Ghosts and Reshtaha

RP-related discussion otherwise not covered in the Character Closet.
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Ghosts and Reshtaha

Unread postby FF Fanatic 80 » Sat Mar 24, 2007 5:09 pm

You can thank End for reminding me about this, as it's something I'm not completely sure on.

The wiki stuff on reapers covers most of the actual reaping process. But, I'm a little confused on things that don't quite mesh with this concept.

Specifically, ghosts.

How does this happen, given the reaper lore? Oversight? Intentional? Divine intervention? If someone doesn't want to cross over, due to unfinished business, how does that work?

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Unread postby Kai » Sat Mar 24, 2007 11:54 pm


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Unread postby FF Fanatic 80 » Sun Mar 25, 2007 2:53 pm

...so, wait:

"Until very recently, it was more or less accepted among agents of Reshtaha that ghosts could not be processed. They simply did not have enough energy to survive the procedure."

So until 2nd gen, if a ghost remains to take care of unfinished business, they're completely screwed?

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Unread postby FF Fanatic 80 » Sun Mar 25, 2007 3:05 pm

Also, the entry is handy for seeing the mechanics for ghosts in Gaera.

However, it's not entirely clear on how or why they exist in the first place.
Is it something Ishtar/Reshtaha intended? Is this something that can happen to anyone, or does outside influence play a role?

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Unread postby Kai » Sun Mar 25, 2007 3:15 pm

It can happen to anyone if by some oversight a reaper isn't able to catch them in time (very very rare), or if they're so determined to stick around they somehow evade capture and processing (somewhat more common). Exact mechanics of how a ghost would evade a reaper are something I intentionally left open so that anyone who wanted to use such a problem as a plot device could do so. The point is that reapers are powerful and highly-specialized for their work, but they aren't infallible.

And yes, until second gen ghosts who lingered for too long were screwed. It's certainly possible that a ghost could get its business taken care of before it deteriorated, and the amount of time a ghost can sustain itself is highly variable. Some ghosts will begin to wither quickly, and more tenacious ones can hang on for a really long time. If a ghost still has the energy necessary to make the crossover after it's done with whatever it was fixating on, it can pass on like a recently-deceased person would.

But yes, it is intended to be a rough deal being a ghost. That's one major reason why ghosts sometimes get so angry at living people. They're stuck and it's awful to be stuck.

That's why there are reapers, ideally to make sure everyone can get taken care of. Anyone they don't catch (or can't for whatever reason) will be much much worse off as a ghost than they would be if they'd just pass on like most people do.

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Unread postby FF Fanatic 80 » Mon Mar 26, 2007 7:06 pm

It would appear I have a lot of ret-conning to do then. Wee

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Unread postby Idran1701 » Mon Mar 26, 2007 7:09 pm

Huh. Well, too bad for Greg, then.

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Unread postby Kai » Mon Mar 26, 2007 8:16 pm

Like I said. Ghosts are rare and there's a lot of variation among them. If a ghost hangs around and manages to pass on, it's probably because it was a more tenacious sort that was able to sustain time hanging between this world and the next. It totally does happen. It just isn't reliable enough that agents of Reshtaha can assume it will occur without them.

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Unread postby Idran1701 » Mon Mar 26, 2007 8:27 pm

No, I meant Greg is specifically hanging around now because of unfinished business. His reaper decided to let him stick around.

Edit: Wait, were you talking to Dave? If so, never mind.

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Unread postby Kai » Mon Mar 26, 2007 8:53 pm

A reaper would certainly have it in his power to do something like that, but he would definitely be sticking his neck out and hoping that when the time came the whole processing thing would still be possible.

And before I have to justify this further, here is why I wrote that ghosts deteriorate. If anyone reading this has any knowledge of ghost phenomena on Earth, the general theory is that there are some ghosts with the wherewithal to do things like throw shit, break shit, and possess people.

But you've also got cases where some really really really old castle has a couple of ghosts that don't do anything but walk down the stairs, disappear, and walk down the stairs again. There's basically no intellect left, no interest in anything or apparent will to do more than manifest visually now and again. It's basically a case of a human soul wasting away until there's nothing left but a vague emotional or visual imprint bonded to a specific place or object.

There's little left at that point.

I didn't decide this arbitrarily by any means. It seemed, based on what I know of ghosts, to be the most logical conclusion.

Also factoring into this was a ruling from the guy who plays the god of death that ghosts are difficult if not impossible to do anything about. I combined this with the fact that Earth-people who help ghosts pass on generally end up totally exhausted. As a result, it seemed most likely that the causal relationship here is that it takes a good deal of personal energy from the medium in question to make such a thing possible given A: Practical difficulty, and B: Willingness of an obsessive remnant of a human soul.

As a result of these things, I wrote that a ghost needs to have a lot of personal willpower and plain-old power to keep itself from degrading away into one of those fragments you occasionally see standing on a widow's walk doing nothing. A mortal or reaper attempting to assist such a spirit in passing on must invest a great deal of personal energy in order to do it, and until someone came along with the right astral birth defect, it simply wasn't possible after the decay had progressed to a certain degree.

