Happy Halloween! I’ve taken some time away from the blog to get my life sorted out, and it’s been sorted out for the foreseeable future, but while I waited, I did some light righting on the side, which of course means I have roughly 50k words of a half-finished supplement sitting on my computer. What is it about? Ghosts. Specifically, ghosts in Psi-Wars, though I think non-Psi-Wars fans might enjoy it too.
Continue reading “The Revenge of Space Ghost”Tag: Ghost
Wiki Showcase: Broken Communion
The last form of Communion to cover is Broken Communion, or “Psychosis Communion,” the communion that arises from shared insanity and the attempts by the human mind to comprehend the incomprehensible.
Broken Communion is, perhaps, the most complex of the forms of Communion. Where True Communion embraces community and selflessness and Dark Communion embraces chaos and selfishness, Broken Communion embodies self-destructiveness, weirdness and mounting horror. It represents psychic powers as unnatural force, a peeling back the skin of the world to show the monsters within. As such, it festers and writhes in its own self-horror. Those who use Broken Communion become changed by it, but also change the world; they cannot control what they become, they cannot control what they spawn, and Broken Communion itself controls nothing. Things happen, sometimes for a reason, sometimes in ways that defy logic.
Broken Communion is a great “go-to” for forbidden powers, power that “costs your soul,” or as a rich mine for horrors. Be sure to check out the additional articles detailing Psychic Diseases, Corruption Metatraits, and the Ghosts of Broken Communion. You can check it all out here.
On the Morality of Broken Communion
“If True Communion is Good, and Dark Communion is Evil, then is Broken Communion, like, more evil?” — The Gentleman Gamer
I find a lot of people trip up on the morality of Broken Communion and that’s partially intentional. I knew that by creating three forms of Communion, I would break up dichotomies. You couldn’t really talk about Good vs Evil anymore when you’re talking about three things. Instead, you have to stop and wrestle with the implications of a multi-dimensional structure, which is why I always recommend you go with at least three things, rather than two: to avoid trapping yourself in a single-dimension.
Thus, exploring the morality of Broken Communion, how you feel about it, can inform you on the morality of the rest of Communion.
(A theme I want to touch on that I hope will illuminate the difference between the three forms of Communion: True Communion seeks to expand the self to the community; it favors the other over the self. Dark Communion seeks to benefit the self at the cost of the community. Broken Communion harms the self to harm the other; it seeks to dissolve all things).
Broken Communion is Super Evil
“In the far future, the [human group] fights a pitched battle against the mighty [alien name] Empire, but deep in the mysterious [region of space], among the ruins of the past, a darker threat looms.” —Standard Space Opera Setting, TV Tropes
A common trope in fantasy and space opera is the idea of “Good, Evil and Worse Evil.” Humans fight the orcs, but then they both need to team up to defeat the Demons. In this context, Broken Communion becomes the “worse.” This literally happened once in Psi-Wars, with the Ranathim (Dark Communion) teaming up with the Keleni (True Communion) to defeat the Eldoth (Broken Communion).
True Communion and Dark Communion have their philosophical differences, but one can build some sort of functional society with the psychological principles upon which they are founded. You cannot build anything with Broken Communion as it lashes out self-destructively. It destroys not just those around it, but those who embrace it too.
Part of the danger of Dark Communion is that it can give rise to Broken Communion, which requires True Communion to “heal.” So, if we accept Dark Communion as “evil,” it’s a lesser sort of evil, a gateway to a greater evil: the Pagan Witchcraft that accidentally gives rise to full on Cthulhu worship eventually. For example, a Mystical Tyrant might turn to the powers of Death or Madness to fuel his maniacal rise, which makes the Bad of Dark Communion Worse.
Broken Communion is Tragic
Alternatively, we can consider calling Broken Communion “evil” as a sort of “victim blaming.” If we accept Dark Communion as “evil,” we must acknowledge that it’s the sort of evil one must indulge in: nobody forces you to accept Dark Communion’s free power, nobody forces the addiction of it on you, nor the using of others. Broken Communion, by contrast, just happens. It’s the only form of Communion open to certain people, and things like Twisted Psionic Energy inflict Corruption on people not because they did wicked things or because they accepted its power, but just by its nature.
