Quick, need a story!

[Serpentine]

In a dungeon I'm making for my (seldom played :smallsigh:) D&D game, there's gonna be a couple of murals. The temple is to a Trickster god (mostly based on Kokopelli), and I'd like the murals to depict particular stories about him. One of them I've already decided on, a snake in a circle with a sphere between its tail and its mouth: Kokopelli once tricked a great serpent into eating its own egg. It swallows it, and slowly digests in its stomach. Then it starts to make another egg, which grows and is eventually laid. Then it eats it again... Thus, the phases of the moon.
I'm stuck on the other one. One possibility is that Kokopelli (the real-life one) used his flute to drive away winter to bring in Spring. That would work, with the whole cycle thing, but how would I depict the seasons?
Any ideas?

[Jair Barik]

How about this.

Four brothers each came to Kokopelli seperately. One with a red hot temper, one with a deathly palour, one with a heart as cold as ice and one with much youtful vigour. Each of the brothers sought the death of his younger brother with the exception of the youngest who sought to kill the eldest. But each also knew one of his brothers hoped to kill him. To each of them Kokopelli taught two songs that he would play upon his flute. The first song would be a warning that the killer was near and the brother should go into hiding. The second was that Kokopelli had seen his sibling who he hoped to kill and that the brother should come out to search for him. Each payed Kokopelli handsomly for this service not realising the song that called him was the same song that warned he who they desired to kill.

[Catch]

A love story. While Kokopelli is a trickster spirit, he's largely associated with fertility, concerning both childbirth and farming. Perhaps the weather or world could be represented by a woman, who in her loneliness grows into a frigid, shrew of a woman, clutching the land in her grasp. Your trickster spirit designs to find her a lover, and in an amusing turn of events (I'm picturing Beatrice and Benedick from Much Ado About Nothing), the spirit fools the sun and the woman of the weather to fall in love. The world warms, their romance is the summer, but the sun gets absolutely sick of the whole relationship and takes off for a while, bringing back the season of the world's loneliness. It's up to the trickster to, once a year, convince the two to make up, ushering in spring.

In areas visited by winter, primitive cultures always worried about the sun's return, so for your setting this opens up an explanation for long winters ("the spirit's having a hard time this year") and the potential for a holiday (the world and the sun getting back together.)

[Coplantor]

Trickster god you say?
When the players ask about a mural, print and show them this
http://genuine240.files.wordpress.com/2008/04/rickroll.jpg

You could also tweak real myths, like Heracles and Atlas, each trying to outwit the other into holding the world (wich resulted into both being gullible idiots:smallsigh:)

[Serpentine]

I should point out that it's best if it's able to be depicted very simply. My snake one is literally a lumpy snake in a ring.
That said, all these might be useful for some other part, so I'm not complaining!

edit: If it helps, you can read about (my version of) the god here (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=133706).

One I was thinking about was a depiction of "Curiosity killed the cat... but satisfaction brought it back." A sort of Schrodingeresque dead/not dead feline.

[Jair Barik]

You could have the God sitting in the centre of the picture with his flute and the four brothers hiding behind rocks with weapons at the four compas points.

For Catch's you could have the sun and the woman, the woman either appearing to be rejoicing at seeing the sun arriving or sorrowed at seeing it departing.

[Serpentine]

Hey, what about some sort of very simple causality effect? Kinda like dominoes, but with something more interesting. So there's a starting point, something happens, it changes and changes and changes and ends up where it started again.
...
ionno

Part of the Thing with the snake is, once they figure out it's a lunar figure, it will be easier to figure out which parts go where. If it's something that knowledge of the story will help to complete it, that would be extra-nice.

[Coplantor]

For some reason, the link you posted is not working for me, can you write a brief description of the god here?

[Serpentine]

That's weird, it's working for me. Here:

