- Pronouns
- They/Them
I don't have this splat so I don't really know what I'm talking about, but wouldn't absurdly broken powers work well with your idea of "sure, you could go back to human and not be an asshole, but do you want to?"?
White Wolf's World of Darkness
It just didn't sell. The player base was dedicated, but small. Too small to financially justify further releases.
No. Because the Geist power rules are just bad. They expand poorly, and adding a single new power requires writing tonnes of new powers - either one power for every single existing Key if you're adding a new Manifesation, or a form for every existing Manifestation if you're writing a new Key.
It is much harder to work with than Mage, which is more freeform and thus because it's more effects based is much easier to work with since spells are just precedent for a fairly solid system - all of Geist is exception-based.
And Geist wants to be a street level game, so high power powers are bad for that.
Revlid
blob of bugs
- Location
- England
One thing that everyone's always liked about Geist, more or less, is the lack of angst.
You're alive! Life is for the living! Don't mope about under an umbrella or agonize over your dark animal urges, you're alive! A Dia de los Muertos sort of feel, more akin to the dance parties of the Corpse Bride than any of the crawling in my skin nonsense from other gamelines. This is a unique selling point, and one people like, so it's important that any rewrite preserve it.
It does, however, make it somewhat difficult to inject drive into the game, because the same things that deliver angst are usually what force players to get off their asses. In Vampire, the fact that you're a parasitic monster who is totally vulnerable during daylight hours drives gameplay, because quite aside from more personal concerns or vampiric politics you need to conceal your nature, feed your hunger, defend your resting place, and so on. In Changeling, the fact that you were kidnapped and tortured by a godlike extradimensional being for years drives gameplay, because quite aside from more personal concerns or fairy tale eruptions you need to entrench your new identity, group up with other changelings for protection, deal with your fetch, fend off privateers, and so on.
"Addicted to life" is one of the few sources of drive I could think of which worked for a game so entrenched in death as Geist, while still allowing for a positive outlook on the whole situation. Life is great! It's amazing! It's fun and fast! Life is sexy and delicious and thrilling, and where there are thrills there are bound to be thrill-seekers. Where there's adrenaline, there's bound to be adrenaline junkies. You should absolutely want to indulge in life, and live each day to its fullest extreme. The dead can't, after all. That's why the Geist came to you. You are its drug mule, and the drug is life.
A random note worth considering: the afterlife often shares real estate with unwanted things, entities better left forgotten, creatures locked away by heroes, secrets hidden from the living world, wicked folk tormented for eternity. A prison, at least in part, guarded by monsters and unhappy gods. Tartaros within Hades, the deepest circles of Hell where antediluvian monsters are locked away in Cocytus and Malebolge, the pits and traps of Mictlan, Irkalla shuttered by its seven gates, Yomi blocked by Chigaeshi-no-Okami, the maze of Diyu, the trek across desert and river for the secrets of Tuonela, Niflheim which was home to the world-gnawing dragon, and Duat which housed Apep the sun-eating serpent, Duzakh where all sorrow is sealed, and of course Xibalba, where Skeleton Chads play just a prank bro and force you into friendly games of b-ball.
And have some random anime bullshit, too.
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- Location
- England
There's a character in my Chronicle that does that.
- Location
- Pittsburgh, PA
To me, @EarthScorpion's take is still going a little too far into White Wolf edginess & derp, what with the "ur a druggie" angle, treatment of them not having some big spooky cabal of racial antagonists as a bad thing, and the erasure of the Geist/Sin-Eater divide. I'm perfectly fine with a splat that needs a little TLC and forethought to develop good hooks for* if I get to have a fun time once things get rolling.
Likewise, while the Underworld was somewhat underused in the original version of the game, I'd prefer to give players more reasons to go there rather than just shift the balance of setting prominence, because I see G:tSE as being defined by the idea of "you came back from death, now cope with mundanity (and the supernatural freakery hidden underneath it, and the other returnees who may or may not want to shiv/recruit you)" over "let's try to make a version of Wraith that doesn't make people want to cut themselves".
Making the Kerberoi into fallible, automatically-hostile ghost cops, instead of bizarre manifestations of some alien body of law among the dead, likewise utterly fails to appeal to me; the idea of an inhuman power that obsessively enforces a set of rules within an area and has little, if anything to do with any human understanding of psychology is just more interesting than a spooky-looking Underworld policeman who will either attack on sight or demand you slip him a fiver to overlook your presence.
* And to be honest, the ideas of blending gangland ideology and cult/secret society politics together with krewes works just dandy for letting you set up premade points of conflict when designing a region, and you can totally work in more layers by adding one or two local phenomena involving the resident ghosts, or getting your hands on the H:tV ruleset for designing your own eldritch monstrosities to give your Sin-Eater PCs some decent antagonists/possible uneasy allies.