We can conceive of Broken Communion not as a monstrous thing, but the result of monstrous acts. Death is not evil, but rather, murder is. Madness is not evil, but willfully inflicting sufficient trauma on someone to inflict madness is. Broken Communion represents the consequences of Dark Communion. This is why, if you follow the “cycles” of Communion, Broken Communion defeats Dark Communion, because Dark Communion gives rise to Broken Communion. Left unchecked, the Id will result inevitably in psychosis, yours or someone else’s.
In this case, the proper thing to do with Broken Communion is to heal it. True Communion’s consecration can override Broken Communion corruption and heal the mad and bring back the dead. It builds bridges to those who have been alienated and brings them back.
Broken Communion is Weird (and Wondrous)
When I wrote the three, I joked to a friend that they were the “Good, the Bad and the Ugly.” Broken Communion isn’t evil so much as weird. A lot of its powers are actually very helpful, and you can argue that it’s not such self-destructive as self-changing. Sure, players might take a dim view on gaining new disadvantages, but disadvantages aren’t necessarily “evil,” they can represent how the character is changing and, to some extent, improving.
Broken Communion looks at concepts that are difficult for the human mind to understand. It points to the Terra Incognita of the mind and of reality and seeks to explore those things. Those who follow its paths learn to explore those worlds and those concepts. It lets one speak to the dead, communicate with the alien, understand the mad, and grasp the deeper implications of the infinite.
These things tend to scare us; Lovecraftian horror turns on this sort of fear. But if you strip the words “evil” and “horrible” out of Lovecraftian stories, you’re left with straight up sci-fi stories about people exploring impossibly ancient and advanced alien races and their ruins. With a slight change in tone, we go from the horror of Lovecraft to the wonder of Sci-fi authors. I think the film “Annihilation” captures this essence of Broken Communion perfectly: it changes you and it’s this uncaring, alien thing, but it’s not necessarily malicious and it can even be beautiful, if you know how to look at it. I sometimes get questions like “Why isn’t there a Broken Communion philosophy,” and an answer I sometimes give that leaves people confused is that Neo-Rationalism is a Broken Communion philosophy. When I say that, I mean it in this sense, in the sense of the Weird and Wondrous, in exploring the universe and all of its implications, not just that which you’ve designated “good and worthy.”
Broken Communion is also the only option for many of the setting’s misfits. If you’re an anti-psi, or a semi-willful member of the Scourge, or a genetic abomination, your only recourse to Communion is Broken Communion, but it is a form of Communion and all forms of Communion allow you to connect with the broader universe. The rest of the Galaxy recoils from you like you’re a monster, is that your fault, or their mistake?
Broken Communion as Set Dressing
Broken Communion does some unique things that other forms of Communion do not. Namely, where other forms of Communion sit around passively, acting as a source for cool powers for heroes, Broken Communion actively changes the world around it. It twists the landscape and the inhabitants within to create new and alien worlds. This means that if you’re looking for something unique to put into your campaign, it can act as a great source.
Space Ghosts!
I often describe Broken Communion as “willful.” The idea here is that it resembles the “baleful energies” that suffuse “bad places.” If you have a spaceship that’s become corrupted with Broken Communion then obviously you have a haunted spaceship. The easiest way to handle this is to just invoke some random Broken Communion miracles: someone gets a horrific vision of some unplatable truth (Horrifying Truth), or they find that certain doors or mirrors take them to seemingly disconnected places, perhaps thousands of light years away (Roads of Communion), or things can rise up as though held by an invisible hand and lash out at the players (Poltergeist) but a better way to understand the “haunting” of Broken Communion might be to conceive of it as “ghosts.”
“Ghosts” have motivations and histories. They typically suffered trauma and seek to rectify their situation. This allows you to apply a certain logic and limitations to the weird events in Broken Communion. Instead of randomly rolling on a table of High Weirdness, you create an interesting mystery for your players to explore, where the madness of Broken Communion seems to follow a certain logic, and then by defeating or helping the ghost, Broken Communion can be “resolved” and healed, returning to normal.
If you want an even more powerful version, you can think of “ascended ghosts” or “Dark gods.” Malefic beings or empowered Tulpa that has drives and desires (typically to be freed from its prison, or to have worshipers, or to enact some terrible, world-changing thing). These too follow a logic, one that creates a mystery for the players to solve.
