A Year and A Day: Skhanda Mara

Changeling: the Dreaming

Homebrew Rules

Character Creation Guide Download: Skhanda-Mara.pdf

Quoth the Skhanda Mara:

“Don’t knock it. Maintaining a quiet household is tough work, and well worth the tedium. It can be a glorious existence if you let it. It’s a shame that the rest of the world is too busy to appreciate it.”

The Mara Tribes:

Deva Putra Mara
Klesha Mara
Mrtya Mara
Skhanda Mara

Kith Excerpt:

When the Buddha Siddhartha sat under the tree, himself not yet quite the Buddha, Mara the Distractor – Godfather of Demons – offered temptations and distractions to shake him from the path. Though the Buddha saw through them all, they still exist in and of themselves. Four Tribes arose – the Mara Zo-dor, named for the Grandfather God. Each of the four Tribes oversees, and IS, a principle distraction that prevents ascension in mortals, Fae, or other.

The Skhanda Mara are the children of the perceived entirety of experience, the obstacles of self-image, the illusion of permanence of self, the aggregate factors of life. In layman’s terms, the illusion that this is all there is. These Mara are the Lords of the limited reality, but this should never be misconstrued as Banality or Dukha. It is important to realize that this life matters, and that which makes a person a person should be treasured – so the Skhanda Mara will remind you time and time again.

None of the Mara are evil, and the Grandfather God Mara himself should never be mistaken for “The Devil.” The Skhanda see what they do as a service to the World, maintaining the status quo, and presenting a challenge that strengthens the lax. For all the bad publicity their Tribes receive, the Skhanda understand that they are an integral part of reality – one that is all too easy to forget – and forgetting reality can be dangerous.

Flavor

“The years passed like the steps of a staircase leading lower and lower. I did not walk any more in the sun or hear the songs of larks like crystal fountains playing against the sky. No hand enfolded mine in the warm clasp of love. My thoughts were again solitary, disintegrate, disharmonious – the music gone. I lived alone in a few pleasant rooms, feeling my life run out aimlessly with the tedious hours: the life of an old maid ran out of my fingertips.”
― Anna Kavan, “Asylum Piece”