These profiles are from a work presented to me posthumously by an acquaintance of mine. A bit more on his situation is presented at the end of the material on Necromancy, so I won't go into it here. Suffice it to say that even though he had first hand knowledge of several of these beings, and no doubt met his end at the hands (or whatever) of some of them, even HE doesn't claim that what he was told was entirely the truth. And I myself have met some Things that don't fit into these categories, but didn't really have the opportunity to take real detailed notes on anything but my nightmares, so that's why info on 'em's not included. So, those of you've heard about the dustup in the Cascades last year... DON'T ask. I don't have anything USEFUL to share, and Spirits know I don't feel like diggin' out for something useless. Virtually all these critters that have been observed or documented to Dr. Oi's team are classified as Genus Teneblemurae, so one can assume the rest would be/will be if and when they get observed, assuming the observer lives long enough to take notes, of course. Given the "Strictly Ghosts" slant at the Zenshöan Center's mandate, classifying some of these things as "ghosts" might be a little problematical, but it IS true that the Wiz-types most likely to deal with 'em tend to be fairly far-gone Hellbound Necromancers, so maybe I should keep an open mind. :-) Anyway, here's the skat, brought to you 'from beyond the grave' :-) Sorry, I HAD to say that...
-- Silence
The Baka are the most notably, obviously, and self-admitted "ghosts of the evil spirits of the Dead, much as their counterparts, the Loa, are self-admitted Spirits of the Good, or at least Neutral, Dead, risen to great power, and leading their children along their Path. The Baka, on the other hand, SANK to great Power, and are the ultimate expression of the Ichorous Ghost: Hungry to devour lesser spirits mortal or otherwise, twisted and vile, delighting in corruption, decay, and decadence. I read Voodoo Sam's bit on Congo Rite Vodoun, and I gotta agree: where go the Baka, go Pain, and Misery, and Death. These things WALLOW in corrupting innocence. And when the victim's been through so much that not a shred of innocence remains, they feast on what's left. Far less... "cerebral" in their corruption than the crew that normally refers to themselves as Demons, Baka corruption is a breaking of human to the animal, seeking not turning of higher human ideals and aspirations to evil like "demons", but shattering their targets humanity altogether. Our Circle had rather close relations with a Congo Vodoun Cult in New Orleans for a while, but Yvgenie, NOT a man bothered by anything remotely resembling conscience, told me of the Baka: "They are the avatars of decay and animalism, representing the evil of the Beast, do NOT trust them, deal with them, or turn your back on their slaves. They have no loyalty beyond the moment and the whims of vile lust their Master sends them. If they were any closer to Seattle than they are, I'd wipe them out as soon as deal with them." So. This from a man who didn't blink at human sacrifice, so I guess you know THAT tune.
From what my exposure to them gathered, Baka have a Hierarchy much as the Petro and Rada Loa, but there is less symmetry among the "patron" Baka, as even their devotees consider them to be profoundly UnSane. I have heard that the Baka dwell in an endless cavern-maze beneath Guinee they call The Labyrinth, at the core of which is a place called Masque, where even such a concept as individual identity fragments away. For some bizarre reason, the Congo'mancer I most frequently spoke with referred to the Leaders of the Cult as "Sluagh", and that they had had traded portions of their souls for portions of "the Horsemen's" souls. I have NO clue what Caribbean Cult was bouncing around Celtic fairy names, nor who or what the Horsemen were, or how... and WHY, someone would graft an Ichor-Ghost's spirit into themselves. But I'm passing along the info...
Div, Devils, Jann, Afreets, etc, etc, etc. Every mythic structure in the world has believed. Let's not get into the old chicken-and-the-egg thing: For us mere mortals, it really doesn't MATTER whether the legends came from dim memories of real beings, or if the ages-long belief in their existence caused unformed spirit-stuff to take those particular shapes. What MATTERS is that devils are real. Frag, maybe THE Devil is too, for all I know... I... well, the Master I served wasn't one of the Ones that told his slaves a whole lot. Questioning if and who the Dark Master's Master was was a good way to feed the fires as fuel, so I don't have a LOT of direct knowledge here either, but it comes closer than any of the other groups. Even so, the creatures in this group revel in deception for its own sake, so very little of my description here is what they say about themselves in ANY case, and even saying "they" is a little excessive -- far more than the Baka, spirits in this category are EXTREMELY individualistic, and deadly rivalries are as or more common than cooperating "infernal" power blocs. Some of these beings CALL themselves "demons" (or Jann, or... well, anyway), but many don't. VERY few consider themselves to be "Ghosts" in the classic sense, though most have traditions of especially corrupt servants working themselves up (or down, depending on how you look at it) to full-fledged "demon" status, so I figure it's more terminology than anything else.