I hope that answers some more questions.

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Unread postby Idran1701 » Mon Mar 26, 2007 9:01 pm

No, it makes sense. I'm just saying, poor Greg. (Though I'm thinking the way End played the reaper, he wasn't aware of this either, since it seemed to me much more of an "eh, whatever" reaction on his part.)

How does this mesh with resurrection attempts, by the way?

The answer to this might be a spoiler for me for Seven Plagues, mind.

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Unread postby Kai » Mon Mar 26, 2007 9:10 pm

I don't know. Maybe that reaper has never dealt with ghosts before, or people who want to be one. Maybe the reaper is counting on him getting his shit done before the decay really sets in. Maybe maybe maybe.

The following is based on Philsys speculation and analogy from other systems such as D&D regarding returning people from the dead. I don't think we've got a formal revivify spell (yet?) in Philsys, so this is theoretical and has rarely come up.

Some people have suggested resurrection is easier provided the soul is still nearby, as evidenced by the fact that a cleric/healer (in D&D, for example) can revivify someone before they're powerful enough to truly resurrect them. This amounts to fixing the body quickly enough that you can stuff the soul back into it rather than calling it from the afterlife and fitting it back into the abandoned meat-casing it left behind.

Resurrection is harder once a soul has been processed and sent where it's judged worthy to go. Resurrecting something without the body handy doesn't work in Philsys, so forget bringing back some ghost who's been dead for several hundred years.

The spell in question:

[Heal=18]Resurrection (120 MP, 20 TP) - Revives a deceased person from the dead. The person must be willing to be revived, must not have died as a result of incurable diseases or old age, and the majority of the body needs to be largely intact--a person may be revived if missing limbs, but those limbs will obviously be missing after resurrection. Deceased characters must be revived within 48 hours in order to preserve the character's prior memories and skills.

A resurrection ritual involves reshaping and calling the aura of the deceased back into its prior state of organization, and a standard resurrection ritual requires either (4+1d6) - (any modifiers in Ritual, Astral or Resurrection Magic that would logically benefit the caster) hours, of which must be a minimum of 2 hours regardless, or some other GM determined time period.

If the character cannot be revived within this time period, it is still possible to animate the corpse, creating a zombie with the assistance of death magic through any number of processes. A zombie has none of the skills or abilities it had in life, but retains all physical statistics except INT and WIS.


I don't know what End has planned for Greg. I'd say that if he's been dead for more than two days, Greg either needs to pass on like a normal dead person.... or End has some major plot device that will make things work for him to come back. It's his call, but this is what's been on the table so far.

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Unread postby Idran1701 » Mon Mar 26, 2007 9:13 pm

*nod* Well, good to know. I mean, it doesn't really change anything about how I'll be playing things, but OOCly, it's appreciated.

Honestly, it's something I'd wondered myself before 7P, actually. The whole "how are there ghosts alongside a processing bureaucracy" thing. Seems quite well thought out.

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Unread postby Kai » Mon Mar 26, 2007 9:17 pm

Seems quite well thought out.


Either that or my bullshit engine is just that amazing. :cthulhu:

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Unread postby Idran1701 » Mon Mar 26, 2007 9:22 pm

There's a difference?

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Miang's abilities

Unread postby Nekogami » Tue Mar 27, 2007 7:06 am

Kai I need to get with either you or Charles on Miang's "powers".

Miang attracts souls especially souls of fallen warriors and can become possessed by them.

So far she's been inhabited by souls at least 300 years old. This spirits have remained in some kind of dormant state until Miang's strong aura and strong emotions awaken them.

The has a demonic dragon soul, that only comes out when she's extremely angry or experiencing intense hatred. Yue Fei, a swordsman. And Haak Ling, a sorceror. That's a bit of flavor text but I intended on a plot point to give her a broader range of spirits. At least 6 (a fighter, a dancer, and an archer) at various periods of her life.

The possession becomes even stronger when she acquires the weapons that these spirits used in life. In return for all of this, she must spend time meditating and reliving each spirits death/key moments of their lives or the spirits will fade and leave.

Kind of like they live through Miang.

What say you on this?

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Unread postby Kai » Tue Mar 27, 2007 8:06 am

This is something that happened to Zea too, to a great extent. Generally a ghost will fixate on an action, place, or object, but sometimes the attraction is great enough to a person who can see them and even interact with them that that chance to verify and affirm their own existence is irresistable. They end up latching onto that person for the sake of staving off their own crushing sense of irrelevance.

This, too, is something that happens sometimes with "Earth ghosts." They'll follow a relative or something. There are even cases in haunted houses where everyone in the family will be senselessly tormented except for, perhaps, the second-youngest daughter out of five. This child gets sung lullabies and receives baskets of oranges from freaking nowhere and there's never any explanation for this favoritism.

Seriously. I really doubt that anything anyone has done would be a problem with this version of ghosts. Odds are if someone thought of something for a character based on what we know and have heard of "real" ghosts, then it fits just fine because these are based on that same information.


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