Ghosts

When human beings die, especially in a sudden or traumatic fashion, they sometimes leave parts of themselves behind. Ranging from broken, animated afterimages, unable to do anything but reenact their death, to intelligent, malevolent, once-human spirits with power over whatever kind of calamity killed them, the world teems with vast numbers of the restless dead. More ghosts exist than any other supernatural creature, but the truly powerful, independent specters of legend are rare.

The majority of ghosts are poor at influencing the world, trapped in their insubstantial state and unable to even Manifest, noticed only as a strange chill or eerie vibe if the living sense them at all. Ghosts are drawn to places and people that they had emotional connections to in life — these anchor the ghost in the world and allow those with enough power to Manifest, whereupon they carry out whatever mad urges they still feel and attempt, in their broken state, to further the goals they left undone in life. Ghosts feed on Essence, a spiritual energy created by the memories and emotions that build up in their Anchors and are fed directly to them when they are remembered by the living. Ghosts that lose their Anchors and can’t transfer their attachment fade from the world, passing over to a dread realm filled with all the orphaned Ghosts that have gone before. This realm has many names in occult writings: Tartarus, the Great Below, the Land of the Dead, the Dominions, or simply the Underworld.

The living seldom visit the Underworld, though mediums and death-obsessed mystery cults all over the world teach that gateways to it are more common than supposed. Its doors exist in the same Twilight state as ghosts themselves, invisible and unnoticed by the living. Tales of living occultists who learned the right places and the proper ceremonies to open the gates of death describe the Underworld as a chthonian hell of passageways, tunnels, and caverns, filled with desperate

ghosts that lost their grip on the world. The Underworld sustains the dead, allowing them more freedom to move and act than the living world, but it also imprisons them. Once there, though, ghosts may increase in power and influence, evolving beyond the image of the person they were into twisted rulers of dead kingdoms, or sponsors and advocates of particular forms of death. If summoned back to the physical world or allowed to escape the Underworld by chance conditions, a ghost that has spent centuries growing stronger can wreak havoc until exorcised.