Day 22: Geist Ready Made Characters

Onyx Path’s Month of Nightmares features games, stories, and more to celebrate the spirit of Halloween. Count down the days with us by reading our excerpts, participating in the discussion, or by taking advantage of our special offers leading up to a haunted Halloween.

I’ve always been a big fan of the Ready-Made Characters series and let’s just say I bugged Rich for some time with lines like “Hey, so Geist is the only game without a RMC” and he’d say “Yep…and?” or something along those lines. Eventually, he let me develop the Crossroads Drifters I think just to get me to stop asking.

Ready Made Characters packs offer an immediate chance to jump into a game, with pre-generated characters that have a built in connection and shared origin. I find them incredibly useful for running convention demos and introducing new players to the World of Darkness games.

They can also be used as NPCs by enterprising Storytellers looking to challenge a group of characters. That is one of my favorite uses for the RMCs. I’ve occasionally pulled in a group of characters from a different game line to act as enemies or at least rivals for characters.

As a traveling krewe, the Crossroads Drifters make excellent characters to launch a fun game of Geist or they can be dropped into just about any World of Darkness game as a curiosity for a group of established characters to encounter. Will they be enemies or could they somehow assist the PCs before rolling on to the next town?

Ethos

The mythology of the Crossroads Drifters is grounded in the idea of the traveling performer who wanders from place to place to put on a show. Never putting down roots, the mythology offers players the chance to explore ideas related to permanence and transience. The Drifters’ ethos shapes these concepts.

The Drifters are a Tier One krewe who, like any other, has a ban, duty, and destiny that make up their ethos and flesh out this mythology. Unless the Storyteller requires a bigger krewe for her chronicle, the five characters listed here should suffice. If needed, this particular troupe of street performers could be one of several krewes that roam worldwide.

Ban: The Crossroads Drifters perform for the dead. While performing, the krewe cannot force the dead to leave. The Drifters can corral them if they are causing trouble, silence them with threats, Manifestations, or Ceremonies, but they cannot remove them unless the dead have physically attacked the performers or other members in the audience. At official shows, the dead cannot be removed until the end of the show. If the krewe is simply whistling a tune or singing a song, they may stop their performance to allow the dead to be removed. Whether this ban applies to Undead or not is a situation the Drifters have yet to encounter.

Duty: The Crossroads Drifters are tasked with traveling and bringing peace to the dead in one of two ways: they can either help them move on or simply escape their problems for a while. Similarly, when possible the Drifters are to serve the living as well. However, their duty to help the dead supersedes their lesser duty to entertain the living.

The Drifters may stay in a specific location and enjoy themselves for a while, but eventually they must move on to a new place and find new dead to assist. In this way, the Drifters truly live up to their name.

Destiny: The more ghosts the Crossroads Drifters assist, the stronger and more powerful the court gets. Each member of the court was once human; when the krewe helps enough souls move on, the human form of each member will rise again. The Drifters can join with them and regain full ownership of their bodies once more. By doing so, this will effectively double their numbers and create a new type of Sin-Eater. Though this destiny will create a new way for Sin-Eaters to help their Geist become what it once was, the Drifters are forbidden from revealing this secret. To tell is to risk someone (or something) trying to stop them. If that came to pass, the court would have a great deal of difficulty convening a new krewe. Indeed, Ray, the newest member, is not even aware of this destiny, though the others assume The Spider of Sound knows.

The Crossroads Drifters continue traveling the open road for now, bringing music, laughter and respite to the dead. Not all welcome their presence, but few can mistake the mark the Crossroads Drifters make wherever they go.

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