Excessive randomness is something to be endured. Why are the players suffering corruption? Why are they getting psychic diseases? Why are they seeing these visions? “I dunno, just how Broken Communion is” just means the only thing players can do is get out and nuke the place from orbit. By giving Broken Communion some form of logic, albeit an alien and strange logic, it can create a more satisfying experience.
To return to our haunted ship, it may turn out that its powered by a Eldothic Deep Engine which has cracked and unleashed whatever malefic influence had been locked within. Also, the ship had been an experiment in psychic navigation, and had a chamber where a powerful psychic was imprisoned. The ship is currently the site of a psychic war between the malefic Dark God and the ghost of the psychic. She seeks to be put to rest and to see the Dark God rechained, while it seeks to be free and to consume the sanity of those aboard and turn them into its thralls. Her visions warn people of the danger and plead with people to bury her corpse; its visions tempt people with power. It seeks to kill those who might help the psychic, she seeks to protect them long enough to get them off the ship. The weird visions and circumstances that occur can be, with sufficient exploration and research, explained by this logic.
You can read more at The Ghosts of Broken Communion. I borrowed a lot of material from GURPS Horror and the Ghosts of GURPS Monster Hunters 3 to give us a cohesive system of ghosts. While it’s written with an eye towards Psi-Wars for obvious reasons, I think it fits well in almost any setting. In particular, check out the section on the origins of Broken Communion and ghosts.
Space Monsters!
Most monsters in Psi-Wars will be natural or semi-natural: either biological creatures that evolved on alien worlds, or they’re mutants or cyborgs or other creations of science.
But given the corruption of Broken Communion and the way it changes people not just mentally, but also physically, it too can create monsters. This fits the logic of the “bad place energy.” If you spend too long on a haunted world or on a haunted ship, surely you’ll become infused with the monstrousness of your environment.
I’ve included a few ideas as to what this might be like, such as the Gnarlspawn, which are Rakghouls with the serial numbers filed off. Such monsters can give the players something tangible to fight that emphasizes the danger (and weirdness) of their environment without leaving them feeling helpless as ghosts might.
Space monsters also give you a way to create new “aliens,” such as beings who require Twisted Psychic Energy to survive, perhaps even entire civilizations or cities lost in the recesses of some especially weird part of space. The Eldoth arguably already represent this, but Broken Communion can create new races and perhaps even, if you believe the lore of the Akashics, doorways to alternate timelines.
You can read more at The Shape of Corruption. The idea here is that when dealing with Broken Communion, you risk Corruption. Corruption ultimately manifests as disadvantages that you have to take. The Broken Communion paths are full of suggestions for what disadvantages might manifest from Broken Communion. But if, as a GM, you want to heighten the danger of Corruption and focus on its transformative aspects, you can also use meta-traits. After all, the point of Corruption is to make you lose points and to change who you are.
In this more liberal interpretation of Corruption, a failed Corruption roll results in the opportunity to change your character. You could layer a new racial template atop yours, or add a host of traits as long as they result in a net loss of points equal to the expected loss. This contains a list of such metatraits as suggestions.
This also represents a useful opportunity to look at what sorts of people or creatures one might encounter in a Corrupted region. After all, we have entire worlds covered in Twisted Psychic Energy. What became of the inhabitants after years of exposure to corruption? What sort of monsters might you face? This section has some suggestions.
Psychic Disease
If Broken communion represents a violation of the cosmic order and that violation can seep into your body and corrupt you, the most obvious manifestation of that would be as a disease. You can already think of corruption as a disease, but we can make it more specific and give it more flavor. Just as standing around breathing the miasma of a swamp can make you sick, so too can hanging out in a haunted area.
Psychic diseases do more than give a name and some details to the corruption someone suffers from excessive exposure to Broken Communion. It also represents a concrete way in which Esoteric Healing can be useful. If you go into the ancient shrine of a dead god and return with the Black Hunger, then a True Communion Monk can lay you beneath a crystal and meditate over you, sorting out not your body, which is fine, but your soul and spirit. Broken Communion represents a uniquely psychic phenomenon, and the inability of “medical science” to treat the maladies it inflicts emphasizes the psychic nature of Psi-wars.