Unlike the Baka, Demons work for one and only one goal: Personal Power. Generally, they go about GETTING that power by way of corrupting the living and sucking up their polluted essence. Almost universally, they delight in deception, lies, and illusion to a well-past-pathological degree, but seem to have little else in common, though MOST seem to prefer building up Cults of one sort or another, and corrupting higher human ideals into dark parodies of their original nature by way of temptation, rather than direct assault. Power-mad tyrants, lust-crazed stalkers, bloody-eyed terrorist fanatics all delighted our Circle's Dark Master to NO end. Sometimes it seemed to me that this was merely a sport for them, other times an integral part of their nature... given their penchant for lies, it's hard to say with accuracy, and even harder to say if it would make a difference in practical terms.
The BIG question, these things. This is less of a category than a description of a type that covers a possibly infinite NUMBER of groups: What they have in common is that they've got NOTHING in common with our reality. According to my Mentor, not all of the so-called "Ichorous" dead were EVER human, or even alive as we define the term. What they have in common is that their motivations, as far as they can be deciphered, are not concerned with feeding or gathering power in any normal sense: their natures are SO alien that they can't properly exist here, or even in the near astral, but seek ways to change reality here to allow moving in and taking over the entire world. That means they loathe each OTHER even more than they seek to prey on living beings, which is a small blessing, at least. From veiled hints picked up during the course of my Fall, some of these beings may not be ghosts at all in ANY sense of the word, some, in fact reproducing in some manner, rather than deriving from living beings. They deal with Necromancers more because the plasmic nature of their magics is somehow less antithetical to their natures, and is able to more closely match their own. Yvgenie once claimed that some of them were "here before, when the stars were right for them to live." One group was apparently dominant a LONG time ago, and are somehow connected with the ichorous spirits known as Wraiths. Others he claimed were some sort of insect demons... others Dead Gods. All of the beings my Master referred to as Djur (he said it was from some old Norse term for Things that howled in the darkness outside wintered-in villages) are vile enough that even the most evil of other ichorous spirits treat them with caution, if not respect, due to their inscrutable behavior and unpredictable powers.
«««I know of at least one sort that made an attempt at penetrating our world within the last couple of years. A thing that we think was referring to itself as a Mandrake tried to manifest through infested Nature Spirits in a bog in the Cascades last year. I'm still not 100% sure how it was stopped, though the team of Seattle Runners that did it got chewed up pretty bad doing so. They never did clue me in on details, but I lost half a field team of toxic-magic-cleanup experts to some kind of flesh-eating fungus and insanity before they did. -- Duck'n Cover»»»
«««That was my first major run out of Seattle, and I barely survived with my sanity intact. What a way to start your career, eh? Actually, I did go mad, but once the thing was dead, or banished, I got better. It's a long story, and I REALLY don't feel like sharing the details. All I'll say is this: If I had known what taking up that run would wind up doing to me, I would have walked right away and kept walking until I was far, far away. -- Jett»»»
«««I TOLD you not to bring up the Cascades... We didn't tell you anything because we didn't KNOW anything. All I know is that it tried to do too much at once, and faded when we fragged its little ritual use of ME as a power source. -- Silence»»»
«««That, Si, and the fact that I woke up just in time to hack the thing it was using as an anchor to pieces...Frag, I've never heard ANYTHING scream like that. That was dumb luck, though, just like Pink's shot...The effigy attacked me, and I killed it. I didn't realize just how important the ugly thing was. 'Course, we didn't put together all the pieces and the truth about the mummy until later. -- Jett»»»
«««Another reason I hadn't wanted the subject to come up -- we STILL have no REAL understanding of how we stopped it, other than the basic "Anything it tries to do, try to screw up, maybe we'll frag something inportant"... not a real tactically sound plan, if you have an option. -- Silence»»»
«««THIS is what you were talking about, Si? -- Buffy»»»
«««Yes. -- Silence»»»
«««Guess I pulled out just in time... Sorry Si, I'm not really geared up for saving the earth. Hope SOMEONE does though, or I won't have anywhere t'keep my stuff :-). -- Space Case»»»
««Hey, you said these things sometimes manifest THROUGH other spirits? I wonder... back before they dropped the Bomb on the Bugs, I ran into a Nest of DEAD Buggers trying to do something ritual with a mainframe while I was on the trail of a blood-sucker. We lost half the team before we managed to blow the whole building. At the time, I thought it had something to do with the Vamp we were after... now I'm not so sure... -- Stake Fry»»»
«««Magic and Tech do NOT mix, ya scut. Pull the other one. -- Jub Jub»»»
«««Well... normally. These things ARE, thank the Spirit, very rare... but they DO often use natural laws that should NOT exist... on the good side, they need a lot of time and power to gain any kind of foothold, but once they manage enough to warp things... or find or create a nastily tainted Haunt, they can do things neither normal magic OR technology can explain. I don't know if they could DO a magic/matrix mix. Hope to Heaven they CAN'T... but after the Cascades... I'd hesitate to say ANYTHING would be impossible. -- Silence»»»
Prev | Next | Out | Introduction | Background | Mechanics | Sourcebook