Thanks for this information!

The way I see it, folk tales are basically a bundle of narrative tropes that can be switched out depending on the needs of the storyteller. So when the Wild Hunt narrative spread across Europe, people always tried to make it relevant to their local region. And in regions where there were still fragments of belief in Odin, it is not surprising that he appeared in one form or another - while in others, the Wild Hunt takes on rather stranger forms.

Ultimately, their main commonality is the strange noises you can hear in the countryside at night.

One possibility that might be interesting is if religions have some sort of ceremony that “marks” children for the afterlife of their religion, such as baptism for Christianity. Without this ceremony, the souls of children - or people in general - will develop into other types of spirits, instead of moving on to the afterlife.

I know - I have translated quite a few tales of witches’ gatherings.

Still, the insect that flies to each person’s head is a rather striking and unique element.

As the linked story shows, religious parents could be very distraught if they thought that their children would not end up in the same afterlife as they did.

So what happens if the parents end up in different afterlives? It’s certainly something to ponder.

There are a number of tales - Wild Hunt or otherwise - where there is an explicit mention of a “Wode”. I don’t think linking that to Wodan/Odin is too much of a stretch.

Still, the connections to Hulda are far more numerous, which I find fascinating. I mean, in modern discussions you almost never hear of the Wild Hunt being led by a woman, yet I have encountered quite a few such tales.

I have already started a few such thematic maps, although there is still a lot of work to do.

I 100% understand any culture I make up, definitionally.

If true, that’s very impressive indeed. Every custom, every belief, every fashion, every turn of speech? I study folklore - “culture” is a many-headed beast, and fractal.

I doubt that even Professor Tolkien truly understood the cultures of Middle-Earth “100%”.

In many cases, the player characters are themselves unfamiliar with that culture, in which case any mystery, mistakes, miscommunications etc are valuable in-character roleplay. And when the PCs *would *be familiar with a relevant aspect of a given culture, you can simply tell them that detail, no need to loredump everything.

I do believe that player should be able to gain a basic understanding of the cultures their characters come from. The question is how much information can they get, and process?

As an example, consider Glorantha with its many intricate cultures. The players don’t need to know everything about the setting - indeed, it is so complex that few people have even read the majority of the source material. However, it is essential that they understand what their home culture believes, and how members of that culture expect the characters to act.

Oh, there are lots of tales missing. I estimate that there are more than one hundred thousand German folk tales that have been published in the 19th century alone, and there are a bare 755 of them on the wiki (as of this writing).

While I try to translate as many as I can, I am just one guy who does this in my free time. So yeah, there will be gaps.

I’ve read some other books by Claude Lecouteux, and I am looking forward to reading this one.

The Despair Dragon in particular. I don’t think I have ever seen such a weird-looking dragon.

Well, paying more for stuff is never fun, but the profit margins in the RPG industry are razor thin as it is. Both the employees of Paizo and their freelancers have mouths to feed, and I can understand why they do it.

I’ll continue to buy their stuff as before.

This was my very first RPG, back in 1990.

The first piece of advice: Don’t have player character deckers. Make them NPCs. The decking rules are a horrible, horrible mess that takes the action away from the table.

Yeah, as a German the settlement patterns within most D&D settings looked deeply weird to me. But for all of its pseudo-European trappings, D&D owes at least as much to the tropes of the “Wild West” genre.

The problem is that cities are usually dependent on the resources of the surrounding countryside. You have to protect the fields and the mines as well, unless you can somehow produce all that stuff within the city walls.

Keith Baker always encouraged this kind of creative reskinning of classes.

And, of course, the privilege of superbeings has been explored in #ttrpg before, such as in the setting of Aberrant.

Eberron is one of my favorite DnDoid settings, precisely because the designers put a lot of thoughts into this stuff.

Seoni, the “Iconic Sorcerer” from the Pathfinder RPG.

I rarely have buyer’s regret for TTRPG products, but Carcosa ranks high on that list. The “Sorcerous Rituals” section is maybe worst - do we really need a detailed list of how sorcerers sacrifice humans to work their magic? Not to mention one ritual (“Consign to the Lightless Lake”) where the sorcerer actually rapes his victim.

I will never buy anything from Geoffrey McKinney again.

Done. Thanks for the suggestion!

They are! Click on the link under “Source” in each article.