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.
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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.