Qizilbashwoman

rebellion! A chapter starting on page 318 entitled ""Player Characters and the Rebellion" actually there is a better overview I'm thinking of but I have to track it down now, because it includes things like "there's an emperor and an empire and the characters don't know anything more. Is there a Luke? Is there a Sith?" and a "beyond the empire, everything else is up for grabs"

Twelfth Night remade as She's The Man got me through a lot

honestly one of the best discussions on how to handle this appears in the most recent iterations of the STAR WARS rpgs, because it's implausible to ignore that the canon exists. they suggest all of the above and more.

to be fair, this was not unlike the general atmosphere of life in the ancient world, except nobody had incense. just look at our meatpacking plants - and no, i'm not a vegetarian (although I'm actually ALLERGIC to mammal protein, so birds it is). we just sequester it now.

if it wasn't, a recent reread of Genesis (a translation into Yiddish by the secularist poet Yehoyesh, d. 1927, for my Yiddish class) has reminded me that even the most familiar of scriptures is full of Lovecraftian monsters and even more monstrous actions. We just finished reading about Dinah (TW: SA) and the massacre that eliminated Shkhem's patrilineages. Genesis is an incredibly bizarre document. No offense meant: I was raised Episcopalian and we critically read the Christian Bible ("Old and New"), but rereading it in another language reminds me of how confusing and inexplicable the events and actors' actions really are. God appears and shatters a man's hip in a wrestling match. People set up baetyls (if you don't know what a baetyl is, the Kaaba in Mecca is one; the name is a latinisation of BETHEL). Nothing at all is explained anywhere and without context, even with Rabbinical commentary and scholarly discussion, things are weird as a snake's suspenders. The substitution of the ram for a child in the Isaac/Ishmael narrative is literally like the most coherent and well-understood event in the entire Tanakh in the modern era (it was part of a cultural shift in ancient Southwest Asia - it's also the reason Carthage was settled!) and that is certainly saying something.

the authors of that are Young Earth creationists whose and not actual archaeologists and admitted to manipulating the photographs. They wished to identify the site as Sodom. Their "dig" was by an uncredited Evangelical Christian diploma mill, Trinity Southwest. But you can still have Lovecraftian horror happen!

Tom DuBois' An Introduction to Shamanism is a solid introduction; he's notably written Nordic Religions in the Viking Age, which is perhaps the single best introduction to Scandinavian religious practices before Christianity as well as a number of books on Sámi and Fennic religion.

billabong is fun as hell to say but i think it's entirely restricted to Australia, it's a Wiradhuri loan. Oxbow or oxbow lake are standard. As long as people know what you are talking about, though, say billabong!

this is par for the course in how shamanic initiations are described. I have seen Siberian-origin shamans wear skeletons on it representing the replacement of body parts by magical pieces. They also wear skeletal imagery for other reasons, but for this specific reason? Yes. and the reason for elf shamanism doing this is different: you are turning into an actual elf. It's not standard procedure to change races.

wait, is there more than one House of Black Arkat? I thought it was a single location in Esrolia? Are there lodges elsewhere?

The Greek understand of them was that they personified the storm winds, so I think we're on track here. There were beautiful harpies in early texts but later they uniformly became understood to be ugly later, which also tracks.

the gloranthan chicken and egg is "which came first, the naiad or the local body of water"

don't forget mermaids and selkies. a reminder that right-minded folk know that mermaids are predators and humans are tasty

there's literally a temple to AA, the OG Darkness husband, in Boldhome? why are Uz off the menu? the trolls have a fraught relationship with the Red Goddess and Her empire

I'd like to observe one of the dread Elder Scrolls enemies here: the Briarheart. Through daedric (Chaos) magic, a Reachfolk Breton hero will be ritually mutilated by having his living heart removed and replaced with a heart made of a poison fruit that grows on a hagraven-nurtured Briarheart tree. (A hagraven is a Reachfolk daedric witch; they are like bird-human hybrids. The briarheart seed, as seen below, is planted in a corpse.) The original heart of a Briarheart is stored so that they will pass on after death; if it is defiled, they are trapped in Nirn (the mortal world) until such time as it can be reconsecrated. Some Briarhearts further evolve, through horrible torture rituals, into a variety of "Lurcher", or embodied spirit in the form of a juggernaut made of plant material. Below is an image of the Reachmen Hero Faolan ("Wolf"), who was a werewolf (a gift of Hircine, the daedra lord of the Hunt) and the first Briarheart. While Chaos does not map exactly to Elder Scrolls daedra, it is close enough. The major difference is that the source of Chaos is a sacrifice by one of the first creators to enable change (and thus life as we know it rather than permanent stasis). Briarhearts mimic the sacrifice of that dead lord, whose heart was torn out. (Daedric and non-Daedric positions on the event vary: anti-Daedra argue it was an execution but pro-Daedra know it as a self-sacrifice, the first mother giving birth). Anyway, the Reachfolk have a terrifying society with extremely fascinating daedric theology and I thought maybe this might spark some horrible GM ideas. Elder Scrolls theology is wild. For example, the origin of the entire universe is said to have been a starship whose engines exploded in some kind of alternate space; the crew were divided between two factions, and became the gods and daedra of the world. A ship's AI embodied itself and is the origin of several Aedric heroes: https://elderscrolls.fandom.com/wiki/KINMUNE. (One of Her embodied forms is Queen Ayrenn, who founded the Aldmeri Dominion.)

the O.G. medievalist's meme right there

unrelatedly the Russian discussion of the Swedish forces has an illustration that looks almost exactly like a woman with a fake moustache. Just thought I'd throw that in there because instead of paying attention I was like "did this illustrator use women as his models?"

what, they don't make you eat a sentient being before you can be a troll?

Fun note: marsupials evolved in what is now the Pacific Northwest of the US and Canada in prehistory (that area was a separate landmass) and then spread to South America and Antarctica, which were then connected. They entered Australia from Antarctica much, much later. Since Genertela is inspired by West Coast America and Eurasia, the absence of opossums-modern North American marsupials-would be a problem. But as for the wild variety of Australia? I don't know. They would have been transplants, which is common.

two of these species are antelopes! the gazellets and the ordeeds.

dyke drama is the finest kind of drama, have a +1 rose bride for your ideas

Tien had the Death Rune and Atyar was the Knowledge Thief; together you get the bizarre combination of Chaos, Truth and Death that is Thanatar

it's not a netflix film, they just carry it, so no need to subscribe

Ah, I see. I mean, I still think 2-3 mooks is not hugely different in scope from 6-8; it's just "which kind of heroic narrative are you telling?" I've always thought of the Iliad and the like as good models, and they are all "the heroes with divine blessings destroy armies, and the minor heroes like Odysseus do it differently"

I've always thought Thanatar (for example) was best run as the Chaos face of Orenoar-derived gods, which span Buserian the Solar (the OG wisdom lord), the Orlanthi ex-sorcerer Lhankor Mhy (who doesn't have an elemental rune associated) and the Lunar Irrippi Ontor. (Who is the Truth deity of the Darkness?). Krarsht is Larnste.