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[Harry Baldman]

Except it's possible a spirit might take on the image of the devil, without actually knowing too much about the devil. They might see the image used a lot in other contexts and form their image and identity from those associations.

I'm thinking the main way to harm spirits would be humans with strong/trained minds and other spirits, though things in opposition to a spirit's spheres could weaken or negate their powers. So, spirits with similar affinities could still harm each other. However, the whole idea of opposites gets a little muddy.

How about it being possible to convince a spirit that it has a weakness to something without that necessarily being the case? It'd work kind of like social pressure, you just need to instill doubt and desire to conform and play along in the spirit in question. Get them in the spirit of the moment, one could say. For instance, a ballsy spirit hunter could throw a cat at a devil-spirit, and with even so much as a very convincing "AHA!" and a look of triumph on their face manage to get the devil-spirit to believe, for only a moment or for longer, depending on the psychological damage, that the cat is going to hurt it terribly. In particularly extreme cases, the spirit may react much like a solid object (one-sidedly - the cat would still sail through unimpeded, though the spirit will try to make it appear as if this weren't the case) when struck by the cat, and maybe even start to melt in response. The key is to trap a spirit in the moment, get them to believe they can be harmed by a certain thing. This even works cumulatively - once a spirit is convinced that a thing can harm it once, future applications will elicit the desired response much more effectively, and reinforce the belief.

On the flip-side, this adds an additional benefit to partnership - if a spirit is convinced they are weakened by something, the much better-grounded (even if they're insane, they're nevertheless better-grounded as a general rule) human can potentially convince them otherwise (usually for extraneous weaknesses, however) through persuasive words and cunning arguments. For instance, if a vampire-style spirit is afraid of being incinerated by sunlight, educate them in the lore of Bram Stoker's Dracula, so they're only weakened by it, though they'd take on new weaknesses in turn (not being able to enter a home without being invited and so forth), but perhaps new powers as well (turning into wolves and communicating with animals, for instance). And if it's the garlic and crosses thing that bother the human, they can instead show off their encyclopedic knowledge of Anne Rice's works or their extensive experience with White Wolf's Vampire games. To the spirit, if such a thing is presented well enough, all manner of things can be true, even if (such as in the case of a Vampire: the Requiem rulebook) they are transparently works of fantasy - nuh uh, they're a method of realistically modelling actual vampire behavior, the human can rationalize. And Interview with a Vampire is totally a factual account of a thing that happened. The spirit can't really prove the human wrong, can they? They can suspect the human is lying, though, and this is definitely a breach of the spirit's trust, making subsequent attempts at convincing them far more difficult for the person in question, whether they be a spirit-hunter who failed a bluff check or their best friend that failed to make a convincing case for why sunlight should really only make the Ghost of Count Ravenloft sparkle.

This way, spirits don't actually have weaknesses. They just believe they do - this is, once again, integral to their sense of identity, as a spirit can't hold a certain shape without believing it actually is that thing, and not having a certain set of bizarre weaknesses (or mundane ones, as befits the spirit - while a devil may run at the sound of church bells, an animal spirit would be deathly afraid of fire, a spirit of wind would be greatly hampered by lack of ventilation and so forth) hurts their suspension of disbelief. To stop themselves from having weaknesses, a spirit needs to return to more chaotic forms, and usually this is accompanied by partial or complete info-death, as they can't quite get their former identity back - they can imitate it, though, even if they've lost a lot of their former memories and mind in the process. In addition, the act of returning to chaos is traumatic for a spirit, and hinders further attempts at taking new shapes, to the point where a spirit might eventually be unable to take any form at all, unless completely dedifferentiated, in which case nothing remains of their previous selves and they are capable of only rudimentary thought (including template-seeking behavior), from which point they can begin completely anew.

I don't particularly like the idea of a "strong mind", though, if only because strength of mind is extremely hard to explain satisfactorily and usually borders on natural magic for humans, which runs contrary to the point of the whole thing, methinks. A trained mind, sure, even if it's in the ways of acting, which I'd assume would work wonders under this model of spirit weaknesses. But strong minds just sound dubious.

[~Neri]

Except it's possible a spirit might take on the image of the devil, without actually knowing too much about the devil. They might see the image used a lot in other contexts and form their image and identity from those associations.

I'm thinking the main way to harm spirits would be humans with strong/trained minds and other spirits, though things in opposition to a spirit's spheres could weaken or negate their powers. So, spirits with similar affinities could still harm each other. However, the whole idea of opposites gets a little muddy.

