Quuuuuestion that I'm sure has come up before but I can't for the life of me find it. Directed mostly towards
@EarthScorpion and
@Omicron since they do ze undeadz:
What's the draw of summoning ghosts over demons? What can necromancers do that sorcerers can't? No surrender oaths and ease of bulk summoning would be one I guess. And you can interrogate ghosts to find out neato shit. But I guess my question is how to make them feel /distinct/ I that makes sense?
Demons are tools. Gods are bureaucrats. Elementals are Pokemon (I really did like
@Revlid's analogy for them). Ghosts are horror stories. But like...
Say I have a home that needs guarding. Why summon a ghost over the other options is what in getting at I guess. How do you make a Necromancer not feel like Pepsi to the Sorcerers coke. "We don't have Blood Apes but are skeletons okay?" Y'know?
Hm. Operating on the assumption that we're throwing out canon in favour of a best case scenario, let's check our options.
Gods, raksha, demons, elementals, and ghosts are the five main varieties of spirit that a player character can put to work, in the game. Gods and raksha can't be summoned, though the former is accessible and bribable and the latter can be bound by oaths, so they're more like allies than servants. With that in mind, we'll just consider the latter three as "servitor spirits". These are inhuman entities of sub-Exalt but above-mortal power, who can be brought forth or contacted by mortal sorcery, and conscripted directly into service with Exalted sorcery.
Our options for distinguishing these types of servitor spirits are:
- Setting role. Summoning a ghost or elemental is a distinct roleplaying experience from summoning a demon.
- Aesthetic role. Summoning an elemental or demon has a distinct "look" from summoning a ghost.
- Mechanical role. Summoning a demon or ghost offers different practical benefits and downsides from summoning an elemental.
In the current setup, 1) has potential but is largely underdeveloped. Ghosts manage it, though their poorly-explored mentality and relationship with the living means much of it is game-driven, but elementals are mostly just "summon a less interesting demon for 'good' people", because conscripting a member of a deliberately-engineered slave race is apparently less objectionable than enslaving prisoners of war. 2) is in much the same state, since demons can and do look like more-or-less anything, while ghosts largely look like grey people and elementals have little in the way of a uniting aesthetic beyond "made out of that element, but not like the gods, raksha, and demons who are also made out of that element". It doesn't help that demons had much stronger early development than either of the other two, which led to more later material from both writers and fans.
So assuming those two are developed in interesting ways, 3) is the real stickler. At that point, you need to decide whether you want demons, elementals, and ghosts to be "reskinned" versions of what is essentially the same utility, or be substantially different. The former is simple - just lay out the upper limits of "a servitor spirit", standardize it across all three types, and then focus on making 1) and 2) as cool as possible. An Abyssal who wants to guard somewhere summons a guardian ghost, a Solar summons a guardian demon, and beyond the specifics there's basically nothing in it. You can then use this as a balancing point for pseudo-servitor spirits, like automata.
In the latter case, you need to set out mechanical territory for each of those three types. These territories must be clearly distinct, suited to the spirit's aesthetics and role in the setting, and appropriate to the capabilities of those who can summon and bind them. If you want X, summon a ghost because they're Y. If you want A, summon a demon because they're B. These can be black-and-white limits on two spirits which the third does not possess (e.g. only ghosts can function in the Underworld), or soft tendencies (e.g. elementals have much more efficient magic for affecting the landscape of Creation), but they have to be policed harshly or the trichotomy falls apart.
Given that the former requires no further thought beyond "make ghosts and elementals cool" (admittedly already a tall task), I'll throw some ideas at the latter.
One potential difference is ease of summoning. Elementals live in Creation, ghosts live in its basement, and demons live in the county jail. Elementals are a (largely) natural part of creation, ghosts are an unexpected side-effect, demons are specifically banned. So you could always make demons the most powerful and least convenient servitor spirit. The downside being that this will have little effect on downtime summoning, and "ease of access" is already split up by the Circles needed to summon a spirit. Similarly, ease of binding is flawed because 1CDs are
meant to be dirt-simple to bind, lest they fall into old, tired fantasy tropes of demon-summoning being for people with more confidence than sense.
So what about the stuff they can actually
do, rather than how sorcerers access them? Well, to toss some ideas out...