Kokopelli
The Trickster, Coyote, Huehuecoyotl, The Joker
Greater Deity
Symbol: A humpbacked flute-player, a face of many expressions, a smiling coyote head. Symbols vary greatly among different worshippers, depending on the aspects upon which they focus.
Home Plane: Various, especially Chaotically-aligned ones. Unusually active on the Material Plane.
Alignment: Chaotic Neutral
Portfolio: Trickery
Entertainment, music, art, jokes, humour, comedy, performance in general - both good and bad. Only mediocrity is boring.
Fertility - especially when undesired. Special protector of its unwanted products, and of orphans. Is often involved in designing special fates for them.
Luck - good and bad, double-edged, and disguised.
Theft and mischief.
Thinking around corners, problem-solving, creativity - convoluted and complicated solutions are far more interesting than straight-line logic.
Intelligence, wit, cleverness
Coincidence, irony.
Justice - preferably fitting, personal and twisted.
Ambiguity and confusion - half-breeds, hermaphrodites, individuals of confused or atypical gender, the insane, shape-shifters, polymorphed creatures, and the lost (literally and metaphorically), among others, are under his personal protection... and are his personal playthings.
Opposition to mediocrity - if there's anything he can't stand, it's the ordinary.
Drugs - especially hallucinagens, often an important part of his worship.
Phobias, fetishes and irrationality
Time - especially "early" and "late", and the tricks time can play.
Contradiction.
Extreme emotions
Tears - of laughter and sadness.
Inconvenience
Weather (local only, preferably dramatic, inconvenient and/or inappropriate)
Noise, and the absence of it.
Crowded, anarchic groups of people - battles, riots, cities
The Butterfly Effect, obscure causality
Double-edged swords.
Deception - through both lies and misdirection, and creative application of the truth.
Worshippers: Anyone, midwives, rogues, bards.
Cleric alignments: CE, CN, CG, N
Domains: Chaos, Liberation, Luck, Madness, Transformation, Trickery
Favoured Weapon: Wit. Failing that, improvised weapons.
Worship, description and general nature of the trickster god varies between groups of worshippers. The Trickster of this temple emphasised wit and cleverness, sideways thinking and deceptive appearances, as well as humour and irony.What about some sort of optical illusion?

By the way, I'm almost certainly overthinking this. It's not even for the real one. The twirling blades will stop a metre from the ground, and the mosaic will be missing a piece or two. Just to give 'em a scare.

[Yarram]

Kokopelli once tricked a great serpent into eating its own egg. It swallows it, and slowly digests in its stomach. Then it starts to make another egg, which grows and is eventually laid. Then it eats it again... Thus, the phases of the moon.
I'm stuck on the other one. One possibility is that Kokopelli (the real-life one) used his flute to drive away winter to bring in Spring. That would work, with the whole cycle thing, but how would I depict the seasons?
Any ideas?

The Snake is from Healers Quest...

These, for if you want it to be known that the world is round:
You could always have a child god playing a game, hiding from another child of the opposite gender. One brings hot while the other is cold, and they constantly chase each other around the earth by foot. They are small and slow see?
Or just one god, who goes around the earth for some reason, who is cursed to be hurt by heat, and so the sun god turns down the sun for this god.
An expansion of this could be that the winter god is evil, but unfortunately the sun god is indebted to him, but keeping your house warm keeps the evil god out.

[Serpentine]

The Snake is from Healers Quest...Dunno it, and I've drawn it myself, inspired by that snake mound in the US. It's generic enough I'm not surprised it's been done before, though.

If it helps, deities like Garl Glittergold and Loki are "aspects" of this god (the snake thing was, somehow, inspired by the thing with Garl and the kobold god).

[Thajocoth]

What about an Escher-esque mobius strip of dominoes, that, as they fall, their fallen position is now set up perfectly, if you think about gravity in a different direction, for the next wave to knock them down again?

For the seasons... Winter is often depicted as an elderly person. (Man in this culture, but mythologies that have depictions for all 4 seasons often have women for all 4.), if you can do something with that... I'd use ents instead of humans.

For the dead/not dead cat... Have one half lively with a paw reaching towards a flying bird, while the other half is limp and bleeding, a dagger sticking out from it's side... To represent curiosity, the dagger made of a rolled up parchment that's just unrolled enough to tell what it is, but still keeps a distinctly dagger-like shape.

Having pictures like these in my head sometimes makes me wish I had an ounce of artistic talent.

[Serpentine]

My Boy has a brilliant idea he's never going to actually create for a website which would help you with that.

Okay, I'm just gonna go with the Schroedinger's cat idea for that, I think. But now I need another idea.
There's a room in this temple that's full of... think I'm gonna go with boiling acid. Trite, but true. Anyway, there's a bunch of floating islands dotted around it. Each island has 4 stone faces with different expressions on them. The party has to go from angriest to happiest (or vice versa, haven't decided that yet). If they jump from the wrong face, the island flips them off into the nastiness.
The thing I need is some pithy line to have at the entrance to this room so they know what to do. So far all I've got is "Slow and treacherous is the path to happiness." Lame. Are there any other sayings or anything that could work as an obscure and somehow significant way of saying "jump from the angry face to the happy face"?