Certain mages seek out ghosts for information about the past. Others either enjoy the company of the Restless Dead, or else converse with them in an attempt to understand the mysteries of life and death. For most mages, however, ghosts are — at best — sad creatures they want to lay to rest, occasionally showing up as horrific monsters that must be exorcised or destroyed.

With very few exceptions, the Restless Dead cannot affect the mortal world through physical phenomena. They might alter temperature, move physical objects, or possess a living host, but those abilities depend upon the nature of each individual ghost. In haunted places, ghosts often attain the eerie, insubstantial forms for which they’re best known. Physical barriers rarely hinder them, and distance seems more like a polite suggestion than a limiting distinction. Because ghosts exist as, basically, consciousness manipulating energy, these entities probably grasp the principle that Correspondence Masters teach: All places are actually one big place, and the spans of time and space we perceive really are just all in our heads.

Technically, ghosts should be listed among Chapter Four’s Ephemeral Entities. Because wraiths tend to be considered Night-Folk, however, and because they’re World of Darkness player-critters, we’ve included them below. For further details about mages and the Restless Dead, see the “Necromancy” section of How Do You DO That? (pp. 84-89).

Tragic Phantom

Suggested Attributes: Strength 2, Dexterity 2, Stamina 2 (Physical Traits apply only in the Low Umbra), Charisma 3, Manipulation 3, Appearance 3, Perception 4, Intelligence 3, Wits 4

Suggested Abilities: Alertness 2, Awareness 3, Brawl 1, Cosmology 3, Enigmas 2, Expression 3, Etiquette 2, Intimidation 4, Investigation 2, Occult 3, Stealth 3, Subterfuge 2

Here’s one of the terrible truths about death: Although death sometimes is not the end, there’s no return from it, and there’s often a whole lot of regret. Despite being unable to manifest physically in the mortal world, this ghost’s still trying to right the wrongs she committed in life, looking after any loved ones who are still alive. Our tragic phantom’s willing to provide information and aid to any mage who’s willing to help her accomplish those goals. Even so, she’s got a nasty side that comes out at the most unexpected time, turning a phantasmal ally to a terrifying spectre.

Willpower: 5

Health Levels: OK, OK, OK, OK, OK, OK, Incapacitated

Armor Rating: N/A

Powers: Ghosts don’t suffer wound penalties. Their Physical Traits matter only in the Low Umbra, where they’re as real as any living thing. Life and Matter Sphere magicks are obviously worthless when dealing with a wraith, and only Spirit magick can affect (or even perceive) such entities in the living world. In the dead lands, Spirit 3 or Prime 2 (combined with Entropy 3) works like Life; Mind works normally; Forces, Life, and Matter mean nothing; Correspondence and Time have weirdly unpredictable results; and Entropy has… unfortunate… effects. Entropy magick brings out the worst aspects of a ghost. Although such beings are unusually vulnerable to that Sphere (‒2 difficulty to castings made against a wraith), it energizes their darkest elements. Each success gives the ghost additional powers and — unless that ghost wins a successful Willpower roll at a difficulty of (the mage’s successes +5) — drives it mad. The resulting spectre manifests violently unpredictable powers beyond the ghost’s usual abilities and behaves as destructively as it possibly can. When representing ghostly abilities in a Mage chronicle, let that entity use an array of traditional ghost powers — spectral manifestation, psychokinesis, atmospheric disturbances, spooky sounds, illusions, etc. — on a successful Willpower + Occult roll. In the living world, the difficulty depends upon the local Gauntlet rating, which gives ghosts a decided edge in haunted houses and other such places. In the Low Umbra, that difficulty depends on the size and strength of the manifestation; conjuring a wall of fog would be easy (difficulty 5) but calling up a storm would be far more challenging (difficulty 8 or higher). A ghost can also possess a living host with a successful Willpower + Occult roll (difficulty 3 + the target’s Willpower, maximum 10); enter her dreams (same roll, difficulty target’s Willpower); or simply scare the living hell of her (Storyteller’s discretion). Certain ghosts can try to conjure material phenomena like insect swarms, bloody walls, or sinister animal forms with similar rolls if such manifestations suit the ghost in question. All ghosts appear to be connected to Earthly objects, people, or locations that mattered to them in life. Referred to as Fetters, these provide a focus for the wraith’s consciousness. Mages who understand this fact (roll Intelligence + Occult or Lore [Ghosts], difficulty 7) can try to locate the Fetter and use it as a bargaining chip, summoning focus, or weapon. Mages who work with the Restless Dead claim that destroying a Fetter can destroy the ghost. In practice, though, that might simply piss it off. By using Spirit 3, or combining Entropy 3 and Prime 2, a mage can inflict aggravated damage on a wraith. A wraith defeated with such damage is apparently gone for good, although he can try to soak it with his Willpower. (This, by the way, will definitely piss off said wraith.) Otherwise, ghosts heal one health level per turn in the presence of their Fetters, one per day otherwise.

Brenda Marshall

A mage who helps the ghost resolve the issues that bind him to the Earthly plane can release that wraith to whatever peace or torment awaits him on the other side of death.

