Excerpted for posterity, from Christopher Simmons, the author of the quickstart:

According to my notes, it was supposed to be a vulture’s skull on a leather thong that gives him a +3 to his Grave Dirt effects (Grave-Dirt Caul and Grave-Dirt Rage) and allows him to spend 1 Plasm to increase his Survival by 1 point, up to a maximum of 5.

The long of it is here. The short of it is that every Monday, Matt’s going to unlock each of the eight entries devoted to the Geist playtest. The first one’s here.

Give it a read. It’s well worth a moment of your time.

The Thresholds are nice and creepy. It reminds me a bit of the categories in Dead Like Me, where some reapers were concerned with murder and others with accidental death. Picking a way that a character died or nearly died might force you to contemplate your own mortality, which lends a certain edge to deciding how and when your character nearly met her end.

Geists themselves are clearly an echo of the Shadow in some way. It’s an other-self that appears to have its own agenda. What I’m not clear on and what intrigues me is the extent to which one’s geist is independent. The Synergy write-up discusses the effect of Synergy on a Sin-Eater’s ability to work with his geist. Each of the sample characters has a write-up for their geist. To what extent does it matter? Is it purely mechanical? I imagine it’s a dial like any other, but in the extremes of any game, it has to mean something. Or perhaps the question should be: in a game about a geist, how much independence does it have?

I ask because I’m fascinated by the write-ups of the sample characters’ geists. How often do these guys get to be on screen? What do you have to do to piss one of them off?

The way that Keys and Manifestations overlap is interesting. It’s unclear to what extent your Threshold dictates your Keys. My guess would be that one of your keys has to be from your Threshold, and you can pick the other as you like.

The powers themselves are pretty bizarre, and I mean that in a good way. Rage is fairly straightforward, but Boneyard is weird. Some of the Caul-related powers are also really neat. It’s interesting to envision the overlap of things like, say, Primeval or Passion Caul. I look forward to seeing what they come up with.

It’s really not clear how to determine how many powers you get. Characters get two Keys and three dots of Manifestations, and yet one sample character has four powers (two for each Key) and another has two (one for each Key). They appear to have spent their Merits on other things.

One thing that’s interesting is that these guys seem fairly powerful. They don’t have crazy healing unless they have a specific ability (one of the Caul abilities grants fairly rapid healing). Their offensive abilities, for example, tend to do 1L per success. The rolls are based on a variety of abilities, much like Mage’s rotes, so it’s not entirely uniform. Still, it seems quite feasible to use your Keystone to get +3 on these rolls, putting you in the ~7 dice range without trying too hard. Another power they get lets them discover every nook and cranny in a building. That’s amazingly useful for such as infiltration or reconnaissance.

All right, folks, that’s all for now. If you’re as interested as I am, I’d suggest keeping your eyes on the White Wolf news feed for Geist teasers, as I suspect they’ll start doing them in earnest soon. It’s interesting times in this pre-Geist world.

As I said before, an extremely rough way of describing the concept of Geist is to say that it’s like the old Risen game, except sustainable. If you’ll recall, Risen are wraiths who want so desperately to be back in the Skinlands, the material world, that they’re willing to make a deal with their Shadow, their own personal devil.

A Sin-Eater (as they are called) is somebody who has died with Unfinished Business who was also psychically sensitive, like such as a medium. Some sort of being called a geist (“more than a ghost, less than a god”) comes to you during or after your dying moment and offers you a deal. You get to live, in exchange for binding yourself to the geist and bringing it into the material world with you.

Geists

The logistics of the geist itself are sparse. It seems like they’re independent beings, as each of the sample characters has a short, three or four sentence write-up of their individual geist. The details typically relate to the character’s death, so someone who fell out of a building happens to get a lady made of cracked and bleeding asphalt. More about the giest as an independent entity in a moment.

Sin-Eaters’ “morality” stat is Synergy, which describes how in tune a Sin-Eater is with his geist. Lower Synergy means you and your geist have a kind of dysfunctional relationship, whereas higher Synergy makes it easier to channel or work with your geist.

I haven’t finished reading the story part yet, so it’s unclear to me whether they discuss at all to what extent one’s geist is a fleshed out character unto itself. This could, of course, vary depending on the game (i.e., it’s one dial among many), but what I’m really curious about is what, exactly, the geist gets out of the deal. There’s a bunch implied about how these beings are elemental and terrifying but since it’s a quickstart, it’s mentioned in passing.

There are a bunch of effects of being bound to a geist that relate to ghosts. Sin-Eaters can automatically see geists that are not trying to hide, and automatically detect possession. Ghosts have an easier time manifesting around Sin-Eaters, and Sin-Eaters have the ability to force them to manifest. They can discern people’s age and intuit information about a body’s cause of death. There’s more than this, but you get the idea.

Oh, and then there are supernatural abilities you pick.

Thresholds, Keys, and Manifestations

In terms of splats, it’s a bit tricky.

Archetypes appear to be the social, opt-in splat. An archetype describes roughly what the Sin-Eater’s attitude is towards his second chance, whether he uses it to make life comfortable for himself, mete out violent justice, or assist unquiet dead in moving on.

Additionally, each geist comes of a different flavor, called a Threshold. I’m guessing that this is the born-in splat (i.e., Clan, Auspice, Path, etc). Which Threshold a character belongs to (?) is based on how the character died. For example, the Silent are those who died from deprivation, whether it be starvation or asphyxiation. The Forgotten are those who died or nearly died by chance.

As for powers, well, this is where things deviate from the usual.

As far as I can tell, each Threshold gives you access to Keys. These are things like Industrial, Grave-dirt, Pyre-Flame, or Stigmata. You don’t assign dots to Keys; they look like they’re binary, in that you either have them or you don’t. Instead, you assign dots to Manifestations.

