The Riddle of Death; The development of my rules on Spirits

[sirogit]

Here's what I have currently developed as rules for ghosts and other unattached spirits. I'd like to thank everyone in the previous thread for shaping my ideas to a degree. My main ideals for the rules were:

1. A small amount of rules being interepreted to a wide amount of uses.

2. Death means something, being a ghost is not a substituite for being revived.

http://www.geocities.com/thekrown/ROD.html

[Ingenious]

Okay having the book just arrive and pouring my remainder of the night into sorcery I realized that magic is some powerful shit. Not only would your spirit be vulnerable after death and such, but even the evolved form of it(i.e. a ghost).. would be vulnerable. Imprisonment/banishment spells would most likely obliterate the ghost... but then again.. what would cause a sorcerer to actively use magic for such a thing? MONEY!!! Maybe have that tied into the storyline of anyone with the 'haunted' flaw, aside from just the expendature of SA points to buy it off.
A variation of what you have for the reincarnation part seems good, and you could even twist that to explain how Fey are reborn or something.
The magic that a ghost can do is pretty self explanatory though, just read chapter 6...stuff like illusions, telekenesis(think of the library scene from Ghostbusters).
Other than these minor details I think your suggestions are good.
Others might tweak them a bit, and that's fine.. but at least report your tweakage on here.

-Ingenious

[sirogit]

Well, I wouldn't say "Obliterated", as I'm following the magical guidelines that spirits/ghosts cannot be destroyed. They're still there, which is more one can say about the physical targets of magic.

I think it'd be quite in-genre for the only thing that ghosts have to fear are Sorcerers. I'm not quite sure where I heard that before but the concept seems very familiar.

The biggest consideration to me is the whole two rolls after death thing. Maybe those could be reduced. Maybe make the pull to dissapear thing stated as more optionial, as it seems like possibly an odd point to stress that I just happened to find thematiclly powerfull.

Soon I'll be adding a on how with these rules you get The Walking dead, Liches, Revenants, Multiple Personalities...  anything else people would paticularly like to see?

[Balbinus]

Does this mean then that the Stahnish atheism is, as a matter of canon, factually incorrect?

[Lance D. Allen]

If you play in Weyrth as written, yes.

Whether or not there are gods is still in doubt, but as their beliefs encompass a stubborn disbelief in anything supernatural, to include sorcerers and magical creatures (though I doubt many Stahlners disbelieve in Gol, or in the northern reaches, Hef). As these things do exist in the setting as written, their particular brand of Atheism is incorrect.

[Clinton R. Nixon]

Speaking of Stahl, atheism, and Hef: I just ran a one-on-one game of TROS where a Hef caused a serious problem for a local baron trying his hardest to enforce atheism. He had to go to his enemy, a local ex-soldier believer, to get rid of it before anyone else found out.

Stahlnish atheism is, in my opinion, pretty funny stuff.

[sirogit]

I really love Stahl Athiesm in the game. They're like atheist-Ned Flanders. "Can't let this little doozy get out."

But er, back on topic... Canon wouldn't be the word here when addressing ROD, as it's completely unauthorized, no more canon than the supplement for playing Exalted like a shoujo(Girl's anime) with fighting hamburgers. Though that should be canon. But I digress.

I'd like to expand this system more but I'm not quite sure what folks would find useful. I was thinking of possible scenarios, like one specifially for Ghost PCs that involves contemplation of the different possibilities of it's current perdicament, but wasn't really digging the theme.  

If anyone found this useful, what would they like to see expanded?

[Ingenious]

Expand it to include more undead stuff, and the factors and SA's that fuel them. This of course is if they are not being animated or controlled by a sorcerer, which would be simple really.. just use a bit of the conquer vagary and possibly a contested roll of willpower against the sorcerer's or something. And make that willpower contest a bit hard for the undead creature to handle, as being undead usually precludes the existance of a brain. But that's where the SA's could come into play, all of them might be firing for example.. and one might use those IN the contested willpower roll.
I am not sure what is covered in OBAM in terms of undead, though I know that the walking dead is, either in OBAM or the core-book. Possibly Lich's are as well. But vampires? Nightwalkers vs daywalkers? The whole 'Blade' issue...
I'd like to eventually see some sort of undead that even a sorcerer might think twice about taking on.
Zombies? Are they in either book? What methods does one have to use in order to kill all of these things? Anything specialized.. such as stakes, garlic, decapitation, etc?

You know, just the garden variety undead stuff... doesn't have to be too detailed.

-Ingenious

[sirogit]

Not sure if you read the update I made, where I offered pretty barebones exampes of how certain things, like liches, zombies, etc, would originate out of my system, or if you just found it too undetailed.

I need to read OBAM more in-depth sometime, I glanced over it at a friends once, I think Lich had an entry under the "Possibly unfitting" section and I know shambling undead were in OBAM somewhere.

But anywho, Vampires. I like vampires alot. If I were to present them in this lil' system, I'd like to boil down the essential ingredients of them:

* - Immortal. (In the Fey-way. This is debatable, but we could stick with it for the point of convention.)
* - Scary. (Sexy-scary, scary-mysterious, scary-deformed, I think scary's pretty vital.)
* - Damned. (Important thematic consideration, from my view.)

I personally am in big favor of vampirism being of demonic origin. perhaps vampirism is in effect a demon's soul being intertwined with one's own, the blood drinking and debauchery being a nessecary part in making one's body a healthy unholy temple. I like how this fits them into demonic entourage; agents and courtiers and stuff. Course, this is assuming a christian demon, if the demon was wholeheartedly different, even good, it would be a very different creature.

Is that concept "open" enough you think? I'd like to address things like specific creatures just enough so that people could run with them, even if I have certain directions I like to push them into.