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[Andres]

Anyways, I really don't think that it should have a fixed end point, that would just cause problems for people who wanted a different end point.

No no no, what I said is that a good end should be possible. I didn't mean to say that there should be one ending or that there must be some kind of ending - just that out of all the possible things that can happen in the game, a good ending is one of them.

[WillowLuman]

Yeah, a good end would be possible. But here I'm more concerned with getting the lore in order.

[Andres]

To be honest, I'm more of a mechanics guy. I'm not very good with lore so I'll let you guys handle that. One thing that I really must say concerning the lore is to make the spirits magical and don't make them aliens. It's like making the TMNT aliens.

For mechanics, how about this: burn-out happens with short-term use and burn-out decreases with frequent use. Spirit possession decreases the lifespan of a human but this effect only happens after the spirit leaves the human. While it's actually inside it, the ageing process is paused, meaning that someone who has a spirit inside them constantly can theoretically live forever.

I've also come up with some mechanics relating to the usage of powers. Basically, calories can be used as an alternate fuel source to power the....power? Magic? Spells? You guys have to work on that. But yeah, powers can be powered by calories. Using calories to power the powers reduces their strength to 75% (or less) but doesn't put a strain on the body (beyond what using so many calories so quickly will do) or the spirit. That the spirit doesn't get put under any kind of strain could be a reason why they would seek out human hosts.

I think the negative effects to the body should be physical. Cuts, bruises, internal bleeding, aches & pains, headaches, broken bones, muscle ache, fatigue, disorientation, etc. That stuff is a lot easier to handle than kidney failure or whatever and these obvious symptoms send out a clear message to humans that possession by a spirit is a bad idea.

[WillowLuman]

By "alien," we don't mean "extraterrestrial," we just mean "strange and unfamiliar." They are creatures of a different nature from humanity.

Someone can't live forever with a spirit inside of them because they'd both burn up. Though I think the time they can co-habit the body should probably increase over time, starting with only a few minutes but experienced pairs eventually getting around half an hour to an hour. As for physical symptoms of getting close to burnout, I'm thinking something resembling simultaneous hypothermia and extreme fever, or receiving a very large dose of radiation. The experience would probably be "wow, I feel awesome and powerful!" right up until both start burning up and dying extremely quickly.

Hosting several times in rapid succession (as opposed to the spirit staying in the whole time) should result in exhaustion, and possibly fever.

[Andres]

The immortality situation can only occur if burn-out is removed or becomes negligible, meaning that said immortality is only theoretical and practically impossible. Maybe one of the conflicts in the story can come from an individual or group using unethical means to try and find a way to decrease burn-out?

As for rapid succession vs staying in the whole time, if rapid succession results in decreased burn-out for an equivalent amount of practical usability, why would anyone want the spirit to stay inside them the whole time?

[kj1225]

Because it's a bitch to deal with not being super powered at an in opportune time.

[Andres]

That's the thing, why can't the spirit just hop right into your body as soon as that inopportune time comes around?

[kj1225]

Because that's even more dangerous than being like, hey hop in, and having them get in.

[GiglameshDespair]

Maybe we should consider it like this.

When possessing someone, the human suffers burnout, their life both decreasing and suffering physical effects.

Maybe being possessed is unpleasant and takes a short while, and the un-possession is worse the longer you've been possessed?

So it's a trade off - you want to delay being possessed, but it's neither instant to do and incapacitates the human while it's happening, so it must be done in a safe area. Being unpossessed is painful and damaging, but not as damaging as long term possession.

[Andres]

Maybe we should consider it like this.

When possessing someone, the human suffers burnout, their life both decreasing and suffering physical effects.

Maybe being possessed is unpleasant and takes a short while, and the un-possession is worse the longer you've been possessed?

So it's a trade off - you want to delay being possessed, but it's neither instant to do and incapacitates the human while it's happening, so it must be done in a safe area. Being unpossessed is painful and damaging, but not as damaging as long term possession.

That'll work.

[kj1225]

Except for the life shortening thing. I still think it's over used.

[Harry Baldman]

In general, the spirits and humans should be alien enough to each other that distrust exists from that alone, and early interactions (possessions, attempts to bind to servitude) might have made things worse. Spirits being stranded on this plane and needing a guide sounds like a good motive, though. Bear in mind that the players can supply the motives for their characters, within reason.

One possible model I had in mind was the spirit plane was originally unstructured, but as spirits started falling through into the physical plane, structure started leeching into the spirit plane. So they'd come in as unfeeling globs of spiritiness, resembling meteors, then gradually acquire a distinct form and personality from interactions with the material world. Then sometimes a few of them would return, bringing distinctness and structure with them. This is just one possible model, though.

