Katabasis: On Geist: The Sin-Eaters Second Edition
The general theme of the game, encapsulated in the official art. Almost all of the images in this piece — all but the last — are official art associated with the game.
I need to take a brief break from talking about political and theoretical topics, because I’m building my classes for the fall, working a lot at my summer job, and it’s hot as hell in the apartment – so I’m going to do my normal thing when I need to do that and discuss tabletop role-playing games.
There’s been a long stretch of time – nearly a year, I think? – since I last did a review of one of these games, and I want to talk about one that I’ve loved for a while. I’m referring, here, to Geist: The Sin-Eaters.
I believe Edgar has noted in the past that they are a fan of the Chronicles of Darkness games – it feels like home to them – and in that space, Changeling: The Lost feels like not just their home, but their room at home. While I’m not quite as wedded to the Chronicles games as they are, I have a similar relationship to Geist. Like other games of its type, it’s got a bit of that “gothic punk” element that was first popularized in Vampire: The Masquerade, the original game from White wolf that kicked off the World of Darkness, and eventually led to Chronicles. It’s set in the world beyond your window, but it’s a world in which the supernatural exists – made all the more real because it’s hidden, either through the efforts of the supernatural individuals themselves, or through a sort of censorship imposed by the cosmos (as you find in Werewolf and Mage.)
All told, there have been a number of games in which the players take the role of various monsters and heroes in this style – the Old World of Darkness had Vampire, Werewolf, and Mage, alongside games highlighting faeries (Changeling,) heroic mortals (hunter), ghosts (wraith), demons, mummies, and the like. In Chronicles, these have been updated, adding in Beasts (stranger monsters,) weakening the Hunters, and trading out wraiths for sin-eaters.
The cover of the book — old-fashioned keys are not just a thematic element, but integrated into the system: characters “unlock” their most powerful manifestations with conceptual keys.
So, let me talk about the game in particular. In Geist, the player characters are mortal people who have died and been brought back to life, riding alongside them is another entity, the titular Geist, which is a ghost that is evolving and changing into something else, swollen on unnatural power and metamorphosing into a small god of death. They have bits and pieces of mortal memory, but they’re also resonating with a particular kind of death – by drowning, or freezing, or burning, or violence, or deprivation. All told, they make for pretty awful roommates.
It’s a new twist on an old story, in a very afterfictional fashion – you die, you descend into the underworld, and then you come back. What is your life after that?
What draws me to the game isn’t the ghost element – I’ve got a fondness for ghost stories, as I’ve referenced and mentioned – but it’s this syzygy with something inhuman and obsessive, living with the weight of what’s happened and trying to push on. In the world presented, the underworld is a corrupt and horrifying place, where the weak are preyed upon and ground down, where the best that can happen is embracing dissolution so that you no longer have to suffer it. Into this world, the player characters step, and while they can attempt to dominate their ghostly companion and lead lives of excess, the path that is highlighted, signposted, is that of the principled rebel: this system is broken, I’m going to fix it or die trying.
After all, I died once, and so the hard part’s been done.
The original version of Geist came out as White Wolf was going bankrupt, and it was somewhere between getting the last project out the door quick and a failed Hail Mary pass. The book was poorly edited, and the systems weren’t as thoroughly play-tested as they could have been. It contradicts itself heavily, and received only one additional book (something grossly at odds with how the other game lines were handled.)
Former White Wolf employees, though, went on to found Onyx Path, and have put out updated books over the past decade or so. This was the jump from “new” World of Darkness to Chronicles of Darkness. Generally speaking, the newer games are much improved, finding a happy medium between the metaplot-heavy “old” World of Darkness and the sandbox of the “new” world of darkness. There isn’t a vast, world-shattering story unfolding in the background, a giant rollercoaster track that the players hop on or hop off, but there are hints. There are shadows. It feels less like a railroad and more like a vector. Needless to say, I was interested and, a few years back, they finally worked their way back to Geist and released a second edition.
While some bits of fluff and fiction headed in the wrong direction, the theme of rebellion against a corrupt universe, a quixotic quest to make the afterlife just, has been dialed up and made explicit. Here, we have a game that has benefited from another decade of game design and from its writers being older and wiser.
As someone who is occasionally a sucker for cosmic horror and weird fiction, I loved the Kerberoi. They feel like cosmic horror, but are fundamentally concerned with humanity: trapping and processing the ghosts of the dead to
The first major change is the introduction of Reapers. While in the first edition, a Sin-Eater might go bad or the players characters might face off against an ancient underworld guardian called a kerberos, there wasn’t exactly an opposite number. The various chronicles games have made an effort to highlight the opposite numbers of the player characters, allowing for the game to more easily feature direct conflict: the vampires have the stryx – corrupt owl-like spirits that possess and corrupt, – the werewolves have the idigam – protean spirits formerly imprisoned on the moon that adopt the nature of whatever they touch, – and the mages deal with the Servants of the Throne – sorcerous collaborators to the material world in the game’s gnostic parable. The Sin-Eaters – humans brought back to life through collaboration with a ghost – are opposed by Reapers – ghosts given access to the world of the living as hunters of runaway spirits, empowered by unknown chthonic powers.
This difference makes for ready-made conflict, and allows the thematic element of “fighting the system” much clearer. Some of the sample Reapers are even sympathetic, trying to improve the system from within, to make the afterlife of dissolution more comfortable and palatable, directly paralleling reformist politics. What I enjoy here is that the game never skimps on emphasizing the personal motivations and how these intersect with the character’s attitude toward the “system” as a whole: this one is blinded to the systemic aspect by personal tragedy; another is a jaded radical with a good heart that doesn’t have the strength to go on fighting outside of it; yet another is an evil person that has found how to carry out their abuses within the system and receive reward for it.
