GM’s Blog – Geist: The Sin-Eaters – Monday 11th June 2012

This week marked the end of both of my regular games for the university’s summer vacation. While I shall be running other games during the break this was the last time we would be playing either of these games until September. As usual for last sessions I felt a degree of pressure to go out on a high, giving people something to remember and a reason to look forward to the game starting up again in the Autumn.

GM’s Blog – Geist: the Sin-Eaters – 28th May 2012

The heat wave is continuing and the hot weather is definitely having an impact on my energy levels when I’m running games. It leaves me feeling hot, sticky and distractable and these aren’t a great combination when I’m attempting to pay attention to one thing for around three hours. The group was also split into three pairs meaning that for a majority of the session I could only work with two of them at a time, without huge numbers of NPCs around for them to play for each other, either.

GM’s Blog – Geist: the Sin-Eaters – 21st May 2012

So last week we ended the session with the krewe preparing to spring an ambush on the Strangers, a group of pain-obsessed Bound with whom they do not see eye to eye. For this reason I was expecting a session dominated by combat and did not spend much time planning out other activities for the evening. By now you will probably have noticed that a lack of preparation is a recurring motif of my games.

GM’s Blog – Geist: The Sin-Eaters – 14th May 2012

For those who don’t know, Geist: The Sin-Eaters is a game in which players portray those given a second chance at life. They died but were offered a bargain by a spiritual entity called a Geist. It would let them live again and in exchange they would share their life with it. The resulting gestalt of living flesh and deathly energies is called a Sin-Eater. Sin-Eaters are all able to see and interact with the dead and gain power by resolving or consuming the ghosts of the departed. They are also able to physically journey into the Underworld to seek forbidden knowledge and to interact with those long dead.

This game has been running since Geist was published in 2009 and features a group of Sin-Eaters in London who have recently bound themselves together into a krewe (s supernaturally bound group that channels energy from the Underworld)  in the face of competition from two larger krewes. Their krewe has no official name as yet but the characters have also founded a company called Twilight Investigations which offers help with troubled spirits and other occult weirdness.