OSSR: Orpheus v. Geist

[Ancient History]

Orpheus v Geist
A War of the Wraiths After the Death of Wraith

FrankT:

We're going to do two books that happened well into White Wolf's shovelware phase: Orpheus and Geist. Both of them were attempts to revive the “Wraith” line, which went defunct not only before White Wolf did, but before the old World of Darkness did. Wraith got canned in 1999, making it the first main line to be thrown on the ash heap (unless you count the 1991 abortion “World of Darkness: Mummy,” which is a story for another night). There is a certain kind of White Wolf fan that feels that White Wolf can't fail, it can only be failed, and thus getting Wraith back on track has been a goal of a certain splinter faction of highly obsessive goth nerds for a long time. They've come up with many ideas, and all of them have been bad. And we're going to review two of them together. But unfortunately, before we can really talk about how shitty Orpheus and Geist were, we're going to have to say a few things about Wraith: The Oblivion. Because if there wasn't the big scythe of Wraith hovering over peoples' heads, neither of these games would have been printed.

Orpheus was made in 2003 as one of the last projects before they canned the old World of Darkness. Geist was made in 2009 and is one of the last books that actually got printed. I guess what I'm saying is that Wraith has been something of a bad omen for White Wolf, and the various attempts to reboot it have been harbingers of doom.

AncientH:

Wraith actually got off kind of lucky. It was the first game line to officially end with Ends of Empire in 1999, and from this perspective got off kind of lucky, because I think we can all agree that Time of Judgment sucks salty monkey scrotum and it thus avoided actually being officially reincarnated as one of the crappy nWoD games. Well, okay you can make an argument that Geist is supposed to be Wraith with a Vengeance, but I'll fight you on that and win.


Seriously, at least Wraith ended in such a way that you could still plausibly keep playing Wraith. It was the end of the game, not the game world.

Wraith was also fairly important in the old World of Darkness cosmology because pretty much everything dies. Vampires, werewolves, mummies, fae, sorcerers, Eastern vampires, African vampires, ghouls, mages, kinfolk, mediums, White Wolf...



Now, a lot of these guys come back in one form or another, and a couple tend to give the afterlife a general pass, but the whole afterlife is a really big and cohesive part of the oWoD cosmology. Pretty much every flavor of supernatural died and passed through there at some point, and most of them had some version of necromancy, so whether or not any of them ever used the Wraith books, they were at least moderately supposed to be relevant. Hell, you could actually theoretically have your character die and come back as a wraith and keep on playing! Granted, that didn't happen much in my experience, but it's a hell of a lot more interesting than "We shall all miss Ragnar O'Kittensquasher IV. All hail our new friend, Ragnar O'Kittensquasher V!" and its endless variations.


I would be remiss not to mention that when official uber-munchkin Samuel Haight finally fucking died, he became a wraith. And was promptly forged into a tasteful soulsteel ashtray to scream for all eternity. This was a better send-off than any of the Antediluvians got, and was well-received by all.

FrankT:

I think it was K who described Wraith as “The best game you didn't want to play.” I think that might be overly generous. I mean, you don't really want to play RIFTS or Tales From the Floating Vagabond either. But I definitely know what he's talking about. Wraith was the game that was too White Wolf for White Wolf. All the other game lines might talk about how doomed you were and how you were degenerating into bestial madness, but when it came down to it you were basically superheroes with fangs. Or in the case of Mage: just super. Thanks for asking.

Not so in Wraith. Wraith didn't ask you to roleplay being horrified at how much badassery you'd been cursed with, Wraith gave you a Shadow. And your shadow was your dark and self destructive side, and another player got to play it. So your dark nature actually made you do things you didn't want to do. Like, all the time. And players were actually competing to piss each other off and do hateful and disturbing things to each other. It was a fucking trainwreck! But unlike all the other games, it actually did deliver on being a deeply disturbing and unpleasant experience. A masterpiece of design in a way, although the fact that people didn't actually want to play that game should have been all the proof anyone needed that the whole “Woe is me!” shtick from the TruRoleplayer faction of White Wolf fandom was full of so much shit. Wraith was made after White Wolf had decided to put out a “main book line” every year. And when sales figures came back from it, they decided to stop doing that.


If those sales figures had gotten back in time to stop Changeling from happening, we could have been spared so much pain.

So really, we can probably blame Wraith: the Oblivion for there not being a Frankenstein book for old World of Darkness. Not that Promethean was worth the wait when it finally came out.

AncientH:

There's a guy named Dave that owns the Fantasy Shop comics-and-games chain around St. Louis, and he hated the Wraith books with the glow-in-the-dark covers.

"Oh hey, someone's going to break into the shop after hours and steal shit. Let's make sure they can see the stuff they're ripping off!"

Anyway. The thing about Wraith is that even though the game officially stopped production, the game world continued on in the other World of Darkness settings - characters still died, and they went to the Wraith setting. Necromancers continued to exist. So while you might not get a bunch of post-Wraith books telling you to go buy an out-of-print product to figure out what the fuck was going on with Wraiths and their crazy powers and politics, you did have a bunch of books that continued to reference the underworld and wraiths as they had existed in W:tO. Basically, the death of Wraith left a sort of Wraith-shaped hole in the game universe, and because nature abhors a vacuum, that had to be filled. Hopefully without ripping the skin off anyone's dick this time.

FrankT:

Geist and Orpheus are long.


Orpheus comes in at 309 pages. Geist is “only” 303, but it feels longer because the type is denser. There are actually a lot more words in Geist than Orpheus. But the point is that these are two books that could individually be used as murder weapons. And not just by the expedient of having people read them. (burn!)

But to give you an idea of what we're up against, Orpheus has twelve credited authors (well, eleven authors and one “additional writing” who is also the developer), and five credited playtesters. One of the authors is one of the five credited playtesters, so I think that literally that's that one of the twelve people writing this book actually decided to try to play it and the four friends he tried to inflict it on got their names in the book. Also, the project lead is credited as “Lucien Soulban.” That sounds like a joke, but he's from Saudi Arabia and I think it's a happy coincidence. Learning absolutely nothing from the “too many cooks” problems that plagued Orpheus, Geist has a dozen people on “Initial Concept and Design” and then has a dozen people on “Written By.” Exactly one person is on both lists, bringing the number of designers and authors to twenty three. Trivia fact: the guy who wrote and bothered to playtest Orpheus is also one of the writers on Geist. But despite having written an ostensibly similar game six years earlier, he doesn't get any credit for “initial concept” for Geist. Sad face!

AncientH:

I've reviewed some of Lucian Soulban's work before[/i].

Orpheus was a concept game, which is sort of like a limited series in comics terms. It wasn't meant to be an ongoing gameline, at least as far as I can tell, they just wanted to come out with X number of books and one adventure arc and thus give gamers a sort of light at the end of the fucking tunnel.

Geist...eh...it was as ongoing a game as any of the non-major nWoD games, which is to say that they were checking the sales numbers with each release, hands over the big shiny red kill switch.


They just keep coming back. I'm waiting for Wraith Classic.

FrankT:

I kind of think that after White Wolf went under, while CCP was keeping the publishing imprint around, people were just loading everyone's name into the credits they could possibly justify and some they couldn't. Certainly by 2009 it was obvious that the company was not coming back and that many of the books weren't ever going to be distributed. So really, using this shit for resume padding probably makes sense. You can't have 23 people meaningfully contribute to the writing of a game book, even one as long winded and rambling as Geist. But you can have twenty three people put this book on their resume when they go off looking for writing gigs at other companies. There are a veritable fucktonne of people who “playtested” Geist, and no less than two people listed as having designed the cover. I think we should probably show the cover again just to have it sink in how patently absurd that is:

Robert Dixon is credited with “keys,” so I'm guessing that Craig Grant chose the shade of black.

AncientH:

That being said, Orpheus is actually still in the oWoD mindset and thus far less pretentious than Geist. That doesn't sound like much, but it counts for a lot. Unfortunately, this was long after White Wolf had lost their collective sense of humor.

Not yet.

Opening Fiction

FrankT:

Orpheus begins like a respectable book with a credits page and a table of contents. The first chapter is called “Prologue” and the second chapter is called “Introduction” and the third chapter is called “Chapter One.”

The other two fell over and sank into the swamp.

Geist is too pretentious for that, and does the nWoD standard thing of pissing everyone off putting the opening fiction before the table of fucking contents so you have to flip through it every fucking time to find out what pages the chapters start on.

AncientH:

Rum is the Drink the Dead Like Best.

Those are seriously the opening words to Geist.


Orpheus pages are mostly white with black text, with a heavy border and some watermarking, but at least you can read it. Geist went for this fucking amorphous blue shit with white letters that all have 1998-style "glow" feature on them, so they're fuzzy and fade together at the edges. I wear glass, goddamnit. I cannot deal with this shit without getting a headache.


See that top line? Put that on a shifting-blue background.

What it is of course is ectoplasm. Traditionally, ectoplasm was some shit that mediums would fake out of seaweed and flour and mucous and whatnot.


No, really.

But at some point, movies like Poltergeist and Ghostbusters decided a sort of ephemeral mist-like thing would do better, probably because it looked less like ass when they were filming on a budget.

Okay, who hired Mignola to do the anti-drug PSA?

