Yeah, the hsien are very clearly designed more to fit into the "Year of the Lotus" line (Kuei-jin, hengeyokai, etc) than basic Changeling. A part of me likes that, as you say, because it isn't just shoehorning Asian material into a Western paradigm. I could have wished for them to do a better job with it, though. The Nunnehi were a pretty tone-deaf system, too. And then once you get into weird-ass things like the Denizens, it devolves into whut?
For the Mesoamerican stuff, I built the "Courts" around the tropical model of wet season/dry season, and filtered that through the paradigm of sacrifice: fae in the wet season would sacrifice themselves, those in the dry season would sacrifice others. And then I invented kiths out of things I'd come across in my folklore reading, like ocelotlaca (jaguar people), aluxob (agricultural trickster spirits), etc. Their sidhe equivalent were the quetzalcoameh -- feathered serpents -- who were even more powerful, but a lot rarer. And I tried to think through the history of how all this interacted with colonialism and Western fae coming in. But I'll be the first to admit that it didn't have much to do with the creativity = Glamour paradigm of regular Changeling.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2011-10-20 12:09 am (UTC)For the Mesoamerican stuff, I built the "Courts" around the tropical model of wet season/dry season, and filtered that through the paradigm of sacrifice: fae in the wet season would sacrifice themselves, those in the dry season would sacrifice others. And then I invented kiths out of things I'd come across in my folklore reading, like ocelotlaca (jaguar people), aluxob (agricultural trickster spirits), etc. Their sidhe equivalent were the quetzalcoameh -- feathered serpents -- who were even more powerful, but a lot rarer. And I tried to think through the history of how all this interacted with colonialism and Western fae coming in. But I'll be the first to admit that it didn't have much to do with the creativity = Glamour paradigm of regular Changeling.