Yes. Got it in one.
I have no attachment to the Sin Eaters or Geister as they exist. They're basically shit. They have no interesting narrative, no interesting hooks, and they have no mythological archetype. They're a game splat of "we gotta do something with ghosts". They are a synthetic construct, and thus they don't have the "I wanna play a vampire" hook of Requiem, or even the way you can explain Promethean (which is pretty esoteric) of "you're playing Frankenstein's Monster, trying to become human".
I bought the damn game in hardback and I got a half-functional mess with bad powers, no strong archetypes, and a strong absence of driving forces in it. It doesn't piss me off as much as Blood Sorcery does for making me waste my money on it, but Geist is not even a line where "I get what they were trying to do - I just don't like it" like Demon applies. I don't get what they were trying to do. It's a mess that should never have made it to print in its form - and it came as a huge disappointment when it came after Promethean, Changeling and Hunter, back when White Wolf was on a high with a bunch of strong limited line games. Things were different back then. You could expect that the limited line games would be a strong new interesting take on something.
Yes, of course I added more antagonists. Because Geist sucks because of its lack of Stuff To Do. You complain that I'm making Kerberoi into cops - well, what do you think happens when you're breaking the law because you're druggies stealing things for your fix? If you don't break the law, they don't go after you. But if you need to break the law to get your fix... well, that's not their problem. Likewise, the fact that some of your fellow junkies are dealers who want to keep you strung up and don't want you hustling on their turf... is Stuff To Do. And a thing for your party to achieve.
And what you call "edginess and derp", I call "this is a horror setting".
Revlid
blob of bugs
- Location
- England
I think you're overstating the first point. The term "addicts", in this case (to my mind at least) refers to... hm.
Okay, did you see Wolf of Wall Street? Or any similar movie? The players have an amazing time enjoying super cool drugs and having crazy fun, but when their boat is flooding they won't hesitate to scream "GET THE LOODS" at their terrified best friend. You ever watch an illegal street race movie where the main character endangers lives, tears up property, destroys cars, wastes police time, and risks death all because he feels the need for speed, and only illegal drifting will fuel his velocity boner? Being a player character in Geist means you're not living a healthy lifestyle, but frankly, you've already died once - and after the first time a Sin Eater wakes up with aching legs and a headache after another skyline parkour session cracked their skull open, such risks become less of a concern.
Hell, I'd make death even more trivial for Sin-Eaters than it currently is, in most cases.
In that respect, keeping the Geist around is vital to me, because it's a literal devil in the ear of the player character. Drive even faster, growls the blood-red samurai with racing stripes and a motor grille for a mouthguard. It needs to feel the wind, the rush, the speed. That guy's so desperate, giggles the stick-figure of scissors and chocolate skin. He'd be in bed with you in a second. Go on, your friends can wait another hour, or two, or three. Fight, screams the ashen musculature with cinderblocks for hands, all this talking is pointless. Get a little pain up in here, a little impact, a little violence. Aren't you strong? Don't you want to feel the dominance, the power? You can't when you're dead.
Also because, as with the "lack of angst" aspect, the idea of having a Persona/Stand is a unique aspect of the game that most people really liked. Any rewrite would absolutely need to use it (more than the original game did, which is "not at all").
Despite what ES has written above, I think you are taking his conception of the Kerberoi rather too literally. Within the metaphor of "PCs as drug addicts/street racers/bootleggers" they fill the role of cops or feds. That is to say, a domineering presence with far more power than you, restricted to a particular territory, which usually has to be bought off, avoided, outsmarted, or forced into a conflict with the rules they have to follow. That doesn't mean they literally are police officers. Similarly, within the metaphor of "vampires as mafia" breaking the Masquerade fills the role of media attention. That doesn't mean it literally involves shooting up enough dudes that the national papers take notice.
To address Kerberoi for a moment: they're extremely cool, but they do run into a few issues. Most prominently, there is clear confusion about how the Old Laws work.
In some pieces of writing, they're a limited, themed set which make sense if you tilt your head and get the story behind the Kerberos, and which are set up to provide a risk/reward opportunity and facilitate a story. If we imagine a great library of mouldering texts and age-worn slabs containing the secrets of the dead, the Kerberos running the place might have the rules 1) to enter, a new text must be offered, 2) no texts can be removed or damaged, 3) silence. This creates an area where you can trade knowledge to receive new knowledge, but finding what you want can be difficult. It means you can leave dead-drops there, because no texts can be destroyed. It means fighting or discussing your findings is nigh-impossible within the domain, because the Kerberos will punish you (and the manner in which it does so also varies). And so on. It's a ruleset which creates the image of a stern librarian Kerberos and the domain it oversees, which fosters certain ideas and expectations and story-seeds, and which is easy for Storytellers to come up with themselves, or tweak.
