Ye Olde Resource List

A big list of reference links: some for BBC Merlin, some general Arthurian, and some all-purpose medieval/Britpicking.

via little_details on LJ, which is an excellent resource in its own right.

One of my favorite things to do when creating a character is setting up their journal in a way I feel reflects their personality or their general character theme. This can be incredibly difficult when it comes to medieval and fantasy characters because obviously they wouldn't have an online diary via the internet. However inaccurate the medium might be, one way to give a journal the appropriate 'feel' is to use a background pattern which reflects the era the character is from.

The following is a link to over 200 background patterns I have collected from various sources all which are either historical in design or at least reflect a medieval or fantasy theme. Some of these are intended to be very tongue in cheek, but others are more accurate. I didn't make any of these backgrounds, and credit to their original creators or sources are given within the album names and descriptions.

If there are any backgrounds that are not included here that you have made or know about and would like to contribute or see posted please feel free to send me a link!

Medieval & Fantasy Patterns

This is a short list to a few sites which I have found particularly helpful in researching for writing medieval roles that I thought I would share with the rest of you in hopes you can use them as well.

Nightbringer - Invaluable if you're into Arthurian legend. I was first pointed here by damosel and I've never had a site I've found as helpful or informative when it comes to researching information about different aspects of the Arthurian legends. They have biographies on everyone, information about locations, traveling distances, money, summaries of different stories and everything is well cited enough that you can go and hunt down the books their information is taken from in your local libraries.

Society for Creative Anachronism - The Society for Creative Anachronism (or SCA) is a world-wide medieval re-enactment group. The main page for the society may not be terribly helpful however if you go under groups you'll find links to all the different kingdoms and from their local shires and groups etc. Most kingdom pages have many, many helpful and informative links on everything from weaponry, clothing, food, and names and numerous essays written by members of the group available for viewing by anyone who visits their sites.

Medieval Naming Guides: Welsh, Cornish & Breton - Put together by various members of the SCA (Society for Creative Anachronism) this is a list of links to different reviews and articles about Welsh name structure in the middle ages which is very helpful in trying to create an authentic sounding name for your character. They've created these lists in hopes of helping their members when creating their period personas and I've found them very useful for roleplay.

A Concise Dictionary of Middle English - This will be especially helpful to those who write within the Merlin fandom as the spells used on the show are translated into a form of Middle English. This is a rather lengthy dictionary which I found on a site intended for helping the layman get through the works of Chaucer.

Middle English to Modern English Dictionary - Very much like the last link, but not quite as lengthy. This amounts to a list of common words but doesn't contain quite as much information as the previous dictionary though it is somewhat more easy to follow.

Long Ago Captures - I can't remember who first linked me here. It might have been damosel again, but maybe not. This is a gallery of high quality screencaps taken from period films. Their gallery is sorted by era and makes a great resource for icon makers.

Character Roles in a Low-Technology Setting

The site is long defunct, but the Wayback Machine has preserved it. It contains a detailed list of medieval-type occupations, along with the job descriptions and suggestions for RP. There are a few Wheel of Time-specific entries, but the rest are applicable to all kinds of games.

For those of you who RP medieval fantasy and also like to make character outfits/collages on Polyvore, I have made approximately one (1) million collections of suitable clothes and items:

The Medieval Collections

Constantly growing, as I am a pack rat of the first water.

During discussion in the first post it came up about the lack of fantasy icons and the like around the RP Community as a lot of people don't want to play outside the 'norm' even going as far as giving animals etc human faces. Therefore I have gone and made fantasy_icons.

The aim of this community is to bring icons of dragons, fairies, hobbits, mermaids or whatever else you make to one place so that its easier to find. People can post to the community or link back to their icon comms/journals, I'm not all that fussed. I hope this comes in handy for you guys! I've started creating tags for the posts but I'll go through posts etc and tag them as necessary as well.

Enjoy!

A while ago damosel and I started compiling a list of all the icons various icon makers had made of pbs in period clothing. I will admit that most of the hard work that went into the coding and maintaining this was done by damosel and so without her this wouldn't have been able to happen at all, but I've been told a few times that it's been a very helpful resource for moderators and players both and so I'm posting a link to it here.

MEDIEVAL & FANTASY ICONS

So you're writing a character from some vaguely medieval setting, and you want his dialogue to reflect the fact, without getting it hideously wrong? You have come to the right page: the Complete Noob's Guide to what the untutored masses call Old English, but which is actually an early form of Modern English.

DISCLAIMER: I am not a linguist or historian or expert of any kind; I just have an ear for this kind of thing and a pedantic streak a mile wide. This is meant to help writers and roleplayers "sound right" to the average reader. This page should not be cited in your research paper. /END DISCLAIMER

( how to wryte goode )

There are probably a lot of us lingering around IJ who are into the medieval fantasy genre but given the popularity of modern day, reality based pb games, and celeb, and fandom games we tend to get pushed to the side. There's no great place for us to share resources or plot or advertise games that are just in that genre. Sure fantasy_rpgs exists but most of what I've seen from that community are Harry Potter ads.

Most medieval fantasy games that I've seen manage to start off with a handful of interested people but once first ads are done the games tend to die. I think a lot of that is due to not having a central meeting point. So, I've made this community in the hopes that maybe we can redirect some of that focus here. People interested in games within this genre can use it to look for co-mods, storylines for communities and psls, and post game advertisements. I think it should be more than just an ad community though and that it can be used to discuss potential game plots and gauge interest, share resources such as period icons, medieval looking backgrounds, mini-icons and things like that.

We can talk about what rules we want in place as far as posting goes (right now membership is open and posting is unmoderated so anything can come through). I think that as far as advertising goes, we should make things more or less text-based, more of what you see on pbads with a link and a brief description of what you're looking for. This is mostly to cut down on loading time, however if someone has a larger ad they can always put it behind a cut. I also think we should tag our entries for content to make things easier to browse for.

In essence I guess what I'm thinking is that we make this a community structured somewhat like rp_tutorials but focus it on this genre in order to put players more in touch with one another and help this genre become more popular.

I'm hoping others will have some thoughts on this and will be able and interested to contribute.