Quote:
Originally Posted by Astromancer
Both the Aztecs and the Greeks give us undead to be/serve the Cold Ones. I book I referred to before made the case that the Nymphs of Greek myth were originally the spirits of young women who died unwed. In archaic Greek terms, they hadn't fulfilled the purpose of their lives. A typical condition for becoming a ghost.
In Aztec lore women who died in childbirth became Cihuateteo deadly malevolent beings. Like the nymphs, beautiful and mystically powerful. La Llorna could be a Cold One assassin working for Santa Muerte.
Following this link should help you with the Cold Ones in Latin America. |
Something I should probably note is that my campaign setting is agnostic on the subject of souls, afterlives, gods and demons.
There are spirits and supernatural entities who may claim to be gods, demons or angels, and may wield powers way beyond mortal magicians, but there is no way to determine whether they are lying, themselves delusional or actually right. Everything they do might actually be the same magic that ritual magicians can access, just more powerful, better manipulated and not limited by the lack of systematic thaumatological science that modern magicians are bound by.
No human currently living has been able to use any supernatural abilities longer than for ca 35-38 years and very few have been aware of magic as a truly real force for even that long. The 'average' human caster is self-taught, relying on unsystematic and inaccurate superstitions as much as any true thaumatological lore, and most rituals are learned by rote from old books, with experimentation almost completely ineffective in the first years, simply due to how slowly mana levels rose.
In game terms, the RPM rules didn't apply for most mortal spellcasters in any meaningful way until the nineties, more than ten years after the first hints of returning magic (even then, probably less than a thousand people knew
anything about the truth, with less than a hundred having any points in Thaumatology, and of those, most believed they were among the only ones to know), and even now, at the end of 2018 (New Year's hasn't happened yet in my game), most of Earth outside the Vile Vortices is Very Low Mana (-8 to -10).
The most powerful magicians in the world have pretty much all been mentored by spirits or supernaturral beings in the early days of magic, or learned from someone who has. This has the side-effect that there are a lot more crazed cultists who cast potent spells than there are rational, educated ritual magicians of comparable power.
In terms of percentages, probably 80% of those human beings who can use any kind of supernatural ability learned that as part of an established religious or spiritual tradition with elements dating back to prior eras, before the 20th century, when it seems magic also worked. Another 15% belong to cults established by powerful supernatural beings or are otherwise taught by such a being. Only 5% are truly thaumatological scholars who understand magic as a force independent of religious traditions and aren't bound by either rote learning or some form of pact. There are a lot more traditional shamans, bokors, mambas, brujas or the like in the world than there are Hermetic ritual magicians.
Outside sub-cultures which exist also in the real world, e.g. Afro-Caribbean religious and magical traditions, there wasn't really any true 'occult underworld', let alone organised cabals of mages, until the last decade or so, with what existed before that being just like the real world, i.e. people studying the occult and esoteric, but not actually able to do any magic and might not actually be learning anything terribly relevant to RPM and Path skills (though having been an occultist before discovering real, working magic actually tends to be a good background to start learning Thaumatology, and, of course, any supporting skills remain useful).
In 2018, magic and the supernatural are still secret and not officially acknowledged, but the secrecy is fading. In real reality, there are plenty of places where the majority of people claim to believe in ghosts, witches, curses or other supernatural things. In my setting, the percentage of people who believe in something supernatural has trended upward from the 1990s, along with violent crime figures, and in 2018, pretty much everywhere is suffering from historic levels of violent crime.
Average first responders, crime reporters, ER nurses, priests or similar people have seen too much to completely swallow official denials, though most simply have unanswered questions and doubts about imperfect rationalisations they've come up with as part of the Facade, not true knowledge. A lot of criminals and street people know well enough that there are scarier things than cartel
sicarios and serial killers out there, but there is much more inaccurate superstition being talked than valuable information.
Few places where people live permanently are higher than Low Mana (-7 to -3), with any place where rituals can be cast at unmodified skill likely to be also the epicenter of covert conflict, constant danger and otherwordly incursions. No sane occultist wants to live in a Place of Power inside the most magical areas of a Vile Vortex, that's how you end up insane, dead or suffering a fate worse than death before you ever manage to learn something truly momentous. I guess the cutting edge thaumatological research is mostly being performed by those whose curiosity or lust for power outweighs all other considerations, or by those not burdened with sanity or self-preservation. In other words, PCs, their peers and kindred spirits, and their foes.
So even if mortals can't yet match the powers and abilities that spirits and other supernatural beings from other worlds can wield, that doesn't mean they are necessarily ineffable mysteries. It just means that in the less than forty years after humans started to be able to wield magic again, no one has yet managed to learn enough to figure out how to do the things the most powerful spirits and other beings can do. At least, no one who is willing to share his discoveries...
By the same token, spirits that resemble ghosts exist in the setting, but whether they are bodiless souls of the formerly living, spirits of an incorporeal species of extraterrestials never alive, but simply given shape and semblence of personality by the belief or expectations of the living, or something else, like astral remnants or lingering echoes of the once living, any personality or volition the result of some external influence, is hotly disputed, in setting, by occultists.
Questions of the afterlife, religion and the nature of reality in the setting may or may not be answered in the course of play, but are meant to be central motivations for characters. And it's important that nothing about the way supernatural powers and beings work serves to prematurely answer any ultimate questions.
What that means for ghostly foes, for example, is that the GM and players have to be able to bisociate. Every power 'ghosts' exhibit can be explained either by traditional religio-spiritual reasoning,
or, by rationalising the effects human belief has on the realm of the preternatural in terms of philosophical analogues to the Observer Effect, quantum mumble-bumble-something, and scientifically defining ghosts as incorporeal parasitic mimics that require belief to survive and who, consciously or unconsciously, conform to human supsrstitions and cultural expectations about the supernatural.
So, using these excellent Latin American legends and myths as the basis, the creature responsible might be a witch, spirit or ultraterrestial powering their preternatural powers through manipulation of cultural iconography (which might or might not eventually result in becoming the mask). It might be an aspect, a tiny tendril, of the Lords of the Last Waste, discovering a preternatural ecological niche, through which it can siphon life, warmth, possibilities and potentialities out of this reality, into its barren void. The resemblence to a real world myth could then, perhaps, result from the summoner perceiving the alien in familiar terms and with such perception, defining the boundaries of existance the aspect has in this reality.
Not to mention that several magical traditions in my campaign world have a concept similar to the tulpa, thought form, and these generally take on shapes and abilities defined by various myths and legends, because collective belief is in many ways the most vast reserve of energy that can be accessed through preternatural means. It takes a lot more energy and will to make a thought form that only you can conceptualise instead of relying on the dreams and unconscious beliefs of crowds to handle most of the work. Creating from scratch vs. building on established code.