a puzzle about spirits

[carllarson]

If I see this right, you are having the two worlds not overlap. So, the Spirit Plane is not 'beside' the Material Plane, but somewhere else. And there is a separate plane overlapping the Material (and perhaps the Spirit) where Insubstantial beings can observe the Material. (Bear with me please, if this isn't what you meant.)

So, when a spirit moves to the Insubstantial plane, he can observe the Material, but not his home plane, the Spirit. Likewise, when a Material moves to the Spirit plane, he first arrives in an Insubstantial plane beside the Spirit.

So, perhaps when a Material sorceror travels to the Spirit Plane, he first takes up the Insubstantial template, as regards the Spirit primary plane, and can further manifest there. When a Spirit travels to the Material Plane, he first arrives in the Insubstantial, as above, and can further manifest.

Rather than setting it all up as one package, try two character sheets, one for Substantial, and one for Insubstantial, for any character that can make the trip.

Make the baseline Substantial character, which is what he is on his home plane. Make an additional Insubstantial sheet, to reflect his abilities when projected but not manifested.

Then all you need to price is the ability to Planewalk, which is fairly straightforward, and place that on the baseline character. Let the rest be part of effects of the travelling.

I guess I see it as when you are on your home plane, you are a material person, and so, when you have travelled to another plane, you are now an in immaterial spirit there.

Which does leave an issue, what about those that don't work it this way, and bodily travel to another plane. This idea may be useless for you, sorry.

[transmetahuman]

I was having trouble figuring out what you meant by "for spirits that have come from the spirit plane to the material plane", until last night I was thumbing through Cabal. So, it looks like you want a material plane, an "outer" astral plane/state (represented by the 4e Spirit template), and at least one other region where the physical laws are different from the other two, with distance being a more abstract concept, etc. In Cabal (under 3e rules), sorcerers and psis use the Planar Visit spell or Astral Projection psi-skill, respectively, to get to Yetzirah (astral). Insubstantiality, oddly enough, explicitly could not get you to Yetzirah. It seems (Cabal p.49) like they could then re-use the same spell/skill to move on to the inner Realms. Supernatural critters, and presumably spirits, used Spirit-Jumper to travel between Realms/states.

I don't really get the point of spirits needing to breathe pneuma. They don't have bodies or biological needs, unless materialized on Assiah. The only reason to think they'd have any kind of biology at all in the spiritual state is the rule about same-type Insubstantial characters being able to hurt each other with physical attacks. Personally, I want to ignore that - but my spirit world is a lot emptier than the ones in Cabal.

Maybe you should give us more detail about how you want the supernatural ecosystem to work; what needs spirits will have in outer and inner states, and what you want spirits and spirit-projectors to be able to do to each other in each state. I'm betting Spirit-Jumper will be your best bet for translating the outer astral insubstantial state into whatever traits they have in the "inner realms state". Then you won't need to define traits from the perspective of the material world (as the Spirit meta-trait does), because the material state and the "inner realms state" can't interact with each other.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by transmetahuman

I don't really get the point of spirits needing to breathe pneuma. They don't have bodies or biological needs, unless materialized on Assiah. The only reason to think they'd have any kind of biology at all in the spiritual state is the rule about same-type Insubstantial characters being able to hurt each other with physical attacks. Personally, I want to ignore that - but my spirit world is a lot emptier than the ones in Cabal.

Maybe you should give us more detail about how you want the supernatural ecosystem to work; what needs spirits will have in outer and inner states, and what you want spirits and spirit-projectors to be able to do to each other in each state. I'm betting Spirit-Jumper will be your best bet for translating the outer astral insubstantial state into whatever traits they have in the "inner realms state". Then you won't need to define traits from the perspective of the material world (as the Spirit meta-trait does), because the material state and the "inner realms state" can't interact with each other.