Not coincidentally, it is also the only kind of ruleset we ever get examples of.
By contrast, at other points we receive descriptions of totally arbitrary rulesets, or rulesets spanning to thousands of clauses. Which are, obviously, never actually expanded on, and would be impossible to write except as Do Not Go Here marked on a map and a statblock for an insane, vindictive, permanently-hostile Kerberos (which there is certainly room for, but shouldn't be anything like the norm). Can you imagine running a game where a zone is governed by more than a handful of rules, especially if they're non-intuitive? It'd be agonizing, not to mention hardly very engaging. In this respect, the idea of Old Laws running totally alien to human logic fall into the same gap as the idigam being spirits of concepts that never existed: yes, that's a cool idea, but what does it mean? How do I play it, or write it?
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It really perplexes me that they didn't just provide a chart with "this is how many major laws they're allowed per dot of rank they have", so a relatively weak Kerberos has a few solid ones while the eldest, most powerful ones might have ten or more in the deepest, darkest most dangerous parts of the Underworld (where the network of law is part of the danger).
- Location
- Pittsburgh, PA
In other words, we have a fundamental difference of perception.
To me, Geist: the Sin-Eaters is already a perfectly functional game, janky powersets aside. I found it a joy to read, and by the time I was finished I already had a bunch of cool ideas percolating in my head on how you could run a campaign.
I just don't have the sort of burning contempt for this that you apparently do, and thus I don't really see the need to burn it all down and then start over with the intent of making it more "horror compliant".
... That's actually almost worse than I was imagining.
What you're describing is - well, it's pretty much inimical to the kind of stories I'd be interested in seeing told. It feels constrictive and unsustainable long-term, because every character's motivation and goals has to circle back into some metaphor for drugs, unhealthy lifestyles, or some other form of destructive hedonism. You can't have quiet scholars or standoffish self-appointed community guardians or, well, anything outside the aforementioned narrow band of somethingjunkie archetypes.
Further, it doesn't help that all of your examples for PC inspiration are repulsive garbage-people. I don't enjoy the idea of playing the lady from Hellraiser who's so addicted to her boyfriend's ghostcock that she'll bring men back to their apartment for him to consume.
See, the thing is that those are all good ideas for geister. Unfortunately, within the paradigm you're establishing, every single geister is going to be like that. They're all going to be completely self-absorbed hedonists with no concerns beyond their next fix, and that's kind of fucking boring compared to the previous rules where geister could be damn near anything.
I can't have Mala Hera, who manifests as a necrotic, continuously-mutating pastiche of black-and-white movie starlets and subtly goads her hosts toward building a web of social influence and emotional dependency with themselves at the center, because that's too subtle and long-term and your geister have to be fixated on nownownownownow. Dead Juniper can't whisper pleadingly for his Stricken "student" to become a martyr to the cause of life and death, using themselves up to promote the happiness and wellbeing of all creatures, living and dead alike (and wielding guilt and emotional blackmail with unerring precision if he thinks that is what will take for them to understand), because an exploitive bone-and-wood Asclepius doesn't fit within this new paradigm. Vast swathes of potential fodder and geist ideas just evaporate under your version of the game.
I suppose I might have misunderstood ES there, but just to clarify: I oppose any version of Kerberos that have human motivations. At most, I want to see thinly-veiled Third Circle Demons, powerful creatures driven by a handful of motives which utterly define their actions and perceptions. Making Kerberoi too human destroys the point of having them exist at all.
As for the rules, I don't need them to be nonsense, I just need them to be divorced from human prioritization. In the Valley of Flesh, it is known that none may kill without consuming a piece of their victim afterwards, none may enter alone, and no food may be brought into the borders. Sure, that creates a horrible abattoir where cannibalism runs rampant, but the rules make sense within their own context and promote a clear pattern of behavior. It's just not sensible by any human standard of morality or practicality.
- Location
- Denmark
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Look; the important part of all this is that you all get the conjugation of Geist wrong.
- Geist is singular.
- Geister is plural.
- Geists is an anglicism.
Geisters
Wait, I don't think this works.
Lots of people( and "people") in WoD/CoD accept that other people are sometimes food, so they couldn't bring someone else in, so they couldn't go in at all.
- Location
- Quezon City, Philippines
What?
