Hey there, folks, dusting off this blog a bit. I dragged my feet on it, but with everything going on I'm running a game for some of my tabletop folks via voice chat (or at least trying to). As I don't want to go to the trouble of learning any special software for running stuff online unless I have to, I'm holding off on Starfinder as it's a little tactical for running like that. Instead, I've worked something out with a few of my players to dip back into the Chronicles of Darkness for a bit. Specifically, we've started a Geist: The Sin-Eaters game.
For those of you unfamiliar with the game, Geist is a game of second chances. The player characters are sin-eaters, people who've died and in the moment of death made the Bargain with a ghostly entity called a geist who's brought them back to life. Now they walk in the worlds of the living and the dead (both metaphorically and literally), driven to resolve what's brought them back (referred to as their Burden), and what keeps their geist going, and along the way they have to decide how to deal with the ghostly remnants of people who are now stuck in a half-existence designed to chew them up and swallow them into literal nothingness. They organize into groups called krewes made up of both living and dead members who work together to help the ghosts under their charge and maybe -- if they're lucky and put in the work -- reform the Underworld itself.
(Note: Geist is a game about ghosts and the raw deal that being a ghost is. It's not inherently darker than other CofD games but death and the roads that people to take to get there can be touchy/tricky subject. So consider this a general content warning.)
This will take place in my Woodburn Chronicles setting, but with a bit of a twist... this game is taking place in a different place and time. Almost none of the existing setting elements I've established in my other games are likely to matter, aside from maybe some cosmic behind the scenes stuff. It's taking place in (or at least starting in) Las Vegas in 1951. We just sat down and started talking about what we wanted to play, and that's how the conversation played out.
So Vegas it is, hence the appearance of one-time mascot of Vegas, Vegas Vic up above. And further down, below the cut, we'll meet our krewe and get started!
First, our group of sin-eaters is called the Crossroads Krewe, a trio of Necropolitans operating out of a motel called the Crossroads Inn and running it as sort of a halfway house for ghosts, providing a mutual support network for the formerly-living. The members consist of:
- Edward "Eddy" Black, played by Zac. Owner and operator of the Crossroads Inn. Eddy used to be a rumrunner during Prohibition, buying and using the motel as a base of operations. But towards the end of those years, Eddy wound up trapped in an abandoned cellar surrounded by casks of alcohol during a police raid that caught the building on fire. He died down there, and came back as one of the Hungry. He's still a criminal now, but he works as a fence now that smuggling alcohol is not the industry it used to be. His geist is the Lonely Proprietor, who appears as an older man dressed in some sort of service uniform, possibly as a head butler or a majordomo, his face cloaked in shadow except for a golden monocle and a single glowing eye behind it.
- Richard Truman, played by Bryan. An engineering student who once became indebted to the mob and worked off that debt by building custom rigged slot machines for the mobsters setting up in Vegas. One day he saw someone lose everything to one of his rigged machines and out of guilt followed her to find some way to help her and saw she was going to kill herself. Before he could reach her, he was hit by an oncoming car. Now that he's returned as one of the Kindly he's vowed to do right by the family she left behind, and find and destroy as many of his rigged machines as he can. His geist is Lady Luck, a woman whose exact appearance changes every time you look at her, with an emaciated body and sparkling coins where her eyes should be. She's adorned in rags but wears the finest jewelry.
- S. Kenneth Brown, played by Sean. An FBI agent assigned to investigate organized crime in Las Vegas (spoiler alert: he found it), Kenneth's focus is a mid-level mobster named Richard "Manny" Rossi who's just high enough in the syndicate to be worth going after but low enough that it's possible to get at him at all. But just a couple of months ago, his investigation took an unpleasant turn and he wound up dragged out into the middle of the desert and Rossi and his men broke his legs and left him to die out there. Perfect circumstance for coming back as one of the Vengeful, though it did take a while for him to drag himself back to civilzation. His geist is the Skinwalker, an older geist that takes the form of a headless Native American man whose head has been replaced with a coyote's skull with snake fangs.
So the game picks up on December 1st, 1951. The year is on the way out. This is the year that Vegas' red light district, the seed from which modern Vegas' decadence was born, was shut down as a public nuisance. It's also the year that Vegas Vic, the famous neon cowboy sign, was built at the Pioneer Club where every 15 minutes it squawks "Howdy, pardner!" at passersby.
It's also currently the rise of mob-run Vegas, just a few years after the murder of Bugsy Siegel when organized crime really got the modern casino hotel industry up and running. Frank Sinatra is currently performing at the Desert Inn, filling at best half the room. He'll bounce back, eventually, but right now his marriage is over and his career is in shambles and the Rat Pack is years away.