Now, Wraith: the Oblivion wraiths weren't whispy motherfuckers, but somehow the Geist people didn't get the memo, so now my eyes are bleeding/

FrankT:

At ten pages, the opening fiction in Orpheus isn't terribly long. It is, however, kind of a giant what-the-fuck. See, when someone hands you a book called “Vampire: the Masquerade” you kind of know what the fuck is going on from the start, and you can excuse the introduction for rather talking around the point to “build mood” or whatever the fuck. But when the book is called “Orpheus: Don't Look Back” that is rather less explicable. So the fact that the intro fiction doesn't get down to brass tacks and tell you what the fuck is going on is rather less excusable. Flipping to the back of the book, you get the following blurb:

What if death wasn't the end? What if you could die and return to your body, to live again? What if you could remain among the living long after your body crumbled to dust? What if science had rendered death a mere inconvenience?

The door between this world and the next has been thrown open. He souls of the deceased haven't passed, they're among us, and now the living walk among the dead. Mankind has learned to look into the void of the afterlife... but does it stare back?

If death is no longer an absolute, what is?

Some laws should never be broken.

Not terrible as hooks go, but it doesn't really explain what the fuck is going on. Apparently we have techno-necromancy or something. Are we doing Flatliners or Final Destination? This being White Wolf, we can assume the answer is “yes.” But that's really not explicit.

Anyway, the story starts out with characters in an office talking about how they work for the “Orpheus Corporation” and are being paid obscene amounts of money to do what sounds like ordinary private detective bullshit. A page or two in, you really feel like you know less about what this book is about than when you read the back cover and made assumptions. Even the name “Proof of Life” is so generic that it conveys no information to the reader.

AncientH:

Orpheus was a bait-and-hook for the Wraith crowd, because there were things in Wraith like the Orphic Circle (a circle jerk of supernatural necromancers of every stripe), and this was the tantalizing hint of tying back into Wraith without ever fucking coming out and saying it. Believe it or not, oWoD used to pull this shit all the time. The whole thing with the Cappodacians and the Giovanni and the Samedi and the Harbingers of Skulls was one long-drawn-out mindfuck which only ever seemed to progress by accident...but then, it was still better than Ghostwalk.

FrankT:

The prologue story in Geist is only four pages, but it sure feels way longer than that. Partly it's because I have a pdf copy and this section loads extremely slowly. It's white text over a blue and white background with fake page breaks in the middle of pages. And the encoding is done very very badly, and the shadows of the letters load before the letters do. Ugh. It's awful.

But while it's hard to actually read this fucking thing, it does at least get you to the point in a hurry. The name of the section is “Rum is the Drink the Dead Like Best” which right away makes you think we're talking about a game about Voodoo necromancy. Then the first mini-segment is a description of a voodoo mass murder complete with salt water and blood and flies shooting out of peoples' noses. So that at least tells you what the book is about. That's better than most White Wolf products can manage.

AncientH:

Geist is another bait-and-switch, but in a different way. In Wraith: the Oblivion you're already dead and a wraith (unless you got the Mediums supplement, where I guess you can play a medium). In Orpheus, you're a human that interacts with the dead, but not using any of the old medium abilities because that would be cheating make sense. In Geist, you're a living human being inhabited by a ghost.

Yeah, you read me, and yeah, this is explicitly the exact same bullshit that went into Mummy: the Resurrection and Demon: the Fallen and Hunter: the Reckoning and probably several other crappy White Wolf games that I'd forgotten about. Normal human being gets supernatural element bonded to their soul, and now life sucks that little bit more.


Drink up, we have a long way to go.

FrankT:

The Orpheus corporation apparently has a nemesis who is named “The Bishop” and he's super bad ass, and people are supposed to care about him or something? It doesn't make a lot of sense. The Orpheus agents seem to be amoral and harassing people with some sort of body jumping technology at the behest of rich people. I don't actually understand why they are supposed to care that there's some bad dude out there doing bad things. It all sort of runs together, where the story can't decide if it's doing an intelligence agency story or what. Basically, the characters appear to be shadowrunners for hire in a big corporation. Like Dollhouse, and like Dollhouse, it really isn't that good.


Not even a low cut shirt could stop that show from having a shitty premise.

So anyway: there's a corporation and they have super science that puts people into cryo-freeze so that they can send their spirits out and spy on people or haunt them. That's... really weird. Not at all obvious how you'd tie that in with anything else in the world of darkness, but I'm guessing you weren't really supposed to. You get to play the bad guys from Quantum Leap only without the time travel. And there are badder guys who are ghosts on purpose and I don't actually know why I'm supposed to give a fuck.

AncientH:

One of the up-or-downsides of Orpheus is that despite teasing itself as a Wraith spin-off/spiritual sequel, it wasn't strongly connected to the rest of the WoF. This is probably because making it a Pentex subsidiary would have hypothetically fucked with Werewolf's endgame, and the Technomancy rules for necromancy are actually so remarkably straight forward you wouldn't need any of this "I stole this plot device from the Frighteners" bullshit.


Seriously, if someone told me Orpheus had started out as a Frighteners RPG, I'd believe them.

I mentioned before that Geist suffers a bit from being nWoD, and I'd like to explain that: oWoD had a fairly elaborate (if fairly nonsensical) map of the underworld. You had the Veil between the physical realm and the Shadowlands, which was sort of the ghostly counterpart to the real world, and then you could go off into a bunch of individual culturally-appropriate (and more than vaguely racist) afterlives like the Dark Empire of Steel or the Dark Empire of Flint or the Ivory Kingdoms/Bush of Ghosts, which were separated by perpetual storms, and then somewhere past that you had some really weird Far Realms which were like self-made heavens and hells, and all of that was just a giant fucking whirlpool surrounding the infinite abyss that was hell.

New World of Darkness...not so much. There's an underworld, yes, but it's at once sadly more coherent and less fleshed out, and appears more to be based on Exalted than the oWoD version. Also, and I want to stress this, all of the gamelines pretty much only use the generic underworld in nWoD if and when they want to; most of them appear to fucking ignore it. To the extant that of the 5+ necromantic disciplines available to various vampire bloodlines, I'm pretty sure only 1 ever actually mentions any aspect of the geography of the underworld as used by, say, Mage: the Awakening.

So right the fuck away you're at a bit of a downside for both games in terms of interacting with the larger world. I mean, theoretically you as an Orpheus employee can go peek in on the vampire's crypt or something. But in Geist if run across a vampire necromancer, but none of you are going to be playing by the same ruleset when it comes to interacting with ghosts, and not even share much of the same language when it comes to talking about the things you're trying to do, and that's just poor game design right there. For example, can a Dragolescu vampire with Essentiaphagia eat a fucking geist? No clue! You're a bad person even for asking.


Also, Wraith had style.

FrankT:

There are a bunch of vignettes in the opening fiction of Geist. People die in various magical ways. Something something about keeping ghosts out, which is important for some reason. Kind of incoherent, but sets the tone and explains the what the fuck way better than Orpheus. Not that this is a high bar.

AncientH:

I'm going to give the designers of both books their props here: while neither book has the iconic look and design of Wraith: the Oblivion, both of them are actually solid efforts once we get past the glowy font phase in Geist. Also while both books are way fucking long - arguably way fucking longer than they should be - the approach that both take is actually reasonably straightforward and concise. We bitched about Lunars because of the low information density, shoddy design and layout, and many other sins besides, but at the points these were made White Wolf basically had a step-by-step guide to creating workable shelfbreaker main game books, and it shows. Ostensibly both books only have 4-5 chapters with no-nonsense titles like "Character Creation," "Systems," and "Storytelling" being the meat of the book, and appendices and introductions and prefaces and shit are just there to fluff the page count.

Of course, at this point you might well ask yourself why Character Creation, Systems, and Storytelling are their own fucking chapters, since these are all World of Darkness games, and that gets into a very high-level aspect of game design. See, GURPS is the kind of game where you all buy the main GURPS book and then you buy additional books with more rules to add onto it as needed; White Wolf sortof-kindof acknowledges that approach, but when it comes to their "core" game books they always like each one to be able to stand alone. On the good side, that means you could pick up Wraith: the Oblivion or Orpheus: the Necrophiliacs or Geist-hard with Vengeance (wait, did I do that joke already?) and never have to worry about another fucking White Wolf product for as long as you may live.

On the bad side, that means every single fucking game has separate mechanics and unique subsystems, and these can quickly or slowly drift out of phase until eventually you've got a bunch of game ostensibly based on the same system with skills that overlap and rules that disagree and other rules that just can't fucking relate. oWoD got around this by various tie-together products so that Eastern Vampires treated Western Vampire blood points as yin chi and crap like that, but nWoD made the command decision in the beginning that they were not going to be having all of that, which is why you can get into some serious arguments over what the fuck constitutes a "Wasteland" in your nWoD game and...and...well, it annoys me on the obsessive completionist level, because part of the "fun" of oWoD was trying to figure out how the pieces went together, and in nWoD they couldn't even be fucked to decide what shape the pieces were, much less the picture.

Man, and this started life as a compliment about the layout looking better than some other games at the time.

In White Wolf, nudity in art was okay if it was on a corpse. True story.

[Prak]

Also, the project lead is credited as “Lucien Soulban.” That sounds like a joke, but he's from Saudi Arabia and I think it's a happy coincidence.

From his website:

Q. Is Lucien Soulban your real name?
A. Yes, and there's actually more to it than that. The men on my father's side of the family were named Shukri or Moussa… the name alternated with each generation or sibling. When I was born, I was destined to be a Moussa Soulban, but my mom refused. She didn't want her son growing up with that burden. Moussa, you see, means Moses (though Moses Soulban would have been a cool name for a writer). Instead, my mother suggested that my two middle names be Moussa Shukri, the names of my grandfather and father. They then gave my grandmother (on my mom's side) the choice for my first name, and she chose either Lucien or Christopher. They opted for Lucien.

