Specifically, I spent some of the time trying to come up with ideas for a Geist game. It’s a little tough.

Obviously the first problem is that coming up with “ideas for a $game_name game” is a tricky proposition without any PCs to speak of. Surely it can be done — that’s precisely what modules are, right? — and I think for games like D&D it’s a bit easier.

What’s that on the horizon? Why, I think it’s a tangent!

Party vs. {throng, cabal, coterie, etc}

For White Wolf games, well. This reminds me of a discussion I had with a friend of mine about Promethean. He said something about each Promethean throng or game being a special case. Most prometheans are probably looking for humanity, but their individual quests are unique. So each throng is kind of a special case, in the sense that you have to design how everyone encountered one another in a way that’s not generic.

Aha! But that’s how I think all groups in strongly character-driven games should be designed, for my preferred style of game. There’s more work involved but I find the kind of interaction that results more satisfying in general.

This isn’t to say you can’t do the same setup with D&D. I tried something similar with Er-Eret. D&D’s default story is, however, a bit different (“default story” isn’t really the term I’m looking for and I can’t remember the actual term). I think someone phrased it as something like “adventurers explore dungeons, kill monsters, and take their stuff.” That’s a bit reductive, of course, but it gets the point across.

Geist’s default story is considerably different. I prefer to phrase it as a question: “You died, but now you have a second chance. What do you do?” (I suppose one could do something similar for D&D: “You’re extraordinarily skilled in a dangerous world. What will you become? Hero or villain?”)

How the players answer that question, explicitly or implicitly, is really the jumping off point for the sort of game I prefer. If I can’t design personal plots, and designing regular plots can be problematic, that leaves me with setting.

Fluency

I took a copy of Mekhet: Shadows in the Dark with me on vacation with my family. Incidentally, although the clanbooks are months old by this point, they still consistently impress me. I went on to finish reading the other clanbooks, specifically Daeva and Nosferatu.

Reading these books has driven home how solid a game Vampire: the Requiem is and how, in a way, it’s by far the most flexible of the big three. If it’s not obvious why, maybe I’ll write a bit more on that some other time.

By this point, I feel like I grok Vampire pretty well and at this stage in the game’s lifetime, there is so much to draw on. I mean, shit, there’s a 400 page monster of a book on how to build a setting.

This is actually one of those dilemmas of White Wolf games: you can play without the supplements, but I pretty much can’t. Granted, this is one of those problems that, for me, is a nice one to have: too many enjoyable things to read! Oh no! Still, when it comes to a game that’s likely to see fewer releases than previous ones, if the release schedule so far is any indication, it’s a bit frustrating.

This is all just a long-winded way of saying I don’t really feel fluent with Geist yet. Oh, sure, I’m just bellyaching. I think it’ll be fine. The vision for the game is remarkably clear. The Book of the Dead will fill in many gaps re: the underworld. And there’s plenty of other ghost-related stuff either from other games, or places where Geist logically intersects with other games. For instance, the first chapter of Immortals describes a group of people remarkably similar to abmortals.

Planning. Always planning.

So where does this leave me?

Yesterday, I spent a bunch of time jotting down ideas, exploring possibilities for plots, different threats or antagonists. That worked reasonably well, and I think I might be able to borrow ideas from other games to get a sense of conflicts another step up, in a non-Geist specific way that I can still use.

Next is coming up with some krewes that I will ultimately use in a setting. Most likely I’ll pick a few themes, maybe start pretty basic by looking at how a krewe centered fairly closely around a couple of archetypes might look.

Wish me luck!

Still, I think Changeling would be a good challenge for me; I’ve learned a few things, and Changeling is one of those games that’s kind of amazingly open-ended. I mean, there’s a lot you can focus on in any given game. Off the top of my head, there’s changeling politics; changelings’ relationship with mortals, family (incl. fetches) or otherwise; various changeling-specific supernatural stuff; and of course conflicts between privateers, True Fae, and changelings. It’s intimidating, which I’m guessing is why good GMing advice tells you to consider seriously what your players want.