A little under a hundred miles to the northwest, the government has been testing atomic bombs at the Nevada Proving Grounds. The tests are in full swing but have not yet caught on with mainstream pop culture (that will be in a few months when they start televising them). And on the date in question, the military has just wrapped up a series of military exercises and soldiers are swarming into the city to spend their pay.
So we begin with a man named Mel Stash, a low-level mob flunky with a constant day's worth of stubble, a cheap suit, and kind of a hangdog expression on his face. He brings a duffel bag into the Crossroads Inn and asks the woman at the desk if Richard is around. While Richard has paid off his initial debt to the mob, they still occasionally leverage the fact of his past association to get him to jump through hoops again.
Richard comes out, and Mel says he's here to get Richard to do a job -- and this one will even pay! He says he's building a custom roulette wheel but he needs the centerpiece electroplated with gold. He opens up the bag and pulls out the centerpiece so Richard can look at it -- nothing too fancy, and electroplating is really simple to do. Honestly, he could probably just take it to an engineering school and get a student to do it in the college's workshop, but whatever. Then Mel pulls out the gold he brought for this -- a handful of gold coins in a paper bag. He says that Richard can use however much gold as he has to to cover the centerpiece, and then can keep the rest for himself as payment. All in all, this is enough for the equivalent of probably a couple of grand in modern money (assuming inflation applied to what the gold would be worth then, as opposed to the price of gold today). Mel assures him this isn't for anything illegal, just gambling.
Richard agrees to the job and takes everything back at his room to take a look at it. The coins have designs suggestive of antiques but the coins aren't quite worn enough to match. Also, he discovers, there's dried blood in on one of the coins as if someone did a crappy job cleaning it off. He calls Eddy down to his room to take a look at the coins, and it turns out they match a set of antique coin dies that Eddy fenced a while back to a local engineer. He goes to check his records to see who bought the dies while Richard gets a feeling that the coin might be a ghost's anchor.[0] He keeps that coin on him and stashes the rest in a safe.
Richard calls up the operator to get an address for the phone number that Mel left with him -- a casino currently being remodeled. He goes out there and finds it being worked on. There isn't a current name on it, but he can see enough of the old signage to know that it used to be called "Bacchus." He pokes around the lobby a bit, successfully wandering around like he's supposed to be there, and his geist gets kind of a weird vibe off of the place, particularly the Romanesque architecture inside. She leads him a bit through an empty chunk of the floor where the slot machines used to be, following sort of an invisible labyrinth, muttering "Cigars, cigarettes?" to herself. The place is familiar to her. He asks if her if she worked there, and she isn't sure. Before they can pursue that further one of the workers calls out to him to ask what he wants. Richard says he wants to talk to Mel, but he's told that Mel is currently at lunch. Richard says he'll come back later and goes to leave.
Meanwhile, back at Eddy's office, he's dug up the name of the guy who bought the dies from him, a man named William Eisenberg. He gets William on the phone, who says that he's been using the dies, occasionally making coins out of gold he's acquired and spending them in town. He mentions a man named Mr. Staszicz (Mel's proper last name, 'Stash' being a shortened form) bought a bunch of the coins as some sort of promotional thing for his casino. He admits that it definitely seems odd, but the guy's money was good so what would it hurt?
Eddy thanks him for his time and calls up Kenneth at his office. He explains the situation, and Kenneth's concerned that Richard is in trouble. As this is almost seventy years ago, cell phones aren't a thing, so he has no way of reaching Richard out and about. He makes a few calls to find out where Mel's been working and heads out to find the casino being remodeled. He runs into Richard outside, and they all head back to the motel to regroup and try using the Lover's Telephone ceremony to reach the ghost anchored to the coin.[1]
So they find some space in the motel and put their phone in the middle of a room, scattering loose change around to symbolically 'connect' it to the gold coin. They darken the room and light some candles, and plug the phone into a skull. Richard performs the ceremony and it works -- a man with a Southern accent named Sam Benson picks up on the other end. He's uneasy at first, but they quickly emphasize that they're here to help him.
Sam explains that he was killed in a horrible accident earlier that day and he had some gold coins in his pocket that embedded in his body. He says that he saw someone paying the doctor to pull the coins out of him. He tells them that he is at the coroner's office right now. He can't leave, though -- it's just too bright out. They tell him to sit tight and break the connection.
They head down there and Kenneth can easily enough wave his badge to get them in to the morgue where they see Sam's ghost sitting on a table. He's a young guy with a blond buzz cut, maybe 20, in an Army uniform that's got a bunch of holes like bullet holes in the chest. They have the attendant slide the body out of the drawer and give them some time to inspect it alone. The body does indeed have a bunch of holes punched in its chest.
As they take a look, Sam explains that he was in town looking to spend some money, and was out in front of the El Cortez where he got into a fight with a construction worker who hit him in the chest with a 2x4. He had the coins in a shirt pocket and they punched into his chest (looks like puncturing a lung), and he suddenly got really weak and collapsed on the street... The next thing he remembers after that is 'waking up' to a man wearing a cheap suit with stubble and a hangdog expression paying the doctor to dig the coins out of his chest. When asked, Sam explains that he won the cards from a game of three-card monte.