As I see it, the astral plane is governed by the Law of Similarity; its inhabitants are in effect images of material beings. Since a mammal has lungs, the image of a mammal has the image of lungs, which breathe the image of air; and likewise for water and food. A mortal who travels bodily into the astral plane is translated from a material/causal body into a body image, but the image goes on functioning the same way the body did.

For out of body travel, with a "silver cord" effect, the projected form does not need life support in the spirit plane; it's sustained by a link to its entranced body in the material plane.

Now, for a spirit native to the spirit plane, which travels to the material plane, it may be going to a place that doesn't have a huge amount of life support resources. Perhaps it can take along a cache of magical energy to sustain it, like an astronaut taking an air tank on a spacewalk. Perhaps it can inhabit a material body and be sustained by that body's internal metabolic processes. Or perhaps it can assume a material body and use that as a kind of "exoskeleton."

This discussion has helped me clear up what I think about all this a bit. Further comments are welcome. Thanks to all who've jumped in!

Bill Stoddard

[Hyrneson]

A simple and semi actual based belief from the past is the one I use for my campaign. I use the Ethereal Realm as the place spirits inhabit when they come to the Material plane but don't / can't materialize.
Living things give off an aura and block spirits (which explains those many country ivy covered old churches) and lets me leave clues of ectoplasm occasionally for my players. (Ectoplasm being the matter of the Ethereal plane brought to the Material plane. Cool stuff, you can shape it, charge it, fling it, and all sorts of stuff, and it will effect spirits. best of all, it evaporates at the rate of about a gallon a minute.)

We also have the elemental realms and the astral too, its just that the material co-habitates and exists only with and near the material realm.

RH

[Jerander]

Will non-spirits entering the Spirit Realm have the same powers/abilities as the native spirits? (Whether they know how to use them or not may be a separate issue...)

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Jerander

Will non-spirits entering the Spirit Realm have the same powers/abilities as the native spirits? (Whether they know how to use them or not may be a separate issue...)

Well, mostly. If they left bodies behind in the material plane, they'll have a different response to being attacked. And if they don't have Magery, they'll find it hard to navigate, unless they take the skill Dreaming as a substitute. I'm working on the protocols now; I'll post them when the first draft is done.

Bill Stoddard

[demonsbane]

Originally Posted by whswhs

(...) I'm working on the protocols now; I'll post them when the first draft is done.

Well, perhaps I'm late but still here I go. I sorry not being currently able to help with the game mechanics, so here my fluff contribution to this thread:

Originally Posted by whswhs

(...) Everything there is a spirit, or made of whatever "stuff" spirits are made of, and presumably spirits have some sort of life-sustaining interaction that's functionally equivalent to eating, drinking, and breathing, in the same way that a machine has a need for fuel.

The so called "spirit world" matches with the psychic domain of Platonic teachings. Psychic in this context wasn't "psychological", but instead an entire and huge non-human world!

The substance of these "spirits" (souls would be more appropiate) would be, according to these teachings, psychic. I would relate this psychic substance with mana, prana and chi.

The three typical domains of platonic emanationism are:

1) Pneumatic: the purely spiritual order. The higher of the Three Worlds.

2) Psychic: the domain of non-physical individual souls and beings. The intermediate world.

3) and Hylic: the corporeal world. The lowest world of the Three (only "beaten" by the psychic subcorporeal hellish extension).

The Man, being constituted by these three elements, potentially participates in different proportions of these orders of reality (most of them work for life almost only aware of the corporeal one), and that opens the possibility of their active participation in higher or less-ordinary orders (the psychic and the spiritual) than his natural one, of course under some specific, ritualistic and supernatural circunstances.

This fundamental tripartition of Man (body/soul/spirit) and Cosmos (earth/atmosphere/heaven and/or underworld/earth/heaven) matches with most recorded ancient antropologies, and with the Three Worlds scheme, too (G3 Spirits, The Shamanic Worlds, page 23; 4e Fantasy, Magical Realms -pages 34-36: all them (Dreamlands, Faerie Realms, Afterworlds, Spirit Worlds, Heavens, Hells, Archetypal Realms, and Pocket Universes) would have their place in or as one of the Three Worlds).