How about it being possible to convince a spirit that it has a weakness to something without that necessarily being the case? It'd work kind of like social pressure, you just need to instill doubt and desire to conform and play along in the spirit in question. Get them in the spirit of the moment, one could say. For instance, a ballsy spirit hunter could throw a cat at a devil-spirit, and with even so much as a very convincing "AHA!" and a look of triumph on their face manage to get the devil-spirit to believe, for only a moment or for longer, depending on the psychological damage, that the cat is going to hurt it terribly. In particularly extreme cases, the spirit may react much like a solid object (one-sidedly - the cat would still sail through unimpeded, though the spirit will try to make it appear as if this weren't the case) when struck by the cat, and maybe even start to melt in response. The key is to trap a spirit in the moment, get them to believe they can be harmed by a certain thing. This even works cumulatively - once a spirit is convinced that a thing can harm it once, future applications will elicit the desired response much more effectively, and reinforce the belief.

On the flip-side, this adds an additional benefit to partnership - if a spirit is convinced they are weakened by something, the much better-grounded (even if they're insane, they're nevertheless better-grounded as a general rule) human can potentially convince them otherwise (usually for extraneous weaknesses, however) through persuasive words and cunning arguments. For instance, if a vampire-style spirit is afraid of being incinerated by sunlight, educate them in the lore of Bram Stoker's Dracula, so they're only weakened by it, though they'd take on new weaknesses in turn (not being able to enter a home without being invited and so forth), but perhaps new powers as well (turning into wolves and communicating with animals, for instance). And if it's the garlic and crosses thing that bother the human, they can instead show off their encyclopedic knowledge of Anne Rice's works or their extensive experience with White Wolf's Vampire games. To the spirit, if such a thing is presented well enough, all manner of things can be true, even if (such as in the case of a Vampire: the Requiem rulebook) they are transparently works of fantasy - nuh uh, they're a method of realistically modelling actual vampire behavior, the human can rationalize. And Interview with a Vampire is totally a factual account of a thing that happened. The spirit can't really prove the human wrong, can they? They can suspect the human is lying, though, and this is definitely a breach of the spirit's trust, making subsequent attempts at convincing them far more difficult for the person in question, whether they be a spirit-hunter who failed a bluff check or their best friend that failed to make a convincing case for why sunlight should really only make the Ghost of Count Ravenloft sparkle.

This way, spirits don't actually have weaknesses. They just believe they do - this is, once again, integral to their sense of identity, as a spirit can't hold a certain shape without believing it actually is that thing, and not having a certain set of bizarre weaknesses (or mundane ones, as befits the spirit - while a devil may run at the sound of church bells, an animal spirit would be deathly afraid of fire, a spirit of wind would be greatly hampered by lack of ventilation and so forth, a human-style spirit ) hurts their suspension of disbelief. To stop themselves from having weaknesses, a spirit needs to return to more chaotic forms, and usually this is accompanied by partial or complete info-death, as they can't quite get their former identity back - they can imitate it, though, even if they've lost a lot of their former memories and mind in the process. In addition, the act of returning to chaos is traumatic for a spirit, and hinders further attempts at taking new shapes, to the point where a spirit might eventually be unable to take any form at all, unless completely dedifferentiated, in which case nothing remains of their previous selves and they are capable of only rudimentary thought (and realize template-seeking behavior), from which point they can begin completely anew.

I don't particularly like the idea of a "strong mind", though, if only because strength of mind is extremely hard to explain satisfactorily and usually borders on natural magic for humans, which runs contrary to the point of the whole thing, methinks. A trained mind, sure, even if it's in the ways of acting, which I'd assume would work wonders under this model of spirit weaknesses. But strong minds just sound dubious.

I really like this idea.

[WillowLuman]

"Strong" in this case might meet confident and with a good grip on reality, knowing oneself enough not to be messed with.

I guess, in short, spirits are weak to (in addition to magical brute force) that which challenges the identity they've formed? Though I don't see the theatrics and convincing working on a fully-formed spirit (as otherwise anyone who stumbled across the existence of spirits and was fully convinced that a crucifix would do the trick on all of them would be right).

[Harry Baldman]

"Strong" in this case might meet confident and with a good grip on reality, knowing oneself enough not to be messed with.

I guess, in short, spirits are weak to (in addition to magical brute force) that which challenges the identity they've formed? Though I don't see the theatrics and convincing working on a fully-formed spirit (as otherwise anyone who stumbled across the existence of spirits and was fully convinced that a crucifix would do the trick on all of them would be right).

Do note that charisma is always contextual. A guy waving a crucifix at a rampaging bear seems merely crazy - the spirits are not entirely disconnected from reality in their convictions. And some might be convinced they are not spirits at all, but something different instead.