Alright, first off I'd ditch Summon Elemental entirely. Elementals are the spiritual fauna of Creation, the sort of creatures that run around in Miyazaki works as background noise. They're basically Pokemon, or the kind of crazy clearly-magical animals that populate mythology, like the firebird or a kelpie. Not sapient like raksha, or in positions of authority like gods, just... weird animals with elemental "magic". They're naturally material, and most of them probably don't
have a dematerialize Charm. There's not really any call for them to be summoned and bound as servants.
So just make them background material underlying Sorcery, as a mechanism. You cast many spells by calling upon elementals. Spells like Calling the Wind's Kiss, or Dance of the Smoke Cobras, Raising the Earth's Bones, or Magma Kraken should all work
through elementals. Flight of the Brilliant Raptor already explicitly conjures a temporary "savage fire elemental" to perform a suicide run at an enemy. Benediction of Archgenesis should effectively be an extended roll to increase the value of an area of land, performed by a workforce of spontaneous Wood Elementals. You could have an equivalent for repopulating the land with precious minerals, using Earth Elementals.
The thaumaturgical equivalent, for mortal occultists, would be knowledge of how to attract Wood Elementals to your crops, spreading fish guts around so that the bulbasaurs who come to eat them improve the harvest with their pollen. Or stopping forest fires by offering up a portion of the forest surrounding the fire as a burnt sacrifice to the rampaging charmanders, so they become full and sleepy. Or how to account for squirtles flooding the dam you set up to divert their river.
So that's elementals dealt with by way of elimination, and we just need to split up ghosts and demons... now, there are a number of options here. You could give ghosts more subtle and indirect magic, with better access to ways influencing events while immaterial – demons should have little need of that, since they live in Malfeas, where everything's (im)material anyway, and it suits the ghostly narrative.
You could declare that ghosts are
servants, while demons are
tools. That is to say, ghosts started out as people, and are defined by
what they care about, while demons started out as tools, and are defined by
their intended role. This makes demons very good for task-binding, because you're after a specialized tool anyway – but it makes them pretty bad at branching out, or approaching the world except through their specialty. Ghosts, meanwhile, are much better at extended servitude, because they can totally understand how to deal with things outside of their passions, they just don't care. They're more flexible.
Blood apes are great bruisers, but if you order one to do something that doesn't involve bruising, it'll either be really bad at it or end up bruising someone anyway. But while you can't specifically summon up a ghost designed for bruising, you can sure as hell summon the ghost of a champion boxer – and while he might not care about anything but reclaiming his title from the man who murdered him, that doesn't stop you binding him as a bodyguard or door guardian.
Or you could exploit the fact that ghosts are tied more closely to Creation than demons. If you want to solve a murder, you can call up a waddling bat-demon who drinks memories from blood with its drinking-spear tongue, and have it taste the last thoughts of the victim... or you can conjure up her ghost and ask. If you want to learn sorcerous secrets, you can conjure a robed mantis-demon who once served as a librarian to a mortal sorcerer who was buried with his scrolls... or you could summon the sorcerer's ghost and bind him to tutor you. If you want to undermine the rule of a godblooded princeling, you can bind a flesh-weaving courtesan demon to seduce him while you spread whispers of the royal family's pollution... or you could call up the ghost of his mortal father and have him denounce his decadent son through bloody lips.
Every ghost has a direct and passionate relationship with Creation (at least until you start getting into the really old, really mad ones, who are more 2CD territory), which makes them very suited to certain roles. Conjure Ghost should be an information-gathering tool far beyond Demon of the First Circle, because while demons are good at what they do they usually have fuck-all in the way of context for it. This could also play into an alternative take on the passion vs role split – if you want a demon to guard your treasure, you need to pick out a demon designed for guarding treasure. If you want a ghost to guard your treasure, you need to summon a ghost who
cares about guarding treasure, whether that's a mad old miser or a claw-handed and boneless vault guard.
On the other hand, with elementals out of the picture you could just say "ghosts for Necromancy, demons for Sorcery" and have the difference be that if a sorcerer wants a bruiser or courtesan or builder, they summon a blood ape or neomah or hopping puppeteer, and if a necromancer wants a bruiser, they summon the ghost of a bruiser or courtesan or builder. That's simple enough, and might even work out better than the alternative.