-The food issue:

Vedic gods or Devas, inhabiting the spiritual domain (higher than the psychic order), are depicted sometimes as needing the divine elixir Soma for keeping their existences. A lot of them also are nourished by human-made sacrifices to them, as butter in fire.

Also, regarding purely psychic entities (the dead ancestors inhabiting the psychic domain of the Moon, including ambiguous entities and demons too) and purely spiritual beings as Devas, too, they are showed in Vedic tradition and in some branches of Buddhism, as "eating" and consuming the accumulated good or bad karmas (a sort of "point reserve"!) for keeping their non-corporeal existences, and "dying" for immediately regaining through transmigration a different existence and rebirth in one of the Three Worlds after depleting that reserve (from here, mostly they go downwards instead upwards).


- Differences between beings native to the psychic world ("spirits" in the vague and conventional sense used in this thread and in G3 Spirits) and "foreign visitors":

While some mythical beings are described as purely psychic beings (the Djinns, for instance; a lot of particular demons, too (1)) don't raise problems here, "foreign visitors" do make room for more considerations:

Man participates in a very small degree of the psychic world while thinking, sensing... That is, with all things involving any activity of the mind, conscious or inconscious.
While sleeping and dreaming, Man participates in the psychic world in a greater degree, because his identification and awareness of the bodily world is a more faded, left behind for a while.

But to actively participate in the psychic world (that is, to travel there with total efficacy and fully awareness), in the hardcore and definitive way, ancient ways did show it was need to transcend the corporeal limits of the conscience (identified with the spirit-intellect, in its higher and deeper dimension) through a ritual death to the ordinary world, and adquiring so a second birth: this second birth was deemed not biological nor corporeal but psychic.

In this way, the successful initiate developed trough mysteric techniques a "psychic body" (the linga-sharîra in Yoga and Hinduism) and through this new "psychic dimension of himself" he was able to participate entirely in the psychic world or "world of spirits" (2).

He still needed his body alive in the earth, enough nourished because losing the attachment to his corporeal life could lead to be definitely lost in the immense psychic world without the ability to escape or return.

Mostly this was the stronger and definite way for "human foreigners" to travel to the "spirit world".

Originally Posted by whswhs

I think that the spirit realm is not destructive to the body, because translation into the spirit realm automatically puts the physical body on hold, except as a life support unit for the spiritual body, perhaps. But it may be seriously destructive to the mind, if you don't have the ability to find your way around a landscape governed by similarity rather than causality. Think about the weird transitions of dreams. . . .

Exactly.

This journey exposed these "travellers" to all sort of dangers proper of the psychic world. This is portrayed as "the descent to Hell" and for suffering a lot of attacks and deceptive illusions from hosts of gods and demons. Insanity (in a very broad sense) or eternal damnation of the soul (again, the "psychic body") were some of the results to avoid while travelling in the psychic or intermediate world

Even psychic death (destruction of the psychic body) was deemed as possible, at hands of God, enraged and terrific angels, or demonic hazards. This was called sometimes as "the Second Death", not being bodily but psychic.

Originally Posted by whswhs

Also, there will probably be human characters visiting the spirit plane, whether in dreams, in trance, via spells that produce the same effect, via spells that transpose their bodies there, or via gates or "soft places" that let them walk from the material world to the spirit plane. How does one represent a material being visiting the spirit plane, from the viewpoint of the spirit plane?

I find this mysteric theory suiting with some of this, from my viewpoint of course.

Speaking again of that adquired supernatural psychic rebirth, the "perceived form" of that "psychic body" could be varied, ranging from a entirely different form-creature as a phoenix or sacred goose, to a form equal to the bodily. Sometimes that was mainly a sort of indefined "body of light" (but still not purely spiritual due the psychic veil obscuring him), however.