On the other hand, why not? It probably wouldn't work if the guy just clutched the crucifix in terror and pointed it at the spirit, seeking protection. But if, say, they jabbed it forth and shouted that the power of Christ compels them at the top of their lungs, they'd at the very least startle the spirit in question. Being monomaniacal, zealous and in possession of a coat full of supernatural-seeming artifacts has its advantages, and is one of the standard spirit hunter archetypes, along with cunning rogues with a variety of tricks and rational scholars with a variety of gadgets. Their respective methods wouldn't always work - a spirit can also be defined by the weaknesses they emphatically do not have (like a devil-spirit who goes all 'your feeble god cannot save your soul, mortal' or loves quoting sinister Bible passages as they approach, or a spirit who knows enough about science to say for sure that there is no such thing as psychokinetic energy and that crossing the streams probably just causes some diffraction or whatever, or a street-smart thug spirit who knows a hustler when he sees one).

EDIT: In addition, a fully formed spirit would have their weaknesses (and what their weaknesses are not) better defined, but I imagine they could still be put on the spot through force of personality and capitalizing on things they are not sure about or possibly forget in the heat of the moment.

[WillowLuman]

It should be noted that, in most cases, spirit knowledge of human culture would be second or even third-hand, since they tend to avoid them (though exceptions of course exist, and there's room for spirit-human cooperation on a less close level). So, street-smart spirits would be exceptionally rare (likely limited to just those partnered with street-smart humans.) In the background, we'd have an interesting dynamic of nature/haphazard observation of the world -> influences spirit identities -> influences human folklore -> influences spirit identities. Increasingly indirectly with each permutation.

On reflection, I want to move away from the "kryptonite" idea, and eschew the middleman of paraphernalia and have it more as a contest of wills. It's not the object that does the damage, it's the spirit-hunter's ability to pull an O'Brien on the spirit.

As for spirits believing they are not spirits, it might be possible on certain levels, but on some level a spirit will always have a nagging feeling that they are not of this world (even if only on a subconscious level). Yet, at the same time, it is from this world that they derive their identities, individuality, and structure.

[Harry Baldman]

It should be noted that, in most cases, spirit knowledge of human culture would be second or even third-hand, since they tend to avoid them (though exceptions of course exist, and there's room for spirit-human cooperation on a less close level). So, street-smart spirits would be exceptionally rare (likely limited to just those partnered with street-smart humans.) In the background, we'd have an interesting dynamic of nature/haphazard observation of the world -> influences spirit identities -> influences human folklore -> influences spirit identities. Increasingly indirectly with each permutation.

On reflection, I want to move away from the "kryptonite" idea, and eschew the middleman of paraphernalia and have it more as a contest of wills. It's not the object that does the damage, it's the spirit-hunter's ability to pull an O'Brien on the spirit.

As for spirits believing they are not spirits, it might be possible on certain levels, but on some level a spirit will always have a nagging feeling that they are not of this world (even if only on a subconscious level). Yet, at the same time, it is from this world that they derive their identities, individuality, and structure.

I don't mean that the spirit is actually street-smart, more that they're roleplaying street wisdom and hardened cynicism, and are less likely to take things at face value ("on da streets, every-fuckin-body's got an angle"). And their knowledge of human culture may be firsthand just as much, since it's kind of difficult to find a place on Earth not in some way shaped by human culture or presently inhabited by human beings - to avoid humans, spirits by necessity need to observe them to some degree.

Once again, I don't envision spirits as having a distinct culture of their own, or societal cohesion of any kind, since the running theme with them is chaos. There could be spirit clans, sure, like some variation of the Wild Hunt or myth-inspired hierarchies of demons and angels, but these would normally be the exception, and spirits would not be naturally associated with one another in any way, or particularly regulated in what they do. Their limited impact on human society would presumably then be explained by their low number and dilution in the world at large, though this is progressively changing as more of the spirit realm attains structure and spirits appear at increasing rates.

By contest of wills, though, what exactly do you mean? As I may have mentioned, will is a very poorly defined thing. You could say bluffing already is a realistic example of a contest of wills, but an equally good example is any form of armed or unarmed standoff, or indeed a whole lot of other things. And the paraphernalia always helps because it lends credence to the assertions of the user (provided it looks interesting and legit enough - takes some skill to pull off a nice-looking neutrino wand).

[WillowLuman]

Your average spirit isn't terribly likely to go to the cinema, flip on the TV, or read a book, though. By second-hand, I mean they gain their knowledge of human culture mainly through watching from the peripheries (since as established, they don't tend to mingle), or occasionally from hearing from each other. The established ones tend to make their homes in either the wilderness or in desolate/abandoned places.

