The Ash, the Elder, and the Hen Elm

 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...

Here's the big deal of Ármann Jakobsson's The Troll Inside You: Paranormal Activity in the Medieval North - the thing that distinguishes (or at least elevates) it from any academic, critical work on myth and folklore: 'The first thing readers of this book must do is refrain from imagining that they know precisely what a troll is. While in the nineteenth century Icelandic trolls were taxonomised ... in a thirteenth-century narrative a troll has no such clear identity, not even within the human psyche. Trolls do not constitute a race or a species. The first step when considering the troll sighted on the ridge is to avoid the idea of a clearly demarcated group. ... Thinking like a nineteenth-century scientist will not further one’s understanding of the medieval troll. Furthermore, it might be useful to resist the glossarial impulse to treat medieval Icelandic words as concepts that are carefully defined as they are used. ... How could these men understand a troll? They accept ...