Animals in Doskvol… do they leave ghosts?
Maybe I missed the note about them in the book but is there an official word on the creatures of nature and their interactions with the ghost field?
It seems you can have pets (as per a Special Ability) and these pets can also become spirits, or… something. But what about the dog that dies in an alley way etc?
If there’s no official word, what do you do in your games?
Ghost fields react to consciousness, animals are alive, but their capacity for conscious thought is an order of magnitude less than human beings, thus, their effect on ghost fields is rarely impactful. Maybe just reserved for characters who have a supernatural connection to their pets which is amplified in the ghost field.
Im just spitballing here.
Mostly no. But only mostly.
I thought there was something about animals becoming ghosts, and they were the reason the Deathlands were so dangerous. Human ghosts maintain some of their former selves for a little while before becoming insane life killers, but the process happens quickly for animal spirit.
If that is the case, Spirit Wardens will be cleaning up the bodies of all kinds of animals, including work at slaughter houses, which doesn’t make much sense. Maybe only predator species become ghosts? Or, more simply, its what andrew smith and Rob Donoghue said, and its only humans.
Or maybe there’s a prescribed method of ritual slaughter (ala halal/Dhabihah). The pigs and goats of Doskvol all get branded or tattooed with a little glyph (e.g. https://i.pinimg.com/originals/32/b1/ab/32b1aba6401ed219788c0392f267dbb1.jpg), a few ancient words are muttered when the creature is slaughtered, and all is well…
But what does this ritual slaughter actually do, and what if someone applied it to humans? Some kind of charnel/butcher’s cult could be an interesting development.
i.pinimg.com
A pack of Vampire Dogs, though… just sayin’.
Only a small step to vampire rabbits. 🙂
I introduced my crew to the shadow pangolin (telegraph.co.uk) which definitely has ghost and drmonic abilities, I have already added ants with similar abilities (which the crew nick name ebola ants) so I think the only limit is the gm’s imagination..