Lara Croft of Tomb Raider is an example of a Sin-Eater. She died in her backstory and brought back to life by some mystic force, and now being an archeologist filled with stupid risky adventures fuels her need for adrenaline. Those treasures she obtains? Fetters and anchors.
I get what @EarthScorpion and @Revlid are trying to say, due to my own personal experience. People react differently when faced with trauma and death. There are those that want a reminder that they're still alive and kicking. Some channel that into being productive, others go into a self-destructive downward spiral. This being the WoD, it leans more to the latter.
It's the reason why "Memento Mori" meant get off your asses, do something, and enjoy life. You're going to die, so make the most of your lfe. The problem is that them Geister don't die so the consequences really don't matter, thus they do more stupid shit in a repeating cycle.
Revlid
blob of bugs
- Location
- England
I don't have a burning contempt for Geist, personally. It's a book (well, a line if we include Book of the Dead) of peaks and valleys, and when it peaks I'd go so far as to say it's one of my favourite gamelines. That said, I don't think its issues are any secret, and since the Chronicles of Darkness have been pretty consistent in shaking up their gamelines in often fairly fundamental ways, I think we can expect Geist to try something new to fill in those valleys and capitalize on those peaks. I'm pretty sure the actual second edition will be quite different than anything I've floated here, however.
EarthScorpion, on the other hand, is driven by burning contempt in the same way that steam engines are driven by boiling water. Don't take it personally.
This is, however, why we stand in three different places. You want to update the game, I want to see it reworked, and ES wants to make something new.
Why not? To address both of those character concepts in two different ways:
1) Unconventional "Addiction". Elizabeth Min was bookish and tubby, with glasses the size of bottlecaps. She didn't exactly evoke the image of a adventuring archaeologist; for one thing, she'd never be able to pull off the hat. Still, exploring the ruins of history (and prehistory, and some older ruins that had the archaeological community kind of worried) gave her a joy like nothing else, so when the chance to join an excavation in Peru hit her inbox, she moved in like a flash. Unfortunately, so did the flood that hit their dig on the very first day, collapsing newly-revealed stone into a swamp of softened earth and cracked catacombs. When they dug her out, days later, she was called a miracle survivor, caught in a million-to-one air pocket. Liz never opened the Get Well cards. By all rights, she should want nothing more than to stay away from crumbling old stone for the rest of her life. But there's a voice like the rustle of old pages, one which shares her joy at picking apart secrets, one which knows the thrill of a fresh find. Sesheta's eager for her to get back to work, and she knows places, deeper digs than any living scholar could undertake, places where secrets are buried like landmines.
2) Geist-Bound Opposition. Mateo Catalejo never started fights, but he always finished them. He was the big kid on the playground who kept order better than any of the overworked TAs, the child who treated being a hall monitor as more than a joke, the student everyone thought was stupid because he only spoke when he had something to say. His yearbook read "most likely to become a police officer", but his classmates had used much less flattering language for their actual votes. It continued at university, but eventually the dorm dealer decided a switchblade was a pretty definitive answer to Mateo's stern words and looming. He woke up in hospital with a surgeon standing over him, staring in disbelief. To his left, mingling cheerfully with the relieved surgical assistants, was Mister Machete. A few days bed rest saw him back on campus, and the dealer taking his place in the hospital. It was just a broken arm, but Mateo can tell Mister Machete enjoyed it. He wanted him to do more, and every day the skinless man gets a little more impatient, prods him a little harder, points out some misdemeanor and claims it calls for a beating. He shrugs him off, but it's getting harder to concentrate in class with el Diablo screaming for blood in his ear. These people don't deserve Mister Machete's attentions... but maybe he can find someone who does?
For example.
I'm using these immediate examples because they're the most visceral and translate most directly to a human understanding of thrill and addiction. Something like Mala Hera's desire for authority and dominion is more abstract, but it still works. I mentioned the Wolf of Wall Street, but ultimately Belfort's real drug isn't any chemical narcotic, it's the thrill of outsmarting the system, proving himself cleverer and more daring than these hidebound old men (and also a bunch of old ladies with pensions, but shhhh let's not think about them). Fundamentally, this is about emphasizing that Geists love life, and they want to live it vicariously through their Sin-Eater, without much care for the cost. They crave something so much they crawled out of the Underworld to get a sip of it through a mortal's lips, a vital experience in both senses of the word. This gives them a firm and unified reason to Make You Do Stuff, offers ground for retheming certain other parts of the game that could do with direction, and helps give Bound themselves a much kick up the ass, especially if paired with the sort of Breaking Point mechanics that second edition has been playing with. Something like a vampire's Mask, Dirge, and Touchstone are interesting examples of where this might go.
