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What We Know So Far: Geist the Sin-Eater 2nd Edition

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  • What We Know So Far: Geist the Sin-Eater 2nd Edition

    Here's a part cut & paste, part paraphrased sum up of what's been revealed so far about Geist the Sin-Eater 2nd Edition. Please add & correct! :

    Premise:
    "It's still fundamentally the same game about people who have died and come back thanks to the intervention of a spooky ghost-thing... but aside from that it's probably going to see the most mechanical differences compared to its first edition of any CofD game so far. Celebration of existence is still a key part of the game, but it’s also a horror game, just less internal than in Vampire. It is HOPEFUL. Every ghost story is, at its core, a tragedy--someone died, and they left something terribly important unfinished. Injustices were done and never righted. Lovers torn from one another, grand dreams thrown into the dark below to be forgotten. Geist is a game about looking at that state of affairs and saying "No." And then being able to back that up with action."

    Inspirational media: "Mama and ParaNorman. Make of that what you will."

    Bound Terminology
    "Bound" = general term for "people who accepted the Bargain and returned from death mystically bonded to a geist." These Bound are truly alive and have heartbeats, need to eat and other such bodily functions of the living. As such, their blood will sustain a Vampire. They also have something (roiling mass of Plasm and rage) in the place souls usually are, so they aren't soulless exactly (no more an empty vessel than vampires). the Geist's Bargain with the Bound does not give it any hold on the soul of the Bound, which departs at or shortly after death, thought the Bound's own ghost (which made the Bargain) remains ensuring the continuance of the original person's personality, being and self, bound into its recently dead body and to the Geist. While the body lives, the Bound is still considered one of the Dead by the Underworld, supernatural senses, and Reapers. A Bound may get have children, but those children are not affected by the Geist inhabiting their parent or parents.
    Also, like all major supernatural templates, being a Bound prevents you from awakening or being embraced. Short of archmage levels of power the major templates may not be altered nor removed.
    "Sin-Eater" = specific term for those Bound who fall into the player character-suitable splats, generally trying to help ghosts pass on and not solely using their powers for personal gain. (Much like “Uratha” means all werewolves and "Forsaken" means "this specific group the game is built around playing."). UPDATE: "the origin of the term "Sin-Eater:" a Bound who tries to heal their own geist. It has since expanded in scope to refer to any Bound who actively stands against the Underworld and those who exploit the dead in general, but that's where it started."

    Powers: 2nd edition powers are not called Manifestations (that’s the 2nd Ed. Ephemeral entities abilities now, and Sin-Eaters don't have them), they are called Haunts. Keys are still a part of powers, but work differently than before (the old way made too many athematic powers and the grid system made adding new powers too difficult in 1st Edition).
    The first dot of a Haunt will provide a basic effect and higher level powers allow higher effects for extra Plasm expenditure.
    Pyre-Flame Key & Haunts of Caul & Rage are specifically mentioned in reference to Ghost Rider from Agents of Shield this season
    A recent Dev Blog post has said that in addition to the Haunts of 1E (and if you are unfamiliar they include Boneyard, Curse, Caul, Marionette, Oracle, Rage, Shroud from the corebook) there will be three new Haunts: Dirge, Memoria, and Tomb .
    The thresholds of 1E are still represented in 2E by the Keys. How exactly those will interact with the Haunts in 2E remains to be seen.

