Ghosts, Anchors and Unfinished Business

If a Sin-Eater or human helps a Ghost resolve their Anchors, but NOT their Unfinished business, does this mean they "go away" because they are drawn into the Underworld, or because they move on?  Does the peaceful resolution make the difference, and help them to the Beyond?  Or, do the ghosts that Sin-Eaters think they are helping end up someplace terrible after all?

Of course, it COULD be that there is only Oblivion, and any Ghost that is resolved or helped to move on suffers the same fate as those that are destroyed--they lose the last vestiges of Self, and simply disappear.

Cleverest of Things:

If a Sin-Eater or human helps a Ghost resolve their Anchors, but NOT their Unfinished business, does this mean they "go away" because they are drawn into the Underworld, or because they move on?  Does the peaceful resolution make the difference, and help them to the Beyond?  Or, do the ghosts that Sin-Eaters think they are helping end up someplace terrible after all?

The latter. If a sin-eater think that ridding the ghost of it's anchors in a peaceful way helps it to "move on" he/she might be disheartened to find it in the underworld two months later, still not ready to move on, trapped by its own passions.
 
If the anchors and passions align though, then resolving the anchor and finishing unfinished business might be accomplished by a single act.

Personally, unless I wanted to make a story out of it, I'd somehow let the players know that's how it works before they have a chance to make that mistake (not fair for them to go through ages of trouble to "be nice" to the ghost just to stick your tongue out and say "nah-nah she is languishing in the underworld anyway..").

There could be a good story there somewhere though. A group of sin-eaters find an easy way to help a ghost (preferably that of someone they care about) let go of its anchors only to realise, just a second too late, that they are really banishing her to the underworld. What follows could be a series of sessions where they first try to take care of the ghosts unfinished business and then find her in the underworld to deliver the good news so that she can move on.

How Kerberoi pass the time when no Laws are being broken.

I've been reading quite a bit in the Death and Darkness areas of mythology lately, and something that is prevalent throughout the world, really, is that man comes from the darkness (the underworld), as well as returns to the darkness at death. This is why you have goddesses like Demeter and Persephone (or Kore) of the Eleusinian Mysteries, Kali  and the Morrigan,  who are goddesses of fertility and death -- the mother of your birth, the mother you return to in death -- and for the ancients this place, this darkness of the Underworld, was the same place.

The only way to move on past the darkness, or not to return to the darkness, was to rid yourself of all attachments to this life, ... basically you have to get over yourself ... and then you have a chance of being reborn into a higher plane or moving past the realm of the gods altogether.

Joseph Campbell, in his Transformations of Myth Through Time eps 10 - The Tibetan Book of the Dead and 11 - The Mystery Religions of Ancient Greece are great introductions into this area of thinking which has been prevalent through out most of the history of man, and is still a strong belief system for most of the world.

What is clearly noted by Campbell, is that the soul not able to make the transformations into death, is held back for the most part out of Fear. Fear of the other-side, fear of being before god, terrified of being seen by the gods as they really are (their core being).

Campbell brings up in this series, as well, the levels of spiritual awareness outlined by the beliefs of the Kundalini Yoga  followers, a system which has been a heavy influence to just about every religion of the Near East, Middle East and Far East, for over 3000 years. One of the areas he points out is that if a person has not been able to raise his awareness above the 3rd stage, into Heart level, then he is living in the area of the animal. These are also the people, most likely, unable to move on, as Fear is their guiding light. This same idea is found in the Greek, and Egyptian mythologies.

The World of Darkness area, or the Geist writings do not seem to have any allowance for a ghost to be on the Living World simply because they are terrified of going anywhere else, and are "clinging to the earth", but I find the idea of this very attractive, as well as, opening up a broader vision of the Ghost-Anchor idea.

Mirrorscape:

There could be a good story there somewhere though. A group of sin-eaters find an easy way to help a ghost (preferably that of someone they care about) let go of its anchors only to realise, just a second too late, that they are really banishing her to the underworld. What follows could be a series of sessions where they first try to take care of the ghosts unfinished business and then find her in the underworld to deliver the good news so that she can move on.

Another good option is to let them finish the anchors of the ghost like that, but later find a shade in the Underworld that (After being appeased and infused) it is there because someone helped him get over his anchors.  He found himself drawn down into the darkness, kept from the Beyond by his passions but unable to anchor himself to the mortal world any longer.  Once the Krewe realizes the fate of this poor ghost, they might look back on any ghost they once did this to.  If they are particularly guilty, they might hunt some of those ghosts down in the underworld, to help them resolve their business.  This would be a great excuse to get a Krewe to explore the Underworld, if they'd previously focused on the ghosts trapped in Twilight.