Thinking of Broken Communion as a psychic disease also helps emphasize another thematic element of Broken Communion: it spreads. If you go into a Bad Place and return “sick” with the badness of the place, like the Mummy’s Curse or the Malaria of the Dark Jungle, you can infect others around you with that badness, bringing the “bad” of the “bad place” into the good wholesomeness of “home.” Dark gods might use this to spread their influence and corruption, like sending out tendrils of their influence. The sick might even see visions of the God or Ghost, lurking over their shoulder, in the corner of their eye. Once a region of Twisted Psychic Energy begins, the wise might seek to quarantine it, not just because it’s dangerous to those who go into it, but those who return from it carry that danger with them.
You can read more at Psychic Diseases. Psi-Wars emphasizes mysticism and psychic powers, which means psychic healing. I spent a great deal of time exploring esoteric healing (there’s even a patreon special for it). But to really get the most out of it, we need some psychic diseases to play with. This section expands on the corruption one can gain from over-exposure to twisted psychic energy with the option to instead gain psychic diseases. These give esoteric healers and psychic healers an excuse to practice their craft, as well as creating flavorful new diseases to play with. This also synergizes with the Ghost Venom power from the Ghosts of Broken Communion, giving them a suite of powers to pick from, as well as the Plagues of Madness Broken Communion miracle.
Using Broken Communion in your Setting
If I had to pick any form of Communion to use outside of Psi-Wars, I would pick Broken Communion. It fits well with Dungeon Fantasy’s depiction of Psychics as vulnerable to psychic diseases, or with 40ks imagery of the Warp. It can represent a malefic force that seeps into the world and threatens it. It can represent the high weirdness that psychic powers bring with them, and the costs of exploring that weirdness.
Patreon Special: Sample Broken Communion Ghosts
Yesterday, I released a document on Broken Communion ghosts, including the means of creating your own. I want to follow this up with a few sample ghosts, in part to test how such rules work and make sure that I have all necessary pieces in place, and also to offer you, dear reader, an idea of what such ghosts might look like. Naturally, any of these can be dropped into your Psi-Wars game, but they can also be adjusted and used in a horror or Monster Hunters game.
This is a publicly available document, available for free and it should be fairly easy to divine how these ghosts are intended to work, but if you’re not yet a patron and would like a better understanding of the system behind their creation, the design document is available to all $1 patrons, and can be accessed via the link above.
If you’re a patron, check it out. If you’re not a patron, you can still check it out! And enjoy.
Patreon Special: Space Ghosts Revisited
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| Ghost Cvlt by Ramsesmelendez |
When I first dove into Communion itself, I wanted to break up the simplistic duality of “good and evil” that Star Wars offered. I don’t necessarily object to “good and evil,” I just find that it can sharply limit the sort of stories GMs might want to tell or what sorts of characters people want to play. I conceived of Broken Communion as the crux of that change, as it introduced something that both “Good” and “Evil” could face off against, (the “Ugly” of “the Good, the Bad and the Ugly”), or something that could redefine “evil.” What’s worse, someone who is selfish but mostly hurts themselves, or a broken person who hurts others without meaning to? I wanted Broken Communion to offer both a terrible evil to fight, and a terrible pain to heal, creating a tension that was neither really evil, nor really good, but still a potential problem.
The core of that “problem” would be in its effects on the psionic characters who interacted with it the most. Those who wielded it would find themselves corrupted by it, and those who entered areas sacred to Broken Communion would find their psychic powers twisted by it. I also suggested that Broken Communion, unlike other forms of Communion, might “create miracles on its own.” In principle, any form of Communion might do this (Miracles “just happen” all the time), but Broken Communion seemed especially prone to doing that.
I left the details up to the GM, but the theme of “haunting” definitely arose from the ideas in Broken Communion and the nature of its miracles. Where True Communion had themes of the holy and sacred and Dark Communion had themes of fantasy-esque “cool evil,” with raging orcs and demonic seductresses and dark wizards, Broken Communion had distinctly horrific imagery. The haunted spaceship, the mass grave, or the terrifying jungle full of stalking, squamous things might all be places steeped in Broken Communion. But I left the details of this up to the GM.
