I’m playing a witch in our new Pathfinder Carrion Crown campaign and she is Vudrani. Vudra is basically the “India” analogue in Paizo’s Golarion campaign world. I wanted her to have a much more extensive Indian (Hindu/Buddhist/whatnot) flavor to her. So I’m looking for skinning ideas from you! Her name is Sredni Vashtar’s Girl and she worships her weasel familiar as a god. More details here in a previous post on her background…
My ideas so far include:
1. Using mudras (those funky hand signs) for her hexes. I’m trying to devise a mapping (this one for Misfortune, this one for Fortune, etc.). ideas here very welcome, for some reason the Interwebs are failing me in coming up with good lists of these and their meanings. She’s low level and only has a couple so I’ve been able to fake it so far, but once she has a bunch of them I’d like it to be distinctive to the point where I don’t even have to say which hex I’m using for the GM and other players to know “OK, here comes Slumber…” just from the hand sign.
2. Having a mantra she chants instead of Cackling.
3. Generally considering her weasel one of the thousand gods of Vudra.
4. She describes her manipulation of luck (fortune/misfortune/etc) as dharma and things that affect people like healing as affecting their chakra.
As a sub-theme her weasel is really an evil Nyarlathotep worshipper and so her spells are more “evil great old ones stuff” but her witch powers are more her/her culture/her philosophy based; as she goes on she’ll have conflict between the two.
That’s about all I’ve got… Back in Feng Shui days when it was time to have some Daoist sorcerers I watched a bunch of HK movies to get some cool flash, but I’m not super familiar with the Indian panoply of stuff (and most of the Indian movies on Netflix don’t seem to have religion/ritual/magic/etc as too much of a component…). I tried going through the Far Eastern sections in my local Half Price Books but though there was a lot of stuff it wasn’t very helpful for these purposes.
Any ideas for sources, ways to skin the witch, etc. along these lines? Doesn’t have to be “true to” the real Hindu/Buddhist stuff, just ripping off the flair. Like how Christian churches are depicted in Japanese anime, where all priests have reflective glasses and silver crosses that shoot energy out, is “authentic enough” for these purposes.
Geek Related 