As for forms of spirits, they should be diverse: from flame-like/swirly energy things, to animal/insect-like, to really bizarre things with lots of wavy bits, and anything in between. Possibly demonic-looking ones too, but I'm a tad leery of that aesthetic here (I'm not going to veto it yet, though). But I'm not going to say "All spirits must follow X aesthetic," aside from the proviso that they seem insubstantial in some way. I want to let people be creative.

How alien is alien enough? My best idea was taking inspiration from invertebrate specialization and behavior, and attempting to assign a quasi-human personality to that. But you really can't count on people bringing something interestingly alien to the table if they're supposed to make a person in the first place. Xenofiction hardly ever works.

The unstructured spirit plane sounds rather amazingly boring at first, but I could see how you could do some fun things with it. Spirits imitating nature (and humans as well) without true understanding a la Dragon Age, and structure being introduced to the spirit world around the area of the passageway, with the edges of it forming a gradient of structured and wild environs. How about allowing humans into the spirit world, but the role of human and spirit is reversed there?

You could even have it be a question of awareness - the spirit world consists of three extra spatial dimensions, each orthogonal to every regular spatial dimension. Humans and spirits always occupy both worlds (they both have presences in all six dimensions), it's just a matter of learning to change one's perception from one to the other (neither a human nor a spirit can perceive six dimensions of space at once, so they can navigate either one or the other at a time - the alternation happening either in sleep, to further rip off Dragon Age, or as a learned technique that has only recently become apparent to spirits, who have then taught it to willing humans in return for guardianship in a strange new world). Maybe all regular life always existed in the spirit world, each the center of an island of structured reality? Each spirit, meanwhile, exists in regular space as well, and around them you get areas where strange things sometimes happen (before they started moving around, that is) - forests of suicides, a bridge that dogs jump off of, mysterious, illogical monuments occasionally found around larger populations, that sort of thing. Or maybe what we call plants and rocks in our world are spirits in the other one, while we humans are the plants and rocks of the spirits (this doesn't fit with the rest of the paragraph, but sounds cool in my head)?

And similarly to the world of regular life introducing order and structure to the spirit world, you could have the spirit world introduce unpredictability in the regular world. Entropy, so to speak. Just as you have humans probably wishing for a return to normality, you could also have conservationist spirits seeking the return of spiritkind to their native state of total chaos and unity, fighting the novelty of Earth life-induced permanency by any means necessary.

As for aesthetics, it's pointless to argue what aesthetics are appropriate while nothing at all is clear of the universe itself. Start from the fundamentals. Though that might just be my interest in constructing cosmologies talking.

[WillowLuman]

Earlier I thought you meant they should all look like invertebrates, which is why I brought the aesthetics up.

As for how strange/alien spirits need to be, we don't need Ye Incomprehensible Daedric Lords of Yog Sothoth. Spirits probably won't be familiar with most technological or organizational/political stuff, but they can understand human emotions and motivations. Imposing strict xenofiction with unrelatable beings would set the barrier to entry pretty high.

I do like the idea of the mere fact of the planes remaining in contact with each other causing them to pollute each other, providing justification for the "beware the other side!" people (and possibly tying in thematically with the burnout concept, on a macro scale), though there is the issue of "everyone's doomed from the planes colliding" leading to grimdark. I also like the idea of them being layered over each other. Another model might be you have the spirit plane, the material plane, and a sort of "halfway" superimposed plane.

Note: I know next to nothing about Dragon Age, so don't worry about that. I'm more stealing from the Bartimaeus Trilogy, Avatar, and Howl's Moving Castle (the book).

As for rapid succession vs staying in the whole time, if rapid succession results in decreased burn-out for an equivalent amount of practical usability, why would anyone want the spirit to stay inside them the whole time?

While the "jump in and out" repeatedly thing might avoid death, it's still going to wear the human out pretty fast and cause them to pass out. Staying in the whole time, they'd be much less wiped out after separating, provided they have a rest/cooldown before doing it again.

Let me stress: hosting is cooperative. It's not one taking control of the other, its both of them combining their power and working together. My original intent is that it can be initiated quickly, but whatever its used for should be done quickly, since it can only be used safely for short stretches at a time. In HBM's, scenario, you might see it as allowing them to perceive and act in both dimensions at once.

I stress a different terminology because spirits forcefully taking over someone is probably also possible, though more dangerous and less powerful.

[Andres]

Yeah, we all realise that the spirit doesn't take control of the human. You don't need to remind us. (Not-annoyed tone.)

[kj1225]

So, like digimon?