell you it was promising ; no nonsense about it.”

One sunny morning Merion knocked at the door of the studio at Richmond. He heard the sound of footsteps crossing the studio, then Sefton’s voice rang out. ” Who’s there ? “

“Merion. I’ve travelled miles to see the thing you call a picture.”

” I’ve got a model.”

” And what does that matter ? ” asked Merion.

” Well, I’d be awfully glad if you’d come back in an hour. We’d have lunch together somewhere.”

” Right,” said Merion, sardonically. ” I’ll come back in about seven million hours. Wait for me.” He went back to London and his own studio in a state of fury. Sefton had never been a man to pose. He had never put on side about his work. He was always willing to show it to old and intimate friends whose judgment he could trust ; and now, when the oldest of his friends had
travelled down to Richmond to see him, he was told to come back in an hour, and that they might then lunch together !

” This lets me out,” said Merion, savagely.

But he always speaks well of Sefton nowadays.
He maintains that Sefton’s “Aphrodite” would have been a success anyhow. The suicide made a
good deal of talk at the time, and a special attend- ant was necessary to regulate the crowds round it, when, as directed by his will, the picture was exhibited at the Royal Academy. He was found in his studio many hours after his death ; and he had scrawled on a blank canvas, much as he left his directions to his charwoman :

” I have finished it, but I can’t stand any more.”

Rose Rose

Order: False God (pretends to be an infernal ghost)
Infernal Might: 10 (Imaginem)
Characteristics: Int +0, Per +1, Pre +5, Com +1, Str -1, Sta Tireless, Dex +1, Qik +5
Size: 0
Confidence: 2 (6 points)
Virtues and Flaws: n/a
Personality Traits: Proud +6
Reputations:  Corrupting Muse +1 (demons)
Combat:
Improvised club: Init +5, Attack +1, Defense +1, Damage 0
Rose is not combat-worthy. She appeals to her artist to protect her while she flees, or uses her inhuman Quickness to create a distraction and then discorporate.
Soak: 1: Flesh that is clay-like when cut..
Wound Penalties: –1 (1–5), –3 (6–10), –5 (11-15), Incapacitated (16-20), Dead (21+)
Abilities: Assume Brawl 8 (wings), 
Powers:
Coagulation*: 3 points, Init +4, Terram: Can manufacture a solid body out of ambient matter.
Dark Muse: 5 points, Init -10, Mentem: The demon can grant the Free Expression virtue to one human at a time. While granting the Virtue, its Might Pool is reduced by the cost of the Virtue.
Envisioning* 1 or 5 points, Init +5, Mentem: Can enter dreams and cause waking dreams.
Obsession*: 1 point, Init 0, Vim. Can impose the sin of Pride on the artist affected by her Dark Muse power. Uses it to convince artists of the great value of their work, such that they neglect their social obligations and health.
The Wealth of Nations: 3 points, Init +5, varies (as per form of summoned thing): Can only use this power to create materials that allow the artist affected by the Dark Muse power to continue work. Rose uses this to prevent her victims from taking breaks due to lack of supplies.
* See Realms of Power : The Infernal pp 31-2.
Equipment: Clothes, usually.
Weakness:  Cannot destroy works of inspired beauty.
Vis: 2 pawn, Imaginem.
Appearance: A human model of great but eerie attractiveness.
Source: This is a weaker variant of the Musa Laeta from Ars Magica Monsters Volume 1.

Mythic Cheshire: The Wizard of Alderley Edge Saga Seed

When you open a book of Cheshire folklore, Alderley Edge immediately looms. It’s like Sherwood in Nottingham folklore. Time for us to head on in. Here’s a version of the core story.

There was a farmer headed to market at Macclesfield to sell a fine, white mare. As he passed Thieves Hole on Alderley Edge, he was stopped by a man in a robe. He offered a price for the horse, but the farmer thought he could get higher at market. The robed man said he wouldn’t, and that he’d see him on the way back. He was proven right: it was a busy market, but the farmer just couldn’t land a buyer for his horse. On the way home the man again appeared and offered him his price.

The farmer accepted, and the man led him to a set of open iron gates, leading into a cave. Inside he told the farmer to take a fair fee from the piles of gold lying about. In the middle of the cave were knights and horses, fully armoured, and sleeping. The wizard explained that he was one horse short as he led the mare away. The man left with pockets of gold, and told all of his friends. They scoured the area but were unable to find the cave. Sometime people see the wizard in the distance.

