[tantric]

I'm writing a setting book based on Bantu mythology. There are many stories of people wandering off into the spirit world, or the Underworld, or Heaven, whathaveyou, so I'd like to have this reasonably well described. Part of adventuring in an animist setting is spirit adventuring. I have to integrate the spiritworld/dreamworld/etc into the setting, make it real and important. I don't want 21st century types on safari, I want immersion - I want the world of mind to be the world, if that makes sense.

That means getting my cosmology down pat. From my readings of the myths, I've decided to have the afterlife be a real place. When you die, your spirit wanders through the underworld into the land of the dead and once there, you build yourself a new body. Thus the ancestor spirits that normal people encounter are actually projections - the ancestors have real physical bodies in the land of the dead and astrally project into the land of the living. The idea is that all people have latent psychic abilities, and that death is a metamorphosis that makes them operant. When your eyes are dust, ESP flowers, etc. Thus the dreamworlds and projecting into them are important - 'dreaming' is the unconscious use of the astral projection power we will one day use as ancestors to watch over our descendants. And that plays into psi and spirit magic being the same thing. Ideally, in this setting, dying doesn't mean giving up your character - you just keep right on adventuring as a ghost.

So, basically, there's no Jumper in this world, because there are no other worlds. The Land of the Dead is a place you can walk to, if you're determined (in the stories they go down caves or burrows). Okay, then - you're right, I just have to ditch the Jumper idea, and build it all out of Astral Travel, adding the domain modifiers and merging Dream Psi. Oh, boy.

(reading your dreamlands blog - you must also have that dreamlands bestiary that I once had, the one with the Cat From Saturn. *loved* that book)