Image: Ghosts reflect their state of mind. Some appear to be noble, if melancholy, figures, whereas others embody shrieking horror. A wraith’s image tends to be fluid, shifting in accordance with its mood. Even the most peaceful ghosts, however (if such beings could ever be considered “at peace”), evoke uncanny sensations in the living: shivers, shudders, nightmares, sweats, creeps, and other “that just ain’t right” reactions. No matter how tragic or gentle it might appear, a ghost is literally the Restless Dead.

Roleplaying Notes: You didn’t recognize what you had until life slipped away. Now you hover between the life you once knew and the void of ultimate Oblivion. Maybe there’s something else there, too — eternal peace or a heavenly reward; based on what you’ve seen, though, , that’s pretty unlikely. Hell seems more possible than heaven, and the place you’re trapped in now seems an awful lot like the prelude to a greater form of damnation. Maybe one of those wizard folks can help you. Anything has got to be better than what you currently endure.

What a stupid way to die. Brenda Marshall was taking a selfie on a convention-center escalator when she stepped backwards, lost her balance, and bounced all the way down, hitting what must have been every sharp edge along the way. Worst of all, her fall wound up being recorded by over a dozen people’s cell phones and was posted all over the internet — minus her bloody-corpse conclusion — as a “massive fails” video for folks to laugh at. Between her pending graduation, a new girlfriend, and a massive scholarship award that was supposed to take Brenda to Yale, she had everything to live for and a lot to lose. Combined with the video’s popularity and the sheer indignity of her demise, Brenda got stuck between life and death. Three years later, she’s still hanging around, with no end of this Restless existence in sight.

She’s not the only person to perish in that convention center, of course; Brenda, though, was among the youngest other than that poor kid who got stabbed to death in a bathroom during a drug dispute in the early ‘90s, so she’s bored as fuck and sick of the company. She can leave the convention center, and often does, if only to see how her family, best friend, and former lover are doing these days. The escalator keeps drawing her back, though, and it’s the site of her greatest degree of influence over the living world… in short, her strongest Fetter, if only because she was “immortalized” falling down the damn thing. As a result, rumors about the ghostly girl and the screams that echo around the convention center after nightfall continue to swirl around that place. A web-famous group of paranormal investigators even filmed a segment in the convention center, though it was later removed from YouTube by order of the convention center’s management. They didn’t

catch any evidence of Brenda’s haunting, but a member of their team had recently Awakened, and he noted her presence even though he said nothing about it to his peers. That guy began trying to contact Brenda on his own, but Brenda’s not sure if she wants to contact him back or not. Yes, she’s bored and getting frantic about her in-between existence, but his status as a grandstanding internet “ghost-hunter” has not, shall we say, inspired her with confidence about his motivations.

Meanwhile, Brenda remains drawn to her former girlfriend, Marisha, who’s now married to another woman in what Brenda knows is a covertly abusive relationship. Trapped in the Shadowlands, Brenda’s essentially helpless to intervene. Her power, though, is growing, fueled by loss, sadness, and an ever-hotter sense of rage. Her paranormal furies have already manifested eerie phenomena on the living side of the Gauntlet — phenomena that paradoxically frighten Marisha even worse than they scare the wife on their receiving end. Caught between worlds, passions, and circumstances, Brenda descends deeper into her darkest self; coupled with her growing ability to cross the barrier between life and death, this phantom’s existence seems bound to turn a grotesque farce into gruesome tragedy.

For the few people who can see her, Brenda looks like a hypervivid impression of the young woman in the selfie she was taking right before she fell: a tallish, pretty blonde girl just shy of 19 years old, dressed in a bright-red blouse, a white denim jacket, distressed jeans, and the black high-heeled shoes that led to her death. Some folks might recall having seen her video — after all, several million people did. Brenda’s still got the vibrant life-ahead-of-me smile she had in that photo, but she doesn’t show it much anymore. When distressed, she manifests a swirling wind around her, the skin of her face thinning into a taut visage pulled tight across her skull. Her voice, pleasant if a bit high-pitched under calm circumstances, rises to a gut-freezing shriek in those frequent moments when rage and sadness consume the Brenda she was when it seemed she might live forever.

Raging Spectre

Sometimes the destructive side of a ghost’s personality takes control, either for a short while or for good. Mages who understand the depths of the Dark Umbra call the latter sort of ghosts spectres. Such entities exist to spread destruction and suffering, both in the Underworld and in the mortal realm. Most of these spirits soon destroy themselves in their pursuit of death and pain; a few, though, become skilled at the arts of terror, surviving in that form for decades or even centuries. Awakened folk have learned to fear these terrible creatures, and to keep records of their powers and deeds. The most dangerous spectres often visit the mortal world for a short while and then return to the Low Umbra for months or even years… only to return again, but stronger and deadlier than before.

