Geist: The Sin-Eaters

Geist: The Sin-Eaters
RPG published by White Wolf / CCP
Rule System	Storytelling System
Authors	Justin Achilli et al
First Publication	2009/2012/never?

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A New World of Darkness RPG, much removed from but sharing themes with the Old World of Darkness's Wraith: The Oblivion and Mummy: The Resurrection. Once, you were human. And then you died. But in the underworld, you were approached by a Geist, the ghost of someone who's been dead so long they remember nothing about their mortal existence save for how they died. It offered you a bargain: go back to the land of the living, and get to live your life again but in return you gotta share your body with the Geist, who wants to experience life again. Naturally, you accepted and through that became a titular Sin-Eater. Now you have a crazy-weird ghost sharing your body and you can talk to ghosts, but you have all sorts of awesome necromantic powers and you're not dead anymore.

Like Changeling: The Lost, GtSE is a case of White Wolf reversing the moodset of an OWoD gameline and thus managing to make a formerly unpopular idea popular. GtSE is a pretty welcome breath of fresh air in the NWoD since its themes are a huge difference to the general Wangsting that is so prevalent in the other game-lines. The tone is akin to a celebration of being alive, you cheated death so you may as well make the most of your new life before you kick the bucket for real. Think of the Mexican Day of the Dead or a New Orleans funeral and you won't be too far off.

It's one of the only two NWoD games pre-upgrade to the God Machine Chronicles where supernaturals had morality meters that actually managed to make them feel inhuman, instead of just being ridiculous hamhanded "tack on some extra race-appropriates 'sins' and call it done". The other was Werewolf: The Forsaken. Instead, the Bound (as the mortal part of the pair is called) has Synergy, which represents how well he/she works with the Geist. High Synergy means that the two halves work together effectively as a single individual, while low Synergy means that the mortal and the Geist no longer share the same goals. Additionally, if you die the Geist can bring you back but you'll take a major hit to your maximum Synergy in the process and you'll be forced to see the death of the person who was chosen to die in your place. At its lowest point, a Sin Eater may end up as one of the Wretched: a Geist and a mortal unable to share the same body, resulting first in a form of split personality (as the Geist and mortal struggle for control), ending with the Geist taking total control of its new meat-puppet.

While the premise works, nearly everything else doesn't. Only one book was ever made and it was rushed, to the degree it's parodied as Geist: the Underdeveloped and Unedited. It took three years for an errata'd "version 1.1" to be released and to no one's surprise, the game still has problems.

Thresholds

Water is wet, fire burns and NWoD games have a "racial" and a "class" splat. Your Threshold is your "race", determining how you died. This in turn determines which Keys you have access to from the start.

The Forgotten

Those Who Died By Chance. The unlucky sods who got struck by lightning, had their skulls cracked by meteors, stuck a shovel in the ground and hit a bomb, stepped on a marble and broke their neck, or just about any other death that's through stupid misfortune. This is more or less the DIY faction of Geist: they're the Extempores, the Orphans, the Caitiff and so on. If your death is down to sheer bad luck, a bizarre coincidence or something utterly out of your hands then you're a Forgotten. Their Keys are Industrial and Pyre-Flame.

The Prey

Those Who Died By Nature. Victims of the elements, nature and animals. Bitten by poisonous spiders, crushed by a hippopotamus, caught in an avalanche, mudslide, hurricane, or volcanic eruption, swept away in a river and drowned, got caught by hypothermia or overheated: all of these will create a Prey. Their Geists tend to look inhuman: animals, plants and elementals are all favorites. Their Keys are Primal and Grave-Dirt.

The Silent

Those Who Died By Deprivation. Those who died of hunger and thirst, were neglected or suffocated but also fell to addiction are all Silent. They tend to resent their Geists, who look like hollow versions of their Sin-Eater or resemble their death in some way. Their Keys are Stillness and Cold Wind.

The Stricken

Those Who Died By Pestilence. The sick and poisoned, those who died by viruses, bacteria, infections, and all that stuff. Their Keys are Phantasm and Tear-Stained.

The Torn

Those Who Died By Violence. War, violence and all other deaths of conflict generate the Torn. This does not always make them the combat splat: while most of them do favor the physical Attributes, many of them favor social Attributes to act as instigators making them very similar to the Brujah. Their Keys are Stigmata and Passion.

Archetypes

For Geist the "class" splat is your Archetype, aka how your death changed you. Each Archetype has a way it uses its Manifestions in the eyes of the Sin-Eater's Virtue and Vice. When a Manifestation is used in such a way it requires no Plasm, making it free to use (but secondary effects still use Plasm).

Advocate

Advocates are there to help spirits move on in life. The Virtuous do so to help a ghost to a better place while the Vicious do so to gain something out of it themselves.

Bonepicker

Bonepickers seek to make their mortal lives as comfortable as possile by amassing large amounts of wealth and resources. Viruous Sin-Eaters do this so that they can help other people while the Vicious do so for selfish reasons.

Celebrant

Celebrants are the mandatory "they're totally not there just for sex, guys" splat. They embrace life and all the fun stuff it offers, seeking thrills and desires so that they feel better than they ever have before. The Virtuous take a careful and moderate approach while the Vicious are full-on Slaanesh tier.

Gatekeeper

Gatekeepers are the border watch between the worlds of the spirits and the living. Virtuous ones take a gentle but stern approach to keep newcomers out and drive out those who are already here while the Vicious take the violent and easy approach.

Mourner

Mourners take care of spirits and their unsated passions. The Virtuous help ghosts come to terms with their deaths while the Vicious sate these passions for themselves without caring for anyone else.

Necromancer

Necromancers revel in their powers and seek to learn more. Virtuous ones do so to help the living and other ghosts while Vicious ones do so to get ahead of their rivals and takes knowledge from others rather than find it out themselves.

Pilgrim

Pilgrims guide ghosts through the land of the dead. A ghost must shed its emotions and its humanity before it can move on to its final reward. This can be done with both ghosts and people: by making them forget connections, severing bonds or helping them move on a Pilgrim fulfills its purpose. The Virtuous help people with the chaos and tragedy in life and guide them to move on while the Vicious will hurt, steal and break in order to do so.

Reaper

Reapers are the required edgelord splat, the judges of the living and the dead. They seek out those who sin and judge them, killing the unworthy and sending them to the Underworld. Virtuous Reapers do this out of compassion and love while the Vicious Reapers seek to gain from their killings, use people first or do so for the lulz.

Manifestations and Keys

The powers of Geist. What Manifestations do is determined by what Manifestation is used and what type of Key is used. The former come in seven types and determine the rough type of the effect, while the latter determine what its effect actually is. There are ten Keys and seven Manifestations, creating a total of seventy possible powers. Each of these Manifestations has five levels of power, represented by the traditional dots. The more dots you have in a Manifestation the more it can do, though some Manifestations require the spending of additional Plasma to use it.

Some Manifestations allow for the use of Anachrotech, pieces of technology that have fallen into disuse. They act as a kind of focus for the Manifestation, adding a dice modifier based on how old the object is. If the object was made before 1960 there is no modifier involved. For every decade onwards (60s, 70s, 80s, 90s and 10s) there is a cumulative -1 modifier to a max of -5 in place while older objects made in the 40s, 20s or even the 19th century add a cumulative +1 modifier to a max of +3.