[Icelander]

Originally Posted by tshiggins

Okay, I've kept up with this thread, but haven't had time to post any information about the sources that might help you, until today. A lot of the research I did for Facets might come in handy.

Ute Tales. By Smith, Anne M.; University of Utah Press, Salt Lake City.
ISBN 0-87480-442-6.
-This is a collection of Ute Indian folklore and fairy tales.
-I pulled the Tsiants (the Ute version of ogres) directly from this book.

Island in the Rockies: The Pioneer Era of Grand County, Colorado, to 1930. By Black III, Robert C.; Grand County Pioneer Society; Country Printer; Granby, Colorado.
Library of Congress Cat. No. 70-80767.
-Mostly useful as an authoritative text of the conflict between the Utes and the settlers.
-Probably limited utility for your needs.

Web sites:
Native American Legends and Folklore
http://www.native-languages.org/legends.htm
-Probably the single most useful
-A great central repository with scads of links

Indigenous People dot net
http://www.indigenouspeople.net/
-Lots of stories from indigenous people from throughout the world
-Not just limited to American Indians, although the selection of those stories is pretty impressive, too.

American Folklore dot net
http://www.americanfolklore.net/index.html
-The selection of indigenous stories isn't nearly as good, but it has a fair smattering of 19th Century American tall tales
-Limited utility for me, but you might get more out of it

If you're looking for some more fictional and dramatic examples of stories based on American Folklore, I can't recommend Manly Wade Wellman highly enough:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silver_John

For horror with a Caribbean flavor check out
http://www.miaminewtimes.com/1997-06...hs-over-miami/
If you can't find inspiration in those children's stories, turn in your GM's hat. The provenance of those stories might be a bit questionable, but as sources of inspiration they're tough to beat.

Thanks a lot.

It is certainly true that the stories of homeless children in Miami was especially inspiring. I wonder if Alice Talbot, the PC anthropologist who is supposed to be working on her PhD on the evolution of Jamaican folklore among immigrant communities, might actually be getting sidetracked into investigating folklore among homeless children in Houston.

She's not Charitable (which would pretty much clinch it), but she is Curious and if she notes that children from other ethnic backgrounds are telling stories similar to ones that at-risk Jamaican children are, she might want to investigate more closely. Especially if she recognizes anything that sounds like it might be true, in a world with magic.

Then again, with Shyness and no real social skills to speak of, Alice isn't the best field interviewer. I guess Pitiable would help her gain the trust of children, though. For best results, though, she should be paired with someone with impressive social skills, who can handle getting people to open up, while Alice memorizes everything they say and collates it with her reference-file mind.

Mental note, make sure to detail an outgoing NPC who is partnered with Alice on her research. For best results, make her every bit as Curious as Alice, but pushy and disturbingly good at getting people to talk about things they weren't planning on disclosing, which will no doubt play very nice with Alice's extreme reluctance to disclose anything of her own past.

Originally Posted by tshiggins

At one point, you mentioned voodoo and asked if there was anything else like that. I haven't seen you mention Santeria, yet, so I don't know if that interests you.

This is a good overview:
http://www.aboutsanteria.com/what-is-santeria.html

In Facets, the practitioners of Voudou and Santeria seek assistance from the spirits, which usually demand sacrifice of some sort. Generally, for a spirit to work its will in Assiah, it needs intermediaries which, in some cases, act as "chevals" or "horses," for the loa ("lawgivers") to possess.

This is dangerous, as the spirit tends to like to "rearrange the furniture" in the mind of the cheval, to make it more amenable. The more a cheval gets ridden, the more his or her personality begins to resemble that of the spirit (in GURPS terms, the psychological disads and advantages get acquired or swapped around).

Eventually, if a cheval gets ridden too much, the original personality disappears completely, and the body just becomes a "glove" through which the spirit works its will upon the world.

The whole notion of losing one's mind is seen as wholly unacceptable (or even horrific) by the Cabal lodges. As such, they focus on manipulation of the decans, directly, and tend to react to the presence of Voudou and/or Santeria practitioners with suspicion -- or outright hostility.

The Columbine Lodge in Denver is a bit of an exception, because the loss of the occult library, early on, severely limited the power available to them. As such, they had to reach accommodations with the priests and priestesses of Voudou and Santeria, as a way to resist as a common enemy those who used the KKK as proxies.

I tried to get the players interested in creating active practitioners of Afro-Caribbean religions, but none did.

There is one obeah woman aboard the yacht they live and one PC, 'Nonc' Morel, is a rootworker with a background in Southern 'hoodoo', which is not a religion, but simply a magical tradition. He's actually a 'druid', now, but before developing his own magical style of druidism, his magical study was in the field of hoodoo/rootwork.

Lucien Lacoste has the talents to be a truly impressive shaman, being a natural medium and very good at any magic having to do with spirits, but he's simply a devoted Catholic and not interested in voodoo, vodoun or any other Afro-Caribbean religion. Well, 'not interested' might be understating things, as Lacoste came across a lot of criminals who used voodoo rituals for nasty things in his work as a detective and Lacoste feels that the idea of allowing spirits, who might as well be demons, to possess one is not only dangerous, but actively against God's word.

Lacoste does suspect that his grandmother, Nana Lacoste, might be less orthodox in her Catholic religion than he is, given that she has a reputation among the occult underground in New Orleans.

I intend for practitioners of various Afro-Caribbean religions to be potential allies, rivals, foes and villains in the campaign, so any detail is useful. From Kessler's history, an allegiance with elderly Cuban santeros (or even more likely, santeras) is quite probable, whereas my setting background makes it almost inevitable that many Dominican Drug-Trade Organisations (DTOs) will be strongly influenced or even dominated by people (or beings) with supernatural powers.