Cleverest of Things:

Mirrorscape:

There could be a good story there somewhere though. A group of sin-eaters find an easy way to help a ghost (preferably that of someone they care about) let go of its anchors only to realise, just a second too late, that they are really banishing her to the underworld. What follows could be a series of sessions where they first try to take care of the ghosts unfinished business and then find her in the underworld to deliver the good news so that she can move on.

Another good option is to let them finish the anchors of the ghost like that, but later find a shade in the Underworld that (After being appeased and infused) it is there because someone helped him get over his anchors.  He found himself drawn down into the darkness, kept from the Beyond by his passions but unable to anchor himself to the mortal world any longer.  Once the Krewe realizes the fate of this poor ghost, they might look back on any ghost they once did this to.  If they are particularly guilty, they might hunt some of those ghosts down in the underworld, to help them resolve their business.  This would be a great excuse to get a Krewe to explore the Underworld, if they'd previously focused on the ghosts trapped in Twilight.

Absolutely. The main thing, I think, is not to have the players feel "tricked" by the Storyteller. Of course if they have actually been tricked by an NPC into believing that they are laying the ghosts to rest, feeling tricked is just more fuel for the fire.

In fact that might work best as the start-up of a Geist campaign. The players start as mortal "ghost-hunters" with various abilities related to ghosts and dead. They are financed by a party that does not want to be directly involved, but who furnishes them with ghosts to investigate and hints on how to best "resolve" their anchors.
Somewhere along the line they realise that the person funding them is more than a little bit shady and hints appear that maybe he/she caused the death of these people in the first place. As the players decide to confront him or alternately try to get the attention of the authorities, the patron decides that they know too much and has them killed in various ways. And thus we move the campaign to Geist as the characters accept the bargain.
Now they have two focuses: righting the wrongs they have caused and settling the score with the person who used them. If the financier is an abmortal, vampire or other long-lived antagonist some of its earlier victims might even had time to become the players geists.

Mirrorscape:

Absolutely. The main thing, I think, is not to have the players feel "tricked" by the Storyteller. Of course if they have actually been tricked by an NPC into believing that they are laying the ghosts to rest, feeling tricked is just more fuel for the fire.

It wouldn't just be them.  Rather than feeling specifically tricked, they might feel like they've had a revelation--Only their Krewe has had the chance to realize that resolving anchors w/o their unfinished business is a terrible thing for ghosts.  What would they do with this knowledge.. accept it, and take a fatalistic approach to the gaining of Plasm and helping Ghosts move on?  Would they try to teach the whole of the Twilight Network of the extreme error it had been perpetrating for millenia?  Would they change their own ways, but not bother with anyone else?  Would they become Helldivers, and hope they can make ammends by helping the Shades move on by finishing their business?

Mirror, our views aren't that far apart, but I do have a few things I need clarified.  First, how do you 'resolve' an anchor without resolving any business attached to it?  When my jeep broke down, I didn't resolve the problem by rolling the rest down into a ravine, I resolved it by fixing what needed fixing (and spending waaaay too much money . . .).  'Destroying ' and 'resolving' are two very different words with very different meanings.  Now that I think about it, I think 'resolve' pretty much implies that something unfinished has been finished.  It's like a major 7th chord, it needs resolution by the next chord, not just ended in its own right.

And I think we covered this during the dam discussion, but as ST, I like making the anchors relevant to the tether (Note: my group house ruled the definition of 'Anchor' to be the specific object, whereas 'tether' is the ghost's own personal connection to it, more represented by the business that is unfinished.  Further more, it shores up the relationship between the two, because the tether is what holds the anchor to the ship . . . er ghost), because if I make things too arbitrary the player will just get fed up and destroy (or try to illusion their way out of it).  If a man's anchor is his wedding band, but his tether is his daughter, not only is he no longer anchored to this world by what concerns him (his tether is hooked to something else, and his anchor's just chilling at the bottom of the ocean), then from a narrative point the story's going to run in circles for a good long time while the characters examine all the angles of this wedding band.  I figure the term 'anchor' should imply that it really is the focal point of what keeps a ghost here, not just because it keeps the ghost on this plane, but it literally anchors them to a specific area in this plane.

namelessIIIEsq:

Mirror, our views aren't that far apart, but I do have a few things I need clarified.  First, how do you 'resolve' an anchor without resolving any business attached to it?  When my jeep broke down, I didn't resolve the problem by rolling the rest down into a ravine, I resolved it by fixing what needed fixing (and spending waaaay too much money . . .).  'Destroying ' and 'resolving' are two very different words with very different meanings.  Now that I think about it, I think 'resolve' pretty much implies that something unfinished has been finished.  It's like a major 7th chord, it needs resolution by the next chord, not just ended in its own right.