Ragdoll

One night, long ago, a young single person went on a date with the wrong guy. His neighbors found the pieces stuffed into two dozen trash cans, mailboxes, and — perhaps the most appalling touch of all — a dog’s food bowl. The guy was found, but his victim’s identity was lost. The last thing that tortured soul recalls hearing above their own screams and the sounds of slow dismemberment was the killer singing that Aerosmith song “Rag Doll.” Now, it’s the only name Ragdoll still knows.

Before the pain, there was a life. After one hell, there came Oblivion — not the all-consuming end of torture but the roar of extinction reverberating through an endless labyrinth winding through the Underworld. That roaring torment claimed every shred of Ragdoll’s identity save the hated phrase and the name their killer gave them. “Their” is Ragdoll’s proper pronoun, too, because the person they once were has been supplanted by fractured consciousness and a jigsaw body that cannot hang together. Even in death, the

dismembered bits of Ragdoll remain separate, connected by slivers of identity but nothing so coherent as a self.

Years past their death, Ragdoll’s ghostly pieces haunt the places where those bits were laid. Each home violated by the butcher’s sense of humor has gone through a list of owners before winding up abandoned and unsellable. Still, the spectral limbs manifest on eerie nights when the darkness feels deeper and the wind blows colder than usual. Ghastly shrieks burst from empty air, sending living things into panicked, shivering fright. The neighborhood where Ragdoll’s murderer disposed of the remains has become a literal ghost

town, inhabited only during daylight hours by creatures too desperate for shelter to go elsewhere. Nothing larger than an insect, though, sticks around for longer than it must. A handful of ghost-chaser types have tried to pin the Ragdoll legend down, so to speak. Most of them gave up the trade for good after they found what they were looking for. Three didn’t survive at all. Oh, the occasional death-mage drops by to see if Ragdoll can finally be laid to rest… or perhaps be put to less-altruistic purposes. One sight of the dancing limbs, though, wreathed in black flames of Oblivion, is enough to remind them that some powers are better left alone.

It is an anxious, sometimes a dangerous thing to be a doll. Dolls cannot choose;

they can only be chosen; they cannot ‘do’; they can only be done by.

— Rumer Godden, The Dolls’ House

Darius never wears his shirt. He doesn’t have to. It’s not as if he feels the cold. Besides, I like to see the muscles slide across his chest and shoulders as he moves, his bare feet soundless on the floor. An eight-pack tight enough to bounce a quarter off of, and a delicate sheen of phantasmal sweat that never stinks up the lab or demands showering. He’s delicious, really. Fits my tastes perfectly in all departments. I should know. I made him that way.

I did give him pants, though. I mean, who wants to see that big thing hanging down unless he’s putting it to good use? Darius’ ass looks just as fine in that pair of skin-cupping jeans, with the thick suggestion of manly goodies packed tight against the front. The human body is a perfect argument against intelligent design, with the raw absurdity of male genitalia presenting, so to speak, the exclamation-point in that debate. I can’t say honestly that I don’t enjoy the way it feels, but honey, there’s a time and place for everything, and that particular everything does not belong out and about in my laboratory.

Darius helps me around the lab. I don’t need him to, but I like having him around. His rough voice purrs against my ears as I puzzle through the snags in my latest project’s practical applications. A hologram can’t bring me a drink directly, of course, but there’s always a nice cool glass of iced tea, perfectly mixed and seasoned, close at hand once he tells me it’s ready. I calibrated the electrodynamic sensors for the transpatial TENS unit so that it feels like he’s giving me a massage when I need one. And for those times when I need something more than that, Darius’ synthskin chassis is waiting for me, warmed to the perfect temperature and ready for whatever pleasures I require.

There are times, I admit, when I miss the unpredictability of human company — that ability to surprise me with a gift or reaction I didn’t program in. Given the hassles inherent to such relationships and their infinitely fallible components, though, I’m going to stick with Darius. He doesn’t snore, doesn’t stink, doesn’t mess up my lab, and keeps random unpleasantnesses limited to flickers of projection and the uncanny sense that something actually is alive in there, beyond my control and locked within a matrix of artificial whims.

No mage is an island. Even if that mage avoids human company, she’ll generally fill that empty space with companions of a nonhuman sort. Certain mages employ their Arts

or hypertech to craft biomechanical constructs, others invite guardian spirits to inhabit material bodies for mutual gain, and a number of Awakened folks do both. With or without human

company, these familiar beings provide comfort, security, and assistance in a life that few folks could ever understand.

Whether the following characters find their way into your chronicle whole-cloth or inspire creations of your own, these entities are far more than simple “artificial intelligences.” Even when conjured or engineered by their Awakened creators,

constructs and familiars have their own needs, desires, limits, and agendas. One HIT Mark may recite poetry while another quotes lines from 80s action movies and a third remains stoically silent. For mages and players alike, individuality is the key to surprise… and we wouldn’t those folks getting bored or anything, would we?

Miracles of magick and Enlightened science allow Awakened folk to build or alter living beings. Uplifted animals, cybernetic associates, clones, robots, living skeletons, and far more, these beings transcend mundane biology and bring new meanings to the old saying, “Life always finds a way.”