Q. That's an interesting name. What does it mean?
A. In full, Lucien Moussa Shukri Soulban translates as Light-bringer (Lucien), Moses (Moussa), Thanks (Shukri), Holy Crosses (Soulban). So my name literally means Light-Bringer Moses Thanks Holy Crosses. I figure that'll get me a few brownie points on entering Heaven.

The fact that someone actually legally from birth named Lucien Soulban who wasn't born to crazy scary "the bad kind" satanists exists to write Orpheus is perhaps the most convincing evidence I will ever see that there is a higher power, and not only that, but he's nowhere near as uptight as people think he is.

Also, I think he got hired at White Wolf primarily on the basis of his name.

[TheFlatline]

We played one. Precisely one game of Wraith. I think it lasted three sessions.

First session everyone tried to play everyone else's shadow and it was a clusterfuck.

Second session the storyteller tried to play everyone's shadow and by the end of the night we agreed that was too much work to do for him. So I offered to ditch my character and play everyone's shadow while the storyteller just kind of ran the game.

That was the third session. I walked back and forth behind the players and whispered into their ears what their shadow was saying. The session ended with me convincing one player by using his passions and fetters (the emotions that kept him ghostly and the things he considered important, in this case a deep urge to protect his teenage daughter who was getting into drugs) that the best way to protect his daughter was to let the shadow take control (you black out when this happens so I promised the PC there would be no guilt, I'd bear that burden for the both of us), then have us kill her, and then be there to bring her into the land of the dead where she can't leave us ever again.

And the player agreed because he couldn't see how the PC *wouldn't* agree, and gave control over to the shadow.

We stopped the game before we got to "that point", all kind of looked at each other, I apologized for freaking the entire group out, and we stopped playing and went out and drank a lot of beer to forget the experience.

And that's the one time I played Wraith.

[TheFlatline]

nWOD had this idea where they wanted to pull a D&D and have a "core" book and then "splat" books like Vampire, Mage, etc... So they released the mostly useless World of Darkness blue book.

Their original argument at the time was one of two things: One, yes the core book was 30 dollars, and you would have to spend another 30 dollars buying the Vampire book, but in moving all the generic rules over to the blue book, think of how much more material they can put into the Vampire book! Yeah, Vampire the Masquerade only cost 30 bucks and this was twice the price, but it was going to be twice the content!

The second argument was actually contradictory to the first: By making all the core rules exist in the 30 dollar blue book, they could push the flavor books down 10 bucks a pop because they wouldn't be as long because they wouldn't have the generic rules in each of them. So in the end if you bought Werewolf, Vampire, and Mage, you spent the same amount of money as oWOD. And if you go in for the niche games, you save even more!

Of course, to point 1 it was quickly observed that even though they pulled 200 pages worth of material out of Vampire the Requiem, they covered pretty much the exact same territory that oWOD covered at the same page count. In fact, the major bitch was that they covered *less* ground than Vampire, due to the "every city is an island" thing that they set the game up as.

To point 2, that was originally bandied around when the core blue book was originally announced, but when pricing structure was named WW pretended like they never said that. Ever. Pinky swear ever.

Then they decided that all their books were going to be fucking hardcover, right down to the LARP rules, because when playing in a LARP obviously you want a giant fucking hard cover field manual to juggle along with your deck of cards because fuck rock paper scissors.

[Username17]

There was a third argument in favor of having a core rulebook: gameline transparency. In oWoD, the rules for doing basic things were repeated in each line. But like a game of pretentious gothic telephone, they were different each time. This was a game where the combat system tried to model the difference between kicking and jabbing and throwing a haymaker by giving out various die (or in earlier versions: target number) modifiers to attack and damage rolls. So when those numbers were subtly different in the mage book and the werewolf book and the vampire book, that was a major headache.

Now that being said, while nWoD did successfully end the period of no one knowing what the combat rules that were being used actually were (what with the extremely high probability that your storyteller is misremembering some of the rules for the game you are nominally playing and substituting rules from other storyteller games), they fixed them to combat rules that were extremely bad. Also, while you'd think that gameline transparency would make the coveted "monster squad" game a reality, it seriously didn't.

Firstly, the whole "and there shall be no metaplot" thing that nWoD had going on meant that none of the hooks in Mage really interacted with the hooks in Werewolf, and vice versa. So while most of the nWoD lines had serious "what the fuck are we supposed to do?" problems, as soon as you tried to mix any of the titles that problem got like a hundred times worse. Secondly, the power discrepancy was insane. While Vampires, Werewolves, and Mages all nominally used the same ruleset, there was just no comparison in what they could do. Mages > Vampires > Werewolves. No one seriously disputes that. Geists, by the way, are closer to the Mage end of the scale. And thirdly, while they did make a line of "generic" books that were supposedly usable with any of the game lines or mixtures of game lines, those were extremely terrible.

-Username17

[Longes]

If I remember correctly, Bishop is a guy from the proto-Orpheus. It was a government(?) program where they took dangerous psychotic criminals and forced them out of their bodies. What could possibly go wrong?
Bishop guy decided not to go back into his body, found a superpowerful evil spirit in the world of the dead, and is now working on bringing that spirit into our world, which would result in an apocalypse. He is still a dangerous psychotic (dead) criminal who will kill you for lulz.

[Ancient History]

Introductions


Pleased to meet you too.

Your musical accompaniment for this section is Head Full of Ghosts.

FrankT:

I'm writing my section on a bus this time around, so if we get out of a sync, I'm blaming that.

Both Geist and Orpheus do have introductions, so we can do a simple apples to apples comparison. First things first: White Wolf used to put up little pithy quotes at the start of their chapters, kind of like how K and I did on the Tomes. White Wolf old world of darkness material wasn't always coherent or even good, but it was stylistically important. By the time nWoD came around, they had to stop doing it. And by “had to” I mean that they literally had to. They had apparently gotten in some legal trouble over the fact that they were copying rather long quotes. And you can kind of see how that might be. By the time they got to Orpheus, White Wolf had gotten so cavalier with plagiarism that their opening “quote” for the Orpheus introduction is the entire nine sentence “I see dead people” exchange from The Sixth Sense. That's... a bit much to be fair. I can see how they might have been told by legal that going forward they weren't allowed to do that shit anymore. The replacement was to put small pieces of written fiction in unreadable fonts. Geist isn't as bad about this as DaVinciForwardRegular or anything, but it's definitely a step backward. These paragraphs of “original” text aren't as original as the actual rip off texts of the old days, which is bogus and sad. Honestly, all they needed to do was adapt quotes or limit themselves to quotes small enough to be considered fair use. This is really a baby and bathwater scenario.

AncientH:

Geist is actually a bit of a throwback in some respects, because it's introduction - in addition to a long tirade about theme and mood - is a section on "sources and inspirations" listing different books and movies that have informed the work and are basically relevant. This used to be fairly common, and you might remember that GURPS does this thing too - although they like to stick it in the back of the book rather than front loading it.

However, reading this (highly) abbreviated list you're kind of struck by how far we've come; their sources tend to be like Light Rock radio stations: classic (M.R. James), 80s (Flatliners), or now (Persona 3). It's obviously a cherry-picking list, and not even a particularly choosy one - for fuck's sake, Thir13en Ghosts and Final Destination are on there, and you'd have to pay me money to roleplay games based on those properties.

Orpheus is a bit more relevant; it eschews talking about literature and gaming to delve more strongly into the impact of movies on how we think about death and the afterlife, citing (as with Geist) The Sixth Sense, Dragonfly, Stir of Echoes and for some reason Aliens. To sum up the lesson they've learned from these films:

The first major plot twist comes into play 15 to 20 minutes in, after we establish the world's reality; the twist then helps frame the action for the series.

Now, this sounds a lot like "somebody took a screenwriting class," but it goes a little deeper than that in that Orpheus is patently presented as a limited-run game patterned on movies.

FrankT:

The introduction of Orpheus is 10 pages, the introduction of Geist is only 4. Orpheus leaves itself with rather a lot of ground to cover, and it attempts to cover as much as possible in the intro, which is basically why the into drags on for 10 pages. Geist, by contrast, has a rather simple premise to get across, and even four pages feels pretty fucking padded.

Basically, nWoD games are incredibly formulaic. High level design on one of these games is pretty much a Mad Libs that you can fill out in an hour. At various points, I've contributed to three unoficial nWoD splats of various levels of seriousness: Leviathan, Witch, and Zombie. Now, all of those projects withered on the vine, because ultimately they all hit the same wall: nWoD mechanics are terrible in a way that actually feels like it would be very easy to fix, but if you actually change those rules you aren't backwards compatible anymore. But if you were being paid real money and had no pride so having your product ship with a deeply shitty ruleset didn't bother you, writing one of these games would be a snap.