Manifestations include things like Boneyard, Caul, Rage, Shroud, and Marionette. They don’t explain this in depth, but here’s what I inferred: buying dots in a Manifestation grants you a way to manifest a Key. The Manifestation dictates roughly what it will do (i.e., Rage appears to be an offensive Manifestation), but the Key determines precisely what form it takes (i.e., boiling someone’s blood or crushing them).

Soon?

I’ve tried to explain the gist of it, but there’s more to it than this in the quickstart, like some of the Geist-specific Merits the characters have, or Mementos.  If your FLGS has some copies sitting around, it’s worth it to pick one up. Otherwise I’m sure someone else on the Internet has made a more thorough accounting.

I’m hoping that I’ll have a chance to run this soon. I told my friend Alex I’d run it when next he came, which gives me time to finish reading and digesting it. There was too much going on last night, so it’s just as well.

Go me?

Needless to say, I cracked open Geist first. I’m on a few pages in but it’s really cool so far. For those of you familiar with the old World of Darkness, imagine something like Risen except designed to be sustainable. That’s my initial impression so far, at any rate.

I’ve got a friend in town, and perhaps enough people around that I could actually run again of it tonight. We’ll see, won’t we? It’d be a challenge for me, but if there’s enough diggity demand, I’d do it.

Oh also I got my hands on a copy of Spirit of the Century. My friend Alex talked it up, and since my local store had 10% off, the price was right.

Of course, I’ll have to wait until October. Even then it’s rumored to be comparable in price to Vista, an expensive proposition if you have a machine that works fine already. If you’ve got Vista, you might be in luck! I do not, so I’m not sure what my plan is.

However! You don’t have to wait to get some of those features, as some enterprising fellow on the Internet is writing various apps that port newer features of Windows to older versions.

In particular, I’ve been using ViGlance. I’ve felt for a while that the taskbar is untenable with more than a few applications open, so this solves that problem nicely by grouping them under icons and, on hover, allowing you to choose from a list of windows that app.

It’s not complete yet: you can’t pin programs to the Dock Taskbar, and there are no previews on hover. Even without these features, though, I would recommend it.

A lot of it might be snippets of code as much for my own reference as anyone else’s. Other things might talk about horrible problems I’m having and how I fixed them, like the first post up on this site.

This doesn’t mean roleplaying stuff is dead— I’ll still write about it now and then. Right now, though, I’ve got technology on the brain, and so I’ll more than likely share some of that with the Internet.

If you’ve tried to get IPython working on Mac OS X Leopard (that’d be 10.5, and 10.5.7 in particular) with an Intel based CPU, you’ve probably had some problems. I know I did! Let me cut to the chase, with a more technical explanation to follow. Oh, and some mild bitching, too.

I’m following the instructions I originally saw here, on IPython’s Launchpad site.  Yes, my instructions are merely a reprint of someone else’s bug report. More on that after I explain.

Quick instructions

I’m going to assume you haven’t downloaded anything, although if, like me, you wrestled with this for a while, you can still do these steps and it’ll work. It worked for me, anyway. :/

1. Download the .egg for readline, presumably the latest version. Get IPython if you haven’t already. As of this writing, you can get it here at the IPython download site. You can s/i386/fat/ if you like.
2. Copy it to a directory, such as ~/python.
3. You can try to install readline and IPython: sudo easy_install readline ipython. One or both will fail.
4. Open /usr/local/bin/ipython in your favorite text editor, and replace the contents of the file as described at the IPython Launchpad bug linked above. The key is to hardcode readline into the Python system path immediately after sys, and then to launch IPython explicitly.
5. Launch ipython.

You should be OK now, tabbing and all. If you haven’t checked this shit out, using IPython for your system shell, I highly recommend that you do. It’s none too shabby. There’s a book on this, too.

Technical stuff after the jump.

wtf, man

So, here’s the skinny. It took me an hour or two to figure this out, which is way too long. I’m writing this post so that hopefully I can nail some of the search terms that weren’t around when I looked for it on the Googles. I’m mentioning a whole bunch of keywords and specific stuff in the hopes that the next person who has this problem gets here or to the Launchpad site and manages to solve their problem.

Anyway, the technical background: IPython wants GNU’s readline library (tabbing!), but Mac OS X ships with libedit. If you somehow manage to get IPython to work, tabbing won’t because IPython is using libedit. It sucks and practically defeats the purpose of IPython. I had this working briefly, and then I broke it somehow. Whee!

You can download the readline egg and try to install it with easy_install. It will try to compile, then error out. In particular, it errors out on Modules/readline.c:681 a bunch of times. I’m not 100% sure why it does this, and I’m too lazy to remember/figure it out again. I think it’s trying to compile the readline lib specifically for Python and failing because of some mismatch. It sucks and it makes me sad inside.

When I tried to run IPython anyway, I got a bunch of errors about unable to find an entry point. I suspect this is some failure related to  easy_install, egg, or pkg_resources and readline being missing, although it’s vastly unintuitive if so. You’ll get an ImportError related to console_scripts and ipython. It’ll say entry point not found.

The fix appears to be skipping the egg, easy_install, pkg_resource shenanigans by explicitly adding readline to your path and then explicitly invoking IPython instead of giving something else a chance to error out. Sounds good to me!

readline + IPython + Fink?

I didn’t try doing anything with Fink. Fink does have both a version of IPython and readline, so it’s possible that Fink would be a better choice overall. Honestly, I’d try that before anything else. I was too stubborn to give up halfway through.

Of course, not having tried it, I don’t know that it’ll work. It’s gotta be less painful than the hackery above, though, right? Right? I mean, what could possibly go wrong?