The second major change is the shift in character types – in the first version of the game, characters were differentiated by how they died, by what happened to them. Did the character die of bad luck? Of disease? Of starvation? Of violence? By the natural world? Each one slotted into a different role, a different psychology. There are some advantages to this, in that it allowed the players to map out their character’s history. The new edition of the game, however, focuses on something else entirely: why did you come back? Are you trying to get revenge? To complete a great work? To pay a debt? To protect someone or something? To find something lost? This allows the players to map out where the character is going.
Many games, especially traditional games (of which the Chronicles games are a variant, though one with some indie DNA,) ignore this aspect. They don’t give much thought to why the characters might do anything in the game – they rely on giving a particular tool set to the player, and trust that, if a character has a hammer, the player will see the world in terms of nails, while if they have a saw they’ll see it in terms of boards that need to be cut. The recent trends in indie games have been to assume that everyone has a relatively complete – if deliberately unbalanced – toolkit and to give them different suggestions for what they might build.
The result is that players are led not to think in terms of solving the same set of problems more and more effectively as the game goes on, but to select and emphasize different goals in their journey through the story. Someone who came back to get revenge on their killer is going to play very differently from someone who came back to make sure that their family is provided for.
Now that isn’t to say that these archetypes are the only differences: a former abusive father seeking to become good and make sure that his children can have a future free of the damage he caused them will be different from a young man who wants to make sure that his parents don’t bury another son. And, obviously, someone killed in a climate disaster, someone killed by a police officer, and the latest victim of a serial killer are all going to seek revenge in different ways. There’s a lot of space in these different archetypes and they all lead to different stories.
This, to me, seems a much more rewarding approach than the old traditional game one. By privileging motivation, by predicating advancement and improvement on such things, it gives the players themselves a motivation for how to engage with the world presented.
A Geist looming over its sin-eater. I can’t look at this image without thinking about the meme “Aren’t you tired of being nice? Don’t you just want to go ape shit?”
And it does tend to skew towards a world other than the one that is normally shown in tabletop games – even other Chronicles games – where the Vampires engage in urban politicking and shadowy wars with one another, the Werewolves protect the natural places (for a certain value of natural) from corruption, the mages seek enlightenment wherever they might find it, and the Changelings stake out their space and guard it against intrusion by alien beings that have abused them in the past, the Sin-Eaters dwell among the detritus. Their games can be urban or rural, on the move or set in place, but sin-eaters go where death is: they comfort the living, they help ghosts move on, and they fight the system of death and those who would profit off of it.
The third major change, and this is one brought on by a change in the underlying system, is the introduction of “Conditions” – temporary mechanical modules pasted on top of the character and changing the options available to them. While in First Edition, the Sin-Eaters had a random assortment of different powers, in the Second Edition they have (generally speaking) a variety of powers that focus on adopting or inflicting different conditions – ranging from “invisible and intangible” to “covered in weeping sores and boils”. This framework gives a unity to the “haunts” that the player characters use that was absent in the first edition, and allows everything to work off of a common foundation.
I just ran, recently, my first combat in the new system. It took forever – that’s trad games for you – but, that being said, it was fun, and the players in that group like crunch (and you do, of course, have to make compromises on such things.)
Right now I’m running a game set in the upper south, in a corner of the country that might be Appalachian or Ozark – the boundary gets a bit confusing at points – and it focuses on a group of people who live relatively precarious lives: one’s an activist, one’s an academic, one’s a cultists of sorts, and one’s a lawyer. While the players might insert elements that go against the grain (I wasn’t really expecting a cult focused on the movies of film star Patrick Swayze, but we do what we can with what we’re given,) the feel is exactly what I was looking for: normal people, set in an extraordinary situation, and growing to confront it.
These are the sorts of stories that I love, and I enjoy the fact that I’m getting a chance to run it.
If you’re looking for something similar, I highly recommend going for Geist. The system is balanced, and it brings in nearly thirty years of experience with telling fantastical and horrific stories set against the background of the world that we live in and – admittedly, I may be a bit biased about this – I feel it’s a world that needs more of the fantastical and horrific told about it.
Because we know that horrible things happen, but there are very few horrific situations that you can confront with violence and unexpected supernatural powers. After all – as one of the last great conservative intellectuals, G.K. Chesterton – said: “Fairy tales, then, are not responsible for producing in children fear, or any of the shapes of fear; fairy tales do not give the child the idea of the evil or the ugly; that is in the child already, because it is in the world already. Fairy tales do not give the child his first idea of bogey. What fairy tales give the child is his first clear idea of the possible defeat of bogey. The baby has known the dragon intimately ever since he had an imagination. What the fairy tale provides for him is a St. George to kill the dragon.”
And while I don’t really like the rampant infantilization present in our culture, I think that this is something that even adults need to be reminded of: the evil things in the world can be fought. Even if they can’t be beaten, even if it’s just a temporary reprieve and we’re all on our way to dissolution one way or another, there is value in that fight.
Okay, admittedly not a directly connected image, but I thought that this image — poppies in Flanders Fields — was appropriate. Ghost stories are fundamentally stories about loss, and these flowers remain a potent symbol of that. Geist is, fundamentally, a game about taking your loss and making it into a tool or weapon to fight a corrupt system. That, more than anything else, is why I love it.