To illustrate this principle, I'm going to do the high level design on a new nWoD splat right now while I'm on the bus to Prague with nothing but my laptop and some Godsmack CDs: Abominable. It's about being a
Sasquatch. So the first thing is that you need to have five different types of monster and then you need five arbitrary groups of monsters because nWoD runs on its stupid five by five paradigm like a hamster in a wheel. So in Abominable, you get to be from one of five Cryptid Lineages: Big Foot, Jotun, Ogre, Wendigo, or Yeti. Then you are a member of one of five tribes: The Stone Hurlers, The Moon Hunters, The Ice Walkers, The Flesh Tearers, or the Rain Watchers. Then we need to name our special Potency stat, which we will call Cthonus; and our power points, which we will call Gravity for no reason. Now we need to name disciplines in the generic sense and also to come up with between 12 and 15 of them that need names specifically (some number of the Tribes get to hand out new power categories and the others fiddle with background costs). So the categories of powers are called “Vestiges” and our specific Vestige paths are named: Echoes (let's you see the past, become invisible, and project your voice), Reptus (gives you misc. dinosaur powers), Divination (self explanatory), Solaris (sun powers), Eternity (limited time powers and supernatural toughness), Glacius (ice powers), Masticality (sympathetic magic, strength stealing, and close combat powers), Arbory (plant powers), Dislocation (Confusion, stealth powers, and limited teleportation), Lithitude (stone powers), Triumph (the Tribal sorcery of the Stone Hurlers – it gives you various social effects and thus makes you win at this game), Psychopomp (the necromantic sorcery of the Flesh Tearers), and North Star (the incoherent grab bag sorcery of the Ice Walkers). Now we need a couple of extra Backgrounds that probably could have been done with the backgrounds of the basic book but are slightly tailored to this book: we have Roots (which is like Allies but better because it's like your extended and/or adopted family of people who secretly have limited manifestation of their Cryptid Blood), Runestones (which is like wealth, but it's specifically that you have ancient stone currency that only people in this book seem to care about), and Ancestor (which is like Mentor, but it's specifically that there's an ancient Cryptid who is like your great great grandfather or something). The party will need a name as well, and since coterie and pack are taken, we're going to call the group a “Family.” There also need to be some antagonists, which I suppose we're going to call “The Collectors” (for the human super scientist enemies) and “The Boneless” (for your creepy cryptid antagonists). And now our high level design is basically done at this point, and it's totally inconceivable that this shit would actually take twelve people brainstorming to come up with, let alone another eleven people to write it all down. You might think that having two flavors of European Sasquatch, two flavors of North American Sasquatch, and one flavor of Central Asian Sasquatch would be insufficient global diversity, but that's actually more global ethnic coverage than is typical for a nWoD title.

Anyway, Geist's massive author pool seems to have missed the boat at how fucking easy this shit is. Or possibly there are just so many people suggesting stuff for the madlibs lines that they ended up lumping a lot of this shit in. But for whatever reason, the introduction has a glossary that defines fifty two terms, and while it does tell you what the name of disciplines are in general in this game (they are called “manifestations”), it doesn't tell you what any of them are called – so this fifty two term glossary is like amazingly incomplete. Like, whoah. Anyway, in Geist, your party is called a “Krewe,” which since AncientHistory has lived in Florida and I have not, I'll let him handle that.

AncientH:

This is a krewe.

A krewe (pronounced "crew") are groups that get together to make floats for Carnival/Mardi Gras parades. They're pretty thick in New Orleans and, for reasons I have never quite understood, Tampa, Florida. They're basically a lot like Shiners but instead of fezzes they buy weird matching outfits and huge inflatable pirate ships so that they can throw beads at women who take their shits off and shitty plastic coins at whoever brought kids to what's basically a three-mile-long street party. Some of them are actually quite famous, exclusive, and expensive to join; others you give 'em $20 and they give you a hat and let you march behind the actual floats.

Anyway, because of the New Orleans connection and Ks are Kool rule, krewes have been inexplicably linked with voodoo even though they're really not, and that's sort of why Geist is appropriating the word here.

Re: Mad Libs - I think someone at White Wolf lost the back sheet when they were penciling in nWoD, because one thing you notice a lot is that the gamebloat is fast and frequent. Geist isn't even the worst example with it's umpteen manifestations; the discipline bloat in nWoD Vampire is awesome to behold. But I digress.

FrankT:

While we mock nWoD for being too formulaic (and we are right to do so), oWoD had something of the opposite problem. Every game attempted to really sell itself as a stand alone product, and there was a lot of wheel reinvention going on. Each oWoD game had its own mechanics, its own metaphysics, its own rhetoric, its own histrionics, and pretty much anything else you could imagine that ended in “-ic.” Every level was
different, with each line giving their own die roll modifiers for kicking things, their own explanation of how many other worlds there were, and their own backstory for Rasputin. So when it comes to making a new oWoD game, you have to do a lot more than fill in the spaces labeled “noun” and “pretentious Latinification of a verb,” you have to come up with a whole... thing. The idea was that Vampire was “Gothic Horror” and Werewolf was “Savage Horror” and Mage was... whatever the fuck Mage was. And anyway, each line was supposed to set out and make itself meaningfully distinct from all the others. Wraith had attempted to make itself distinct by being way more depressing than all the others, and that didn't work so the Orpheus authors decided to go Cinematic. Orpheus is supposed to be literally like a movie, which isn't a terrible plan until they tell you that they think that means that there should be a total of six books in this movie, and that each book should be an even portion of the two hours. Which comes out to 20 minutes of film for this entire 309 page book. That is not me making fun of them, that is what they actually say in this fucking introduction, This works out to a little less than 4 seconds of footage per page.

The concept here is that in Orpheus you work for the Orpheus Corporation, which is basically the kid from Sixth Sense all grown up and made into a for-profit corporation that deals with ghosts for living people. That's not me condensing it for you, that's them again. They mention the Sixth Sense a lot in this introduction. I honestly lost count of how many times they name checked that movie. Weirdly, they don't really mention Flatliners. That seems odd to me, because the main conceit is that the people they can load into their ghost projection machines are people who've already had multiple near-death experiences. So it's basically the plot device from Flatliners more than The Sixth Sense. But for whatever reason, the movies they really harp on are The Sixth Sense, and to a slightly lesser extent Dragonfly and Stir of Echoes. In their discussion of film theory, they name check a pile of other movies, some of which are even ghost related (13 Ghosts, House on Haunted Hill, and The Haunting), but some of them are just movies that the authors like (Aliens, and Deep Blue Sea. Yes, really. Someone thinks Deep Blue Sea is important for discussing film theory). All in all, we're basically reading Lucien Soulban's insane film theory essay with the hook being that he's making a roleplaying game to hang it on. This is bad.



There's a basic disconnect here that is really quite obvious. If you're going to put a movie out in book form, you make each movie a book. You don't make one movie into six books. That doesn't make any fucking sense. If you want to make more books, that is what series of movies are for. Fuck!

AncientH:

One of the downsides of Wraith is that while everything dies, the dead had relatively limited ways to interact with the living - which was good, because they had their whole necrology to sort the fuck out with terrifying monsters made from dead souls and afterlife bureaucracies that make fucking Beetlejuice look speedy and caring.


Must we go Hawai'ian?

But the dead still interact with the living world a little bit, and to let them interact more White Wolf threw in a lot about mediums (humans that can speak to the dead), the risen (wraiths that possess their corpses), and necromancers (occultists that use/abuse/love the dead). And all was...well, okay. But the idea in Orpheus and Geist was to sort of tie the game more strongly into the contemporary, materialistic world; Orpheus does this with Flatliners technology, and Geist does this by making everybody Brother Voodoo.


No it's cool, they're free trade.

Basically, both games have you play medium-type characters. I'm not saying that's bad, but it also falls far short of what it could be. I kinda like the idea of having a game where your party could be a superzombie, a street houngan/necromancer, a medium who only talks to the ghosts of dead animals and has a crippling gambling addiction, etc. Instead, we've got a party of Haley Joel Ozments.


Also, I think Soulban might have a man-crush on Kevin Bacon.

FrankT:

Geist is stuck with a really stupid name. It's called “Geist: The Sin Eaters” and there's really nothing you can do with that. “Geist” sounds stupid and “Sin Eaters” sounds even moar stupid. The concept isn't really all that bad, you're a death spirit/human hybrid character and you run around solving problems and collecting Adam from broken little sisters to gain power. I think it's a little dishonest to bring out a game that is “about ghosts” and have the players not actually be ghosts but instead humans who allowed themselves to be possessed by death spirits to take a mulligan on dying. But false advertising and shitty nomenclature notwithstanding, this is at least a concept that has legs.

But this introduction isn't mostly about talking about that concept. It's about telling you about mood and theme and how you should totally play Grim Fandango and Persona 3. I agree, but um... what? Much of the introduction is taken up with a recommended watching list. This time they actually do ask you to watch Flatliners, but a lot of it is about how you should watch police procedurals to get an idea of the pacing of mysteries. It's actually kind of puzzling, but as furniture polish drinking advice to new storytellers goes, this is a lot less bad than many other examples. Including Orpheus, for the purpose of this comparison tirade.

AncientH:

Kevin Bacon? Check. Ghosts? Check. Goddammit I bet Soulban is filling out the Mad Libs right now.

Wraith sort of fell into one of the White Wolf traps in that it was by and large a game of personal horror: everybody was more or less stuck up with resolving their fetters and crap from their old life back on Earth, so that the immediate politics of the underworld weren't always enough of an excuse for a gang of ghosts to form and pal around with one another. Orpheus and Geist don't quite solve that problem. I mean, for Orpheus you at least have a job and are getting paid, so that's something. Geist...eh. Your death spirit wants to touch dicks with other, like-minded death spirits to go do death-spirit things. You could go all Ghost Busters with that, but it's a bit of a stretch.


Let's team up! Work less, earn more.

FrankT:

Basically, Orpheus fails at the introduction, which is impressive. The whole concept is stupid. Not the concept where you work for a secretly evil corporation that has ghost diver machines and you're irreplaceable agents because you're threshold crossers. That is fine (although it's essentially completely incompatible with any other part of the World of Darkness). The thing where the authors thought that they could release the plot to a single thriller over the course of six fucking books.



