Built using supplementary material from Werewolf and Mage because cross-applicability is a thing that exists and Geist is short on bookcount.
Imperial Mysteries pegs the deathlords at Ranks 7 and 8. For simplicity's sake and because they occupy a similar position in their cosmology to the Celestines of Werewolf (whose Rank, Lore of the Forsaken notes, can't really be reached without a fundamental rearrangement of the cosmos), we'll assume in this theory that the Horsemen exist and constitute the majority if not the entirety of the greater (Rank 8) deathlords, and thus any rumors of geister becoming deathlords refer to the lesser (Rank 7) deathlords.
Under GMC's systems, geister are Rank 3+ ghosts with unusual Influences (as are Kerberoi). There exists a gap of up to four Ranks between the weakest geister and the status of lesser deathlord; assuming there are no Rank 7 geister that have not become deathlords, this means there are up to three Ranks that can be gained without reaching that state, one of which is still represented in ground-level games as statless. Rank 6 spirits, says Imperial Mysteries, are spirits of "planet-wide phenomena […] — the spirits of nations and oceans, thunder and drought" — essentially, spirits of things that are recognizable on a global level.
"On a global level" certainly rings a bell — the requirements for a krewe to reach Tier Three include (besides membership enough to have developed sub-sub-cliques) a presence on at least two continents; the exception clause for extreme devotion still leans on the existence of a mentor or codex from a previously-extant krewe from that level.
Imperial Mysteries (and Summoners before it) notes that Rank 6 is the point at which spirits start using Royal Avatars — Rank 5 spirit-bodies that evoke the spirit in some aspect. One of the benefits of a Tier Three krewe is the ability of lay-members of the krewe to take on the Aspect of a krewe founder's geist just as that founder could as far back as when the krewe was composed solely of the founders.
But we run into a problem; assuming that the Bargain works like Claiming, how can a geist reach a Rank of 6 and still be able to incarnate like a geist of conventionally-encountered Rank?
By cheating, of course.
Step on over to Night Horrors: Wolfsbane, where we can find the spirit of Lonesome Forest, Enzuk Umada, a strange case among all the other strange cases endemic to a Night Horrors book. Enzuk Umada is mechanically notable for contributing Mass Claim to the body of lore — the townsfolk look physically normal until they suddenly don't for a while — and for establishing this funky precedent: He's Rank 4, but if he hadn't been Claiming so many people, the fact that he's eaten literally every spirit in Lonesome Forest for over a hundred years would, the book says, qualify him for Rank 6. Odder still, even spread so thin, he still had to leave a part of himself in the Shadow — and it's here that I must note both of the drawbacks of high Psyche (tie your increased power to physical objects resonant with death and spend more and more time in the Underworld) as well as the Psyche requirements for Tier Three Founding Benefits.
That's all well and good, but what of the cases where a geist passes on to a successor, who will almost assuredly not have the Psyche to support that kind of burgeoning supernatural weight? Where is the excess going while the successor builds back up to their predecessor's height?
The channel.
By forming a collection of dozens of people Bound to the Underworld, power that couldn't be held by the new founder is instead distributed across the krewe's shared mythology or, should the membership have dwindled, the Underworld itself. (The question of whether a founder's geist may not have simply become a Royal Avatar of their Aspect is left as an exercise for the reader.) Ostensibly, once the founder expires and the geist has tired of Bargaining, they rejoin that mass of power they've accumulated in the Great Below, having managed to build/raise/assemble a god of which they are a mask.
/meander
Feedback?
Imperial Mysteries pegs the deathlords at Ranks 7 and 8. For simplicity's sake and because they occupy a similar position in their cosmology to the Celestines of Werewolf (whose Rank, Lore of the Forsaken notes, can't really be reached without a fundamental rearrangement of the cosmos), we'll assume in this theory that the Horsemen exist and constitute the majority if not the entirety of the greater (Rank 8) deathlords, and thus any rumors of geister becoming deathlords refer to the lesser (Rank 7) deathlords.
Under GMC's systems, geister are Rank 3+ ghosts with unusual Influences (as are Kerberoi). There exists a gap of up to four Ranks between the weakest geister and the status of lesser deathlord; assuming there are no Rank 7 geister that have not become deathlords, this means there are up to three Ranks that can be gained without reaching that state, one of which is still represented in ground-level games as statless. Rank 6 spirits, says Imperial Mysteries, are spirits of "planet-wide phenomena […] — the spirits of nations and oceans, thunder and drought" — essentially, spirits of things that are recognizable on a global level.
"On a global level" certainly rings a bell — the requirements for a krewe to reach Tier Three include (besides membership enough to have developed sub-sub-cliques) a presence on at least two continents; the exception clause for extreme devotion still leans on the existence of a mentor or codex from a previously-extant krewe from that level.
Imperial Mysteries (and Summoners before it) notes that Rank 6 is the point at which spirits start using Royal Avatars — Rank 5 spirit-bodies that evoke the spirit in some aspect. One of the benefits of a Tier Three krewe is the ability of lay-members of the krewe to take on the Aspect of a krewe founder's geist just as that founder could as far back as when the krewe was composed solely of the founders.
But we run into a problem; assuming that the Bargain works like Claiming, how can a geist reach a Rank of 6 and still be able to incarnate like a geist of conventionally-encountered Rank?
By cheating, of course.
Step on over to Night Horrors: Wolfsbane, where we can find the spirit of Lonesome Forest, Enzuk Umada, a strange case among all the other strange cases endemic to a Night Horrors book. Enzuk Umada is mechanically notable for contributing Mass Claim to the body of lore — the townsfolk look physically normal until they suddenly don't for a while — and for establishing this funky precedent: He's Rank 4, but if he hadn't been Claiming so many people, the fact that he's eaten literally every spirit in Lonesome Forest for over a hundred years would, the book says, qualify him for Rank 6. Odder still, even spread so thin, he still had to leave a part of himself in the Shadow — and it's here that I must note both of the drawbacks of high Psyche (tie your increased power to physical objects resonant with death and spend more and more time in the Underworld) as well as the Psyche requirements for Tier Three Founding Benefits.
That's all well and good, but what of the cases where a geist passes on to a successor, who will almost assuredly not have the Psyche to support that kind of burgeoning supernatural weight? Where is the excess going while the successor builds back up to their predecessor's height?
The channel.
By forming a collection of dozens of people Bound to the Underworld, power that couldn't be held by the new founder is instead distributed across the krewe's shared mythology or, should the membership have dwindled, the Underworld itself. (The question of whether a founder's geist may not have simply become a Royal Avatar of their Aspect is left as an exercise for the reader.) Ostensibly, once the founder expires and the geist has tired of Bargaining, they rejoin that mass of power they've accumulated in the Great Below, having managed to build/raise/assemble a god of which they are a mask.
/meander
Feedback?
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