15 thoughts on “Can you give me some examples of how your group uses GHOST ECHOES?”

  1. I haven’t had Ghost Echoes work out in a way that I’ve felt, I don’t know, special about before? Like, my Whisper used it and a lightning hook to make an insubstantial hologram of a wall and that’s about it. I don’t think I’ve figured out a good way to manipulate it to my advantage yet (or maybe just a GM tolerant enough of my bullshit).

  2. Haven’t done anything with them yet, but my players are running Shadows, so I’ve been thinking about this. Ghost Echoes make me think of:

    > the dungeons in Persona that are distortions of the city and the people at their cores

    > Don’t Rest Your Head and its Mad City, complete with Nightmares

    > The movie Ink and the way Incubi and Storytellers battle in a weird, time-bending version of the real world

    > Johnstone Metzger’s The Nightmare Underneath with all of its horrors pouring forth into nightmares underneath your feet

    > The time-jumping mission in Dishonored 2, where you navigate a location in two different time-periods

    > Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within and the blasted wasteland cities filled with Phantoms (which also kind of inspire my thoughts on Horrors and Ghosts too)

    > The Upside Down from Stranger Things

    > The weird city-shifting of Dark City, Inception, and Adjustment Bureau.

    So, you might enter the Ghost Field and pull off heists in the echo of Doskvol that rely on dead or lost riches or information.

    Maybe you want to get your hands on the cache of Skovlan Art that was brought back after the war by some greedy soldiers, but the treasure map to it was lost in a tenement fire last year: you enter the Ghost Field, and discover the 4-hour blaze drawn out into eternity in Zac Snyder slo-mo, with echoes of the dying on all sides of you, used as a feeding ground of agony by the Horrors that inhabit the Field. Can you locate the echo-safe that held (“holds”) the echo-map and find the information you need before becoming a permanent fixture of the time bubble, being consumed by the echo-fire, or alerting the Horrors?

    More immediately actionable, maybe you’re fleeing some thugs in Crow’s Foot and you see where a sky-bridge has collapsed between two rooftops. You Attune your way across the gap rather than Prowling by crossing into the Ghost Field and dashing across the echo of the bridge that exists there.

  3. I’ve thought about this move a lot. It’s certainly very wonky.

    One of the stumbling blocks with this ability in common use is, “This sounds amazing and fun but we always forget to engage it or it doesn’t seem fictionally right that there would be beneficial ghost echoes on our scores”

    One of the traps players can fall into is the, “I never end up doing cool shit with this ability because I don’t know what it can do (and I don’t think I can just confidently make up what it does because I’m not the GM)” trap.

    And on the GM side, you simultaneously worry about the ability getting interpreted in a way that ruins the game and/or don’t remember ghost echoes being a thing, so a bad habit comes into play where you end up saying “No, not in today’s game, but maybe in the future” and then nothing much ever happens with it.

    I think turning the authority of what the ability is able to do over to the players is a great idea. It’s sort of in the rules that this falls under their authority on pg 6, where it says “Which actions are reasonable as a solution to this problem? The players have final say.”

    When it comes time that Ghost Echoes might conceivably help, roll the Occult Influence trait for the district (pg 256 and onward) as a fortune roll to see *not whether ghost echoes are there or not, but how useful/won’t kill you the ghost echoes are.*

    *Example Time:*

    Jeric, the superstitious leech, has the quicksilver-loaded blowgun to his lips. His dart is aimed to knock out the hot new mastermind leading the crew’s former gang of thugs astray. Riley rolls Jeric’s Hunt in a controlled position and it’s a 2! Oof! They get a weird vibe and move out of Jeric’s sight.

    Riley’s not in the mood to put her character in any more trouble, so she takes a different approach. Riley tells the GM Matt, “I’m not gonna chase him down to dart him in the neck. That sounds too needy. We’re uncanny professionals, it says so on our crew sheet! Hear me out for this plan. I’m going to shoot this dart still, but through the empty space in the ghost field from when this building wasn’t here. How can I do that?”

    Matt is a good GM, so he says, “Okay, neat! Your character needs to figure out the situation with the Ghost Echoes here, first.”

    “Alright! So Jeric knocks the dart back into his palm, unscrews the cap, and drinks the silver fluid within!”