Geist fails in that it is built on a faulty foundation (nWoD), and put up by way too many people. Four pages into the book proper and they've already defined fifty two terms. There are some core concepts here that could have been OK, but this book is already a mess and it hasn't even really started. We'll get to the real clusterfuck in the chargen section.

AncientH:

I also take offense to my White Wolf Vocabulary Lesson including a bunch of mundane fucking words like "ceremony." I know what a ceremony is, asshole. I also kinda don't like that Geist recycles so much vocabulary from Wraith and Exalted but uses it in slightly different ways just to fuck with people carrying too much rules and setting material in their heads. Also, despite borrowing words like "krewe," most of the vocabulary for the underworld is taken from ancient Greek mythology, instead of ancient Sumerian or something. That would make sense in Orpheus (because Orpheus is from Greek myth), where they don't do it, but they do it in Geist, where it doesn't make sense.

[TheFlatline]

There was a third argument in favor of having a core rulebook: gameline transparency. In oWoD, the rules for doing basic things were repeated in each line. But like a game of pretentious gothic telephone, they were different each time. This was a game where the combat system tried to model the difference between kicking and jabbing and throwing a haymaker by giving out various die (or in earlier versions: target number) modifiers to attack and damage rolls. So when those numbers were subtly different in the mage book and the werewolf book and the vampire book, that was a major headache.

Now that being said, while nWoD did successfully end the period of no one knowing what the combat rules that were being used actually were (what with the extremely high probability that your storyteller is misremembering some of the rules for the game you are nominally playing and substituting rules from other storyteller games), they fixed them to combat rules that were extremely bad. Also, while you'd think that gameline transparency would make the coveted "monster squad" game a reality, it seriously didn't.

Firstly, the whole "and there shall be no metaplot" thing that nWoD had going on meant that none of the hooks in Mage really interacted with the hooks in Werewolf, and vice versa. So while most of the nWoD lines had serious "what the fuck are we supposed to do?" problems, as soon as you tried to mix any of the titles that problem got like a hundred times worse. Secondly, the power discrepancy was insane. While Vampires, Werewolves, and Mages all nominally used the same ruleset, there was just no comparison in what they could do. Mages > Vampires > Werewolves. No one seriously disputes that. Geists, by the way, are closer to the Mage end of the scale. And thirdly, while they did make a line of "generic" books that were supposedly usable with any of the game lines or mixtures of game lines, those were extremely terrible.

-Username17

Yeah that came later just before publication. The argument was that so many games had crossovers that hey, now you can officially have crossovers. The argument also suggested that all three of the core books should have characters roughly on the same power level as each other, which seemed fucking stupid. So Vampires remained untouched, the werewolf developers for some reason listened to the vampire fans instead of the werewolf fans and made the werewolves so unbelievably weak that a straight up human boxer could probably punch out a beginning PC werewolf in war form, and then the Mage developers said "fuck you" to the idea of power equality and went off and did their own thing.

It was a pretty bad cluster fuck and I literally gave up on WW when the devs came out and copped to nerfing werewolf because the vampire fanboys were pissed that vampires couldn't go toe-to-toe in all out combat with a monster whose entire schtick is being a walking food processor.

Of course, I was most of the way there with the complete "there's nothing to do in the new Vampire game except fuck the other PCs over" lack of setting that nWOD dumped on me... The 30-40 dollar splat books that insisted on being hardcover just to introduce antagonists into the game would have made me ragequit if I hadn't already.

[TheFlatline]

I remember liking the basic concept of Orpheus but wondering how the fuck to make it... like... *work*.

The idea that I came up with was basically that of the 90's dot com boom. The Administrators (never named, often referred to) had developed this technology, raised a massive fuckton of investment capital, and now... were trying to figure out the underwear gnomes' Step 2 so that they could go on to Step 3 and hit Profit before the investors turned on Orpheus and made everyones' lives really interesting.

Problem is, that concept is actually kind of comedic. Especially juxtaposed against the horrific shit you're supposed to be encountering as an employee of Orpheus. So you'd have debriefs where you found the what agents dubbed the Tannhauser Gate on the edge of town that you're reasonably certain that once opened leads directly to hell, and your supervisor is nodding and saying "well that's very interesting but *how* does it maintain profitability for our organization? Maybe Legal can figure out something to do with that gate... thingie."

My attempt at Orpheus turned into something between Ghostbusters and Paranoia, inadvertently.

[Rawbeard]

So what is the story behind this Samuel Haight character? Seems like some forum joke.

[Username17]

So what is the story behind this Samuel Haight character? Seems like some forum joke.

Samuel Haight was a character from the old World of Darkness that kept showing up in different lines, collecting various bullshit powerups that let him use powers from different books in order to be better than the PCs. This is an actual line from his bio:

After becoming a powerfully Wyrm-tainted kinfolk-werewolf-independent-ghoul-hybrid, Haight acquired a magical artifact that provided him with an Arete rating.

The character gradually pissed more and more people off with his special snowflakeness, and eventually one of the authors had him just straight up killed by a powerful vampire and then had his ghost soulforged into an ashtray to sit on a desk in the netherworld. Although I think he probably has clones, because the nineties.

-Username17

[Rawbeard]

So that is an actual, official NPC. That they used with a straight face. And that line from the Bio, which made me believe he has to be some kind of parody in the first place, is serious for reals that happened inside the WoD just like that?

The Fuck?

[Longes]

Behold his charsheet and despair!

[talozin]

Mrs. talozin is sort of fascinated with the real world notion of the "sin-eater", which is a kind of religious absolution ritual that shows up in various guises around the world. So she was intensely curious about this game and probably would have been an easy mark for it, if only it had been any good. I found the Discipline system (whatever they're called for this game) to be both excessively complex and excessively vague, which is not a great combination. The only reason Ars Magica's magic system kind of worked at all is because it is pretty fucking clear which pieces are verbs and which pieces are nouns, and it is fairly clear what the verbs are supposed to do and what the nouns are allowed to do. And it still generates arguments over what's a reasonable effect.

Geist doesn't have that level of clarity in its "magic" system, and the result is a headache.

[Longes]

Mrs. talozin is sort of fascinated with the real world notion of the "sin-eater", which is a kind of religious absolution ritual that shows up in various guises around the world. So she was intensely curious about this game and probably would have been an easy mark for it, if only it had been any good. I found the Discipline system (whatever they're called for this game) to be both excessively complex and excessively vague, which is not a great combination. The only reason Ars Magica's magic system kind of worked at all is because it is pretty fucking clear which pieces are verbs and which pieces are nouns, and it is fairly clear what the verbs are supposed to do and what the nouns are allowed to do. And it still generates arguments over what's a reasonable effect.

Geist doesn't have that level of clarity in its "magic" system, and the result is a headache.

Wasn't Geist magic "dot - effect"? Like Vampire's disciplines, and not like Mage's shperes? What's unclear about it?

[talozin]

Wasn't Geist magic "dot - effect"? Like Vampire's disciplines, and not like Mage's shperes? What's unclear about it?

Geist has "Nouns" (actual name: "Keys") and "Verbs" (actual name: "Manifestations"), and you can do things based on the combinations of nouns and verbs you have. So, for instance, if you have "The Stillness Key" and "The Rage Manifestation" you can do certain things based on how many dots in "Rage Manifestation" you have. And if you have "The Tear-Stained Key" and "The Rage Manifestation" you can do other, often completely different, things. This is only a little like Mage but is very much like Ars Magica, where you combine a Latin verb (example: "Creo" // "Create") and a Latin noun (example: "Aquam" // "Water") to do things that fall under the general heading of "create water".

The inclarity comes in the fact that unlike Ars Magica's nouns and verbs, Geist's nouns and verbs are all very evocatively and vaguely named. I know what "Understand Fire" can do at a conceptual level even if the exact statistics I need to determine how long a given fire will burn might be open to argument. I don't have a fucking clue what "The Stigmata Key" + "The Boneyard Manifestation" does, and Geist makes it worse by having that combination do some highly specific things.

I don't know if the worst of all possible worlds is having a large number (any time you buy a new Verb or a new level of Noun, you gain a number of new powers equal to your total number of whichever you didn't buy) of extremely specific powers that are named and arranged in confusing and allusive ways. Probably not, but I didn't care for it.

[Koumei]

Ars Magica, where you combine a Latin verb (example: "Creo" // "Create") and a Latin noun (example: "Aquam" // "Water") to do things that fall under the general heading of "create water".

"So Creo and Corpus lets you create dead bodies - you can then move life into them or create new life in them or just animate them depending on what other things you have."
"Creo Ignus also creates dead bodies."
"Well yes, but that has the material component of living bodies."

[Ancient History]

Chapters One:
The World of the Dead
At the Cemetary Gate


Some lands of the dead are classier than others.


This is a Lychgate. It's where Gygax got the name “Lich” from.
AH Note: He might also have gotten it from Lovecraft's Lich Street in Arkham.

This section's musical accompaniment will be Voodoo People.

FrankT:

Eventually, we're going to go out of sync between these two books. Chargen is chapter 2 in Geist, but Chapter 3 in Orpheus. But for the time being, we can continue to apples to apples these books, so we might as well do that. In both cases “chapter 1” is actually the third item in the book, which is just a White Wolf thing, so we won't harp on it over much. For the duration of the read-through of the chapters 1, I will be drinking Praděd, which is basically Czech Chartreuse. It has a picture of a creepy old man on the bottle, which seems thematic somehow.

