The Ash, the Elder, and the Hen Elm

This image was one of my only pictures of a vampire as a child, glimpsed very briefly in a video edit of We Are the Village Green Preservation Society then hastily covered by a parent. It mutated in my mind. It scared the shit out of me. This comes from two places. First: The other posts I'm writing right now are taking ages for reasons inc. work, RSI recovery. One of them is about a pair of games I wrote somewhere between the ages of 9 and 12, before experiencing any other TTRPG via more than cultural osmosis. But I noticed, when writing them, that the vampires they contain don't resemble what I recall of my childhood conception of them much, if at all. They're closest to being Warhammer vampires. I want to share with you a very different conception, one that I held from the ages of c.5 (when the concept was first introduced to me via one of those 'children's book of hollywood monsters' books) to 7 (when I started getting more into Warhammer and fantasy fictio...

Intro & Review Hi! Not dead! The RSI is slightly improved, so I'm going to see if I can step up the writing pace this month & maximise the number of posts I can still get out in Q1 of 2025... watch this space.  This is a series I'm doing monthly for 2025 where I take a book I'm reading for pleasure and make gameable content for  something  from it. You can find the first one here . In brief,  How to Think Impossibly: About Souls, UFOs, Time, Belief, and Everything Else  is a text by Rice University religious historian Jeffrey Kripal, published by University of Chicago Press, which takes various eclectic academic approaches to experiences of what he calls the 'supernormal'.  Kripal sets out to 'think-with' a series of people who've experienced otherworldly phenomena of various sorts, taking their experiences seriously as describing real events. There's no attempt at a comprehensive survey - the chapters deal, in turn, with near-death/afterlife...