Especially since Synergy in first edition was essentially "your Geist really wants you to be a Bleach character", regardless of who or what your Geist supposedly was.
Something like Dead Juniper works less well, but I'm not hugely bothered with narrowing the field a little if it gives the survivors an edge.
That's certainly what I'm talking about, yes. These are the kerberoi we see in the books which most interest me, so I'm obviously biased toward making them the standard.
"Alien" implies a certain Lovecraftian level of unknowability and incomprehensibility which is, past a certain level, difficult to effectively write or game for. Mage handles it well, but does so by knowing its limits, shaping the game experience around such incomprehensible entities, being a game about comprehension and forbidden knowledge, and generally being a rather clever game.
Revlid
blob of bugs
- Location
- England
Nail on the head.
And as I've said, this is just one direction the game could go - and ultimately, I think "direction" is what Geist most needs, and what a second edition would really add. The other updates haven't exactly been shy about pushing their splats into new or refocused conflicts, so I look forward to what this one will bring to the table... when it gets around to it.
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Vindictus
XENO
- Location
- Texas
I... think you mean Carpe Diem?
Memento Mori was generally used as a sort of exhortation to be pious and conservative, so that after you die you would go to Paradise, IIRC. 'Remember that you will die (And don't do anything that will fuck you up in the afterlife)' sort of deal.
- Location
- Quezon City, Philippines
Memento Mori in Roman times was a reminder that despite your success, you're still going to die. It's why during a victory parade there's a guy saying this behind the general. However, it also meant that you have limited time to do stuff since death comes for you, so do whatever it is that needs be done. It's related to "Carpe Diem" in that sense.
The Catholic Church took the phrase for themselves and used it for their own propaganda, so we got "Danse Macabre", "Ars Moriendi", and recently, "Dia de los Muertos".
You'd be filled with burning contempt for Geist if White Wolf had sold you a hardcopy of a literally broken game, where the mechanics punished were an earlier draft that no one had caught, and the game was basically a selection of snap-shots of "really cool" ideas someone had had that they'd forgotten to make into an actual game. I mean, they literally didn't notice that the rules they printed were an old draft.
This isn't an Infernals case where the mechanics are cool enough that people are willing to rewrite the fluff to make them less rapey. This isn't the standard White Wolf scenario where a solid theme and an evocative idea is enough to get people to smooth over the mechanical flaws. It manages to be worse as a game than either.
Geist is basically the RPG equivalent of a bug-filled Steam Greenlight game sold on some nice concept art that turned out to basically be skyboxes with very little to do with the actual game.
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- Pronouns
- They/Them
So, since I was bored at work, I thought of ideas for "Orpheans: The Voyagers."
Note, I'm kinda sorta starting at 'throw things at the wall' stage, and also 'throw things out.' Like, I don't know how defined the Underworld was before Geist, and I'm not designing or imagining this with crossover explicitly in mind.
Orpheans are those who have found a secret tome or hidden way into the Underworld. Some, after they've been turned and been around for a while, begin to strongly suspect that someone or something is putting these tomes to be found, to make more of them. But only a mortal (no major templates if we're accepting crossover stuff) who choose to go into the Underworld has any chance of becoming an Orphean, and plenty go in, get lost (but not in the right way) and die.
But it is something that can be controlled in one sense, and anyone who becomes one makes a choice. A choice without knowing what they're actually choosing, but a choice nonetheless.
Orpheans are the tomb-raiders, the drug-smugglers. They congress between the Underworld and Earth, bringing things to and from it, building little pocket kingdoms when they can, or getting rich or dying in the process. They're archivists too, people who search for hidden lore or even a deeper understanding of some potential Afterlife beyond this, through hints in the Underworld.
And each and every one of them, in some way, binds the two places closer together. For good...and for ill.
But the ideas for the groups is less defined than the X and X-adjacent (or whatever it'd be called) splat.
The first is why they entered the Underworld in the first place.
The Shroud-Followers are those who want to talk to their wife one last time. They're the brothers who attempt to bring their mother back to life no matter the consequences. They're the asshole who is so petty they want to get in one last word on a dead rival by journeying into the underworld. They seek that which is beyond the living, and that is their paradox, the contradiction in their quest: they seek to cling to one person, but in doing so they isolate themselves from the world. Not sure on mechanics, but I had the idea of a flaw based on this (each main one having a flaw) and perhaps a power path based on some sort of isolation-bonds theme. Again, this is something I sketched out on a napkin.