Before we get too far into the contents of these chapters, we should mention a bit about the chapter names, because they are perhaps inadvertently fairly revealing. Chapter 1 of Orpheus: Don't Look Back is called “The World of the Dead” while Chapter 1 of Geist: The Sin Eaters is called “At the Cemetery Gate.” If it sounds like the first is a lot more global than the latter, that's pretty accurate. Orpheus does a lot of world building that Geist just doesn't do. That was part of a consistent strategy with nWoD: everything was supposed to be incredibly small. Justin Achilli would give these rants about how it was because that way everything could be more “personal,” but mostly everyone just walked away with the question “Why the fuck am I supposed to care about this shit?” Supernatural monsters in the nWoD mostly just seems like crime that the police should handle, and power levels are mostly down to the point where the cops probably could just do that. On the other hand, oWoD routinely talked about technomantic space lasers and interdimensional demon armies when the authors went off their meds (which seemed to happen with greater and greater frequency as we moved towards Time of Judgment). And while Orpheus is not, its own protestations to the contrary, actually part of the World of Darkness, the oWoD drive for world altering magic gonzo is certainly there.

AncientH:

One of the issues with nWoD is that it used a lot of the same ingredients as oWoD, just in slightly different combinations. It's a bit like traveling to different countries and seeing what the local Coca-Cola tastes like, and then you fuck up and drink something you think is Coke but is really the local off-brand.

They encourage you to return the bottles so they can be reused.

So for example, Geist steals a lot from oWoD but puts them together in weird combinations. For example, the PCs in Geist aren't normal people that had a near-death experience and made a bargain with something to survive, they all started off as the kids from the Sixth Sense and then had a near-death experience and inappropriate death spirit touching. So you've got elements there of Mediums: Speakers with the Dead all over the damn thing, including the whole Benedanti "born with a caul" bit.

This was one of the few pictures I could find that didn't directly feature a vagina.

The first official chapter in Orpheus, for reasons that can only be attributed to a highly liberal prescription pad, begins with a quote of someone saying "Sweet Zombie Jeebus!"



...and for the same reason naturally segues into a multi-page supplement supposedly culled from one of those sensationalist magazines that clog up the aisles at supermarkets.

FrankT:

At 56 pages, The World of the Dead is not a short chapter by any means. It's physically more paper than At the Cemetary Gate, which comes in at 44. However, Geist's chapter 1 has a lot more text. Part of that is simply font choice: Geist has much denser text and the text fills up more of the page. But it's also content. The first seven pages of Orpheus' chapter 1 are fake magazine pages from in-world magazines talking about ghosts. This establishes a lot about the world of Orpheus, and how it's different from our world (or the World of Darkness, for that matter), but it certainly isn't a lot of words. Geist, by contrast, fits more than eleven hundred words on a page with its eye-straining ten point font, so in this case a picture is worth considerably more than a thousand words when it comes to page count.

Orpheus was packaged as a World of Darkness game, but even a casual glance at these magazine headlines shows you that isn't true. The actual central conceit of the World of Darkness is that the supernatural is, you know, secret. For fuck's sake, the star of the line is called The Masquerade! Living in a world with publicly available information about magitech and registered corporations with have patented techno-necromancy devices and give PR interviews to reporters from grocery store scandal sheets is basically totally the opposite of that. I don't know if they figured that because their World of Darkness stuff had recently been the best selling RPG line in the world and their Trinity line had died alone and unlamented that they needed to claim that any new science fiction game they made was really a World of Darkness game and not a stand-alone offering, but it really didn't work out. World of Darkness fans opened it up to see if it was a thing they wanted, and it was so obviously a base betrayal of everything the World of Darkness was, that it was rejected by its fanbase out of hand. If Gehenna hadn't come out the very following year, Orpheus would be remembered as a great betrayal of the fanbase. As is, it's scarcely remembered at all.

AncientH:

On the other hand, Orpheus continues to use a bunch of setting-specific terminology from Wraith & other games, so maybe it's just them fucking with you.

FrankT:

Geist represents a major change for nWoD, though I don't think anyone would call it a “betrayal” and nWoD didn't have enough fans in 2009 for anyone to have been offended. Mostly people just laughed at the stupid name. Geist: the Sin Eaters has luminaries. They aren't called that, they aren't really called anything, but in order to become a Geist you have to already be selected by destiny to be in tune with magic power. These people have various death related super powers, some of which seem pretty neat. Apparently some of them grow up being able to see or hear ghosts, and others are able to see the morbid parts of the future from birth. Some of these seem like pretty terrible disadvantages, and others are pretty great powers. But to the best of my knowledge, none of this is codified in any way. It's not a tie-in to Second Sight (the book nominally about people who have such powers), it's just prologue. You'd think that with the amount of pages in this fucking book and the immense density of the text, that there might be rules for some of this crap. But unless it's pretty well hidden, it doesn't exist. It's supposed to be in the past anyway – apparently before the game started, your character used to have the power of true prophecy or perhaps was constantly tormented by poltergeists or something. You know, whatever.

Ultimately, this book is what it is. And what it is is the work of an almost incomprehensibly overmanned staff. Twenty three people worked to put this together, which is about six times more than you could possibly justify. Obviously, lots of people had different ideas of what they wanted to do with the game, and various compromises were made. The result is something which is simply incomprehensible. So as a Geist, you are a hybrid entity, which is not the same as being possessed. You are both a regular human who is special both because you were born with death magic and because you later on died and got brought back to life by a death spirit and you're a death spirit, which isn't a ghost or a demon or an angel but some other thing. Got that? Of course you don't. This is a fucking mess. Somebody wanted to write a book about necromancers, someone wanted to write a book about ghosts possessing dead bodies, someone wanted to write a book about people who had a near death experience and could now fight ghosts, someone wanted to write Yu Yu Hakusho, and nineteen other people worked on this fucking thing. We'll really get there in the incredibly bloated character generation chapter, but very obviously a lot of people working on this submitted different five by five matrices for how to handle the nWoD ghost book and it all just sort of got hacked together.

AncientH:

Going back to what Frank was saying earlier, Geist gives us this bit right off the bat:

The Sin-Eater's Gift

The precise nature of a proto-Sin-Eater’s “gift” is left intentionally vague. The most common form it takes is an extrasensory ability to perceive ghosts or the imminent energy of death, but that can take many forms. The Unseen Sense Merit, found on p. 109 of the World of Darkness Rulebook, is one possibility, as are the psychic powers and thaumaturgy presented in Second Sight. In some cases, the gift might be wholly external to the individual in question: she might have been enspelled by a mage to serve as an acolyte, or she might have tasted the blood of a vampire with a rare ability to command ghosts. The only restriction is that the character cannot have possessed a major template before the Bargain: only mortals, albeit supernaturally-touched mortals, are spiritually “open” enough to bond with a geist.

One final note: these preliminary psychic powers don’t need to be accounted for on your character sheet, as they’re assumed to be a part of your character’s backstory and are subsumed by the addition of the Sin-Eater template.

Amazingly, the pre-Geist mortals sound much cooler and interesting to play than any of the post-Geist Bargainers, but it's also a bit of a fuck you to the players to say "Yeah, you had some weird necromantic power that made you special, but now you're cohabiting with a death spirit and don't anymore. Sucks to be you, I guess."

Also, and this is just me being picky again, but this hint of maybe Geist being part of a larger World of Darkness is more annoying to me than if they had just fucking ignored it completely. Because dammit what does happen if you run into a vampire necromancer?

FrankT:

After going through the magazine excerpts and a little story you don't care about, Orpheus has a heading called “Introduction.” Now, I know what you're thinking: “Wasn't the entire previous chapter called 'Introduction?' Why would we have an introduction immediately after the introduction?” And that would, of course, be a pretty reasonable thing to be thinking. While Orpheus wasn't written by 23 people like Geist was, it was written an even dozen people – which is still more than double the number you could possibly justify. So obviously, at least two people wrote an introduction, and rather than just allow themselves to have some precious word count thrown away, they sort of hammered it into place.

Orpheus tries to do an in-character and an out-of-character introduction running side by side. It's pretty incoherent. There are a series of in-world memos that are suggestions for employee hand-outs that have fake post-it notes on them with suggested changes before they actually get sent out. This is kind of like the old Shadowrun “hacked file” conceit, except that there's no provided in-world explanation as to how the fuck you're reading this shit. So these are “in-character” papers that you will never ever be allowed to look at in-character. What's the point?



The nomenclature is complex, probably in no small part because despite its own protestations to the contrary, this book was really obviously not originally written as a world of darkness book at all (or if it was, then it was originally some sort of “world of darkness in the future” book, and not the “alternate present of the world of darkness with ubiquitous necrotech” thing they ended up with). All the WoD terminology seems really hacked in sideways. This book is supposed to be a spy thriller about people who use advanced chemicals and cryo-freeze tanks to spiritually project into the land of the dead in order to fight monsters and perform spy missions – all the while working for a company that has sinister secondary objectives. There are of course, a couple of problems here: firstly, that's absolutely not what the world of darkness is about, and secondly that that's totally not what the fucking intro fiction was about either! The intro fiction was about amoral douchebags who worked for an amoral (and incredibly incompetent) company taking obscene amounts of money in order to use body projection to spy on bored housewives and drive business rivals to suicide. They fucking had their chance to sell me on the whole “totally important missions” thing and they fucking failed.

AncientH:

Orpheus reminds me an awful lot of this game:

...which is ripe for it's own OSSR at some point.

I was going to quote a long passage from Geist about how the term "sin-eater" came to be applied, but the tl;dr version is: it has nothing to do with what they actually do and they don't know why they call themselves that. Really, it's like asking a goth kid why they've named themselves after an East Germanic people.

