Geists

As a sin-eater, your body is now shared with an entity called a "Geist." What it is and how you interact with it are a very important aspect of the Geist game, but what a Geist really  is  may not be immediately obvious. To understand Geists, you must first understand two other ephemeral creatures that haunt the unseen world: ghosts and spirits.

Ghosts  are the souls of the dead. They are wrapped in a body of ectoplasm, bound to the living world by memories, business, and physical ties - living relatives, lovers, places they knew. Most of them, at least - a ghost who loses all of its anchors does not necessarily move on to its Final Reward, but instead ends up in the Underworld: a purgatorial realm between the living and the Great Beyond.

Spirits  are the essence of things and places. They are small gods, or kami - the living  idea  of a thing. Werewolves are well known to interact with spirits (being part spirit themselves), and some mages become ambassadors to or even masters of the spirit realm.

So What Then, Is A Geist?

In short: a Geist is a ghost that is becoming a spirit.

A ghost is anchored to the world for a reason, but unbinding those chains are not always  good  things - at least from the ghost's point of view. Let's say a ghost is seeking vengeance against her murderer, anchored to the house in which she was killed. Tearing down that house will certainly remove an anchor - but not bring the ghost any closer to its goal. So, desperate to stick around, she replaces one of her anchors - lets say the house was burned down. The ghost, already a creature of emotional will, replaces her feelings towards the house with her feelings towards the fire. Suddenly, the fire becomes a part of her. Her memories of the house are burned away, the essential self altered fundamentally. She no longer remembers her time there - but she remembers burning it to the ground. She didn't light the blaze, no. She  was  the blaze. Her memories are of  consuming  the house, and it was  delicious.

Now she is a Geist.

All Geists run on a scale. Some have only recently begun to replace anchors, remaining mostly human without only a few quirks or differences from their old selves. Others are creatures so far gone that you would barely recognize them as once-human, the only evidence of the Geist's tattered humanity in the way it responds to a childhood song, or the emotions the bubble up from nowhere when it sees a photo an old lover.

How does the Bargain work?
The bargain was the pivotal point of your new existence. It was the point where the Geist staved off death, just long enough to pull you back from the white light and offer you another chance. It can happen any way you want! It might be little more than an dialogue of primal feelings - a lightning exchange of  HELP/HERE/YES  without a single, real word, and you're alive again. Or perhaps, the Geist really does stop you in that dark tunnel and makes a formal introduction. You chat about the benefits and drawbacks of what it can do for you and, agreeing, you shake on it - and the Geist merges with you from the outstretched hand up through the rest of your body. All that's really needed is that it begins with a choice and ends with two beings becoming one.

Are There Specific Geists I Choose?
Nope! You make up your Geist whole-cloth. There are only two things to consider: The Geist has the same Threshold as you (described in the book), and your second Key comes from the Geist. Therefore, which key you choose should inform what kind of Geist you are partnered with. If your second Key is Pyreflame, you might have the one described earlier, for instance.

If you are having trouble coming up with an idea, the first thing to do would be to take a look at the characters page. No, I'm not suggesting you steal someone else's idea; I am suggesting that you see what your fellow players did so that you can get an idea of what Geists are really like.

How Do I Interact With My Geist?
For most Sin-Eaters, the geist is not really like a second person sharing your body. It is  part  of you now, in body and mind. In terms of influence, it acts like conscience: when you do something it wants, you feel great! But when you do something it doesn't, you feel ashamed, embarrassed, guilty. Part of your job as a Sin-Eater is to channel your Geist's wants to positive ends, allowing you both to achieve whatever it is you stuck around for.

Some Sin-Eaters are a little less  synchronized  with their Geists. This is determined by a stat called Synergy, and it measures just how much you and your Geist are in tune. At 10 Synergy, there's no real way to tell where you end and the Geist begins. At Synergy 1, the two of you are in constant mental warfare for control of the body. At synergy 0, you rip yourself apart in the war for control.

There is one special case at Synergy 0: If you reached Synergy 0 by dying too many times (and being subsequently resurrected by your Geist), your soul is so tattered that there just isn't enough of you to fight for control. At that point, your body is little more than a meaty suit for your Geist to wear as it cavorts around the world of the living.

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