Setting Questions

So I said this in the other thread, but what are the plans/rules in place/whatever about racial diversity? I probably am just overworried about this/pressing the issue too much...but I just want to know what my limits are.

The Earth population totals of the races in the core book account for less than half the non-humans on Earth.  This is deliberately to allow for other species to be added and for people to add their own.

The general rule is that they develop in small populations here and there. In many cases they eventually merge into humanity because there are sooo many humans.

If this is post masquerade, then the extradimensional realms are open too, which brings a wider variety of humans and non-humans to the party. The cosmology of Earth is VERY busy with lost or abandoned shards. There is a sizeable population of gargoyles in the cosmology, though they're isolationist and see Earth-dwellers as primitive and Gods and Demons as dangerous. The Faerie Court retreated to the cosmology, so somewhere out there is a fair-size population of supramicst sidhe and whatever human slaves they took with them to maintain their population. The refugees of the Purges have been out there for around 2000 years as well and represent large pops of seraphim, trolls, succubi, dvergar and humans with probably a few other races as well.

Hmm...that said, I know that I've said nagas bred themselves out of existence and their descendants are all human (or gorgon) now....but there's no reason that a colony couldn't have left Earth before extinction.

there are also the possibilities of pre-Immortality chanar or slithine (the precursors to Demons and Gods respectively) which would look like intelligent, semi-humanoid dromasaurids (deinonychus/velociraptor) or cetaceans (whales/dolphins...think I specifically implied they look like a humanoid orca but none of the fiction has mentioned their original forms yet).


As to dimensional shards. The largest is probably Shangri-la, which is run by the US Navy and has been cobbled together for centuries by numerous independent sorcerers. Shangri-la is about the size Ohio maybe...maybe Germany. Nirvana is about the size of Virgina and Yomi is about the size of New York minus all the water (the actually lived in part of Yomi is a narrow strip around the outer edge of the shard making a circular hoop about the area of Harlem...very overcrowded...think apartment projects built out of alien xenomorph hives)

Fair warning, there's two things that are termed reincarnation: "reincarnation" which is what Gods and Demons do to return to childhood...it's a physical transformation and a sealing memories. Capital R "Reincarnation" is what happens after a ghost has crossed over to wherever it is dead people go to. Souls coming from reincarnation don't generally remember their past lives and sins at least don't seem to carry over. I will say, yes, souls can control their reincarnation to a degree...there is at least one Demon alive who sort of "cut in line" not really breaking a rule, but breaking a courtesy. The same Demon is currently around 12 million years old or so and she remembers past lives in the double digits....or at least she says she does...she's currently pretty...insane...so it's not sure how reliable her statements are (she also peeked in on the tea party but "decided not to attend") and I'm not saying how much her ravings are real. (she's not introduced in novels yet...well, not directly.)

It is possible to have a ghost animate an object, they do that. So they could inhabit a computer that is set up along the lines of a seal. And yes, there is tech among humans for genetic-modification, 17 ft tall robots, 90 year average life spans, cybernetic replacements that are satisfactory to everyone aside from really demanding physical professions like athlete or solider (they're not resilient enough, human limbs "bounce back" while cybers "wear down"). There is also a machine in existence that can perform the human variation of teleportation (which temporarily merges two points in space)...that's a monstrous amount of energy. (Demon teleportation is based on piercing a dimensional barriers and bouncing off the barrier of another dimension to burst back into where they go and Gods teleportation works by splicing a link between two phenomena (two instances of laughter or storm or steel or whatever).) And some of the most advanced psychic tools are possibly intelligent but are basically organic/biological computers.

There ARE ways for a ghost to come back to life, it has happened, such as possessing a body that the previous spirit had left. And there are undead, which pre-death tied their souls to their bodies so that they could continue living on in a body that seemed alive. (normally when a ghost animates a corpse....it's a corpse....with undead...it looks alive). However, the binding requires a lot of life force and since their body is no longer alive nor is the soul actually inhabiting it and so that life-force is generally drawn from the surroundings. However, they NEED that life-force to keep the appearance of life so they don't stop at the ambient life-force. The presence of an undead will slowly cause the land around them to become a wasteland. This is still not enough so they have to harvest from sentient beings usually along with some physical item...how much effort they put into their binding ritual before trying it determines what they need to feed on: organs, flesh, blood, breath....each subsequent feeding from the same target is more efficient, and so flesh feeders can get more out of a victim because the victim lives longer when whole organs aren't taken, bleeders feed even more efficiently and breath-takers are the most efficient of all. But if they switch victims they have to reacclimate, so they tend to focus on one victim at a time and victims don't have enough energy for them, so even breath-takers generally kill a person after a week or so. To gain more efficient life-force harvesting, they sometimes inflict this process on other people altered so that they have control over the person's body as well as the ability to harvest the life-force they gather, using the soul as a power-generator/processing tool and unable to control what their dead body does. So no undead plagues really, but some minions.