FrankT:

I'm just going to quote this paragraph in full:

While the term “Threshold” refers in part to the manner in which a Sin-Eater first walked with Death during her Bargain, it is also used in a wider context when referring to the energy of death. A Sin-Eater who fell from a 57th-floor balcony is one of the Forgotten, but so is the memento of a tragic accident: a charred teddy bear pulled from the ashes of a fatal house fire, for example, or the blood-stained flywheel of an industrial machine that mangled an unlucky workman. A Sin-Eater has a Threshold determined by the manner in which he died, but so does his geist, which might not be the same Threshold as the Host. Even living people have a Threshold, though they don’t know it until the moment of their demise: Sin-Eaters can sense imminent death as plain as day, and a man two days away from being stabbed to death over a card game is no less one of the Torn than the Sin-Eater who took a bullet in the lung.

Got that? Of course you don't. The five threshold terms are used interchangeably to mean people who have died, people who will die, important items associated with deaths or dead people, the alignments of death spirits, or places where people died. I know that's more than five things, but the “five” in this case refers to the different predicates that threshold can take, rather than to the things that have or perhaps are thresholds. And in case you were wondering: “death by violence” is totally different than falling to your death or being caught in the gears of a blood-stained machine. Too many cooks is only the beginning of it. This is too many head chefs ordering around the cooks and also too many cooks besides! So many people were working on this fucking project that actually getting nomenclature straight was simply not going to happen. Not when there are 23 people creating it, and it's edited by scribendi.com. Yes, really. They outsourced editing to a god damned website, so obviously the “editor” wasn't going to rework all the bullshit drafts to use terms consistently. Given those limitations, they made sure to drone on and on about how every term meant like half a dozen things and was going to be used interchangeably to mean those different things throughout the book and you'd better get used to it.

The actual thresholds themselves overlap. A lot. Also they don't really cover the gamut of death very well. Basically it seems that despite the morbid subject matter, none of the people working on this project actually knew very much about death. And I'm not just talking about how “death by pestilence” apparently includes fucking cancer, which HPV and arctic fox parasites not withstanding is not normally a communicable disease. I'm talking about: if you get caught in an avalanche, is that “death by violence,” “death by deprivation,” “death by chance,” or “death by the elements?” Because as written it could totally be all of those fucking things, which means that four out of five of the categories are not meaningfully distinct.


Of the twenty leading causes of death, eighteen are in one category, and the other two are incoherently split between the other four.

AncientH:

After the introductory magazine article, Orpheus gives us an introductory spiral-bound lesson plan and a series of internal emails or private messages or something. There's a lot of basic Wraith metaphysics here (right down to the names of powers), but this being WW they go about it very weirdly. Hell, there's a post-it note on one page calling out the writer for having a description that reads like soft-core porn. (That's all in character by the way.)

Most of the rest of the chapter is a confusing mish-mash of out-of-character regular text and interposing snippets from newspaper articles and stuff. It's not quite Shadowrun-style level of "the magic came back," but it is reminiscent of, say, the Felix Castor series by Mike Carey.

FrankT:

Despite the fact that Orpheus claims that it does not have splats and Geist is part of the nWoD and claims that it does, the reverse is pretty much true. Just as I can't tell the difference between someone who died “by chance” from a long fall and someone who died “by violence” from a long fall, the different shades that Orpheus characters get seem pretty distinct. They are Banshees, Haunters, Poltergeists, Skin-Riders, and Wisps. There are ironically five of them, despite this not being a nWoD game, and they are pretty self explanatory just from the names. Orpheus would have made a much better nWoD game than Geist did, weird as that is to say.


Czech liquor also looks more ghostly than Geist.

AncientH:

Shadows and Dust
Players familiar with other World of Darkness sources, like World of Darkness: Book of Spirits or Werewolf: The Forsaken, might recognize that geists share aspects of ghosts and of spirits, the ephemeral denizens of
the Shadow who embody everything from plants and animals to abstract concepts like hope, fear, and hate.

That’s intentional: for all intents and purposes, geists are ghosts that have found a way to “hybridize” themselves with spirits. Exactly how they do this is a mystery: it could be that Sin-Eaters are right, and it requires a trip to the Underworld — Avernian Gates certainly exist that open into the Shadow as well as the physical realm, and it could be that ghosts must find their way to one of these gates to devour a spirit. Maybe the Underworld journey isn’t always necessary: spirits do enter the physical world sometimes, and a ghost in the right place at the right time could catch one unawares and absorb it. On the other hand, maybe it works the other way around: maybe a spirit of disease finds the resonance of a ghost that died of leukemia appealing and consumes it, thereby absorbing the fragmentary human consciousness into itself.

Whatever the “truth,” it’s largely irrelevant from the Sin-Eater’s point of view; the Bound have no means of interacting with the Shadow, and unless they’re extremely well-schooled in obscure occult lore, they probably don’t even know it exists, or that animistic spirits inhabit everything in the World of Darkness. They simply explain what they observe as best they can.

This makes it sound like Geist maybe-sortof interacts with the rest of the WoD cosmology, and then they pull the rug out from under the readers by saying "lol, who cares?" Because fuck you for maybe wanting to do something with that. Orpheus doesn't mention one damn thing about the oWoD at this point, but there's enough familiar bits from Wraith you could at least make a go of it.

FrankT:

Much of Geist's chapter is dedicated to rambling discussions about holidays, the fact that necromancers like old looking stuff because they think it looks cool, and italicized paragraphs of people ranting in-character about the Krewe's various pirate rules.


Orpheus takes the more expedient route of wasting page count by simply wasting page count. Little clippings from in-world newpapers, inter-office memos about how they want a team member who isn't a total tool, handwritten transcripts from TV shows, and a meandering narrative about working for the company. It's rambling and really poor at getting information across. I genuinely can't figure out whether this is supposed to be a bumbling academic institution, a hyper-competent MIB organization, or what. Twelve authors is still less than 23, but it's still way too fucking many. A dozen authors can't even decide what kind of pizza to order, let alone present a united front about what kind of secretly evil corporation they are writing about.

AncientH:

When Shadowrun does a big compilation of random documents, it's generally understood that they're compiled together on Jackpoint or Shadowland for others to read. In Orpheus, on the other hand, I have no clue who they expect to be reading this or how they would have access to all of this information - private chat and email transcripts, internal memos, all sorts of crap that the PCs shouldn't be able to read. It's annoying to me, because one of the things you as a writer/developer need to decide on is how to present the information to the readers, and this falls down on that--hard.

Meanwhile, in Geist:

Supernatural Trash Culture

Sin-Eater culture is an apparent contradiction. Their traditions look so obviously artificially constructed that an outsider might wonder if krewes really are all that sincere. If the average krewe is a house of culture, the paint on the doors is still wet; it uses rituals devised by its creators instead of an ancient tradition. New ideas fly thick and fast in a young krewe as it builds an edifice of ideas about the dead.

Worse yet, krewe culture is a cultural salad. Sin-Eaters mash together incompatible religions and see what comes of it. They grab discredited science, fringe history, mistranslated hieroglyphs, fake holy books pushed by long-dead hucksters, back issues of dubious anthropology journals. They even get the occult “wrong,” since they use more from 1960s paperbacks, crumpled religious tracts, and fairy tales than the contemporary, “postmodern” occult culture. To many of them a witch
isn’t a nice person practicing a reconstructed nature religion, but a stranger with an ugly face who poisons your well, gives your relatives cancer, and generally fucks your shit up. (In fact, in many krewes, Sin-Eaters want to be that kind of witch.) They cut up the world’s superstitions and extreme beliefs, paste it together, and try to read something coherent from the whole. It begs the question: why would anyone take it seriously?

Sin-Eaters take it seriously because their geists do. When a krewe is sanctified through ceremony, it receives a revelation about the nature of life and death. To the founders, this is a profoundly personal experience because the revelation seems to come out of their psyches. The result isn’t
something they always agree with, but it’s something that holds intense meaning for them, even if it’s built from all the spiritual trash gathered over a life of pop culture, spiritual musings, and hidden superstitions. It may not be the truth, but it’s enough to build on with holy days and secret names of power. That channel is enough to command the dead and invoke the gods — to experience a truth more essential than any catechism can provide.

This is all basically a fucking cover for the inability or lack of desire to make a consistent setting. Say what you will about Unknown Armies, but at least when they appropriated crap for their bullshit occult movements they used Chaos Magick as a legitimate excuse. This is just people claiming that you should lay off them for indulging in their bullshit made-up "pagan" religion.


This, basically.

FrankT:

Orpheus tries to be coy and mysterious about their enemies. But um... that's fucking stupid. You can't get the players to buy in to fighting dudes if you don't give them a reason to fight those dudes. This is pure motivational failure of the highest order. The players need a motivation to look under these rocks. “People are disappearing and we don't know why” would be good enough but “there's a secret organization we know nothing about except that it has secret goals that are opposed to the secret goals of this other organization whose goals are also secret” really truly is not.

Geist meanwhile, rants about how there used to be vast and powerful Geist-based conspiracies that operated multi-dimensional death cults that you might actually care about. But you know, that was all in the past, and these nights everything is boring and stupid like every other thing in nWoD. I hate nWoD so very much. Honestly, I think these are remnants of some of the proposals from the twenty three contributors that didn't make the final cut, which is a shame because a game where you're the people who have death powers due to having been forced to participate in a secret Soviet necrotech experiments sounds much cooler than what they actually went with. I assume that since the name of the book is “Geist” that in the original original proposal it was Nazi necrotech experiments, changed to Soviet-era stuff because the 1940s is now actually quite a long time ago. And then sadly abandoned because if they ran with cool ideas their company wouldn't have been liquidated.