England has a vast number of sleeping warrior sites. They aren’t all King Arthur, although he does get top billing. These armies are often said to be waiting for England’s darkest hour, but given the horrible things that have happened that foretold time must be pretty dire. Some writers say that he’s waiting for an invasion, and that England hasn’t been invaded since 1066, but that’s not true. It’s just not been conquered successfully. The Scots regularly pop over the border to wreck the countryside and drive off the cattle. Prince Louis of France landed with an army in 1216. None of these sleepers woke up to do anything useful in the real world, but in your campaign, 1216 might have been a heck of a year for guys in crowns waking under barrows and killing Frenchmen.

Could guardianship of the sleepers be an inherited duty? The player characters, instead of hunting for the buried Arthur, are in charge of dusting him occasionally and working out where the horses keep disappearing to. The common claim that the wizard of Aderley Edge of Merlin is difficult to reconcile with the idea that Nimune trapped him in a thorn bush or crystal cave. There are stories that put Thomas the Rhymer under a mountain with a sleeping king. His tendency to leave prophecies about could prove useful as a saga hook. The characters are storing up warriors and materiel to defend Mythic Europe from a terrible, distant, but inevitable, threat. The guardians of the sleepers could be a mystery cult. that supports the coming of the Mab Darogan, a sort of Welsh messiah.

The kings of England took a couple of bites at claiming they are the great Welsh (later English) messiah, by naming their kids Arthur. Princes named Arthur seem unlucky, though, so the royal house abandons it as a primary name. Arthur of Normandy gets murdered by his guardians to the advantage of his uncle Richard The Lionheart. Arthur Tudor dies before taking the English Crown so his wife, Catherine of Aragon, is handed over to Arthur’s brother, Henry VIII. You’ll notice they stopped calling heirs “Arthur” afterward. Partially this is because the monarchy started using names in tightly repeated patterns: so tight that Queen Victoria’s parents were told off for picking such a German sounding name, and the current king, Charles III, claimed his regnal name would be “George”. Enough of this diversion.

The main source I’m suing for this is Cheshire Ghosts and Legends by Frederick Woods .Woods makes a leap I can’t follow here, but the best game adaption I can patch in here is to say that the prophecy that these forces will be necessary came from the oracular head of Bran the Blessed. He was the mystical defender of Britain until King Arthur dug him up. Arthur claimed only his arms should defend his kingdom. In the Welsh Triads this is commemorated as one of the Three Tragic Uncoverings as it destroyed the magic defences maintained by the head, which prevented the Saxon invasion. The head, we may suggest in game, knowing that Arthur was going to wreck his first plan, could have set up a mystery cult to create this cache as a second line of defence.

It’s hard for me to go on here, because being a gamer of a certain age I was around when every game wanted to use the cult of the Cult of the Head, and suddenly the place was filled with broody guys in trenchcoats that concealed katanas. It does give us interesting options. The simplest way to design the magic of the cult is to let a head-taker use a virtue from one of his victims, so it becomes a more versatile version of the mask magic in Mythic Venice. It give us the Beheading Game in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight as an initiation script. Also, the green sash Gawain gained in that story became the mark of investiture for Knights of the Round Table, so we have the beginning of a cultic iconography. The sashes worn by hoplites might be related in game. I made up the sashes for hoplites in Sanctuary of Ice, I believe and knew I was pinching Gawain’s sash.

Venice’s Faerie Market: The Ombra Seller

When I was writing Mythic Venice I put in a deliberate error: I mentioned restaurants. Venetians in the period didn’t use them so far as I can tell, they preferred street sellers. Lacking one type of street seller I didn’t mention ombra sellers, so its time to correct that.

Venetians like a snack and a drink during the heat of the day, and if they are in the Piazza, they prefer to consume them in the shade. This can be found in some of the colonnades around the square, but the steeple of the cathedral also acts like a great gnomon. People talking for a few hours gentle process about the square as the shadow moves, drinking wine as they walk. The wine sellers, pursue their customers, at a respectful distance, so they also orbit the square. These snacks are called ombras. literally shadows, because people saying “lets go find a shadow” to stand and talk in came to imply the snacks and drinks. There was a brief period when I considered adding recopies for ombras to the book, but there’s no need: your public library will have them. The one which dissuaded me was Cinnamon and Salt by Emiko Davies. I’ve also recycled an idea from the biography of our friend Edward Cole, who used to sleep under his book barrow.

