Thread by @AlexandraErin

I'm working on a micro RPG (not a one pager, for more reasons than just "I'm so verbose it should be verboten") where the players are a group of ghosts awakened by an (unwittingly) psychic family moving into the house they haunt.

The game's setting lore assumes that ghosts are dormant most of the time because psychic energy leaking from the living is what animates them and this energy is most available when humans are afraid of ghosts without being confident ghosts exist.

Fear activates the psychic energy, but fear of ghosts specifically directs it towards the ghosts. If the humans are certain that the ghosts are real, though, their energy redirects inward as they attempt to deal rationally with the situation.

The game has a multi-day structure (default five days), based around the idea that the veil between the living side and the other side thins more each night the whole family is in the house.

Each night another page of rules is introduced that gives the ghosts more freedom and more powers, as the veil thins. The first night they can't do much more than gather information (it serves as a sort of internal "session 0" that establishes facts about the family/scenario).

On subsequent nights they gain more freedom to act and can begin setting up small scares, and manipulations of the family and the environment to set up bigger ones. Nights 2 through 4 are about laying the groundwork for night 5.

Successful actions during the middle nights can increase the amount of ambient psychic energy (which makes the environment spookier and more ghost-conductive) or a ghost's personal store of psychic energy to fuel ghost powers.

Each living member of the household has a different psychic role such as Medium or Poltergeist assigned to them by the game runner (the Rule Ghoul) and unknown, initially, to the ghosts. The psychic roles change how easy it is to use psychic energy around them, and add twists.

All the ghosts know for sure is that someone in the house is a Wellspring (source of tremendous positive psychic energy) and someone in the house is a Hollow (source of tremendous negative psychic energy).

Hollows and Wellsprings are very rare, and they usually occur in pairs or gravitate towards each other, because they can't live a normal mundane life unless there's a countervailing psychic charge nearby them most of the time.

The goal of the game is to identify the Wellspring before the 5th night ends and cause them to discharge with a massive scare, which will give the ghosts psychic energy on a "one last score and them we retire" level.

Yes, that's right: it's a heist game.

Complications are added to the 5th night based on what happened the earlier nights. Too much blatant evidence of spectral shenanigans and there might be ghost hunters present, or the family might be avoiding being alone.

"If they're all huddled up together in a room, then it's easy: everybody just haunts that room." But 1) it takes more energy to manifest something the more of the living are watching and 2) you trigger the psychic side effects of everyone who is present.

And as vital as it is that you cause the psychic wellspring to discharge, triggering a similar reaction from a psychic hollow under the same circumstances creates a wraith: a flesh being with all the powers of a ghost and a mind possessed by a roiling maelstrom of negativity.

If you create a wraith, you can still win if you keep all the humans safe, neutralize the wraith*, and discharge the wellspring after all that.

*No mechanic is provided for this. There are minimum rolls required, but you have to sell the Rule Ghoul on the story reason.

My original idea, before it evolved in the heist direction, was partially inspired by Beetlejuice's job description of "bio-exorcist". It was about ghosts doing research for the the ghost equivalent of a ghost hunter podcast, called Among The Living.

https://twitter.com/telbasta/status/1468971993219223567

The lack of a climactic event or a reason to constrain the timeframe of the game was why I started adding the psychic worldbuilding elements, and eventually I saw more potential in that idea than in "spy on humans to learn things for a podcast without tipping them off".