So when watching an episode of the Six Towers Gang actual play, John mentioned something that I hadn’t seen in the quick start, which is that the Church of the Ecstacy of the Flesh teaches that ghosts are not the consciousness of the person they spawn from. There is no life after death, just a vile echo spawned by your passing.
I asked him in the comments if this is just a teaching to make people less willing to be sentimental about ghosts and ghosts really are the consciousness of the dead person, or if it is a law of the metaphysics and there is no afterlife for a dead person as a ghost. The answer, not surprisingly but very cool none the less is that it’s up to the table.
I’m curious how the other players/gms treat it in their games, are ghosts really the dead person? An echo created in the ghost sphere by a death?
“They’re ammunition for the Whisper” seems to be how my group treats them. 🙂
Maybe it’s something I’ve inherited from my long years GMing WFRP, but I think that often the “methaphysical lore” of the setting benefits from a certain degree of uncertainty and ambiguity.
Sometimes, just like in the real world, the universe needs to be mysterious.
Maybe ghost are what’s left of someone’s consciousness, maybe are just echoes or both or something else entirely.
Maybe the cataclysm changed the way it used to be, or maybe not.
Maybe they’re all dreams of an undead world, or fading memories of those who knew them, or just another state of being, or….
Maybe some spectrologist is trying to prove one theory or the other (or a brand new theory).
Is there a way to find out the truth?
Is there a way to prove it?
Is there someone (or “something”) that already knows the truth?
Ghosts seem to think they’re the consciousness of the dead. Maybe it’s a bit like the Star Trek transporter conundrum, where you die going in and are remade on the other end, so is that still you? Only in this case you actually did die and came out very different, so even if it is you, it’s not the same you.
All of my group’s PCs became ghosts… After being hung for crimes against the Spirit Wardens and transplanted into pit hounds for illegal gambling fights run by the Crows. Since then a leviathan has redeemed their spirits into new fresh bodies and they fight with a vicious abandon.
I think they might say they were definitely ‘changed’ by the experience.
Since you can sleeve a ghost in a hull, I think my group is treating ghosts as if they really are the consciousness of the living person, but they very rapidly go feral in most cases.
Thanks for the responses everyone! Its sounding like at my table Ghosts will be the actual consciousness of the dead; the line discussing the creation of a ghost in the Unquiet Dead section seems to imply it by making it clear it is at least the spirit that was in the body that becomes the ghost.
You die, but its still ‘you’ that awakens as a ghost. Changed? Absolutely, but its you, not something else that’s born from your death while you stop existing.
When I GM I run it as the ghosts are actually the spirits, harshly slingshotted back into their bodies after reaching the closed entrance to the afterlife, unable to renew themselves and slowly shedding their mind like it was dead skin. I also have the more social and intelligent animals (Cats, dogs, primates, corvids) form ghosts as well, though instead of going mad they fade relatively quickly into first instinctual (a dog will forget the people it considered a pack and most training but still be itself in most respects for example) then to a form that is essentially a wisp, a faintly seen ball of spiritual essence, most often found clustered around sources of electroplasm to feed off of, hovering around streetlights and factory machinery. The main reason this doesn’t happen with humans is because they take so long that a clear and prolonged period of being feral and insane usually results in them being killed.