The Lore-Seekers are just what it sounds like. A historian wants to interrogate Abraham Lincoln, a would-be occultist wants to map even the underworld. It is a desire to know, a desire to go into the dark places and pull something out. But when you've found one thing, then do you stop? The contradict in *their* quest is that with each new thing they learn and find, they might end it, and yet it is the seeking that drew them, that made them make the greatest mistake, or most horrible success, of their lives. Maybe some sort of Obsession mechanic? Not sure.
The Devout Voyagers are those who found a book talking about a mystic path in the Underworld, to a truer and better afterlife, or merely a way to reach enlightenment by struggle, or that somewhere in the halls, Jesus is freeing dead souls and if you find him he'll free even a living soul from sin. The contradiction is that in their search, what they find seems to deny, or at least *tarnish* their question. They seek out nirvana, but if they find it, it is cheap and solves nothing. And yet they must have faith that they'll find it.
The Oblivion-Seeker: There is a way not only to die, but to never have existed. Some people have lost all desire to exist, drowned in their sorrow and mistakes, trapped or desperate, and these tomes, or whispered rumors of a way that requires great sacrifice, all hint at a deeper peace, one that can be found in the Underworld. And so they go forth, and there is the contradiction: for in trying to find an escape from living, they have becoming something between living in dead, and yet by the very act of seeking, they are showing a vitality that many do not. They did not give up one kind of hope, even as they surrendered the desire to live: they had to work to get into the Underworld, far harder than buying a gun, far harder than they had to work. They've proven something, in the act of trying to unprove everything.
The Gold-Drinkers. Immortality. That sweetest elixer. Every Orphean at least lives longer (in theory) than a mortal, and so perhaps they are the most 'blessed' and yet they find that the years wear on them, that having seen death, there is suddenly a sweetness as well as a bitterness to it. They sought immortality in death, and instead they've found something else. While some say that this is the most selfish reason to enter the Underworld, the most selfish cause, it is one that resonates, and one that has a power all its own.
******
And then there are the five sub-things. These represent what *happened* to the proto-Orphean. And they control some sort of power thing as well, again. Not mechanics, just an idea.
The Judged are those who, in traveling through the Underworld, are found to have broken a law by the Kerberos. They are sentenced to various punishments and some who do never become Orpheans, or are killed. But some find a way to escape, and in doing so they take a little of that understanding of the laws with them. And they are spit out of the underworld, exhausted and yet unbroken, in a police station or in a jail, or any other place of Law.
The Torn are those who are attacked and mauled by ghosts. They stumble, bleeding, away from an encounter, and yet survive long enough to journey onward, making a trail with their blood, and in their seeming last moments, they see what death is. They see the violence inherent not only in the living but in the dead. They pass at last beyond mere life, and as they expire, something saves them, and they awaken, often bruised and battered, with scars that represent their wounds.
The Lost find themselves, well, lost in the underworld. But they do not turn back or give up. Instead they wander (and here, again, might contradict some of the Underworld rules as written, not sure), growing more hungry and desperate, until they start to hallucinate. They see the great unmapped and bizarre nature of the place, and they try to map it. Even as they die, even as they waste away, those who succeed in learning something, in Discovering something, find that they have new life, and a new understanding of the twists and turns of the dead landscape. They wake up in a place they have never been before, one that takes at least some difficulty or navigation to go from where they wake up to back home.
The Something (not sure) meet the terrible Cthonians. Ugly, nasty, and not sane in the manner of actual living beings, they are horrible, squalid things, and many simply kill the living. But others torment them, hint at things known and unknown, or mock or dismiss the claims and the reasons he's arrived. They don't even care, in a way, for as one knows the Cthonians (is that an SP?) don't even have their main mind consciously interact with others. But it affects them. It taints them. It twists them, but not so much that they are destroyed, and they wake up in a place of something squalid. A pit filled with refuse. The site of a murder a year ago, with bloodstains still fresh.
The Successful. They succeed, but find that what they truly wanted was not what they got. They seek immortality, and they find a scrap of a hint that might, with years of work and effort, possibly-maybe grant it, they seek to know the last words of a famous man, and hear that they are nothing more than a request for more water. They gain a boon, they never go away entirely empty-handed, but what they get is often far less than they sought, and the 'lives' they bring back are stolen, cursed, and often doomed, if they are even real, rather than merely some crazed ghost pretending to be their beloved wife. They wake up in a grave, three feet under, and must dig their way out, clawing desperately, their success already tainted, until at last they reach the surface.
******
...so, yeah, this is a really rough idea.
Note, I'm kinda sorta starting at 'throw things at the wall' stage, and also 'throw things out.' Like, I don't know how defined the Underworld was before Geist, and I'm not designing or imagining this with crossover explicitly in mind.