Divine Power comes out soon, as well, if it’s not out already. I’ll have it by next week, I think. Previously, I voiced interest in running a divine-themed game and I’ll confess my interest in D&D in general has waned somewhat. 4th Edition’s system is less invasive in many ways, but I’m concerned about unintentionally performing a bait-and-switch. That is, I feel I might be cheating people if I ran a D&D game with a little combat as I typically include.

A little bit of my hestitation with regard to running new games is this tension between wanting to run a long-ish game and the improbability of actually pulling it off. This is a pretty common complaint among adult gamers, as far as I can tell; it comes with the territory of being an adult. I saw how my first long-ish D&D game nearly died until I forcibly rescusitated for one last session. I’m glad I did it but it sucks that I had to.

Anyway, all that aside, I’m also really excited about Geist. Here’s a brief roundup of interesting things I’ve read about it.

First off, you can see some examples of character creation from some of the White Wolf freelancers, incl. Stew Wilson and Matt McFarland. Also, I’ve been remiss in not keeping up with Matt’s actual play thread, as many entries have become unlocked since I last checked.

Finally, if you have any substantial interest in the game, you owe it to yourself to read Martin Ralya of Gnome Stew’s preview of Geist. He got his hands on a review copy of Geist, and takes a nice, long look at the game.

That’s all for now!

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.

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.

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.

Finishing a campaign has freed up some amount of brain-space. I’m still into D&D, but it’s a bit easier to think about other things now that I don’t feel guilty about my game languishing. And listening to the White Wolf podcasts has allowed a lot of the World of Darkness stuff to burrow into to my brain once again. There’s also been some Geist stuff out and about, like the teaser in Epitaph. That piqued my interest.

I think this year, when Giest comes out, I’ll do something a bit different the usual. In previous years, I’ve read through the book, posted some thoughts here and there, daydreamed about games I could run, and that was more or less the end of it. This year? This year, I think I’ll run it once I’ve read it.

Yeah, all right, I’m not sure how that’ll work. The chief obstacle is that I’ll surely be the only one I know with a copy. (We had kind of a running joke back in college that one of our friends, Dan, was the guy who owned all the books. In Seattle, it appears that I’ve fallen into that role.) If the game inspires me, I’ll try to make it work. There should be a quickstart, right? Maybe that’ll be enough to get people familiar with the concept.

The point is that I need to run more games and that, in particular, I should probably run more WoD. Those books make up the vast majority of my collection. They tend to mesh well with my preferred play-style on top of being a highly enjoyable read. So what’s the freaking problem? I ain’t get my shit together, that’s what. I won’t say “No more!” because I’m well aware that thouse could be famous last words. But this sounds like a solid plan.

There’s another idea kicking around in my head that’s related.

I’m thinking about challenging myself to use every single one of the WoD books I own at least once. One-shots, open-ended campaign, limited run game— it doesn’t matter. More games means more fun for everyone (?), and more confidence for me when it comes to game-mastering, which in turn leads to more games. Everybody wins, right?

Wraith was a bit odd among World of Darkness games. While you could make the case that the likes of Vampire, Werewolf, or Mage conferred on PCs a fair amount of power over their destiny, a cursory reading of Wraith led me to the opposite conclusion. It struck me very much as a roleplayer’s game, a game for folks who really enjoyed character-driven narrative. It was one of those games that I guessed would require really good role-players to work well, but if you could pull it off, it would be amazing.

Just like I imply, though, I never actually got to play Wraith. It’s also been a while since I’ve read it, so I could be wrong about all of that. Still, it’s interesting to think back on where Wraith was coming from and where Geist might go. Harrows were pretty important in Wraith, and my gut tells me that maybe there’s an analogous theme, here. Perhaps a sin-eater creates something analogous to these sorts of shadow plays for people, either guiding them through it or destroying them in the process.

The list of White Wolf books on my shelf reminds me that I really should be doing more role-playing. I’m working on that in the short term— this weekend, we should be playing either the ultimate or penultimate chapter in Er-Eret. (More on that in a moment.) There’s also a whole host of games on my shelf which I have not run or played. Maybe it’s time to change that by breaking games down to be shorter, one or two session affairs. Or maybe I should start a new post.