A Sixteenth-Century Castle

Surfing the web for various inspirational reconstructions, like the Pudding Lane Productions one for London just before the Great Fire (and here’s another one from the same project, but at night), I came across this one for Tutbury Castle in Staffordshire:

Although I can’t vouch for the accuracy of this reconstruction, I rather like how it shows how the castle must have been a mix of its medieval origin and later accretions. Too often fantasy settings look like they’ve sprung from the earth fully-formed (ironically, representations of Tolkien’s Middle Earth are especially guilty of this, despite the setting’s detailed history, or perhaps because Tolkien himself was a great philologist but his sense of history was very flat). But RL is much more complicated, with old things always far outnumbering the new and providing the foundations, often literally, for it.

Name of the Rose Ambience

Here’s a rather fun site, designed to create ambience for a monastic murder mystery, in honour of Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, but easily usable for WFRP games too: the Name of the Rose Background Ambience Generator.

It has various sliders you can use, including some to create an especially spooky atmosphere appropriate to this time of year.

Tilean Landscapes

By the time this post goes up I should be in a village in Tilea. I recently stumbled on the website of a landscape photographer who takes gorgeous pictures of that country. Many would be useful for games because they tend to lack obvious modern elements and he also avoids taking images of people, which might also spoil the illusion of peeking into a fantasy world. Here’s a sample to get you in the mood for running Tilean campaigns:

Italy

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Fantasy Germanies

This post is about Fantasy Germany, but before we get to that, here’s a reminder to go support The Midderlands Kickstarter: it’s got 24 hours to run as of posting this. It’s not not-Germany but it’s definitely Warhammer!

The latest newsletter from Triple Ace Games announced that late next month (August) they’ll be Kickstarting a Holy Roman Empire sourcebook called ‘Satan’s Playground’ for their alt-history Gothic swashbuckling game All For One. Per the newsletter:

France is not the only country beset by demons. For 20 years, the Holy Roman Empire has been torn asunder by religious war stirred up by the forces of Hell and the greed of man. All for One: Satan’s Playground takes characters into a land ravaged by strife, famine, disease, and witchcraft – a land where honor means nothing and survival means everything.

I’ve got the Ubiquity version of this and many of the PDFs and it’s very fun, so I’ll definitely be backing this, but it did make me realise we have a lot of fantasy Englands, Frances, Arabias and Scandinavias, but how many fantasy Germanies are there?
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More Magic Books

A few weeks ago I posted some images and a link to an eighteenth-century book of magic. Meanwhile, the Newberry Library in Chicago is looking for help to transcribe some magical books from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, so they’ve digitised the images and put them online. That means that you also get transcriptions of the otherwise difficult to read text. Here’s some instructions for talking to spirits:

The Book of Magical Charms, fol.10r, image 13 (excerpt)

To Speak with Spiritts
Call their names Orimoth, Belmoth Lymocke]
and Say thus. I coniure you by the names
of the Angels + Sator and Azamor that
yee intend to me in this Aore, and send
unto me a Spirite called Sagrigit that
doe fullfill my comanding and desire
and that can also understand my words
for one or 2 yeares [?]; or as long as I will.

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