    2/15/18: FULL LIST of Haunts from today's Dev Blog:
    - The Boneyard: "haunted house" power. Suffuse an area with Plasm to gain perfect awareness of the area and minor poltergeist-like effects. Higher levels: project senses anywhere in the area, trap people in the area, or warp the environment at whim.
    - The Caul: Suffuse your body with Plasm to become protean; malleable. Take on a nightmarish form, spawn homunculi, or consume recently dead to take their shape.
    - The Curse: Hex victim with bad luck. Higher levels: turn technology against victim, wither limbs, make victim forgotten and invisible.
    - The Dirge: Sing out haunting, wordless melody to mesmerize or pluck the heartstrings of the living or the dead, to heal or inflict madness, or call for the dead into the living world.
    - The Marionette: Reach out tendrils of Plasm to manipulate objects at a distance. Higher levels: greater control, strength and even trap targets in prisons of their own flesh (or Corpus).
    - The Memoria: Call up events buried and forgotten, to experience the memory yourself. Higher levels: manifest it as a phantasmal image, bring others into the memory, or change the memory.
    - The Oracle: Send your own Shade (ghost) into the Underworld to seek forbidden knowledge and lost secrets.
    - The Rage: Unleash the fury of the grave. Rending Claws, Blinding Scream, Wrath that cracks open the world.
    - The Shroud: Wrap Sin-Eater in her own geist, pulling her briefly into Twilight. Higher levels: Become preternaturally ghost-like while not in Twilight, Slip between worlds of living and dead easily.
    - The Tomb: Make whole what was destroyed. Higher levels: Invite ghosts in to replicas, imbue creations with weird powers, or spin reality out of symbolic representations.

    Throwing your Geist's ban or bane at your Haunts causes them to end.
    These 10 Haunts mean that each of the 5 Burdens has a signature power.

    Keys are no longer required to Unlock Haunts. If you do use a Key when thematically appropriate, it gives you extra plasm and successes but inflicts a Doom upon you, and you may not use that innate key again until you pay the Doom's price. "You can also resolve your Doom by helping a ghost whose death resonates with the Key’s theme to resolve an Anchor." You get 2 innate keys, 1 reflecting your own death and 1 reflecting your Geist's. More may be gained by collecting Mementos (these grant their holder's keys while in their possession) or by "Ectophagia" on another Geist (ghost eating).
    Keys effect Haunts "cosmetically rather than rules-wise"
    Heavily implied that mortal Occultists could use Keys through Mementos, but must also suffer the Doom.
    Full list of Keys:
    Beasts, Blood, Chance, Cold Wind, Deep Waters, Disease, Grave Dirt, Pyre Flame, Stillness

    Plasm: Big pool of this still. It is a by-product of ghosts spending Essence on Manifestations. Sin-Eaters can consume plasm (preferably in a manner resonant with his own death); otherwise it would sublimate shortly after being collected. UNLESS, a sin-eater eats a ghost directly. As the Bargain makes Sin-Eaters partially ghostly, they can physically eat ghosts, EVEN if it isn’t manifesting. They convert the ghost’s ephemera into Plasm as it’s being eaten.

    Ceremonies: Act much like Werewolf Rites in 2nd Edition.

    Archetypes: “You’ll see some familiar bits, though maybe not quite in the context you’d expect."
    Considering the Dark Eras 2 Kickstarter specifically mentions Reapers as antagonistic toward Sin-Eaters, whatever form this axis takes will not include Reapers in 2nd edition.

    ?: 2nd Ed Y Splat has not yet been revealed.

    Thresholds: 1st Ed. Thresholds really only define your starting point. Posts suggest that elements of them will remain, and recent posts says that mechanically and thematically, their core concept of 'how you die' are still found in the Keys.

    Burden: 2nd Ed. Burdens are the new X Splat. They define why a Bound made their Bargain with a Geist in the first place; what drew them back to the living world. 5 named: The Abiding, The Bereaved, The Hungry, The Kindly, The Vengeful.

    Krewes: still the name for a group of Bound. They still build their own mystery religion. Geists no longer transform into, nor reveal mythological aspects. Geists only figure into mystery religions IF that’s what the krewe builds it around. "Krewe," only became "associated with the Bound and their religion in the 1920s, during a major resurgence of Sin-Eater culture around New Orleans, and it wasn't particularly widely used outside the Americas until decades later." “archaeology” & digging in to past of past krewes is HUGELY Important.
    According to a recent dev blog, Krewes will now have archetypes to describe the group's general approach, much as a Werewolf Pack has a Totem to direct its symbolism and metaphysics. 5 mentioned: Furies, Mourners, Necropolitans, Pilgrims, Undertakers.

