Timothy Ferguson's Blog, page 80

Sprinting toward Sicily

Description: Topography of Sicily, created with GMT 4.1.3 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I work for the only public library service in this country that doesn’t charge you for interlibrary loans*.  This means I can have rather more interlibrary loans than most other people, but it does mean that I get myself into situations like the one I’m currently in.

I’m going to be doing a Mythic Sicily web project. An interlibrary loan has just come in. I’ll have it for 2 week, maybe 4 in the original lender is generous.  It’s about 600 pages long. So, in the next fourteen days I need to go through it and take copious notes, so that I have the skeletal frame of Ars Magica related material from the book. I need to get it done quickly, because I have another Sicily book coming in after that. My plan is to post my notes to a page buried in the depths of this site, so that people can see the stages of the work.

So, time to put aside the novel I’m reading (Cordelia’s Honor) and the books I’m listening to (there are three of them) and the computer game I’ve just loaded (L A Noire). It’s time to sprint toward Sicily.

* who I do not represent on this blog.

Librivox: Gladstone Colony finished except for the editing: Time to spend a year with Clausewitz

The young Clausewitz (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

When you decide to solo a really large book, you are giving a huge portion of your life to something.  The only reason it isn’t daunting is because you carefully conspire with yourself not to notice what you are doing.

I’ve just finished The Gladstone Colony, other than a couple of hours of edits. In the time it’s taken me, my life has changed enormously. My tiny daughter was born, and learned words, and now she can walk if you lend her a single finger to hold onto for confidence.  When I started The Gladstone Colony, I don’t think I even knew what her name was. In among all of that, my way of unwinding was by recording a book which, perhaps, no-one else will ever want to listen to. It’s a city history, and that means the thousands of Americans and British people who flood in to listen to my little parts in Shakespeare or my ghosts stories, they’ll just skip this and look for something else. Still, a solo can be a year, and you don’t really notice, until you choose another book, and think “What will my life be like when I’ve finished this?”

Time for my biggest solo yet: the last two volumes of Clausewitz’s opus On War.

Collated NaGaDeMon Projects

I’ve set up single page versions of Thirty Objects of Desire and The Stories of Marco the Liar, which were a supplement and a fiction project spurred on by NaGaDeMon.

A new look, and a new year

So, a new theme, a new look, and a new year.  What’s happening this year on Games From Folktales?

I over committed myself last year: I think I wrote pieces for seven books, which is a few too many with a new baby. That left me little time for the blog. This year I’m probably taking things slower: I don’t have any books still in primary drafting at the moment. That should free up some time for side projects.

At the moment my plans, which may be interrupted by procrastination or the release of new Skyrim expansions, are:

The Shadows in The Smoke: I’ve discussed this before. I’m collecting ideas for a Regency Ars Magica setting. This is on the back-burner for a couple of other projects, though.
The Patient Art: This is 1220 Ars Magica. I’ve always felt that the Aquam Art received a raw deal. This little project is meant to make Aquam magi as exciting to play as those from the other Elemental Arts.
Stupor Mundi. This is the project I’ll need to tear into, because my research materials will arrive by interlibrary loan, and that will give me a couple of weeks to just devour 900 pages of material about Frederick II, Holy Roman Emperor, King of Sicily and Marvel of the World.

On the Librivoxing front, I’m finishing off The Gladstone Colony, which was really interesting and I’m pleased to have done, but which, at the same time, I’m pleased to have done with. This year, to make life even harder for myself, my next solo will be volumes two and three of On War by Carl von Clausewitz. I have made an odd choice here, because there are good audio versions of more modern translations of Clausewitz available, and I know some in the gaming community can get them for free by hoisting the black flag. I, however, hope that by making a free, reasonable quality recording of Clausewitz available, I might help some other authors grasp his ideas. The process also forces me to really engage with the text, and I hope that will aid my writing.

Just a quick redesign

I still haven’t found the perfect combination of style, colour and not having to pay, but I hope you like the site’s new look.

When I make my fortune as a game designer, I’m getting a professional magazine theme.  Have you seen how lovely Opti is?

A new Ars blog

One of the other authors, who goes by Jarkman on the web, has started his own blog. It’s still being set up, but if you find what’s going on here interesting, you’ll probasbly like My Life As a Grog.