As for spirit-spirit interactions, there are those who think it's their job to enforce what they see as the rules upon other spirits.

[~Neri]

Will write up character later today/in the morning when I wake up. Sorta tired right now. 2am.

[Harry Baldman]

Your average spirit isn't terribly likely to go to the cinema, flip on the TV, or read a book, though. By second-hand, I mean they gain their knowledge of human culture mainly through watching from the peripheries (since as established, they don't tend to mingle), or occasionally from hearing from each other. The established ones tend to make their homes in either the wilderness or in desolate/abandoned places.

As for spirit-spirit interactions, there are those who think it's their job to enforce what they see as the rules upon other spirits.

Wouldn't watching a film be secondhand knowledge, though? It's an observation of human culture performed by humans and then related to the spirit. Observing a human being from the periphery is firsthand knowledge, because the spirit is finding these things out itself. Ah, semantics! I tried not to argue you, but it always comes back to this!

The question about spirit-spirit interactions, however, is how they would enforce rules upon spirits leaving the spirit realm? They can't exactly do anything to a spirit in their home realm, not that there's any point in brutalizing a blob of chaos that wants to go to the mortal world, since there's no end to them, or an already formed spirit who presumably has friends that could brutalize the enforcers right back. I'm thinking there's no authority that would have any form of legitimacy. Why would a spirit listen to another spirit's idea of what the rules are?

One way to envision it, of course, would be that the local Spirit Police were founded by a bunch of spirits (or even one spirit) that went to the mortal world, then came back, similarly to demonic hierarchies within the realm, and then spent an overwhelming amount of time peeling off enough blobs of chaos from the spirit-stuff of the deeper reaches of the realm, then forming them into more and more effective counter-spirit enforcers. These then act as border control for the spirit realm, relaying the laws of the human world to any blob of chaos, making sure it's differentiated enough to understand them, then send it on its way, or tell it that the spirit export quota for this quarter is full, or ask it for its papers futilely, then throw it back into the chaos.

However, to elaborate on how they would possibly enforce any rules on spirits in the human world requires to elaborate on spirit-on-spirit violence. How did that work? I don't imagine another spirit would be capable of bluffing another into compliance with a new weakness, lest they be put up to it by a human lying to them.

Also, another character sheet.

Spoiler: Character Sheet (click to show/hide)

SPIRIT

Name: Wag

Description: Wag, for lack of a better description, is a plastic-looking, slimy purple worm around four meters in length and thirty four to thirty seven centimeters in diameter. He is usually phased into the ground (floor) almost entirely. His body is not segmented, contrary to what one might expect, and has a large, human-looking (but slightly too round to look entirely human) mouth at the surfacing end full of bright white teeth and a pink tongue long enough to touch its own eyes (simple, black affairs arranged radially a little further down), as it likes to demonstrate on occasion. When Wag surfaces, he wags and oscillates his body, keeping his mouth open and his tongue flapping out of it in a grotesque display it seems to greatly enjoy. Along the sides of its body there are lines of waving chaetae about ten centimeters in length (longer when he gets excited) that greatly increase its perceived volume. Its voice is deep and jovial, reminding the listener of a friendly neighborhood witch doctor or perhaps a stereotypical bloodthirsty African dictator or even Santa Claus. When Wag chooses to appear, he does so in a slow, looming fashion, oscillating his body increasingly wildly as a longer section of him emerges from the ground. It tends to be quite distracting.

Abilities: Wag has a few abilities of note. First of all, he emits an extraordinarily unusual smell - not unpleasant, mind you, perhaps actually pleasant - but extraordinarily unusual. Secondly, he produces a mix of near-infrasound and near-ultrasound as he oscillates (increased oscillating length equals greater volume, and also increased frequency range in both directions, meaning greater audibility for elders and the young alike), sounding a little like a squeaky subwoofer. And finally, he can also breathe fire. His greatest weakness is the sight of the Tree of Life from the Kabbalah or the names of the Sephirot as they are said in Hebrew, for reasons unexplained. It seems that words or writing in Hebrew in general spook him, but to a lesser degree where he can actually be calmed after spending five minutes in hiding.

HUMAN

Name: Rebecca Rose Harris, mostly called Becky or Mrs. Harris

Description: a skinny woman in her early forties with an uncanny, somewhat unfortunate resemblance to solo-era John Lennon in hair (not facial hair, mind you) and facial features (she used to wear round glasses that absolutely clinched the look as well before somebody impolitely pointed out that she looks exactly like John Lennon when she does that - she's gone over to contacts instead). Her typical choice of wardrobe is some form of homemade woolen sweater (unless it's Christmas, it's either tan, beige or bright orange) with a dress shirt underneath, a dark shin-length skirt and leather boots or overly sensible shoes. She tends to be vaguely stressed in Wag's presence.