    Synergy: “New rules for it? You might say that.” (will be different from 1E Geist & from Deviant the Renegade) Plan is to make Geists more mechanically relevant. Recent updates imply that Synergy determines the maximum amount of Plasm you can spend each turn, instead of Psyche as in the 1E.

    Safe Place Merit: Cenote is still the name of the Safe Place add on merit for Geist so far.

    Mementos: can be a ghost’s resolved Anchor, an artwork about death created by a sin-eater, etc. Deathmasks are now somewhat separate and don’t fit under the Memento definition. They're still objects touched by the energies of death, still have Keys, and still have weird little side-effects. There are no longer five wholly different kinds of Memento with different mechanics for each. They're also a lot more integral to Sin-Eaters' powers, so you have a lot of incentive to seek them out and carry them around.

    Geists: Pretty direct beings. Not big on dissimulation. They are Rank 3+ ghosts. Most gain rank 3+ by drinking deep from one of the rivers of the Underworld. Anchors the ghost to a CONCEPT of death instead of just their old life’s anchors (harder to blast them back to Underworld once they escape, which they may do through a Bargain, by a Gate, or other means. Lost of Geist have no Bargain-host). Exceptions: A) 1st person interred in any cemetery rises as a geist to serve as its guardian. B) Some occult rituals might do the trick, C) sometimes it just happens with no clear cause. Geists CAN use the Claimed Manifestation on a living person or a dead body IF it knows that manifestation. Bargain is a separate manifestation. (ephemeral entities have Twilight Form and a number of additional Manifestations equal to Rank). Geist-claimed ARE NOT THE SAME as Bound. Topic for the future books: Multiple Geists Bargaining with a single Bound. Geist CANNOT possess you, as part of the Bargain. They are also DEFINITELY NOT 100% under the Bound’s control.
    Recent UPDATE: Geist may be UNLEASHED physically, whether its Bound is willing or unwilling (as far as the Bound is concerned). They have Banes, Bans and Attributes, but not the same Traits as free-roaming ephemeral beings, and they have more mechanical effect than in 1E.
    UPDATE: "the Bargain requires Death in aggregate." a possible reason Bound have appeared and disappeared in number through history is that the energy of deaths must be present in sufficient quantity in the world for the Bargain to be made. In the modern world, the number of average deaths a day has the result of the Bargain happening just about anywhere on the planet at any time."

    Ghosts:
    Rank 2 ghosts are no more limited in faculties than anyone else trapped in twilight for potentially decades, forced to watch their loved ones out of reach. They are effectively traumatized people, not automatons or recordings.
    Rank 1 ghosts are fully sapient people, but their sense of self is eroded so much they are stuck in a loop reliving key events over and over (fugue state), often but not always their own death. Often don’t know they’re dead.
    Integrity <7 at death results in Rank 1 ghosts, if any ghosts. Integrity 7-9 at death results in Rank 2 ghosts if any ghosts.
    Integrity 10 at death leaves no ghosts at all.
    Dave Bradshaw has mentioned rules for playable ghosts (perhaps much like the rules for spirits in the Pack and WtF2?), perhaps as a second entry in the Supporting Cast appendix

    Underworld: there are more rivers than the Five mentioned previously. 11 are named in Promethean 2nd edition. Sin-Eaters are no longer forced to spend time in the Underworld.
    "the structure of the Underworld has been cleaned up, with an eye for providing reasons to go there and explore at a variety of depths. From the Upper Reaches to the River Cities, from the Kerberos-dominated Deep Domions to the Ocean of Fragments, Sin-Eaters have plenty of places to go in the Great Below, and reasons to go there."

    Supporting Cast: the same author (Filamena Young) who wrote the Ghouls, Wolf-Blooded, & Proximi appendices is writing an appendix for Geist 2nd Edition (Confirmed!). The minor playable splat is ghosts (perhaps a special kind?)

