Quote from: riprock;271947All of those are spells which are more atmospheric and less comic-book-y.  So if you intended them as counter-examples, point well taken.

I know they didn't get a lot of play in most actual play situations I've seen -- the big winners were magic missile, invisibility, fireball, fly.

That's true, but it depends on how combat oriented a particular group is.  Mostly, it was dungeon delving, so the flashy spells got the spotlight much of the time.  In a more urban, intrigue focused game, these spells would get much greater use.

If you change the casting time for these from rounds to hours, or even days, you will have a bit more of the medieval flavour you are seeking.   Granted, the list is a good deal shorter than the overall list of Magic-User spells, however.  The list can be beefed up a somewhat with mid- to high-level Illusionist spells, such as Minor or Major Creation, Demi-Shadow Monsters, or Astral Spell.

Quote from: riprock;271597You mentioned "casting spells in the heat of battle."  Definitely, most people did not do magic as such in battle -- they didn't even pray with long, elaborate ceremonies in battle.  A quick "Deus Lo Volte" might make the cut, but anything longer didn't get chanted, for the most part.

As a tidbit, when pre-Islamic Arab tribes went to war, they'd bring along their shamans, who would wait until the armies are assembled for battle, then declaim some magic spells towards the enemy. A common feature of these spells was that they rhymed. This magic was so feared that the enemy army would then quickly duck or throw themselves on the ground so that the rhymes flying through the air would miss them.

Of course, there are lots of similar things in history. Early Christian Celts would have a monk display a highly valuable religious book towards the enemy to ensure divine aid - or if you wish to put it differently, the book's "magic" - will favour them and ham the enemy.

Spells like stat boosts, bless/blight. and prayer are similar to what Premier described - a small boost to a large group taht might give them the edge.  If a game has morale, spells/items that raise/lower it would be reasonable.

Riprock, if you can read Spanish, get Aquelarre. It does exactly what you want, and it does it better than any other game out there.

Quote from: Premier;271998As a tidbit, when pre-Islamic Arab tribes went to war, they'd bring along their shamans, who would wait until the armies are assembled for battle, then declaim some magic spells towards the enemy. A common feature of these spells was that they rhymed. This magic was so feared that the enemy army would then quickly duck or throw themselves on the ground so that the rhymes flying through the air would miss them.

Of course, there are lots of similar things in history. Early Christian Celts would have a monk display a highly valuable religious book towards the enemy to ensure divine aid - or if you wish to put it differently, the book's "magic" - will favour them and ham the enemy.

No wonder the Crusaders got as far as they did.  With warrior monks hamming the doughty Saracens, Allah must have looked with disfavor...

*cough*

...Okay, I can't take that joke any farther.

It's interesting to hear about dodging the rhymes by physically ducking.  I'll have to look into that.  Any titles you can recommend would help.

QuoteSpells like stat boosts, bless/blight. and prayer are similar to what Premier described - a small boost to a large group taht might give them the edge. If a game has morale, spells/items that raise/lower it would be reasonable.

I've actually been looking at The Imperial Age, which is heavily d20.  It isn't so good that I would recommend it, but it does have a clunky ritual magic system.  My main objection is that the d20 tropes are stuck in my head with all my old gaming habits and that my creative juices refuse to flow.  Perhaps if I took The Imperial Age and then heavily restricted the spell list, it would work...

Quoteif you can read Spanish, get Aquelarre. It does exactly what you want, and it does it better than any other game out there.

I can't but one of my players is fluent.  He is also lazy and in love with his Wii, but if I buy the book, I can go to his apartment and demand translations.

I've been looking for legends of medieval magic, but I've stumbled across vampire stories where the vampires resemble living enchanters, not undead monsters.


Bram Stoker's vampire set the dominant tropes, but I've recently learned that the 19th century explosion of British vampire fiction was inspired by a glut of German vampire fiction.

The German fiction seems to have been derived from an outbreak of historical accusations that malevolent dead persons were teleporting out their graves, causing mischief (poltergeist phenomena, killings, etc.) and then teleporting back into their graves.    Blood-drinking doesn't appear to be a big focus of the stories; the evil spirits behave much like any other kind of evil spirit. These vampires don't have to bite you to kill you -- they can just make you sicken, wither, and slowly die. When exhumed, the bodies in question were not decomposed, and were dark with blood.  In some cases, they actually seemed to contain dozens of gallons of blood when cut open.  These corpses were destroyed by various means, notably decapitation, removal of the heart, and fire. (I have looked for folklore about stakes through the heart, but have not found any.  Some peasants ripped out the entire heart and shredded it.  Apparently the peasant life made some people rough-and-ready for that kind of butchery.)  Empress Maria Theresa of Austria sent her physician to investigate, and he concluded that the peasants were superstitious idiots.From that point on, vampires were a respectable fiction topic, but not a legal topic.