I have found, though, from the feedback of my fans, that many of you don’t really like this “leave the details up to the GM” mentality. It’s rife through GURPS, especially in books that don’t really succeed, while books that make those details much more explicit, including catalog books like GURPS Magic, or campaign frameworks like GURPS Dungeon Fantasy, tend to do really well. In retrospect, this makes sense: if you knew how to do it, you would, and you could ignore any details I give you that you dislike. If you can’t, a vague suggestion is of no help, but a highly detailed discussion of how it might work helps a great deal. Thus, it’s better to favor too much detail over not enough (provided that detail doesn’t become mandatory).
Thus, I came upon the handle of ghosts.
Ghosts
Star Wars already has ghosts, though rarely the spooky sort that bang on windows and drip blood down the walls. Even so, it features plenty of “haunted” stories, though it rarely dives into the mythology as to why these sorts of things occur. It is, perhaps, the “dark side of the force,” or it might be an ancient “force spirit” of a Sith lord. Nonetheless, it has a solid precedent in how Star Wars works.
Even if it didn’t, Star Wars certainly does, as Broken Communion feels like a haunting, and “haunted ships” are a staple of space opera, while “haunted ruins” are a staple of planetary romance, both of which Psi-Wars draws heavily on.
So, about a year ago, in Iteration 5 (6 has been a long iteration!), I wrote of space ghosts. The initial idea was that by treating an area of high Broken Communion sanctity not as a vague energy field of evil, but as a specific haunting with specific powers and specific motivations, you could better tell a story. The Broken Communion that arose from a murder in downtown Denjuku will feel very different from the Broken Communion that one finds on an ancient ship set adrift a century ago after all of its occupants died from a mysterious ailment and every scavenger who boarded the ship also died horribly. By thinking about the Broken Communion in this way, by putting a motivating force, an actor, behind the Broken Communion, one could more easily think of what might occur within the area. At the site of a murder, weird coincidences and visions might reveal the murderer and attempt to take revenge. The abandoned ship might hungrily devour all who come aboard, with a strange mutation of machinery at its heart.
This also meant that rather than being an arcane concern for psionic characters alone, they presented genuine threats to all characters, psionic or not! Instead of “just” presenting a problem for psionic powers, Broken Communion could chuck debris at people or given them harrowing visions until they dealt with the problem. And that meant we needed a means of dealing with the problem, things like exorcism or solving the murder, etc.
Thus, in my article, I noodled over all of this, made some suggestions and then walked away.
Space Ghosts Revisited
So, why come back to it? For a few reasons. First, as I mentioned before, I find that my audience wants specifics, and my article was very short on that. Second, the more I pondered the idea, the more I realized how central it was to a proper treatment of Broken Communion and rather than be a suggestion, it should be worked into the rules themselves. Finally, as I worked on the various philosophies, I realized that most of them discussed or dealt with ghosts in some concrete way: Fringe Rationalism would experiment on them, the Akashic Order literally has time-ghosts and the Divine Masks has the Cult of Death, which increasingly looks focused on dealing with and controlling ghosts. Thus, I needed to make these rules concrete.
First, I wanted to define precisely what I meant. What sort of powers might ghosts have exactly? How powerful would a ghost be? When I talk about different ways of dealing with ghosts, what exactly do I mean? Thus, I created a list of “Sources of Broken Communion” (which took up the majority of my time, if I’m honest) which detailed where these ghosts might come from and how they might behave, and rules for creating ghosts, including power-level suggestions, Will values, and a list of typical powers, plus a few atypical powers.
Second, I wanted to carefully define the precise rules governing ghosts and broken communion. What powers could players use to defeat ghosts? How do exorcisms work? What miracles affect ghosts? In particular, I wanted miracles that allowed the summoning of and the control of ghosts.
Finally, I wanted to at least briefly talk about how various philosophies see ghosts, and I wanted to create some concrete examples of ghosts that you could use as worked examples, inspiration for your own ghosts, or just drop directly into a Psi-Wars game.
The resulting document is Psi-Wars specific, but it borrows heavily from GURPS Horror and GURPS Monster Hunters. I made some assumptions that work best for Psi-Wars, but you could easily reverse engineer this material for a Horror or Monster Hunters game.
Mailanka's Musing 