David Chart’s Blog

Latest News

  • Learning Mundane Virtues

    I have written another RPG product, and this is also a short supplement for Ars Magica, under the Open Licence. As you might guess from the title, it is about learning mundane Virtues.

    The cover of the product, which shows a hooded person listening at a door, with the title, my name, and the Ars Magica Open License logo.

    The Ars Magica rule system includes Virtues and Flaws. Virtues are strengths that the character has that are not represented by the basic game statistics. (Flaws are not just weaknesses, but that doesn’t matter here.) The original rules, way back in the 80s, did not have any way to acquire Virtues during play, but over time the game has acquired quite a few. There is Mystery Initiation for Supernatural Virtues, for example.

    There are no rules for acquiring the completely mundane Virtues.

    For some, this is fine. Large, for example, makes you taller than normal, and, assuming you are an adult, there is no mundane way to acquire that. Others are just representations of having been trained in skills before beginning play, and so are already covered by the rules. But there is a subset that looks learnable, but for which there were no rules.

    In the past, we have tried to work around that by using the Initiation rules, but they are not really appropriate. The rules in this supplement are based on the Initiation rules, but without the parts that really don’t fit for mundane Virtues. There’s also a list of the Virtues I think can and can’t be learned using this ruleset.

    The supplement is available on DriveThruRPG and Patreon.

News Archive

My Writing

Fiction

I have written some fiction.

Academic

I have published a few peer-reviewed academic works, on philosophy and Japanese history.

Roleplaying Games

I have written for roleplaying games.

Mimusubi

Mimusubi is my project for non-fiction writing about Shinto. It has its own website.

Recent Blog Posts

  • Learning Mundane Virtues

    I have written another RPG product, and this is also a short supplement for Ars Magica, under the Open Licence. As you might guess from the title, it is about learning mundane Virtues. The Ars Magica rule system includes Virtues and Flaws. Virtues are strengths that the character has that are not represented by the…

  • Glosses and Commentaries

    I have just published a new RPG work. Glosses and Commentaries is a short supplement for Ars Magica Definitive Edition, released under the Ars Magica Open License. It is available for purchase on DriveThruRPG and on Patreon. In the medieval period, certain authors and texts were regarded as authorities on a particular subject (Aristotle, in…

  • Ars Magica Crowdfundings

    My first professional publication for Ars Magica came out in 1993, in White Wolf Magazine. Things rather grew from there, and I spent over a decade as the Line Developer. When I retired from that position, I ended up taking a break for a few years, but now I’m back. First, I prepared the text…

  • Tamao

    My novel, Tamao, has been released. It is an urban fantasy novel, set in Kawasaki, Japan, drawing heavily on Shinto practice and mythology. It is available for purchase on Amazon, Gumroad, and DriveThruFiction

  • Site Redesign

    I am redesigning the site to make use of the latest WordPress technology, and to better serve the role I want it to play at the moment. This will probably break things a bit, even though I have done the ground work on an offline copy. I hope to have everything up and running properly…

  • Accepted as Japanese

    Can immigrants to Japan ever be accepted as Japanese? If you read the English-language internet on the topic, you will find a lot of people saying that it is impossible. That’s not what I’ve found. A few weeks ago, I was at a rare in-office meeting at one of the groups I work with. The…

  • Sensitivity Reading

    Since I have been asked to do sensitivity/cultural reads a couple of times now, it seems sensible to set out what I think that involves, what I can (and can’t) do, and what I think it should cost. What It Involves I will not do your research for you. I expect to read a manuscript…

  • Twenty Five Years Online

    A while back, I was looking through some archived files on my computer, and found a very old page for my website listing updates. It started with an update entry for 25th September 1995, for the Latin translations of the names of the Animal spells in Ars Magica Third Edition. The pages were on Geocities…

  • Citadel of the Red Sun

    Citadel of the Red Sun is a one-act adventure for Torg Eternity, set in the Living Land. A wonder, a fragment of another reality, appears within the Living Land, and the player characters go to investigate it. As this is an adventure, I cannot say a lot about it without getting into spoilers for the…

  • 2019 Survey of Foreigners in Kawasaki

    About ten years ago, I applied to join the Kawasaki City Representative Assembly for Foreign Residents. My goal was to get the city to carry out a survey of its foreign residents, to find about the problems they were experiencing, in particular the experience of racism. At that point, there was no good data on…