It looks like Southey was an important figure, with his "Thalaba the Destroyer" in 1801, but the animated corpse in question is "livid" i.e. dark with blood, just like the historical accusations of vampires swollen with gallons of blood.  Southey's vampire is dispatched with a spear through the heart, not a wooden stake.

Byron threw a couple of couplets about vampires into "The Giaour," but most of the poem is not about vampires, so far as I can tell.  Honestly, it's not easy reading.  The vampire bit basically says that vampires are forced to prey on their beloved living relatives, and that by drinking that blood, the vampire suffers, and the relative suffers.

Byron also started a vampire story -- but there's no blood and ghosts.  It's not a typical vampire story at all, it's a wizard story.  It's called "Augustus Darvell."

http://www.simplysupernatural-vampire.com/vampire-Byron-Augustus-Darvell.html

Okay, so this guy can die and rise again -- as himself, not as some kind of animated corpse moved by an unclean spirit.  That's wizard territory.  This guy is not "undead," he's a living guy who can die and come back to life.  Further, this guy doesn't appear to have any interest in blood.  He does have a wizardly interest in omens, talismans, and oaths, and he prances around in bright sunlight.

Quote"'Swear it, by all that ' He here dictated an oath of great solemnity. "There is no occasion for this. I will observe your request; and to doubt me is-' "'It cannot be helped, you must swear.' "I took the oath, it appeared to relieve him. He removed a seal ring from his finger, on which were some Arabic characters, and presented it to me. He proceeded~ "'On the ninth day of the month, at noon precisely (what month you please, but this must be the day), you must fling this ring into the salt springs which run into the Bay of Eleusis; the day after, at the same hour, you must repair to the ruins of the temple of Ceres, and wait one hour.' "'Why?' "'You will see.' "The ninth day of the month, you say?' "'The ninth.'
...
As he sat, evidently becoming more feeble, a stork, with a snake in her beak, perched upon a tombstone near us; and, without devouring her prey, appeared to be steadfastly regarding us. I know not what impelled me to drive it away, but the attempt was useless; she made a few circles in the air, and returned exactly to the same spot. Darvell pointed to it, and smiled- he spoke - I know not whether to himself or to me - but the words were only, "Tis well!'

He even has a stupid assistant, as so many wizards do.  

Polidori's story, The Vampyre, is actually pretty cool.  The first chapter is a rip-off from Byron's story, but that's okay because Byron was ripping off Southey and the Germans.

Polidori's vampire, Ruthven, is more like an "enchanter" in Arthurian romance.  He can cast geases on people, sometimes without appearing to cast a spell.  Anyone who comes into contact with him runs the risk of having a cursed destiny.

That's pretty cool.  I want to underline how much I enjoyed that part of the story.  But Ruthven appears to be, like Darvell, a perfectly human wizard who can rise from the dead.  Ruthven does need moonlight, rather than sunlight, but that's an astrologically-themed wizard story, not a vampire story.  Ruthven's most powerful geas requires a spoken oath, but it's a doozy of an oath.  The story is worth reading to see just how powerful that oath becomes.  Ruthven also appears to have a pulp-mentalist feel -- he has the mesmerizing presence, the hypnotically dead eyes, the mind-controlling brain-washer aspect.

(It appears that stage presentations of vampires tended to play up the moonlight aspect, and used actors "flying" on wires and ascending from trap-doors to blur the line between spirits (who are expected to fly without walking) and embodied creatures (who must walk).)

Le Fanu's story, Carmilla, has a typically medieval element with its almost qabalistic letter-swapping theme.  Carmilla teleports, changes into a beast form, enchants without appearing to cast a spell, and generally mentally dominates those around her -- within the limits of courtesy.  She has a rare power -- she can become ultra-strong in emergencies.   She has few weaknesses - Christian hymns cause her pain and convulsions, and she dies if her body is exhumed from its grave and destroyed, but sunlight is no problem. Carmilla does drink blood.

(I'm shocked to read that Carmilla was published in 1872 and Dracula was published in 1897!)


In closing, I want to note that Bram Stoker was reportedly a member of the G.D., i.e. the Golden Dawn, along with the nonfiction occult writer, Dion Fortune.  Fortune's theory of vampirism was this: it had nothing to do with blood, and everything to do with life-force.  Vampires who died were actually manifesting an astral body that could drain life-force out of living people and storing it in their buried corpses.  That is why, when exhumed, the corpses hadn't rotted -- they were being sustained by an astral connection to various sources of energy.

Your last post contains lots of cool ideas.  I wonder why Dracula became so popular when and all the others faded.

Quote from: riprock;273461It's interesting to hear about dodging the rhymes by physically ducking.  I'll have to look into that.  Any titles you can recommend would help.

