I haven’t been very involved in the larger blogging world for years now. But once in a while another blog pops up in my feed. In this case I found the podcast the blog is attached to first, and it’s a great podcast. It’s called “Maniculum” after the little hands sometimes drawn in the margins of medieval manuscripts, and true to its name the podcast discusses medieval literature and history and points out things of interest… in this case, of interest to TTRPGs. I’ve only listened to a few podcasts so far but both hosts are knowledgeable about the middle ages and RPGs. The latest episode looked at magic items in and the nature of magic in the medieval imagination. Older episodes looked at particular works like the inimitable and awesome Egil’s Saga. Check it out.
The attached blog looks pretty good too. One of the series of posts is designing a dungeon inspired by grotesques and drolleries from medieval marginalia (which itself is having a sort of renaissance of interest, a good dozen years after the Got Medieval sadly shut down).
Anyway Maniculum is about to launch a Kickstarter for a deck of magic items based on marginalia as well. They might give us a sneak peak once the KS launches.
As a palate/palette cleanser, but still on the topic of marginalia, here are some minis I painted recently. First up, some of Andrew May’s Medieval Marginalia kickstarter minis. For scale, they’re all on 1″ wide bases. You should be able to click on the picture to embiggen, as usual.
Swords & Dorkery