[Pen & Paper] News und Gerüchte! =D

[La Cipolla]

Pathfinder Core kommt im August, die ersten Spoiler gehen gerade über den Tisch und lassen vermuten, dass es selbst zu der radikalen Beta nochmal umfangreiche Veränderungen gab.

Earthdawn kriegt eine dritte Edition. Für die, dies interessiert.


Und Ok, mit dem aktuellen Geist Spoiler haben White Wolf nicht nur den Zeitgeist getroffen, mich können sie ebenso fest einrechnen.

Geist: The Sin-Eaters is a game about that kind of ghost story. It’s a game about death, to be sure, but it’s also a game about vibrant, passionate life. It’s a game about endings, but it’s also a game about resolutions (and no, they aren’t necessarily the same thing) and fresh new beginnings. It’s a game about the dead, but it’s also very much a game about the living and how a close proximity to death can supercharge your life. It’s a game about risk-taking and thrill-seeking, about memento mori sugar skulls and drinking rum at the crossroads. Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die. Stare oblivion in the eye and spit in it.

...

Campfire Stories
Geist Preview for June 5
Posted: 2009-06-05

KHAQQ calling Itasca. We must be on you but cannot see you. Gas is running low. — Amelia Earhart, last confirmed radio transmission

A man driving on a deserted road late at night sees a girl standing on the shoulder. She’s all alone, dressed like she’s going to her high school prom. He stops to give her a ride — she tells him her car broke down and her boyfriend went to get help hours ago. They talk as they drive, about life and love, about holding on to people past their time. The man assures her that sometimes the best thing to do is to let go of them, to let them move on. He tells her her father loves her very much, and that he will always remember her. As the car passes by a cemetery, the man looks over at his passenger only to find that he is alone in the car. The man smiles, whispers a prayer to speed the girl’s soul on her path, and drives on. There are more lost wanderers who need to be guided home.

On a moonless night in the old churchyard, three men and two women gather with shovels and lanterns like bit players in a Frankenstein movie. The man buried here was a very bad man in life. In death, he became even worse. The five are in agreement: there can be no redemption for this man, no resolution to his tale. There can only be an ending. One of them clutches a box of salt while the others begin to dig.

They say the old Van Der Meer house at the end of the street is haunted. Old Man Van Der Meer was a sorcerer and a cannibal, they say, and his wife cheated on him with the Devil himself. She bore a son twice as mean as his daddy, and one Halloween night the boy fetched his father’s favorite knife and went on a rampage. He killed his father first, and then his mother. Then he stalked the servants through that maze-like old house and killed them all. One. By one. By one. When it was done, he followed the old deer trail out to Hangman’s Cliff where his mother had conceived him that night thirteen years before, and he threw himself into the river and drowned. As you stand outside the ruins of the old Van Der Meer house, the thing in your head whispers in the voice of a thirteen-year-old boy: Home again, home again, jiggity jig.

***

Have you ever told a ghost story? Maybe huddled around a campfire in the dark woods, spinning yarns of the hook-handed phantom that prowls the forest looking for children to devour. Maybe in a pitch-black bathroom, chanting “Bloody Mary” into the mirror in fear (and secret hope) that she might appear. Maybe even sitting around the table with friends, telling shared stories of the unquiet dead. We love ghost stories, and not just because they scare us—although the thrills are undeniably part of the fun. More than that, though, we love ghost stories because, in a perverse way, they give us hope. If our souls can haunt the world after we’re dead and gone, that means there’s something after this life. It might not be the shining paradise our religions promise, but at least it’s something, some sign of continued existence after our frail mortal bodies cease to be.

At the same time, most ghost stories are strongly colored by the fact that the ghost wants something. Unfinished business is what keeps a ghost lingering in this world, a yearning need for something from its former life. It might be to see her children grow up safe, or it might be to get her first novel published at last, or it might even be something as simple and direct as revenge on the person who killed her. Ghost stories remind us to savor life while we have it, because even if we do continue beyond the grave, whatever comes after is at best a pale echo, an imitation of what we have while we’re alive.

Geist: The Sin-Eaters is a game about that kind of ghost story. It’s a game about death, to be sure, but it’s also a game about vibrant, passionate life. It’s a game about endings, but it’s also a game about resolutions (and no, they aren’t necessarily the same thing) and fresh new beginnings. It’s a game about the dead, but it’s also very much a game about the living and how a close proximity to death can supercharge your life. It’s a game about risk-taking and thrill-seeking, about memento mori sugar skulls and drinking rum at the crossroads. Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die. Stare oblivion in the eye and spit in it.