No written source for specifically the rhymes thing, sorry. It was related by the professor as a piece of tidbit, but it didn't come from the reading list. Frazer's The Golden Bough, though, would be a good all-around source for historical magic stuff.

However, if you have any savvy acquaintants who speak Arabic and often travel the area (and are preferably older-looking, bearded academics of anthropology), they might be able to get you some actual spellbooks. The things are still being printed and published unofficially. They're not in the libraries and they don't have any ISBN information, but they can be acquired in some countries, such as Morocco, likely also Algeria, Tunis and Egypt.

Of course, they're all in Arabic and they don't exactly look much on the outside, but still...

A couple of folklore nuggets about Vampirism, the undead and burial practises...

Mourning at a funeral was believed to keep the recently dead from returning to plague the living. If they saw how miserable it was, they wouldn't want to come back.

Water was believed to be able to trap souls (maybe this led to the no reflection in mirrors myth about vampires). So at funerals, or if a village was suffering from a vampire plague, the locals would place bowls of water next to their doors. If a vampire passed it, their undead soul would be sucked into the water.

People were buried standing up to make clawing from the grave harder. To seal the deal, a heavy stone was placed above the buried persons head, above the ground. Yep, headstones.

Nailing a copper wire onto your threshold or window-panes was supposed to stop evil spirits coming into your house.

Often, the only clue that someone was a walking corpse (they did not seem to decompose in the grave) was decomposition of the nose.

Quote from: Nicephorus;273487Your last post contains lots of cool ideas.  I wonder why Dracula became so popular when and all the others faded.

I could speculate about the Golden Dawn having a lot of influence, but I'm too tired to be that speculative.

The subject is deep and I lose hours and hours just doing basic reading for it, so I don't want to start outlining the trivia I've amassed in the past two weeks, researching this.  I haven't been posting here because I've been reading old fantasy stories, and it is a massive time sink.

Quote from: Premier;273501No written source for specifically the rhymes thing, sorry. It was related by the professor as a piece of tidbit, but it didn't come from the reading list. Frazer's The Golden Bough, though, would be a good all-around source for historical magic stuff.

However, if you have any savvy acquaintants who speak Arabic and often travel the area (and are preferably older-looking, bearded academics of anthropology), they might be able to get you some actual spellbooks. The things are still being printed and published unofficially. They're not in the libraries and they don't have any ISBN information, but they can be acquired in some countries, such as Morocco, likely also Algeria, Tunis and Egypt.

Of course, they're all in Arabic and they don't exactly look much on the outside, but still...

I was actually planning to travel in Egypt about seven years ago for pretty much exactly that purpose, and then some idiot started a war in Iraq and put a real crimp in my travel plans.

So I haven't learned Arabic as I had scheduled myself to do.

I have notes somewhere about the grimoires permitted as Islamic "white" magic and the grimoires that are not.  Actually a lot of books that Christians would regard as totally occult are considered by Moslems to be boring descriptions of the theological errors of obscure sects.

I lost a few days to a re-examination of Islamic occultism from about 800 A.D. to 1500 A.D. just before Christmas....

Quote from: One Horse Town;273575Often, the only clue that someone was a walking corpse (they did not seem to decompose in the grave) was decomposition of the nose.

So clearly, Michael Jackson has been dead since about 1988.

Sorry for the thread necro, I was looking up references to Ars Magica. Picked up 4th edition at Half-Price books over the weekend. Looks cool.

Quote from: Age of Fable;271543The book Fantasy Wargaming, already mentioned, had a lengthy discussion of role-playing in a more medieval-like society, including magic. From memory there were different magical traditions for different social classes and religions. The group that were most like role-playing wizards were upper-class Christians. They were believed to be devil-worshippers, but they themselves believed their magic came from God, and their rituals involved various kinds of purification (wearing unsullied white garments for example).

yes, but Galloway's Fantasy Wargaming causes cancer.  So that's right out.

Quote from: Premier;271998As a tidbit, when pre-Islamic Arab tribes went to war, they'd bring along their shamans, who would wait until the armies are assembled for battle, then declaim some magic spells towards the enemy. A common feature of these spells was that they rhymed. This magic was so feared that the enemy army would then quickly duck or throw themselves on the ground so that the rhymes flying through the air would miss them.

Of course, there are lots of similar things in history. Early Christian Celts would have a monk display a highly valuable religious book towards the enemy to ensure divine aid - or if you wish to put it differently, the book's "magic" - will favour them and ham the enemy.

I find the post islamic marabout pretty intriguing as well (and more medieval). the whole concept that magical power was contained in Baraka and could be transferred between individuals and sontained withing fluids etc seems to have a lot of game potential.

Quote from: Werekoala;304621So clearly, Michael Jackson has been dead since about 1988.

Now THERE'S a premise for a modern horror game if ever I saw one!

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