I’ve finally made a start on the Against the Dark page

It’s taken a while, but I’ve started my notes on Against the Dark, my twentieth Ars Magica book.

A gathering of thoughts

So, could we design an Ars Magica game which starts at, for example, around 1875 (the greater Regency era, if you will) and runs until the end of the reign of Victoria?  What would it look like?

My suggestion is either that Issac Newton, in his Principia Magica, or Roger Bacon in his New Atlantis takes the role of Bonisagus. He changes how people think of magic. It becomes systematic and non-theistic. How does this differ from Natural Philosophy in the standard game? Well, it doesn;t in a way: what it does it tries to graft the magical machanics into the setting better by suggesting that magical knowledge and scientific knowledge are the same thing.

So, if you have a score in a Form, that acts as an Ability in Lore and Craft rolls as if your Ability score were (Art / 5). So, if you are a Terram magus, you are a great geologist, and if you are an Ignem magus you are great at designing locomotives (which are basically heat transfer engines). The converse is also true: if you are a Gifted person, and you discover a great deal about the creatures of Africa, then you become a better Animal magus. There are a lot of hobbyist magicians, particularly among the clergy.

The negative social effects of the Gift mount with experience.  While you are just a bit of a dabbler you are fine: once you become a really skilled magus (20 in anything) people start to shun you.

Mages club together in Learned Societies. Some, like the Royal Society, have tremndous backing, while others are basically gentlemen’s clubs, or even just people meeting every so often in a particular coffee house.

Enemies: well, the French are the obvious candidates.  They;ve had a learned society for longer than the English, and they have the whole Napoleon thing going on.

Are there Houses?  I doubt it. I mean, someone may say they are a follower of Halley and be really interested in optics, but I don’t see Houses so much as self-taught men who read magic at university, like doctors.

 

Ars Magica Note: London Bridge

Apparently London Bridge had a chapel in it, which means that in an Ars Magica sense, it had a Divine Aura. It also had a band of men who served the chapel and kept order on the bridge, and shops and residences. I think a covenant built on the bridge would be an excellent setting for a game. There’d always be something going on.

The Story of The Shoes – The First and Last of the Stories of Marco the Liar to his Grand-Daughter

“Rosa”, the letter says, on its outside, “whatever you do, do not break the seal of this letter until you are by the shoe tree, and wearing a new set of unloseable shoes. Our lives may depend on it.”

The letter is sealed with red wax, with the intaglio of de Marco, so the little girl sneaks to the strange, leathery tree.  The largest and middle sized shoes are gone. A small pair is ripe, drying in the sun. She picks them, and the sap smells like tar and burning candlewax. She places them on her feet, left then right, and buckles them tight.  She looks about, and seeing no-one, she goes to a high rock from where she can watch the surrounding country. She carefully scrutinises the visible land. The birds on the river are at rest. A deer grazes half a mile away in a forest. She judges, and with a decisive twist of her fingers, the seal cracks, and she reads.

“Dear Rosa, do not read this without your new shoes on your feet.

And now, I conjure your promise to be calm, and listen without interrupting. By your promise, and by the iron in the ink of this letter, I command it.

Your grandmother and I are headed to our home outside Baden in the Alps.

You have a choice.

My dear grand-daughter, you are not a mortal girl. You are a faerie. A dreadful and powerful queen of the faeries. It took me three years of stories to make you forget that. It took me another month to convince you that you were twelve, that I was your grandfather, and that your name was Rosa.  Every time your real identity stirred, I’d mention women, and you’d put your true nature back to sleep, by saying “Grandfather, remember I’m twelve!”. 

It was very difficult to get you to demand that iron bind faeries in this, your sacred place. I planted the hobnail, so that you would cut yourself. Your grandmother allowed herself to be caught. I told you the story about my shoes so that you demanded they come here, to your realm.

And now, your choice.

You can take off your shoes, and burn them, and rebuild your hive of warriors, and lay waste to the farms hereabout again, and perhaps you will fade into Arcadia, or perhaps the Flambeau will destroy you. That’s your nature, and without the intercession of a creative mortal, there would be no possibility you’d choose to relinquish it.

Your other choice is to run away from your role. Your shoes can escape anything.  Even who you are.

Rosa: run home!”