The Ash, the Elder, and the Hen Elm

IT IS FINISHED (It has barely begun) This took longer than expected, in large part because once I'd actually drawn up a coherent plan it turned out that bits of this post will form substantial parts of the third, seventh, ninth and fifteenth instalments :) I'm hoping things will speed up with future posts, otherwise I might be writing this for about a decade, by which time I'll need to come back and re-edit it all to adapt to changes in the real world in that time. We'll see.  If you're a confused recent reader, this is the first proper part of the series I originally discussed here , in which I convert my beloved home region of North West 'England' into a hex-based Mage: the Ascension setting which can operate along similar principles to the archetypal OSR 'hexcrawl': young mages can roam about in a dynamic and weird world full of factions and threats, causing problems and harvesting Quintessence to their hearts content, before eventually establishi...

 Pretty simple concept, been testing it in a couple of games for about a year now. It's a rule for character motivations (and by extension persuasion etc.) which can be ported into any game which A) doesn't have any rules for character motivations ( 24XX ) or B) does, but they have minimal interactions with other parts of the rules ( World of Darkness ). In the latter case, you could keep running with both or plug the inputs of this system into the outputs of the other. Those who've played Exalted may recognize the general shape of this, but it's much simplified and rendered more flexible. That and Delta Green were the primary inspirations. This post should be about a 15-minute read. If I cut all of the examples, I could have made it MOSAIC-strict , but I think they're helpful so I haven't. Might put out a PDF which is at some point. The temptation of Buddha by Mara . Buddha has very little interest in the pleasures of life, and acts instead to achieve enlighten...