I apologize for using the word resolved in that part of my explanation as it probably confused the issue. What I actually meant was that I would allow players to target the ghosts link to the anchor instead of the physical anchor if they so desire. Not so much a question of fixing anything (which resolving does imply), more a question of destroying the importance of the anchor.
Of course this would probably not work all the time, either where the connection simply is familiarity ( I wore that necklace for most of my life ), or where the attack on the connection simply creates a new reason why the object is important.

namelessIIIEsq:

And I think we covered this during the dam discussion, but as ST, I like making the anchors relevant to the tether (Note: my group house ruled the definition of 'Anchor' to be the specific object, whereas 'tether' is the ghost's own personal connection to it, more represented by the business that is unfinished.  Further more, it shores up the relationship between the two, because the tether is what holds the anchor to the ship . . . er ghost), because if I make things too arbitrary the player will just get fed up and destroy (or try to illusion their way out of it).  If a man's anchor is his wedding band, but his tether is his daughter, not only is he no longer anchored to this world by what concerns him (his tether is hooked to something else, and his anchor's just chilling at the bottom of the ocean), then from a narrative point the story's going to run in circles for a good long time while the characters examine all the angles of this wedding band.  I figure the term 'anchor' should imply that it really is the focal point of what keeps a ghost here, not just because it keeps the ghost on this plane, but it literally anchors them to a specific area in this plane.

And that I think is the real difference between our takes. In my take the anchors do not nescessarily have anything at all to do with the reason that the ghost is unwilling or unable to leave this world, they are simply the tools he uses to hang on or the weights that tie him down.

The mans anchor is his wedding band because it is an object he can easily make a connection to. The reason he is still here isn't his daughter, but some emotion or unfinished business connected to his daughter. One is an object with enough of an emotional connection to latch on to the other is the reason for latching on. Of course this example is not really a good one as I agree that it makes more sense that the ghost latched onto something relating to his daughter if she is the basis for the unfinished business keeping him here.

A more reasonable scenario would be one where he latches onto the doll he gave her for her fifth birthday, a worn and ragged thing that she keeps in her attic. The doll hasn't got anything to do with the unfinished business itself (the estrangement between the father and his daughter) but is instead a symbol of the good relationship they once had. If the players somehow managed to destroy the symbolic value of the doll, for instance by showing the ghost proof that the girl actually hated the doll and it is just another example of him not understanding his daughter, the connection to the anchor could conceivably be destroyed, but the unfinished business would still be there, no reconciliation between the father and daughter having taken place.

Cleverest of Things:

Mirrorscape:

Absolutely. The main thing, I think, is not to have the players feel "tricked" by the Storyteller. Of course if they have actually been tricked by an NPC into believing that they are laying the ghosts to rest, feeling tricked is just more fuel for the fire.

It wouldn't just be them.  Rather than feeling specifically tricked, they might feel like they've had a revelation--Only their Krewe has had the chance to realize that resolving anchors w/o their unfinished business is a terrible thing for ghosts.  What would they do with this knowledge.. accept it, and take a fatalistic approach to the gaining of Plasm and helping Ghosts move on?  Would they try to teach the whole of the Twilight Network of the extreme error it had been perpetrating for millenia?  Would they change their own ways, but not bother with anyone else?  Would they become Helldivers, and hope they can make ammends by helping the Shades move on by finishing their business?

As I see it though, since you aren't actually helping the ghost to pass on when you concentrate on "solutions" to the anchors instead of helping them finishing unfinished business, you wouldn't be awarded any plasm for doing that. Of course they might not realise what the difference is, or no-one is there to let them know there is another way of doing it.

The Sin-eaters campaign I will be running for some friends starting later this year has them as the only sin-eaters in their area, with no mentor-figures available at the start of the chronicle. They could conceivably get the wrong idea about disconnecting ghosts from anchors and then get a revelation the first time they actually finish a ghosts unfinished business and are awarded plasm for doing it. "What the hell was that?"

Of if you go with the players gaining plasm for this kind of "resolving" as you suggest, then maybe this method actually damages the ghost and that is why the plasm is torn free and available for absorption.