Orpheans are those who have found a secret tome or hidden way into the Underworld. Some, after they've been turned and been around for a while, begin to strongly suspect that someone or something is putting these tomes to be found, to make more of them. But only a mortal (no major templates if we're accepting crossover stuff) who choose to go into the Underworld has any chance of becoming an Orphean, and plenty go in, get lost (but not in the right way) and die.
But it is something that can be controlled in one sense, and anyone who becomes one makes a choice. A choice without knowing what they're actually choosing, but a choice nonetheless.
Orpheans are the tomb-raiders, the drug-smugglers. They congress between the Underworld and Earth, bringing things to and from it, building little pocket kingdoms when they can, or getting rich or dying in the process. They're archivists too, people who search for hidden lore or even a deeper understanding of some potential Afterlife beyond this, through hints in the Underworld.
And each and every one of them, in some way, binds the two places closer together. For good...and for ill.
But the ideas for the groups is less defined than the X and X-adjacent (or whatever it'd be called) splat.
The first is why they entered the Underworld in the first place.
The Shroud-Followers are those who want to talk to their wife one last time. They're the brothers who attempt to bring their mother back to life no matter the consequences. They're the asshole who is so petty they want to get in one last word on a dead rival by journeying into the underworld. They seek that which is beyond the living, and that is their paradox, the contradiction in their quest: they seek to cling to one person, but in doing so they isolate themselves from the world. Not sure on mechanics, but I had the idea of a flaw based on this (each main one having a flaw) and perhaps a power path based on some sort of isolation-bonds theme. Again, this is something I sketched out on a napkin.
The Lore-Seekers are just what it sounds like. A historian wants to interrogate Abraham Lincoln, a would-be occultist wants to map even the underworld. It is a desire to know, a desire to go into the dark places and pull something out. But when you've found one thing, then do you stop? The contradict in *their* quest is that with each new thing they learn and find, they might end it, and yet it is the seeking that drew them, that made them make the greatest mistake, or most horrible success, of their lives. Maybe some sort of Obsession mechanic? Not sure.
The Devout Voyagers are those who found a book talking about a mystic path in the Underworld, to a truer and better afterlife, or merely a way to reach enlightenment by struggle, or that somewhere in the halls, Jesus is freeing dead souls and if you find him he'll free even a living soul from sin. The contradiction is that in their search, what they find seems to deny, or at least *tarnish* their question. They seek out nirvana, but if they find it, it is cheap and solves nothing. And yet they must have faith that they'll find it.
The Oblivion-Seeker: There is a way not only to die, but to never have existed. Some people have lost all desire to exist, drowned in their sorrow and mistakes, trapped or desperate, and these tomes, or whispered rumors of a way that requires great sacrifice, all hint at a deeper peace, one that can be found in the Underworld. And so they go forth, and there is the contradiction: for in trying to find an escape from living, they have becoming something between living in dead, and yet by the very act of seeking, they are showing a vitality that many do not. They did not give up one kind of hope, even as they surrendered the desire to live: they had to work to get into the Underworld, far harder than buying a gun, far harder than they had to work. They've proven something, in the act of trying to unprove everything.
The Gold-Drinkers. Immortality. That sweetest elixer. Every Orphean at least lives longer (in theory) than a mortal, and so perhaps they are the most 'blessed' and yet they find that the years wear on them, that having seen death, there is suddenly a sweetness as well as a bitterness to it. They sought immortality in death, and instead they've found something else. While some say that this is the most selfish reason to enter the Underworld, the most selfish cause, it is one that resonates, and one that has a power all its own.
******
And then there are the five sub-things. These represent what *happened* to the proto-Orphean. And they control some sort of power thing as well, again. Not mechanics, just an idea.
The Judged are those who, in traveling through the Underworld, are found to have broken a law by the Kerberos. They are sentenced to various punishments and some who do never become Orpheans, or are killed. But some find a way to escape, and in doing so they take a little of that understanding of the laws with them. And they are spit out of the underworld, exhausted and yet unbroken, in a police station or in a jail, or any other place of Law.
The Torn are those who are attacked and mauled by ghosts. They stumble, bleeding, away from an encounter, and yet survive long enough to journey onward, making a trail with their blood, and in their seeming last moments, they see what death is. They see the violence inherent not only in the living but in the dead. They pass at last beyond mere life, and as they expire, something saves them, and they awaken, often bruised and battered, with scars that represent their wounds.
