The people who live anywhere

I turned out to devote most of this week to session prep for a session that never happened – too many players had to cancel. Still, it let me get into doing some actual research for creating Nunnehi NPCs, which was kind of interesting.

Nunnehi, for those not nerdy enough to know, are the World of Darkness faerie-folk native to the Americas. I’ve never really gotten into them, despite being a big Changeling: the Dreaming fan – the Kithain always felt plentiful enough to fill any number of campaigns. But given that I’m now running a sometime Werewolf campaign where one of the characters is an Uktena and the other character is a Fianna of American-Indian descent, it felt like they ought to show up.

Which means first scouring Wikipedia for articles on Apache culture and history, since I figured my particular Nunnehi NPCs were residents of an Apache reservation, and then trying to broaden it to some other tribes who are connected to individual Nunnehi Families (like Inuits for the Inuas, Cherokee for the Nanehi, etc). This may take me a while, but I think I’m starting to get at least some kind of foggy grasp of what sort of folklore the Nunnehi come from.

Things to pay especial attention to next might include traditional foodstuffs – those always tend to set the tone, and might give me more of a sense for the natural habitat my game takes place in, besides (I really do need to get a better feel for junipers and cacti). And apparently there is a series of thrillers by some dude named Tony Hillerman who features a lot of Navajo characters, and that might give me a better sense of their modern, everyday lives than a lot of theory.