    Antagonists: Ghosts are a key part of the game, but NOT in the antagonists chapter. Abmortals from 1st Edition doesn’t make it into the book at all (maybe in the sourcebooks). Antagonists are as yet unnamed, but there are at least two. “Beware of ghosts bearing masks.” One of the unnamed antagonists can “hear about you” when you “hear about it.” Possible angry ghost antagonist anchored to their own name (Bloody Mary) if Night Horrors book happens. Death Lords are getting renamed “Chthonic Gods.” (name connotes lowly, twisted, earthy, dirty, foul things that cling to others). The idea of having a Bargain with Chthonic Gods instead of Geists is a topic better suited for a sourcebook. Reapers are mentioned as antagonists to Sin-Eaters in the Great War era of Dark Eras 2 in the kickstarter page for Dark Eras 2 (assuming this means whatever replaces "Archetypes" as an axis splat in GtSE will not include "Reaper" anymore).
    UPDATE: Reapers are beings claiming to serve the Chthonic Gods. There are also beings called "eaters of the Dead."

    Settings: Tokyo will appear, written by David Hill (David's departure from Onyxpath may mean there will be a different writer for this, or that Tokyo will not be a Geist setting)
    Geist game material in the Demon Storyteller’s Guide is close-ish, but just an outsider’s view of Sin-Eaters (as 2nd edition Geist hadn’t been started yet when it was written).

    Endgames: 2 longterm goals are available to the Bound
    1) Catharsis: the resolving of a Sin-Eater's Burden and the healing of his or her Geist (that is to say reconnecting the Geist to its humanity), allowing both to pass on to whatever waits beyond this world or the Underworld.

    2) Catabasis: your krewes knowledge of the Underworld and its mythos grows to the point that you can challenge the Chthonic Gods. Success means rebuilding the Underworld in your own image. Failure means..."well, all those Dominions had to come from somewhere"

    Anthology: Is in the works.

    Updating it as new info appears on the boards
    Last edited by Robert D; 02-18-2018, 06:51 AM.

  • #2
    Powers, Krewes, and Mementos: I really want to see more updates on them.

    Geists: So, the Bargain is different from being Claimed. It will definitely be good fodder for Werewolf/Geist crossovers, and I'm also liking how the Rivers are tied to their creation, while leaving open other possibilities. I do wonder how the Rank for those who make the Bargain with Bound will be handled, however.

    Ghosts: Nice to have an alternative view on Ghosts that make them more than just echoes. The Integrity prerequisites are also a nice touch, though future supplements could delve into odder cases like Ghost Mages and the Demon STG's Echoes.

    Antagonists: There were never any clear-cut mechanics for Abmortals in 1E before, yes? I might try porting them over using the mechanics for Horrors, either way.

    Settings: We can also expect perhaps a reference to the Asuza Miko, yes? Changeling's Japan setting draft does link them to the Bargains of most Japanese Sin-Eaters.


    "My Homebrew Hub"
    Age of Azar
    The Kingdom of Yamatai

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    • #3
      Aokigahara would be an interesting to bring up from a Sin-Eater perspective for Japanese setting.

      In other news now Geist 2e is out of first drafts and onto redlines!

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      • #4
        Geist always displayed more than five rivers, though?


        Kelly R.S. Steele, Freelance Writer(Feel free to call me Kelly, Arcane, or Arc)
        The world is not beautiful, therefore it is.-Keiichi Sigsawa, Kino's Journey
        Feminine pronouns, please.

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        • #5
          I think he may have meant the five threshold/horseman rivers, I think those are now out in favor of just going with the multiple rivers that were introduced before not tied to thresholds. Goes along with thresholds being changed as well. Curious as to if the name of 2ed's Chronicle/subtitle will drop soon now that it's in redlines.

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          • #6
            None of the Thresholds were tied to rivers though?


