Episode 247: So Fair It Shines as a Marketing Quote
June 23rd, 2017 | Robin
Stare! Stare my friends, into the most psychically destablizing hat of all. For this week Among My Many Hats has the Yellow Sign neatly embroidered upon it, and you know what that means: Robin’s new GUMSHOE project for Pelgrane Press, The Yellow King Roleplaying Game, is Kickstarting now. Ken hangs onto his last Composure point as he asks Robin all about it.
At the triple command of Patreon backer Rafael Pabst, the Book Hut takes a look at the mythic work of Robert Graves.
A simple yet elusive question confronts us in the Gaming Hut. Half-elves: what’s their deal?
Finally Patreon backer Tim Vert knows who he’s gonna call. He asks the Consulting Occultist to tell us all about Harry Houdini’s ghostbusters.
Want to pose a question to the show? Get your priority question asking access with your Support for the KARTAS Patreon!
Snag Ken and Robin merchandise at TeePublic.
In Unknown Armies, Atlas Games’ modern-day, occult roleplaying game, you play the heroically broken people who conspire to fix the world. That conspiracy just got easier, with the arrival of the game on store shelves near you! 
The book has been written. The book has been read. Now it rewrites you.
Across time it spreads, creating dread new realities. And you’re in all of them.
Pelgrane Press is terrified to announce that Robin’s epic new GUMSHOE project, The Yellow King Roleplaying Game, is now live on Kickstarter.
Saddle up! Askfageln’s Western is now shooting it out at the Kickstarter corral! Play desperate desperadoes, merciless mercenaries, courageous native warriors and brimstone-tinged preachers in a time and place in need of heroes.
John Scott Tynes’ Puppetland is ready to knock the stuffing out of a game store near you in its gorgeous new full-color hardcover edition. Join the good folks at Arc Dream in battling the horrific forces of Punch the Maker-Killer! 
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The segment on Graves was wonderful, and Ken’s glee about his crazypants theories was infectious. I have been running a solo BESM campaign based on Greek mythology for about 10 years now, and Graves’ footnotes have been a wonderfully rich source to mine for ideas for that game.
Why do Robin and even Ken pronounce “erudite” as though it were spelled “eriudite”?
Surprised no one has mentioned “The Golden Ass” (not about Kim Kardashian) by Graves as a nifty piece of weird fiction.
On half elves: I’ll note that around the time that “half-elves” were becoming a thing in D&D, “High Men” were becoming a thing as well, though in different games. Where half-elves were rips of Elrond, high men were clearly intended to be rips of the Rangers, who were descendants of Elros, Elrond’s brother. And thus, depending on your definition of half elf, were half elves as well.
Linguistic note: While “anthology” can refer to a collection of works by multiple authors with some organizing principle, it can also refer to “a collection of selected writings by one author.” (Note that this will vary depending on the dictionary you consult, but the etymology also supports either version.)
https://www.grammarphobia.com/blog/2012/06/erudite.html might be relevant here. 🙂
Sorry, the grammarphobia link https://www.grammarphobia.com/blog/2012/06/erudite.html was about the pronunciation of the word in the link. :p
Re: Half-elves, I think my own use of that trope was related to my affection for the Traveller “jack-of-all-trades” skill – in AD&D, only half-elves could be Fighters and Magic-Users and Clerics (FMUCs), or Fighters and Magic-Users and Thieves (FMUTs). (The other triple-class I remember being the Gnome Fighter/Illusionist/Thief, or FIT.) Triple-classed characters worked well as backup in parties featuring straightforward fighter and magic-user archetypes, and the FMUC was an especially useful “back-up cleric” in those primitive, healing-starved times.
I did find that for party composition, it worked well to have either an elf or a half-elf, but not both, just as it worked best to have only one halfling or gnome.
“The very banality and innocence of the narrative section only allowed the blow to fall afterward with more awful effect. […] If I had not caught a glimpse of the opening words in the footnote I should never have finished it.”
– Commentary on Graves, author unknown.