Abilities: Becky's rather well educated, having studied mathematics in college way back, and well-read on top of that. She has more than a decent amount of hand-eye coordination. She jogs, and is entirely capable of running a marathon. She has worked as a teacher in the past, and also homeschooled two of her five children, with varying results. She has learned to drive, and is familiar with the use of a hunting rifle and has used a composite bow once. She also has a scholarly interest in gardening, in contrast to her husband's entirely practical interest and unmitigated passion for agronomy.

BACKSTORY

Certain people are more vulnerable than others, less in tune with the rest of society. Separate, accessible. Unlikely to tell anyone about a spirit's existence. Becky Harris was one such person. Living some distance from the big city, in a humble estate shared by her, her husband Joseph, three of her five children Rosie, Jane and Bob, Joseph's considerably younger and unemployed brother Clark, Joseph's aging mother Charlene, her overly industrious, if slightly senile engineer dad Ralph and her older, widowed sister Tammy, together they share what could best be described as a compound. Solar-powered, off the grid, with independent filtered water supply and even a supply of firearms and MREs in case of a global catastrophe of some kind, the Harris residence had almost everything one could hope for (although the food supply needed some work before it could become entirely self-sufficient, despite the already considerable amounts of land Joseph had devoted to agriculture (they were thinking about starting to raise animals soon, in fact - maybe when her oldest daughter Rachel would become a proper veterinary tech this dream could be realized). Truly an idyllic place for long-term survival, and one unlikely to be hit in any significant capacity by a nuclear attack.

Wag knew what this place needed - him! He felt he could potentially fill a void in the family dynamic they had going in there. It wasn't exactly an elaborate plan, but the nice thing is, after the first wave of disbelief, and the second wave of vague distrust, they seemed to halfway tolerate him, which he counted as a complete and utter victory for his natural charm, with Becky appointing herself as Wag's keeper after Clark, who under fair division of labor (because he was of less than great help to Joseph, certainly) completely fucked it up in the first week and caused a terrible fire that destroyed most of the home they had spent so long building up to self-sufficiency. Wag insisted it was all Clark's fault, and Clark meekly agreed. But Wag, in his generosity, promised he could help fix all the damages, though he was supposed to come upon a shitload of money, nobody knew.

Although staying at the bunker didn't seem like the worst idea for a couple weeks, some housing solution was necessary. So it was arranged that the Harris family, all nine plus one of them, would move into a quaint two-bedroom apartment in the city with heating, running water and food supplies that won't run out soon (though they're taking along the MREs and some of the firearms after locking down the country bunker) as Becky and much of her family - her, Joseph, the teenaged Bob, Tammy, Clark and even Ralph - all seek work in the big city to sustain their new and seemingly lasting (Becky was the main proponent of not insuring the out-of-town estate, since it wouldn't be needed if safety procedures were followed and the firefighting system they installed hadn't mysteriously destabilized and exploded during Clark and Wag's misadventure, and it was much less paperwork and hey, not like insurance would help when society crumbled around them, is she right?) exile from a constructed isolated paradise.

They already hate it here, that much can be plainly understood. The kids aren't used to public school, and most everyone who's a semi-adult is job hunting, so she can't exactly homeschool them properly. Everybody's complaining. When everybody's at the apartment, oxygen levels drop sharply. Windows (no air conditioning and very little ventilation, you see) need to be kept open for as long as possible, which is not very long, actually, since they got a first floor apartment with windows within easy crackhead reach. The traffic is awful. You can practically taste benzene wafting in from the docks as you wake up in the morning. Stepping out in the morning reveals a dangerous, wide, twisting world filled with people who'd eat her and her entire family alive in minutes.

It's almost bad enough for Wag's advice to seem sound, Becky thinks as she lies on the duvet laid out on the ground for her and Joseph, with Ralph sleeping dignifiedly up on the single bed in the room while Clark drools on the couch and Tammy's curled up in an armchair. It all seems rather miserable, and the wagging nub at the foot of the couch making that stupid fucking face at her all the fucking time isn't fucking helping matters any!

COMBINED ABILITY

Wag's little experiment with Clark did show an interesting thing. When Wag wags alone, he is but one wagging thing. But if Wag is enclosed in a human body and kept still, the world around him wags instead, each object in the near vicinity oscillating violently, each at a random amplitude. It's very bouncy. And things start to crack pretty soon, too! A couple minutes in Clark, and the Harris estate was completely trashed and on fire. He wonders how far he could take this, really, but Becky hasn't been willing to let him do his thing with her yet. She seems a little stressed lately for some reason.