    “Wait!? Why are you drinking poison?”

    “Quicksilver! +1d to Attune, but oooh I get fucked up.”

    “Shit. That’s right. Wow. So you’re Attuning? You still get… Level 2 Harm Zoned Out, though.”

    “Yeah-yeah! Marked, and here’s the roll” It’s a 4 on a single die. Jeric’s Attune is garbage normally.

    “Okay… so I think it’s the way you say it is. I’m gonna flesh it out with a fortune roll. This is Nightmarket… so… 1 die!” 6! “Okay so I rolled full effect, so I think… there’s maybe even, if you’re up for it, a little balcony in the ghost field where if you let your body shift slightly into the ghost field you can get a really close shot and he won’t notice you AND-AND you can just walk backward off of the balcony with basically no chance of getting trapped forever.”

    “AWESOME. Normally Jeric would hate this, but he’s fucked up on quicksilver at this point. Let’s do it!”

  4. Alfred Rudzki, one of my groups just started Shadows with an eye toward that ability, so it’s been on my mind as well. Cool stuff, bud. 🙂

  6. Alfred Rudzki, boo-fucking-yah! 😉 This also got me thinking about psychonautical trips and favor-seeking journeys to the realms of forgotten gods.

    As an aside, I am impressed about how you can include a lot of the supernatural or little to nothing and it all still feels totally Blades.

  7. Good ideas!

    Also, like everything in gaming, if you aren’t inspired by something or don’t know how to use it, for pity’s sake don’t take that ability.

  9. Oh oh oh! The levels of Gloom in the Night Watch series of books? Also the sequence in the second movie when the sports car is driving on the “other side” of the mirror stands out to me.

    I’m having too much fun thinking of weird pop culture other-worlds.

  10. Psychonauts sounds to me like someone who puts on a bulky suit like a astronaut and dives into the psych of people on trippy adventures. Previously I wasn’t sure how this could fit into Blades, but having it be in the Ghost Field could fit.

  11. Gorinich Serpant, there could be Spark-tech suits to go “soul diving” into a pool of churning electroplasm. It’s a hyper-charged psychic energy given soupy form that pioneers brave to enter a world of eldritch dreams. You can sift for lost truths through the great sea of memories held in static disarray within the ghost field.

    A more dangerous dive involves a carefully attuned mixture of leviathan blood so the psychonaut can swim in the dreams of leviathans. Or worse.

  13. The Labyrinths in Madoka Magica, with associated Witches and Familiars as Horrors!

    I’m imagining how the echoes of Doskvol work in the Ghost Field.

    Is there a single City-Echo that is made up of this patchwork pattern of tragedies over the last thousand years? You dive in here, and you’re standing amidst the great tenement fire from last year that cost 900 lives, but if you can pick your way through the slow-motion flames you can get down the block to where the great Leviathan attack of 400 IE is is never-ending. Avoid that by taking a jaunt down Bloodstone Alley where the 18 Whitecrown killings across three decades are happening on GIF-like loop simultaneously up and down the street.

    Or are there levels? You try to Attune yourself a doorway to escape the Lampblacks, but your roll goes badly and the GM says: “It’s in there, but jeez, how long has it been? It’s deeper.” And you’re trying to pick through decades of city planning looking for when there once upon a time was a door, peeling apart year after year of Ghost Field to find it. If another gang of Shadows chase you into the Echo City, and you’ve nowhere to run, can you hide by diving deeper, like in the scene from Night Watch where Anton is attacked by a vampire hiding in the Gloom in the burnt out salon? A savage game of hide and seek?

    Yooooo Ghost Echoes lets you set up wild shit, like going into an enemy’s stronghold unarmed, and then using a Flashback to say “I stashed my guns in the Echo of this place before coming here, three weeks ‘down’ when they were fighting us in the streets, so the place was empty.” You can say wild shit like that and only get charged like 1 Stress, because it’s not COMPLETELY RIDICULOUS.

    I’m also now thinking of Lacuna, second attempt and its vaguely European Blue City, filled with blurry crowds of faceless people, illegible signage, impossible to navigate roadways and tram lines, and the terrifying Hostile Personalities.

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