The Lost find themselves, well, lost in the underworld. But they do not turn back or give up. Instead they wander (and here, again, might contradict some of the Underworld rules as written, not sure), growing more hungry and desperate, until they start to hallucinate. They see the great unmapped and bizarre nature of the place, and they try to map it. Even as they die, even as they waste away, those who succeed in learning something, in Discovering something, find that they have new life, and a new understanding of the twists and turns of the dead landscape. They wake up in a place they have never been before, one that takes at least some difficulty or navigation to go from where they wake up to back home.
The Something (not sure) meet the terrible Cthonians. Ugly, nasty, and not sane in the manner of actual living beings, they are horrible, squalid things, and many simply kill the living. But others torment them, hint at things known and unknown, or mock or dismiss the claims and the reasons he's arrived. They don't even care, in a way, for as one knows the Cthonians (is that an SP?) don't even have their main mind consciously interact with others. But it affects them. It taints them. It twists them, but not so much that they are destroyed, and they wake up in a place of something squalid. A pit filled with refuse. The site of a murder a year ago, with bloodstains still fresh.
The Successful. They succeed, but find that what they truly wanted was not what they got. They seek immortality, and they find a scrap of a hint that might, with years of work and effort, possibly-maybe grant it, they seek to know the last words of a famous man, and hear that they are nothing more than a request for more water. They gain a boon, they never go away entirely empty-handed, but what they get is often far less than they sought, and the 'lives' they bring back are stolen, cursed, and often doomed, if they are even real, rather than merely some crazed ghost pretending to be their beloved wife. They wake up in a grave, three feet under, and must dig their way out, clawing desperately, their success already tainted, until at last they reach the surface.
******
...so, yeah, this is a really rough idea.
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- Location
- Pittsburgh, PA
The first one is pretty well in line with what I was thinking, and the second one is good too, just not the "weird hobo who tracks down the PCs when they enter his part of town and tells them they'd better treat his people with respect, this is his place and troublemakers aren't welcome" sort of thing I was imagining.
See, I think I'm starting to get your idea, but it might work better to go with "obsession" over "addiction". Dead Juniper is fixated on the idea that everyone is suffering and they need a savior who will come and heal all that ails them, so he finds dying men & women who he thinks have some grasp of that and raises them up to try and be that savior - which inevitably goes wrong, because he's a lost soul too long dead to realize that his hosts need support and help as much as everyone else, so he just pushes and pushes and pushes until they either go insane or start trying to cut some sort of deal where he'll move on to a new host in exchange for some sufficiently impressive act of humanitarianism.
Mala Hera needs to feel like she's at the center of an adoring circle of sycophants and willing pawns, so she tries to push her Sin-Eaters toward that with subtle encouragements and vague come-ons and other Machiavelli rhetoric clothed in femme fatale jargon (because she's a bit cracked even for a geist, only remembering her mortal self through the countless movies she watched back in her adolescence, how much she wanted to be like the glamorous women of Hollywood & the silver screen, and so she mimics these things because it's all she has left in the way of a sense of self-identity).
Geister are ghosts writ large, and so like ghosts they are driven by obsession and compulsive needs.
(Still puzzled by the Bleach reference tho)
Ohhh. I tend to use "alien" as a term for "outside the common human experience" - like, most Werewolves, Changelings, and even Hunters are going to end up pretty 'alien' by my standards just because their existence pushes them inexorably away from standard societal mores and mental associations. Sorry for any misunderstanding.
I don't know man, obsession is already Mage's main theme(and addiction too for that matter).
Eh, Mage is more Hubris than anything and besides, Obsession is something Ghosts have had since long before this.
Also, Addiction is more of a general theme. Vampires sure as hell have it.
- Location
- Quezon City, Philippines
Bleach as a Sin-Eater game. You have the Shinigami, who are your Sin-Eaters. The zanpakutou is both the Geist and the fetter. Shikai and Bankai is having the Geist appearing and becoming corporeal. The Kidou are the Geist equivalent of Keys and Manifestation. The Shinigami prowl the lands of Soul Society, your Underworld equivalent, hunting down Hollows, your Ghosts.
Synergy? How in tune you are with your zanpakutou/Geist. Higher levels of Synergy results in unlocking Shikai and Bankai with Low Synergy turns you to Kenpachi Zaraki. Plasm? Reiryoku.
And oh... the Quincy? Probably mortals with merits and training that turns them into Ghostbusters.
Or I dunno... We could do JoJo's Bizarre Adventure instead. DIO BRANDO dies, gets ZA WARUDO as a Geist, and he's not actually a vampire, but a Sin-Eater necromancer that is compelled to drink blood. DIO BRANDO survived as a head? He's immortal. Hijacking a corpse? More Sin-Eater manifestations. And the Stone Mask? Actually a key to a locked Avernian Gate/Prison, containing the Pillar Men, who are powerful things from the Underworld.
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