[WillowLuman]

Well, they can just use regular persuasion. And failing that, brute force. Spirits can be tangible to each other, and many of their powers work on each other (for instance, spirits can't possess or manipulate the substance of other spirits, but if they've got energy projection of some sort, they can hit them with that.) As for spirit police, none of them would have quotas or bureaucracy, and it's impossible for them to "stop blobs of chaos at the border,"  since it's at the rifts that said new spirits pinch off. Plus, many spirits on Earth don't actually know where the rifts are (being not yet conscious when they come out of them) though they should probably be better able to find them then a human would. Though, interestingly, spirits would be able to shape the development of unformed spirits that they might find, "raising" them as it were.

As for rules enforced, in general it tends to be "don't be conspicuous, don't draw attention," going back to the mutual self-interest thing and (in general spirit experience) discovery tending to result in spirit hunters. There might even be uneasy coalitions between groups of spirit-hunters and spirit police who have the shared interest in avoiding trouble between spirits and humans.

Remember: the weakness thing is for the individual weaknesses of spirits (and I'm still not sure on the bluffing thing, or on symbols having anything other than a psychological effect) rather than things which affect all spirits. The specific ones might be able to weaken or even hurt them, but killing a spirit requires one of the general ones, like mentally grappling with it and tearing its mind apart (convincing it it does not exist, orverriding and erasing its ego, filling it to bursting with noise thoughts, etc) or brute force from another spirit.


As for your characters there, I think it's very interesting for a family to be involved, as that opens up all kinds of questions and scenarios. The powers might need some work (and I'm still mulling over the weaknesses thing) but I like this concept. You might even have different results for different family members doing the hosting (though you can't play as all of them at once.)

[Harry Baldman]

So the Spirit Police can just punch their ethereal perps into submission, got it. It probably hurts a lot, too.

But this bit right here:

Well, they can just use regular persuasion. And failing that, brute force. Spirits can be tangible to each other, and many of their powers work on each other (for instance, spirits can't possess or manipulate the substance of other spirits, but if they've got energy projection of some sort, they can hit them with that.) As for spirit police, none of them would have quotas or bureaucracy, and it's impossible for them to "stop blobs of chaos at the border,"  since it's at the rifts that said new spirits pinch off. Plus, many spirits on Earth don't actually know where the rifts are (being not yet conscious when they come out of them) though they should probably be better able to find them then a human would. Though, interestingly, spirits would be able to shape the development of unformed spirits that they might find, "raising" them as it were.

This points at a logistical improbability of actually regulating spirits on any basic level, and that the 'rules' are really more like sensible suggestions that one spirit may satisfiedly tell another when they meet, and then both nod politely. I also don't see a forthcoming organized response from humans happening if it's only a couple of spirits causing trouble. Maybe federal investigators interested in what the spirit's up to (they'd probably be really nice to it, too, so it tells them more things), or loonies on missions, but hardly a simple cause-and-effect relationship to be had, no? Didn't you actually say that there is no actual attempt made at a masquerade type of situation, and that it's merely people typically being uninformed about what spirits actually are due to limited contact and information? That was one actually refreshing detail I recall, anyway. And spirit societies seem like a counterintuitive thing anyway.

If you really must have the Spirit Police in some form or another, why not make it exclusively human? Spirit hunters who are not necessarily universally opposed to spirits being there, but exist more as guides for detectable cases? Though their methods in general tend to lend themselves to a view among the spirits that these guys are pretty much to spirits as orphanages are to children with dead parents - they sort of help, sure, but it's kind of a horrible experience for the individual in question that might lead to a maladjusted existence later on. So the spirits tend to avoid the Spirit Police and also humans in general on suspicion of them being the Spirit Police or at least snitches for the Spirit Police . Spirits who've partnered up have in all likelihood heard of the Spirit Police already, though possibly never met a representative of any sort, and only have secondhand horror stories from the emerging whole of collective spirit folklore to guide them.