Originally Posted by whswhs

Not quite. I don't envision the spirit realm as having *the same* physics as the material realm. The material realm is based on causal signs and causality, including "distance" being defined ultimately by lightlike paths between events.

Right, the space is one of the cosmological determinations of the corporeal domain. Psychic world is ruled by a lesser set of determinations, resulting in entirely different "laws".


Well, I hope some of this would be helpful in some degree.


(1) Instead, Devas, Olimpic Gods, or Angels always are regarded as spiritual beings. However, for making themselves visible in dreams, they can adquire a psychic substance temporarily as "dressing". Adquiring a corporeal substance as dress or vessel for earthly manifestation would be harder (that would be two steps down from their home world, instead just one).

(2) Indeed, in the Divine Comedy, Dante's travel in the first two books trough the Hell to the Mountain Purgatory is done with the "psychic body"; for continuing to the Paradiso (the spiritual order) is needed a third rebirth, this time not psychic, but pneumatic or spiritual instead. Direct Divine Contemplation was deemed as participation in the spiritual world.

[demonsbane]

Originally Posted by demonsbane

Speaking again of that adquired supernatural psychic rebirth, the "perceived form" of that "psychic body" could be varied, ranging from a entirely different form-creature as a phoenix or sacred goose, to a form equal to the bodily. Sometimes that was mainly a sort of indefined "body of light" (but still not purely spiritual due the psychic veil obscuring him), however.

Viewing this, I think cccwebs idea of using Alternate Form for getting "a psychic body" is excellent and may match with the linga-sharîra of the "psychic explorer" or "spiritual traveler".

[whswhs]

Okay, here's my draft handout on character creation, as far as it's gone (I still have to write the stuff about spending points and such):

I. Universal Traits

Characters in The Foam of Perilous Seas automatically have certain traits, for which they do not have to pay points.

Unkillable. This is a fantasy campaign, which means that dead people are not actually nonexistent; people have immortal souls that survive the deaths of their bodies. Those souls are effectively spirits, but they are not free to travel about the spirit world at will; they’re consigned to the realm of the dead and powerless to escape it. This is represented by giving them ST 0 and 0 HP.

This inability to actually die is defined in GURPS as Unkillable 3. However, normal characters lack the benefits of Unkillable 1: injury can in fact kill them, or make them lose consciousness, short of being reduced to –10×HP. So the base cost of Unkillable is nominally 100 points, not 150. They also have the Trigger limitation, which means that once dead, they stay dead until helped to return to life by some specific substance or process. This happens very seldom (see the legend of Gilgamesh and Enkidu, or of Orpheus and Eurydice), so the limitation is worth –25%. The net cost of Unkillable is thus 75 points, and all characters have a free 75-point trait. If for some reason a character is “Not Unkillable,” this is a disadvantage worth -75 points.

Reprogrammable. This is a world governed by the laws of magic, one of which is the Law of Names: The true name of a thing is magically linked to the thing and gives power over it. This applies all the way up the power spectrum; for example, Jewish legend says that Lilith learned the true name of God, who therefore is unable to control her! In GURPS terms, this is the Reprogrammable disadvantage, worth -5 points, and every character therefore has Reprogrammable, as a free -5-point trait. Characters are free to keep their true names secret, entrust them to powerful protectors, or even give themselves new true names when necessary, through an elaborate ritual, of course.

Magery. It will be normal for characters to have Magery 0, in the specific form of Correspondence Magery. This represents not merely the ability to perform rituals, but the ability to perceive the magical connections that bind the astral plane together, and thus to navigate the astral plane—to “walk through Shadow.” Characters don’t have to have this, but if they don’t, they’ll experience the entire campaign as a dream, with weird transitions and transformations—and not a lucid dream, unless they have the skill of Dreaming. Magery 0 is worth 5 points; the distinctive trait No Magery is thus worth –5 points.