Undead are actually one of the three abominations partially because they flat can't be destroyed unless you can convince them to pass on like any other ghost. They can be sealed though. and the connection between body and soul can be severed so that the undead has to possess a new living body, renew the ritual and then alter the body to what they want. Generally, undead have their body and soul separately sealed without actually destroying the body (because destroying the body lets them create a new one...the way Dracula was defeated at the end of the novel is a less effective manner....his spirit is sealed but the body was destroyed so if he escapes, he can easily create a new one). So yeah, usually dealing with an undead the ideal is to pull the soul out without destroying the body, seal the soul in one prison and then seal the body in an entirely different prison and hide both in completely different places with two different groups running security on it.

all known undead are currently sealed....currently...Sisyphus is sealed by the Gods, for instance. Van Helsing sealed Dracula. Lamia....well, actually, Lamia's spirit seal is lost but the body seal is secure. So on.

Hmmm... so is it possible for a ghost to inhabit a robot body that's set up specifically so it can do so, and live as an 'alive' human in a robot body? Would that count as Undead or Possession or something else?

I have a vague idea about a guy that's kidnapped and killed so they can force his body into the robot as a proof of concept, before they do so with the actual, really old lady that wants a robot body. Both because, come on, robot body, and she's old enough and weak enough that any kind of surgery probably would just bring her about to a close end. ...She probably doesn't know too much about the actual specifics, even if the masquerade's broken, because she didn't want to draw attention, or something along those lines. I was wondering how feasible that idea would be.

If it isn't, I've got, like, half a dozen OTHER character concepts I can use if I want. XD

Tier 1s are mostly artificially that powerful. Mao makes use of her knowledge of feng shui and ability to see life-force to reach that degree. The Gods and Demons at that level are given access to the power reserves of Ashvattha and Orochi respectively. The primary purpose for people having that much power with the Gods is for a couple of reasons:

A) minimizing natural disasters so they don't turn global...or not so natural disasters...for example, Chernobyl was mysteriously shut down in the midst of going into meltdown in this timeline and almost nobody has heard of it outside of Russia (or inside of Russia for that matter)

B) "driving" the shards they inhabit (typically about three tier 1s assigned to that at once)

C) in case a nameless thing breaks a seal they have similarly powered people to handle it

the psychic Community regards being a dryad a fate worse than death because of how much they're invested in the identity of being psychic even if they themselves make little more use of their ability than to perform daily chores. Also, while specifics are forgotten and pretty much just the image of helpless victim remains, the stuff IS tied to Zeus's history of serial rape.

Dryads do have a couple of options for being dangerous...among those is the fact that their mind isn't hampered at all. So while they can't maintain a high musculature, they are just as smart and can learn "old man tricks" in terms of fighting...think little aikido did flipping people that come near him with no effort. A dryad would range in strength from 12 year old to average adult, which is enough with expertise to be dangerous. As to supernatural, feng shui works off of ambient energies released by others as residual so, while not as precise as shaping and no where near as fast as channeling, they can produce some effects by rearranging their surroundings appropriately. They might also carry booby-trapped talismans with no worry (Talismans designed to trigger harmfully on contact with an active life-force). So they can have other people make them tools.

I just posted a GENERAL equipment rules list. But, yeah. For a LOT of the equipment, especially real life stuff...the GM comes up with the price.

I've posted general guidelines. Essentially, it's like this.

Does it provide an in-game bonus? If not, it's probably Cost 0 within reason.

Does it provide a bonus? Cost=Bonus.

Weapons and armor...same deal. Armor Rating or weapon Rating=Cost.


Special stuff requires GM approval, and having your own house involves the Facility rules, which I haven't gotten into yet.