Also, bluffing is a contest of wills, as previously stated, and I do believe having spirits function on a basis of belief would serve as a nice Planescapish touch to the setting, rather than just vanilla magical spirit stuff (especially since, once again, I find the idea of semi-literal mental grappling entirely absurd). I mean, can you actually walk yourself step-by-step through a process of overriding somebody's mind with your own, provided the two were somehow connected? What is the win condition, expressed in thought? Can you actually will one thing harder than another thing, or is that just a meaningless attempt at quantifying a discrete mental process? If your mind is being altered, can you resist it with that very same mind? Can you even know if your mind is being altered? If two minds are connected and share neural patterns, does the crosstalk cause seizures in both? Are spirit and human thinkpans even compatible on a basic level where they can be directly connected at all? It's all these questions that prevent me from being in any way on board with mental warfare not mediated by dialogue, since willpower as used in daily life is actually a set of habits and priorities rather than some easily quantifiable statistic. It just absolutely never makes sense when you start to think about it, at least to me. Bluffing, on the other hand, is a perfectly intuitive process, and doesn't really raise too many questions as long as the initial assumptions (a spirit's mind decides the nature of the body, including if it happens to melt when watered, and a spirit doesn't have a good grasp on the division between fantasy and reality or enough real life reference to effectively develop one in most cases).

Now, there's also that other thing I mentioned previously, where a spirit and a human run into each other and do a hostile form of hosting, where either the spirit kills the human, they both kill one another or, in the most unlikely case, the human kills the spirit and remains viable. Not sure if that's made it in or not.


Oh, I don't plan on playing each of her family members in the event I don't come up with a different character. The family I added because it's kind of boring if everybody with a spirit partner is some permutation of weirdo single orphan with maybe a friend or two if they get really lucky with their bios.

[WillowLuman]

By "mental grapple" I was referring to the whole "hostile hosting resulting in a struggle to the death" thing. We can't have spiritual possessions without the framework of some kind of psychic struggle, after all. As for the form this takes, it would be somewhat like a wordless argument. Imagine something like the MiniLuv scenes in 1984, where Winston's firmly held conceptions on his identity and reality are taken and systematically deconstructed and stripped from him, completely breaking his will. So, the human would be systematically trying to deconstruct the spirit, while the spirit might be trying to counter with their own rhetoric, or flooding with images to break concentration, or disrupting the human's physiology.

I think you might be wanting something more fragile from the spirits than I do. After they begin settling into an identity, they become set in it, with variable leeway to deviate from it over time. They develop a subconsciousness, an objectivity (for lack of a better word) to their selves. They can be wrong about themselves, rather than being just that which they believe they are. For them to be bluffed into believing some holy water can kill them (and thus holy water killing them), they either must remain naive and suggestible for their entire existence (since they cannot rely on experience, consisting only of self-belief), or experienced spirits become invulnerable to anything humans can do to them.

As for spirit police, I never meant them as some kind of world-wide organization or anything. There is still no global masquerade conspiracy. Just people (spirits or humans) trying to keep order in their neck of the woods. For instance, there'd be spirits who have a good thing going for themselves and would not want other spirits messing it up by disrupting the local area. Of course, there can also be factions that operate around the world (it is the modern age, after all), but there's just no way they can hold sway over all spirits. Not for lack of trying maybe, but like you said, a logistical impossibility.

I think the current discussion is getting away from something I've wanted since early on, for a mutual shyness due to being alien to one another. Despite many of them growing up on this plane, spirits are always aware on some level of their differing nature. Matter, they'd get used to pretty fast; plants, somewhat strange; animals, weird but ultimately no threat; but humans, here are beings that are in many ways similar to them but in others utterly different.

[Harry Baldman]

My idea for the hostile hosting thing actually mirrors a seizure much more closely - it all depends on how much crosstalk the humans produce. A trained human knows how to produce deadly amounts of crosstalk for the spirit to make sure it can't do whatever it wants and also ruin its structure in the process, while an untrained one wouldn't, and would only moderately (variably) harm the spirit in the process, especially if the spirit (a practiced spirit, of course, who has been exposed to this sort of risk many times) jumps in for an instant to simply twist the right thing all the way around, then jump out. And it is much easier for a spirit to kill a human than it is for a human to kill a spirit, hence why humans scarcely ever (unless they have spirit partners to put them back together afterward) survive hostile hosting.

The whole point of the belief thing is to make the spirits more alien, render their mentality and physiology different from humans. So far they're intangible humans with powers, largely mentally identical. They're not really terribly alien at all is what I'm saying. There's no meaningful gulf between the average human and the average spirit, and no, being weird-looking and unfamiliar with human culture (if even that) is not a very meaningful gulf. As for spirits remaining naive and suggestible their entire life, consider that a human being is naive and suggestible their entire life as well - you just need to know the right buttons to push, the right impulses to exploit. Hence, con artists - everyone can be conned if they're put on the spot and manipulated quickly from an unusual position (being immune to con artistry is only possible by carefully avoiding any such setups, which for the spirit wouldn't be entirely practical). It's not even always a matter to make them genuinely believe something is their weakness - it's to make them forget for a moment that it wouldn't be, and when the contrary is witnessed, it makes it part of their role - if they didn't recoil from it later, they wouldn't be very consistent, would they? Especially to themselves. A spirit's interest above all others, I envision, is to stay in character as much as possible, and their superior control of their bodies allows them to stay in character to a physiological level humans can only begin to approach.

