As I posted last month, my mother died on February 4th, 2013. For several years before she passed, I was working closely with her to convert her extensive oeuvre to e-book formats. She wanted very much to share the wonderful world of St. Frideswide with as many readers as possible, and that’s work which I will be continuing to do on her behalf for as long as I live.

Toward that end, for the next five days (until March 7th), Margaret Frazer’s Sins of the Blood will be available FREE on Amazon.

This book collects three short stories (“The Witch’s Tale”, “The Midwife’s Tale”, and “The Stone-Worker’s Tale”), the Guided Tour of St. Frideswide, and a lengthy 10 chapter preview of The Novice’s Tale (the first book in the series).

If it looks like the sort of thing you might find interesting, please grab a copy. If it doesn’t, consider this: My mother was absolutely masterful at placing you inside the viewpoint of a truly medieval character; that’s a perspective that I’ve often found useful in fantasy gaming, and you might think so too. If not, take a couple seconds, see if you can think of any friends or family who might be interested in these books, and then send them a link.

THE WITCH’S TALE

Witchcraft has come to the peaceful village near St. Frideswide, and its foul touch is striking down those closest to the church. Can Dame Frevisse thwart the servants of the devil before the hellfire of hysteria sears the souls of the faithful? Or is there more to this magic than meets the eye?

THE MIDWIFE’S TALE

“Sisters! Come back! Please don’t leave us yet!”

Cisily Fisher has died in childbirth and now the village of Priors Byfield is held in a grip of fear. Can Dame Frevisse find the root of misery behind a murderer’s sin before the next lethal blow falls? Or will the village be lost in a hue and cry of terror? The gentling touch of the midwife may calm the tortured soul… or give birth to a bitter death.

THE STONE-WORKER’S TALE

When Frevisse is given bishop-pardoned leave to visit her cousin Alice at Ewelme, she is enchanted by the work of the sculptor Simon Maye. But Simon is enchanted by the beauty of Elyn, one of Alice’s ladies in waiting. Clandestine meetings have given way to sinful lust, and now the two lovers have disappeared. The servants whisper that the lovers have eloped, and secretly pine for the passion to do the same. Lady Alice believes her sculptor has been stolen away by jealous rivals and rages at the injustice. But Frevisse alone suspects there may be some darker truth behind the midnight vanishing…

A GUIDED TOUR OF ST. FRIDESWIDE

And so we turn to St. Frideswide’s in rural northern Oxfordshire. Imaginary, yes, but fully realized as an ordinary place much like many others common across England in both rural and urban settings by the 1400s. A wealthy widow founded it in the 1300s, saw to its beginning, and endowed it with lands and other income to sustain it – alas, not so fully as she intended to do before she died…

Kindle Edition

Gnome Stew has an article up today: Hot Button — Secrets

Upon further reflection, I’ve decided that I don’t understand the practice of giving flowers at a funeral.

On the day itself, they are beautiful and I was deeply touched by the gesture (and deeply in need of seeing how much my mother was supported and loved).

But as the days pass, the flower arrangements become something that you desperately but futilely attempt to care for until they wither and die before your eyes.

It seems like the last thing I really want to be reminded of.

Something that I touched on only briefly in my Hexcrawl series was the subject of tracks: The system I use for encounter generation features the ability to create random encounters, lairs, and tracks. Random encounters provide immediate obstacles and interludes while traveling; lairs spontaneously generate new locations in the hexcrawl (organically building up material along well-traveled routes as the campaign develops); and tracks are a trail that can be followed to a point of interest.

What I didn’t really extrapolate on is the fact that the concept of “tracks” isn’t necessarily limited to hoof prints in the sod. In the wilderness exploration of the hexcrawl that sort of physical spoor is most likely very common, but the concept of “tracks” really generalizes to “clue”. For example, if I generated a result of “tracks” for bandits that might include a merchant caravan in panicked disarray due to their latest highway robbery; the dead body of a bandit that was critically wounded and abandoned; a bolt-hole containing documents implicating the mayor of a local village in collusion with the bandits; and so forth.

Roger the GS recently posted “Almost Encounters: Sights, Sounds, and Leavings” which breaks this sort of thing down into some useful categories:

• Sights (“a pair of griffins flying across the sunset, many miles away”; “a brief red glow, sighted across a far-away ridge line”)
• Sounds (“snatches of shouting and song down in the valley”)
• Body Parts
• Victims
• Tracks
• Smells and Vapors
• Environment Damage
• Intentional Markings

Check it out. There are a lot of great examples over there.

It includes all three original rulebooks and all four supplements. Each booklet has new cover art, but is “otherwise a faithful reproduction of the original, including original cover art”.

As you can see, the mock-up promotional picture shows eight booklets. I’m guessing that’s an error. OTOH, if WotC had somehow convinced Rob Kuntz to finish Supplement V: Kalibruhn (the original unfinished manuscript of which Noble Knight auctioned off a few years back) so that it could be included in this thread, I’d be spending the next nine months drooling. (Or maybe they’ll include either Chainmail or the Swords & Spells supplement, although neither is listed among the current contents.)