Had an idea kicking around my head for a game where the players form a bond with a spirit/daemon. The pairs work together as a team, and the spirits/daemons have the ability to go into their host's bodies to greatly enhance both their abilities, but only temporarily, since they'll both burn up if they do it for too long at a time. Beyond that, though, I dunno. The idea needs a lot more development before it can be used.
So, let's develop this. Gameplay premise is everyone creates 2 characters, a human and a spirit.
What I had at the start of this thread:
Humans and spirits can each do things the other can't, so there's a benefit to partnership even not counting the "going into human's body" power up thing.
It's most likely some kind of urban fantasy RP.
This isn't "wizards summoning spirits to do their bidding," it's a human and a spirit partnering up because personal connection/mutual self-interest.
Such partnerships are exceedingly rare, since there's a gap of alien-ness and/or prejudice that has to be bridged. Humans in general don't know about spirits, those that do are often fearful/distrustful, spirits tend to see them as unclean/inferior/dangerous.
The partnership has long term effects on both of them. For the human, one of the effects is on their lifespan, but I can't decide which direction. Either it reduces it (repeated hostings burn out the human more and more) or increases it (repeated hostings add to the human's life force/whatever)
Contemporary urban fantasy game where humans team up with spirits.
What's come from this thread so far:There's the material plane we all know and love, and the spirit plane, a world originally of unified, unending, formless chaos whose existence is known to very few here. At some (as yet undecided) point, the two become linked through invisible fissures in the sky, and began to bleed into each other. From these fissures occasionally come newborn spirits, formless lumps of chaotic energy, who fall like meteors into the physical world below. As they interact with the world, they form an identity and begin to settle on a default appearance, both based on their experiences. They are able to alter their appearance to some degree at will, and their default may change over time due to further experiences, though the degree of both forms of malleability varies greatly between individuals. And no matter what form a spirit takes, they will always appear insubstantial in some way. Sometimes, after forming, spirits will return to their plane, bringing with them more structure and identity. While not physical beings, they can still affect the physical world in magical ways that physical beings cannot. These abilities are as various as the spirits themselves, though they mostly center on influencing the substantial, with living substance being more suggestible than the inert.
In the material world, spirits number relatively few, hundreds-of-thousands to millions as opposed to billions of humans, and are spread thin across the globe. Thus, they are mostly unknown to humanity, but those in the know tend to distrust and fear them, since they are quite alien to each other, and in their mutual experience, encounters have often led to trouble. Due to this general experience, spirits usually try to avoid humans, and some even make it their business to ensure that other spirits do not draw too much attention (though the disposition and goals of spirits are quite varied.) They are usually successful at this, due to their relatively few and widespread numbers, propensity to settle in abandoned or remote areas, and natural ability at hiding (phasing into objects, altering appearance, blending into shadows, etc.)
However, sometimes a human and a spirit break this pattern of mutual distrust. For whatever reason, be it naivety of the usual sentiment, circumstances of meeting, mutual self interest, or whatever, they come to befriend and trust one another. Being each able to do things the other can't, such a partnership is quite beneficial, and furthermore, if the human hosts the spirit within their body, they both gain incredibly combined power. However, this hosting can only be done for brief periods at a time, as if they remain conjoined for too long at once, they both burn each other out and die. Over years, cumulative effects of repeated hostings begin to manifest in both of them. Such partnerships are extremely rare, only several dozen existing in the whole world, as it requires both partners to have complete trust in one another. A spirit of ill intent could very easily fatally disrupt a human body, and a human of ill intent could very easily tear apart a spirit's mind.
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Topic: Lore thread - Of Substance and Spirit - Think we're ready to make characters? (Read 16556 times)