And no, they can't really be wrong about themselves - part of the hosting thing I wrote about may have mentioned the entropy thing - spirits constantly change in contact with the world, and the template helps them remember what they should try to be and return to, and prevent long-term deterioration and eventual non-viability. The template is remembered - it's not a constant thing kept consistently, and you can convince a spirit they have been wrong about themselves, and their body would then change accordingly as doubts about the template crop up and are resolved. Spirits have no objective means of keeping their information straight, and even human partners help matters only a little bit. Thing is, they just plain forget a lot of things over time. Or misremember them. Or even manufacture memories to fit their internal narrative when the original memory is unsalvageable. Just like humans, in fact, though a human still finds the idea that spirits do it unnerving. You could even have spirit memory be far less efficient than human memory, only being reasonably accurate for, say, up to ten years ago, if they were existent then (and fabricated before their existence if they weren't), or even less. The rest they've either fabricated over time to fit their template and better explain their current situation or just plain forgotten - their memories, much like their bodies, are chaotic things.

Finally, as far as I recall, the MiniLuv scenes were brainwashing, not a wordless an actual argument. Psychological manipulation through words, being put on the spot, a person being removed from their context and then reshaped as needed with appropriate stimuli. The process was wordless because if it wasn't, it wouldn't feel very effective in writing - I imagine quite a bit of words and other meaningful forms of communication were traded in the process. But I might be remembering it wrong, was some 6-8 years ago when I read 1984. I'll go dig up the quotes and see if that helps me understand.

EDIT: Okay, read the last part of 1984 again (entirety of Winston's captivity), and I fail to grasp how anything similar could be done wordlessly, on the spot, and with connected minds. Wordlessness you could assume to be explained away through mental overlap. But doing it on the spot is absolutely bollocks - it's a highly involved process, molding any mind in such a manner. It requires a strictly controlled environment (which does not occur in field conditions), powerlessness on the victim's part (the spirit is decidedly not powerless in practically any circumstance), an unassailable dominance on the captor's part (if a mind is revealed to the spirit, then it doesn't seem likely, unless the human intellect in question is much more alien and frighteningly dogmatic than that of the spirits themselves, and even then the minds would overlap, as they occupy the same space, where you can't draw a line between one and the other), and also time (which hosting does not permit). It's just nonsensical, and not even vaguely applicable. You can't systematically deconstruct identity and reality in the span of two minutes, or five, or even ten. It just doesn't work.

The hostile hosting thing, as I thought of it, was essentially spirits being able to mess people up really badly if they meld into them, and the best purely human answer to it being mutually assured destruction attained through training that discourages spirits from doing it all the time. The practice itself may have developed from the single paranoid and lucky son of a gun who wasn't killed while resisting - for maximum irony, maybe this was because the spirit was trying to help him the entire time without his consent. He then passed on the knowledge to others before trying it on a hostile spirit (presumably years later) and killing both it and himself in the process, though by that point the idea is firmly established in anti-spirit lore. Since then, maybe one or two spirit-unaided people have ever survived the process in even a vaguely viable state. In some cases, the idea of sacrifice being needed may have planted itself into spirit-killer minds (compared to, say, the average spirit-hunter who'd be content to just make a spirit go away and stop whatever it's trying to do, and maybe get paid for it afterwards).

Bluffing, unlike what you describe, is much more impulse-based, and works much better in an urgent situation. It depends on the heat of the moment, and actually kind of makes sense and is possible to do consistently and write convincingly (because mental grappling usually comes down to a literal mind-wrestling contest, which is much more obviously silly than the idea of trying to argue with your own mind why it shouldn't exist, which is only more ludicrous the longer you think about).

[WillowLuman]

The way in which I imagined spirits to be alien is that, as opposed to generalist humans, they are specialists. Reflecting their status as splinters from a larger whole, instead of encompassing a whole panoply of ideas, an individual spirit's identity is centered around a narrow range of concepts, emotions, or themes. They might grow to understand and appreciate broader ranges from experience (and prolonged hosting with a human partner can help round out their mind), but each one settles into a domain (though the elements comprising this can be linked in rather esoteric ways, since the spirit draws these conceptual connections themselves in their formative period).

You might say that, for spirits and humans, each seems inside-out to each other. Spirits can undergo quite a lot of external change, but are very set internally, while humans are much more malleable internally, but are difficult to budge externally.

[~Neri]

Halfway done with character, suffering from computer difficulties for some reason.