They take a closer look at the body and determine that he wasn't hit supernaturally hard or anything, and they start speculating that there might be something supernatural about the coins. Perhaps a curse of some sort. (Which naturally bothers Eddy, who worries if he unintentionally fenced a set of cursed coin dies) Richard copies down the doctor's preliminary notes (as a proper autopsy hasn't been performed yet).
They then talk to Sam and explain that he's going to have a choice to make because at some point his body is going to be moved, likely shipped back to his family back east, and he's going to have to stick with either his body or the bloody coin if he wants to continue like this. He decides to stick with the krewe, since apparently part of their deal is helping ghosts and he likes the sound of that right about now.
So they take Sam back to the motel to drop him off so Kenneth and the others can go to the El Cortez to check out where this happened. And it does turn out that he's blinded by the daylight outside, possibly a ban.[2]
So they head out to the area out in front of the El Cortez. There are signs of the police having been there earlier, so they know they're in the right place. Kenneth uses Recall the Memoria and produces what is best described as a mystical hologram of what happened earlier so the rest of the krewe can see it.[3] And sure enough, it plays out like they heard... a construction worker talking up a curly-haired blonde while they both have a smoke outside the hotel. Sam bumps into the guy, and they briefly fight while the woman runs inside, and the construction worker grabs a 2x4 from a pile of construction stuff set down nearby (as there's a construction site a block away) and hits Sam in the chest. Sam falls over and starts coughing up blood and the worker flees. Kenneth goes over everything and collects a cigarette butt left behind by the construction worker.
They talk about going into the hotel and seeing if they can find the woman (assuming she's a guest at the hotel) and ask her about what she saw. Though they are a little concerned as this is Manny Rossi's hotel. But they're still going to risk it, and before going in Kenneth uses Recall the Memoria to literally bottle the memory in a flask in case it needs to be reviewed later.
So they head in and after some back and forth Kenneth bribes the guy at the front desk to find that the woman is indeed staying there and what room she's in. (He gets a good enough roll that he gets a condition that gives him a bonus to dealing with the staff while he's there, or he could cash it in entirely to make sure that Manny doesn't find out about this visit.) So they head up to the room and because Kenneth doesn't want to advertise who he is, Eddy knocks on the door and tells Sarah he has a business proposition for her to get her to open the door.
So she does open the door and it's definitely the woman from the vision. Her name's Sarah Weber, she's from Boston, and she's in town on business at least through New Year's. Eddy offers her money to talk about what she saw, who the construction worker was, all that. The worker's name is Gus, and he's apparently remodeling a hotel somewhere. But he was nice and chatty, but he seemed to become a different person when Sam bumped into him. But the rest plays out as they saw. She's more than a little horrified when she finds out that Sam's dead -- she ran off at the first sign of the fight, and a little later Mr. Rossi said he'd make sure she didn't have to talk to the cops so there wouldn't be any trouble. They also get Gus' description, which matches the vision. She says that they were talking about him taking her out for a drink at a place around the corner named the Sunset Speakeasy when he got off work.
They make a note of that, deciding to head to the bar to try and track Gus down and then maybe follow up on where Sam got those coins. Eddy pays Ms. Weber for her time and the krewe heads out...
...where they see a ghost in an alley across the street watching them. They don't recognize them because they're wearing a mask that looks like baked, crumbling earth.[4] The ghost vanishes into the shadows, and we leave off there.
[0]-- While I don't think this is something that's normally an ability sin-eaters have, I thought it might be the sort of thing they might be able to sense.
[1]-- Normally Lover's Telephone requires knowing the name of the subject, but I decided that rule of cool would at least let them have a chance with a coin that literally has the guy's blood on it.
[2]-- All ephemeral entities (ghosts, spirits, angels, etc.) and certain other beings in Chronicles of Darkness 2nd Edition have bans and banes. Banes are physical weaknesses -- sunlight is technically a bane for vampires, for example, as is silver for werewolves -- and bans can restrict a character's behavior and movements. Apparently for whatever reason (I mean, I know the reason, but I don't think it came up in-character), bright light is a ban for Sam.
[3]-- Sure, a bunch of civilians will see it as well, but this is an era without camera phones so who's going to believe them? Odds are, if they tell anyone what they saw, someone will assume that they either made it up for the attention or saw the actual incident earlier and got confused.
[4]-- For those of you at home unfamiliar with Geist, this is a Reaper. Reapers are ghosts who wear (and are empowered by) the deathmask that a geist turns into when it's been killed. They use that power to leave the Underworld and stalk the surface for ghosts to drag back down into the Great Below. Generally unpleasant folks.
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