A cynocephalus (dog headed) man works a small cart in the Merceria. He sells drinks with cracked chips of ice in them. Sometimes, in the heat of summer he sells sorbetto, an Arabic dish made of of shaved ice and fruit juice. Roman writers considered iced drinks unhealthy, suggesting they cause convulsions, but Venetians are willing to risk it during the slow boil of summer. He sings a cheery song about his wares, listing the vintages he carries or the flavours he can add. Sometimes the options he offers make no sense and people try them just to say that they, too, have tried a sardine and squid ink sorbet.

His little cart contains a portal to a mountaintop in his own country, far to the North. He goes there to sleep, and climbs out of the cart each morning, covered with a rime of frost that melts into the Venetian pavement. The “north” in this case may not be a real place: it could be a regio that he Simon enters using his cart as a prop..

Simon is a church faerie. There’s a strong folk belief that Saint Christopher was a dog-headed giant, a story seen in some of the saint’s iconography. Simon does not acknowledge being a faerie at all, claiming to be a member of a tribe of religious zealots from southern Serbia. That cynocephalus men come from Serbia (rather than the India or Africa) is a belief found in some Greek areas. Saint Mercurius, who was a Cappadocian soldier and was gifted a sword by the Archangel Michael, was attended by two cynocephalus monks said to be from that region, and Simon claims to be part of their extended family.

Mercurius is an odd sort of saint, because the truly devout can use him as a Divine assassin. One of my favorite church writers, Saint Basil, once prayed in front of his statue that God prevent the apostate emperor from returning from his military campaign, so that the emperor could not resume his persecution of Christians. The statue of Mercurius vanished and then reappeared, it spear now dripping with blood. Emperor Julian died at the same moment, struck down in battle with the Persians.

Simon the Ombra Seller

Faerie Might: 5
Characteristics: Int 0, Per 0, Pre 0, Com +2, Str 0, Sta +1, Dex +3, Qik -2
Size: 0.
Virtues and Flaws: Faerie Sight, Faerie Speech, Observant; Hybrid Form, Incognizant. Personality Traits: Brave +2, Gregarious +1
Combat:
Cynocephalus Bite: Init -2, Attack +5, Defense +4, Damage +1
Ice chipping tool: Init -1, Attack +11, Defense +9, Damage +1
Soak: +1
Wound Penalties: –1 (1–5), –3 (6–10), –5 (11–15), Incapacitated (16–20), Dead (21+)
Pretenses: Animal Handling 3 (dogs), Awareness 4 (customers), Brawl 2 (bite), Carouse 4 (drinking), Craft: Ombra seller 4 (Venice), Faerie Speech 4 (making demands), Single Weapon 4 (ice chipping tool), Survival 3 (icy conditions).
Equipment: Like the piragua guy in In The Heights..
Vis: 1 pawn, the frozen corpse of a dog.
Appearance: A hybrid of both dog and human features.
Source: Koerakoonlane (Realms of Power : Faerie p.95.)

Mythic Europe Magazine: Call For Submissions

Mythic Europe Magazine, the new pdf fanzine for the Ars Magica roleplaying game, is seeking submissions for issue #2. Issue 1 is available at various online sites.

FAQ:

Deadline: There isn’t one. I’ll collect submissions until there’s sufficient material to release an issue. That’s at least 50 pages of text plus public domain art, but may be more.

Payment is 5 cents (USD) per word on acceptance, paid over PayPal. Acceptance may include substantial rounds of revision and may include editing. Note that creature statistic blocks will not be counted, so you are encouraged to use one of the 700 in the Share-alike license. Publishers wishing to promote their own material within the share alike license are welcome to, but will not be paid for their advertisement copy.

Rights: By submitting your work you are granting me a perpetual license of use. Note that this is not a copyright transfer, but one of the things I will do is add your work to the Ars Magica Share Alike License. Many other publishers or podcasters will refuse to accept something that has been published in this way. Note that this deliberately does not prevent you bundling up your work to self publish at a later date.

Original Work: No AI tools may be used, beyond spellcheckers and simple grammar correction. If share alike materials or public domain materials are incorporated they must be credited. By submitting you are indicating you are the author of the work and have the right to license it.