AncientH:

Orpheus takes place in a world where, amazing to everyone involved, cryogenics actually works and they've brought back people and cured them of critical illnesses. You'd think that would be the set up to some sort of Larry Niven-style futuristic setting, and you would be wrong.



Geist takes place in a world where...um...poor people have a better-than-average chance of having a supernatural talent and dying in such a way as to attract a death spirit that wants to bond with them. No, seriously, they've got a whole section on why Sin-Eaters tend to come from the "underprivileged." Like seeing ghosts as the result of a nutritional deficiency or something.

This brings a critical question: in Orpheus, your PCs are employees getting paid to get drugged up and shoved in a cryotube and told to head toward the light. In Geist, you're...part of a krewe. But you still need to eat and shit, and there's no indication of what you do for a living. I guess you could always pull a "Neo out of the Matrix" thing and sub-standard food crops up as necessary.


No, seriously, can we cut a leg off one of the sleepers in the Matrix and eat that? I desperately need some red meat.

FrankT:

Vampire the Masquerade is called that because there's a really major theme about pretending to not be monsters. It's extremely central to the game. Werewolf: the Apocalypse is called that because there's a really major theme of war and destruction and the end of everything running through the game. Again, it's extremely central to the game. Wraith: the Oblivion is called that because entropy is wiping out everything including your sense of self during the course of the game. Again, “oblivion” is extremely central to the premise of the game. But by 2003, White Wolf titles just had shit after the colon because that is how White Wolf formatted their book titles and for no other reason. I can't really say that “Don't Look Back” is particularly central to the theme of Orpheus, it's just a catchy sounding subtitle. It's a reference to Orpheus and Eurydice, not to the game actually being presented. In nWoD, the subtitles continued their slide into irrelevance. Geist is called “the Sin Eaters” because... “Sin-Eater” is an alternate name for “The Bound,” which in turn is a name for Geists when you want to specify that you're talking about the death spirit-human hybrids and not the death spirits that can hybridize. But they don't actually do any “sin eating,” which is an actual thing that has nothing at all to do with this game. In short, by 2009 they had gotten so amazingly decadent that they were essentially taking random terminology they saw in an issue of National Geographic and slapped it into the book titles because someone thought it sounded cool.

AncientH:

I feel like we've been bitching about little things here, and that's because for all their differences and similarities both of these chapters are pretty much there just to get across the gist of the game and its setting to you. Now, Orpheus does more world-building, and Geist does more ass-pulling, as I think we've gotten across. The highlight of Orpheus is that it's all relatively new, the public may have started hearing about this, but the cryo-company that started it all only began in 1986; Geist is timeless in the sense that nothing the fuck in its history matters and everyone appears to be making shit up as they go along, and yet somehow you have people that can agree to use complex, overlapping terminology and organize themselves into krewes with established political positions. This reads a lot like someone started a random volume of Grant Morrison's The Invisibles and then put it back down without finishing it because they had a blowjob to get to.

Jim Crow is a more interesting character than both of these books combined.

Also, contrary to what I remembered, Geist does have a section on the other "major supernaturals" in nWoD, again suggesting that they're all part of a shared world but without actually providing enough information to allow them to interact. It's like somebody at White Wolf owned shares in Bacardi and wanted to drive the readers to drink.


Rum is the drink the dead like best.

FrankT:

Geist has the underworld monsters from Pan's Labyrinth.

Seriously, these guys.

I don't know how that's supposed to work. They are called “Cthonians,” and really the issue is that they are introduced in this book. Vampire necromancers, stygian mages, and werewolf spirit hunters all spectacularly fail to mention this shit. I genuinely don't know why nWoD insisted on constantly shitting in its own bed. Why can't the Geists be worrying about the weird angel thingies from Promethean or the ancient Atlantean Ifurita knockoffs from Mage? By introducing new cosmic antagonists for every fucking line, they ended up making all the antagonists seem really small. If all the Changelings could go around and just not notice these fucking Cthonians, how big of a problem could they possibly be?

Orpheus, of course, languishes under the opposite problem. They specifically call out that the Specters and other antagonists from Wraith: the Oblivion are totally around – which performs a function call to a rather large body of work. And since Orpheus is set in some sort of weird techno-necromantic near future set after or instead of the World of Darkness, it's not really at all obvious how all that crazy crap (and there is a lot of crazy crap) would fit in.

AncientH:

The major antagonists for Orpheus are, well, Orpheus itself. It's all Paul Reiser from Aliens and that Wayne Knight from Jurassic Park.

FrankT:

All in all, I'm severely unimpressed with both sets of worldbuilding. To really go anywhere or do anything with either you'd need to do some heavy ground floor overhauls. However, I have to give the nod to Orpheus. The world they present is incomplete and sold under false pretenses, but it is a world. Some of the in-world magazines are fun to read, and while the signature corporation fails to be effectively characterized, the soul projection machines are well characterized and there's clearly a game world there. Geist, by contrast, is just as empty as everything else in the nWoD. Nothing connects to anything else, and all the crazy shit is just so fucking small and unimportant that I feel that “getting in a car and moving to Kansas City” is an adequate solution to every presented problem.

AncientH:

You might think we're harping on this, but put it this way: in oWoD you had multiple different sects of supernaturals into voodoo as ya do, but they at least made an effort at different points to draw together the weird wraith-voodoo cults and mage-voodoo cults and vampire-voodoo cults so they could all coexist together. nWoD just said "fuck it" and let anybody use whatever terminology or trappings they wanted with no regard for who else in the game 'verse was also using that stuff. It's like in comics, you couldn't just use the Skrulls, you had to go ask permission from the Fantastic Four dudes first (which is why X-Men had the Shi'ar and Brood) - White Wolf just got tired of even pretending to give a shit about any of that.

Orpheus, for all its flaws, is at least White Wolf working a little outside its comfort zone, pushing its boundaries a little. Geist is...more of a throwback. They have a whole "Twilight Network" where people leave each other messages to necromantic raves written in chalk on century-old gravestones. In 2006. That shit couldn't be more dated if it was a private Usenet group you could only access through AOL.

Anyway, next up: Character Creation.

[TheFlatline]

Isn't the cthonian thing also showing up in that demon abomination that they're working on?

[TheFlatline]

Incidentally, the historical Sin Eater concept would make a cool WOD game:

You are a bad person. You know this. You died, saw hell, and have been very much assured that you're damned.

But you came back.

And others like you have found you, and showed you that as bullshit as the system is, you can cheat it. You're damned. Nothing that can be done about that. But you can take the sin of others onto you. You can rob Hell of it's prize and cheat Heaven of it's rules.

There's something appealing about this cosmic "fuck you". But it comes with it's perils. There are those who see power in what you do, and would like to harvest that power. There are philosophical differences among the Sin Eaters causing schizms. Then there are the angels and demons who are out to restore balance and put the old rules back. You're in their way. Something will have to be done about that. It's not your fight. But that's okay: You've sort of gotten used to taking on other peoples' burdens by now.

[Maxus]

I remember some urban fantasy I read that had a sin-eater in it.

He had his father's sins, and his grandfather's sins...actually I can't remember how many generations of sins on him, as well as those of all the incidental people they'd taken on the sins of.

Which means to people sensitive to the right things, this guy was like a black hole of sin. Standing-on-the-edge-of-a-pit-and-can't-see-the-bottom.

I thought about it, it could make an interesting sort of D&D class--making yourself a sort of...overwhelmingly evil presence by taking on the sins of others, with all that entails.

WOD would also be cool. I support this idea.

[virgil]

I thought about it, it could make an interesting sort of D&D class--making yourself a sort of...overwhelmingly evil presence by taking on the sins of others, with all that entails.

My first thought is that you'd tweak the numbers so that you register as a Overwhelming Evil to the detect spell and have various gaze-style fear effects...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CM5MhDmEz4s

[Maxus]

I thought about it, it could make an interesting sort of D&D class--making yourself a sort of...overwhelmingly evil presence by taking on the sins of others, with all that entails.

My first thought is that you'd tweak the numbers so that you register as a Overwhelming Evil to the detect spell and have various gaze-style fear effects...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CM5MhDmEz4s

I like that. Guess I should avoid derailing the OSSR, though...

[Longes]

This is all basically a fucking cover for the inability or lack of desire to make a consistent setting. Say what you will about Unknown Armies, but at least when they appropriated crap for their bullshit occult movements they used Chaos Magick as a legitimate excuse. This is just people claiming that you should lay off them for indulging in their bullshit made-up "pagan" religion.

[Longes]

Incidentally, the historical Sin Eater concept would make a cool WOD game:

You are a bad person. You know this. You died, saw hell, and have been very much assured that you're damned.

But you came back.

And others like you have found you, and showed you that as bullshit as the system is, you can cheat it. You're damned. Nothing that can be done about that. But you can take the sin of others onto you. You can rob Hell of it's prize and cheat Heaven of it's rules.

There's something appealing about this cosmic "fuck you". But it comes with it's perils. There are those who see power in what you do, and would like to harvest that power. There are philosophical differences among the Sin Eaters causing schizms. Then there are the angels and demons who are out to restore balance and put the old rules back. You're in their way. Something will have to be done about that. It's not your fight. But that's okay: You've sort of gotten used to taking on other peoples' burdens by now.

Or you can use bits of Kuei-Jin and Grim Fandango. You were True Neutral in your life, and when you died Powers That Be sent you back, and gave you magic powers so that you can help people and ghosts and work off your own sins and go to heaven. Or full Kuei-Jin: you died, went to hell, clawed your way out and now you need to hunt and eat bad people to stay alive.