            Kelly R.S. Steele, Freelance Writer(Feel free to call me Kelly, Arcane, or Arc)
            The world is not beautiful, therefore it is.-Keiichi Sigsawa, Kino's Journey
            Feminine pronouns, please.

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            • #7
              I'm happy an anthology is in the works.

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              • #8
                Originally posted by ArcaneArts View Post
                None of the Thresholds were tied to rivers though?
                No, but it sounds like they might be in 2nd edition? If most Geists attain Rank 3 by drinking from one of the rivers of the Underworld, and doing so anchors them to a concept of death rather than a memento from their previous life, it could be that which river they drink from determines what death concept they are anchored with. It could be that your Geist's Anchor determines your threshold. Or, rather, your Threshold determines which Geists will be willing/able to make a Bargain with you, based on their anchor.

                There's a lot of mights in there, but it's possible Robert D was making assumptions along those lines.


                Going by Willow now, or Wil for short. She/Her/Hers.

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                • #9
                  Originally posted by Charlaquin View Post
                  No, but it sounds like they might be in 2nd edition? If most Geists attain Rank 3 by drinking from one of the rivers of the Underworld, and doing so anchors them to a concept of death rather than a memento from their previous life, it could be that which river they drink from determines what death concept they are anchored with. It could be that your Geist's Anchor determines your threshold. Or, rather, your Threshold determines which Geists will be willing/able to make a Bargain with you, based on their anchor.

                  There's a lot of mights in there, but it's possible Robert D was making assumptions along those lines.

                  Didn't mean to cause confusion . Someone had asked in another post if there was a link between the Rivers of the Underworld to the Five Thresholds, & the response was basically just that, "there are more than five rivers." Not much else. No idea if that means anything in particular. I honestly hadn't made any connection in my mind between the Rivers and the Thresholds in 2E before. I just noted that the only info on Underworld Rivers in currently published CoD works that I know of was in Promethean the Created 2E that mentions the rivers specifically in page 303.

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                  • #10
                    Originally posted by Robert D View Post
                    the response was basically just that, "there are more than five rivers." Not much else. No idea if that means anything in particular.
                    It means "No, because there are much more rivers than there are thresholds".


                    Genius templates: Super Science Mini-Template for Demon: the Descent

                    Oracle the Endbringers: Time-Manipulator Fan-Splat

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                    • #11
                      I remember wondering about that question because even the Book of the Dead had more than 5, I think the questioner was just off. Either way, the answer was that there's more than five rivers in the Underworld.

                      One of the mages in my game has a ghost familiar so I've had to raid the geist forum for ideas.

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                      • #12
                        Thanks to the OP for posting this! I always felt Geist was a "diamond in the rough" kind of game, with some interesting ideas but in need of more polishing. This new edition sounds really exciting.

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                        • #13
                          Well this all sounds amazing! Geist will always be teh closest game to my heart and hearing all of this is just leaving me overjoyed. I cannot wait until they start giving previews. I'm especially interested in seeing the antagonists and how powers and ceremonies work. And as a final point, I am really happy that the game is still basically hopeful, that's what drew me to the game from the start and I would have been disappointed if the game had doubled-down on the doom and gloom.

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                          • #14
                            I recall after Mummy coming out that Rose said if she does Geist 2nd ed, then playable ghosts would be in that book. So there is a half decent chance we get one of the Lucid dead.


                            Thoughts ripple out, birthing others

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                            • #15
                              Originally posted by FallenEco View Post
                              I recall after Mummy coming out that Rose said if she does Geist 2nd ed, then playable ghosts would be in that book. So there is a half decent chance we get one of the Lucid dead.
                              You can basically already do that, since rank 2 ghosts are lucid and we have experience costs for ephemeral entities in Werewolf the Forsaken: The Pack.


                              Genius templates: Super Science Mini-Template for Demon: the Descent

                              Oracle the Endbringers: Time-Manipulator Fan-Splat

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