So far as spell use is concerned, magic in the astral plan has two nonstandard features. On one hand, it doesn’t use the standard –1 to skill per yard of range, but the ranged attack modifiers, which are a lot more generous. On the other, casting times are always as for ceremonial magic, 10× as long as specified in the standard rules. Neither of these affects the point value of Magery; they’re features of the setting, not of the characters.

The total standard package is worth 75 points. All characters get it for free.

II. Categories of Beings

There are three broad categories of beings: mortals, who are native to the material plane; spirits, who are native to the astral plane; and gods, who are native to the higher planes. A mortal has a material body animated by a spirit. A spirit does not naturally have a material body, but has a form that resembles a material body. A god transcends not only body but form, being a purely abstract entity.

There are paths and portals that lead from the material plane to the astral plane, and from the astral plane to the higher planes. If there are any direct links from the material plane to the higher planes, they’re not common knowledge.

A mortal who walks from the material plane into the astral plane effectively turns into a spirit; their physical body is turned into an unrealized potentiality—it’s backed up in storage until they come back to the material plane. But it makes them subject to time and age, whereas spirits and gods are Unaging. Mortals in the astral plane otherwise function exactly like its native dwellers, except that if they don’t have Magery they can’t find their way around. Their spiritual forms are visible and “tangible” and can be sustained by the spiritual forms of food, drink, and air.

Other mortals can project their spirits out of their bodies, either to move invisibly about the material plane, or to enter the astral plane. The body remains behind, in trance or asleep. An attack on the projected spirit that inflicts sufficient injury can drive it back to the material plane.

A spirit that walks into the mortal plane takes on the likeness of material substance. But if it’s killed, the substance will disintegrate or transform. This includes its possessions: purses of gold coins that turn into fallen leaves are an example of how this works.

A spirit that projects into the mortal world becomes invisible, inaudible, and intangible; it’s basically a pure disembodied viewpoint. It also can’t survive there indefinitely; the flow of magical energy in the material world is too diffuse for this. Spirits can get around this by going back to the astral plane for sustenance, by gaining the ability to take magical life support with them (this can be bought as Doesn’t Eat or Drink), or by inhabiting the bodies of living beings, like the loa of voodoo.

In either case, a spirit as such isn’t subject to aging, and has the Unaging advantage. Aging is a property of the body and of time, which is a feature of the material world of cause and effect.

It’s possible to reach the celestial plane from the astral plane. The normal method is by going to parts of the astral plane that border the celestial plane, and crossing over. Neither mortals nor spirits are normally capable of reaching the celestial plane unaided, though mortals such as saints and bodhisattvas may sometimes do so. On the other hand, celestial beings are capable of reaching the astral and material planes. Normally they do so with enough spiritual energy to create forms or bodies for themselves. In this campaign, celestial beings will be represented by their spiritual avatars; what they are like in the celestial plane will not be an issue.

Spirits and gifted mortals use magical spells. Celestial beings normally don’t. Their abilities are instead built as powers. In the terms of the material plane, celestial abilities are the true magia, able to alter the nature and substance of reality; magical spells are goetia, creating semblances that can be dispelled. This isn’t true in the astral plane, where semblance is as “real” as substance. For more on this, see the handout on magic.

[demonsbane]

I'm really impressed with the usability and elegance of this.

With your permission, I believe I will use this for my own campaigns, because I was seeking too how to cover the psychic or "astral" modalities of some player characters. I wasn't happy with the bodily death being always their ultimate end.

I need to re-read your post, but I feel it almost ready for my own Fantasy games.

Indeed, this very well could be inside of the 4e Fantasy book. A bit more expanded, it could be a cool Pyramid article.


For the needs of my story and focus, perhaps I will be tweaking some of this excellent baseline in a minor way, as demanding the development of an astral/psychic body (using Alternate Form) for the PCs becoming almost natives of specific domains of the astral, and the development of another, more transcendent spiritual "envolture" (obtained trough a third rebirth or spiritual resurrection) for becoming natives (not only travellers) of the higher spiritual worlds.

Cheers