Spirits
Animist religions describe the world as being full of spirits, with every object, animal and place hiding a spirit within it. They’re partly right; everything in the world apart from humans, even transitory events and strong emotions, does cast a spiritual reflection, but all spirits, apart from the cunning or a powerful few, are confined to a world of their own. Separated from the physical world by a barrier known to knowledgeable occultists as the Gauntlet, the spirit — or Shadow — world is a murky reflection of the physical. Its geography is (mostly) the same as the world, but places appear twisted to reflect their inner truth rather than looking exactly the same. Everywhere, spirits war on each other for survival.
Spirits come into being alongside the thing of which they’re a reflection, but are dormant, barely living, tiny lumps of ephemera at first. As well as creating new spirits, actions in the physical world, and any emotions associated with them, create Essence in the physical world, some of which crosses over into the Shadow. If enough Essence is created around an embryonic spirit, it rouses into activity. By absorbing Essence, the spirit remains active. By consuming other spirits, it merges those spirits into itself and grows larger and more powerful. As spirits become more powerful, they become less pure as reflections of their origins and more thematic in nature. For example, the spirit of a single owl grows by consuming other owl spirits. As it consumes spirits of night, hunting, the prey its owl eats, and other owl spirits, the spirit subtly changes. By the time it is an independent, thinking being that no longer follows the physical creature that created it around, it has warped into an exaggerated spirit of silent nocturnal hunting. The Essence it consumes also has an effect — an owl spirit evolving in an urban area feeds on different Essence than one in the countryside, and its appearance is colored by its diet.
When mortal characters encounter spirits, something has gone wrong. Some spirits are capable of using their powers through the Gauntlet and, as their self-awareness grows with power, decide to create food sources for themselves by influencing what sort of spirits and Essence will be created around them. The true culprit behind an unusual pattern of domestic murders, for example, might be a murder spirit using its abilities to escalate arguments into homicides.
The spirits that mortal investigators encounter in the physical world are refugees and escapees, those that crossed the Gauntlet to flee the constant risk of being killed and absorbed by larger spirits. They constantly strive to maintain their Essence, desperate to avoid returning to their own world. Without an easy source of Essence, spirits must anchor themselves like ghosts, finding an object or person that reflects their nature and tying their ephemeral bodies to them. The spirit remains intangible — and is often actually “inside” the host — but is safe from starvation as long as the host generates enough Essence to feed it. By influencing the host, or humans interacting with a material host, to more closely reflect its nature, the spirit gets a ready supply of Essence and may move on to more permanent forms of possession. Many items thought of as having wills of their own, or as being cursed, actually house spirits.
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