Ghosts. Ghosts are hard in this universe. If I were directing “Blades” as a TV series, I’d try to keep ghosts off camera as often as possible to build up the mood.
Once you see a clearly unreal blob of electroplasm flying around, it might not produce the desired sense of horror.
I’ve been trying a bit of watercolor work to get my take on ghosts mishappen enough, what do you all think? Is this the right track?
Should ghosts just stay in your imagination where they’ve room to be whatever you fear?
I guess there’s nothing that says ghost have to all look the same, or that they have to look like who or what they were in life, or that they have to be humanoid. You could easily vary it up by having most being one thing, then throw your players by all of a sudden having something completely or slightly different.
Check out the “Against the supernatural” questions in Ghostlines (Dark hack). I’ve used these as a GM asking a couple of these questions to the players to make every Ghost different and it works great. nickwedig.libraryofhighmoon.com – nickwedig.libraryofhighmoon.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/ghost_lines-dark03.pdf
I kind of picture the Ajin from the cgi anime series.
Our ghosts tend toward the dementor archetype from Harry Potter. Damn scary. Particularly when they can possess you!
Peter Cobcroft Oh shit, that is an excellent inspiration.
I like to keep ghosts thematic to the rest of the game, and when I feel I’m getting loose in how I treat them, I return to the bedrock foundation.
In my Doskvol, ghosts are the stains and clues and traces personified–they are the lingering of regrets, mistakes and greed. When I think “ghosts” I think “you didn’t get away with it.” Not clean. Not altogether. Not ever.
Pull that idea in to how heists are never quite clean, and then make life and death the same way. And bring that terror of the consequences of failure fully to the fore on both sides of the Ghost Field.
I picture something like the library ghost from Ghostbusters; skeletal but with lots of glowy fiery plasma emanating.
Andrew Shields Will Scott and therin lies the rub. How to draw something that’s both of those. A Tobins style guide for Duskvol would have to be long on spooky inspiration and short on detail. Back to the drawing board.
I don’t think it’s limiting so much as it is freeing. There are the ghosts of drowned children, always leaking dark fluid (blood? Water? Tar? Damnation?) from their mouths as they reach out from under sewer grates who look and feel tangible. There are the ethereal echoes in ballrooms, always twirling, because if they hold still they wither to horrific starvation right before your eyes. There are shadows within shadows, palpable presences with pinpoints of hellfire for eyes that drift around in the smoke and despair of slums. There are screaming, insane ghosts chained to a rune on a rock, translucent and as ever-shifting as their attention spans.
And the Whispers know how to shuck the outer hull for the wisp of energy within ghosts. They avoid talking about how this can be done with live people too.
More to the point, from my point of view, the discussion of ghosts in Doskvol is designed to provide a broad enough umbrella to allow GMs and players to bring in their favorite visions of ghosts, and what spooks them the most.
Embrace that! Focus on the ghosts in YOUR Doskvol, and use that avenue to push in your own fear and horror and unsettlement and discomfort. THAT is what will resonate with players, more than a particular description or an idea; use the advantage of being in a game with people and let your own discomfort into the game, and it will live and resonate.
Well put.