Process: Query letters are welcome and help ensure you do not spend time on material already being covered by another author, or covered in the core 40 books. Send queries and submissions to gamesfromfolktales@gmail.com. Submissions must include your name and email address. Pen names are fine for publication, but a real name is required for submissions. As I’m a single person working on this, there may be substantial delay before I respond.

Style: Standalone works of between 500 and 5 000 words in English. Work should be submitted in a simple file format (like rtf, odt or docx) using a common font. Do not lay out the work, for example by using fonts to mark headings or by using text boxes to create inserts. I simply can’t afford new art and so am not requesting it. There being no guarantee that the magazine will continue for a certain number of issues, serial submissions like columns need to stand as discrete pieces of work.

Dispute mechanism: All legal disputes are to be handled according to Queensland (Australian) law. Note that this means you need to arrange your own tax reporting for income.

Change of terms: I may change these terms without warning, because I’m new at this and may have forgotten something obvious.

Some of the material which currently goes into the Games From Folktales podcast transcript pdfs may be incorporated into this magazine. “Name in the Credits” supporters will be named in the magazine.

Between Mythic Venice sales, Magonomia royalties, and money from Games From Folktales subscribers over the seven years, I can dedicate about a thousand US dollars to this project and when that runs out, the magazine pauses until something tops that up. This is my delicate way of suggesting that if you’ve not subscribed on Patreon, you might consider it. Speaking of subscriptions, this magazine won’t have a subscription model. It will be sold on DriveThru and similar sites as single issues. Subscription is financially a better model, but it has an administrative cost in time that I’d like to avoid. Similarly it won’t Kickstart or ransom: both are excellent ideas, but they’re time intensive.

Nyctalops by Clark Ashton Smith

Clark Ashton Smith is one of my favorite authors, but it is difficult to use his material for roleplaying games. The intellectual property for many of his works, in TTRPG settings, is held by Wizards of the Coast. TSR based the module X2, Castle Amber, on his Averoigne stories. It’s a sort of proto-Ravenloft story that eventually they recycled into the Principalities of Glantri gazetteer. It’s a lovely bit of work and it means I can’t use the Colossus of Ylourgne, for example, for another nine years. Some of his poetry is exempt, though, because it entered the public domain. I’d like to present this one as something the player characters might find in world.

It seems to me to be an evocation of a lucifugus. These creatures were surprisingly central to spirit master practice in earlier editions of the game, perhaps for lack of other statistically-described spirits. They are either formless or always coated in shadow, avoid bright light, and guard secrets. Spirit masters wish to deal with them because secrets are valuable, but the lucifugii often resent this, even if they enter agreements freely.

In the following story poem I suggest that the lucifugii are deliberately putting a bias into the information they provide. They may be doing this because of infernal connections, a worry often expressed by the church for those calling up supposedly natural spirits. It may also be that they know that enough tainted information makes humans self destructive.

So much shadow material seems to be coming together for me at the moment, but I can’t press it into shape as I’m recovering from COVID. There’s the lovely article in Mythic Europe Magazine #1 about a villainous group that use shadow magic. There’s The Charwoman’s Shadow by Lord Dunsany, which I keep trying to cut down into useful parts for this blog. There’s this. I hope you find a way to use them together.

Nyctalops by Clark Ashton Smith

Ye that see in darkness
When the moon is drowned
In the coiling fen-mist
Far along the ground—
Ye that see in darkness,
Say, what have ye found?

—We have seen strange atoms
Trysting on the air—
The dust of vanished lovers
Long parted in despair,
And dust of flowers that withered
In worlds of otherwhere.

We have seen the nightmares
Winging down the sky,
Bat-like and silent,
To where the sleepers lie;
We have seen the bosoms
Of the succubi.

We have seen the crystal
Of dead Medusa’s tears.
We have watched the undines
That wane in stagnant weirs,
And mandrakes madly dancing
By black, blood-swollen meres.

We have seen the satyrs
Their ancient loves renew
With moon-white nymphs of cypress,
Pale dryads of the yew,
In the tall grass of graveyards
Weighed down with evening’s dew.

We have seen the darkness
Where charnel things decay,
Where atom moves with atom
In shining swift array,
Like ordered constellations
On some sidereal way.

We have seen fair colors
That dwell not in the light—
Intenser gold and iris
Occult and recondite;
We have seen the black suns
Pouring forth the night.