Page 124 - Chronicles of Darkness

that they had emotional connections to in life — these anchor
the ghost in the world and allow those with enough power to
Manifest, whereupon they carry out whatever mad urges they
still feel and attempt, in their broken state, to further the goals
they left undone in life. Ghosts feed on Essence, a spiritual
energy created by the memories and emotions that build up
in their Anchors and are fed directly to them when they are
remembered by the living. Ghosts that lose their Anchors and
can’t transfer their attachment fade from the world, passing
over to a dread realm filled with all the orphaned Ghosts
that have gone before. This realm has many names in occult
writings: Tartarus, the Great Below, the Land of the Dead,
the Dominions, or simply the Underworld.
The living seldom visit the Underworld, though mediums
and death-obsessed mystery cults all over the world teach that
gateways to it are more common than supposed. Its doors
exist in the same Twilight state as ghosts themselves, invisible
and unnoticed by the living. Tales of living occultists who
learned the right places and the proper ceremonies to open
the gates of death describe the Underworld as a chthonian
hell of passageways, tunnels, and caverns, filled with desperate
ghosts that lost their grip on the world. The Underworld sus-
tains the dead, allowing them more freedom to move and act
than the living world, but it also imprisons them. Once there,
though, ghosts may increase in power and influence, evolving
beyond the image of the person they were into twisted rulers
of dead kingdoms, or sponsors and advocates of particular
forms of death. If summoned back to the physical world or
allowed to escape the Underworld by chance conditions, a
ghost that has spent centuries growing stronger can wreak
havoc until exorcised.
Spirits

Warped Reflections
Animist religions describe the world as being full of
spirits, with every object, animal and place hiding a spirit
within it. They’re partly right; everything in the world apart
from humans, even transitory events and strong emotions,
does cast a spiritual reflection, but all spirits, apart from
the cunning or a powerful few, are confined to a world of
their own. Separated from the physical world by a barrier
known to knowledgeable occultists as the Gauntlet, the
spirit — or Shadow — world is a murky reflection of the
physical. Its geography is (mostly) the same as the world,
but places appear twisted to reflect their inner truth rather
than looking exactly the same. Everywhere, spirits war on
each other for survival.
Spirits come into being alongside the thing of which
they’re a reflection, but are dormant, barely living, tiny lumps
of ephemera at first. As well as creating new spirits, actions in
the physical world, and any emotions associated with them,
create Essence in the physical world, some of which crosses
over into the Shadow. If enough Essence is created around an
embryonic spirit, it rouses into activity. By absorbing Essence,
the spirit remains active. By consuming other spirits, it merges

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Ephemeral Beings