Do Not Go Gentle

Upon a Midnight Dreary

The Ghost Hack gets its first expansion. You can pick it up on drivethrurpg as PDF.

The Ghost Hack introduced four 'Trades' (character classes) that aimed to be accessible. Banshees influence emotions, Poltergeists move things around, Revenants appear to the living. Nightmanes are a bit odd, as underworld-explorers, but you soon realise they're a cross between rangers and clerics. All plain sailing.

Do Not Go Gentle offers six more Trades and they get quite esoteric. Doppelgangers are simple enough: they're shapechangers who can heal easily and turn their ghostly bodies into weapons. Helgaunts are ghostly paladins who specialise in killing Wights but have forgotten what it's like to be human. Then it gets odder. Anubians are ghostly psychotherapists who have an intense relationship with a NPC client that they are forced to betray eventually. Their 'Dark Counsel' is an amazing benefit but it puts you in their power forever after. Fleshweavers and Morpheans are sorcerers - the Fleshweavers control Mortal Coils while the Morpheans build dream-realms. Grimliches are Wights - self-aware and rational, but still creatures of spite dedicated to making somebody's life miserable.

The expansion is a chance to explore what it's like being a ghost and what the dead get up to. The pressing problem for most ghosts is that their Mortal Coil is always shrinking while their Grave Die is always growing. Eventually, they end up starved of Soul energy and turn into a depraved Wight.

The Misericordium is here to solve that problem. This shadowy organisation recruits ghosts to work as clerks in abandoned offices, writing their life stories in vast ledgers, supervised by stern overseers. As you write, your Mortal Coil is transferred into the ledger and then your Grave Die fades away too. You end up a faceless cipher serving the Misericordium, having sold away your personality and your past. But at least you got paid!

Players are unlikely to be tempted by the Misericordium's Kafka-esque dystopia, but what about the Temple of the Dragon Soul? Or the Church of St Thomas Repudiatus? Or the Entropic Research Unit? These 'cults' also promise to take away your Grave Die and/or your Mortal Coil - or in the case of the Entropic Research Unit, boost your Grave Die through the roof so you can make peace with your inner-Wight - but offer attractive benefits along the way. Martial arts, anyone?

These organisations - known as Heresiarchs - are likely to be the villains in a Ghost Hack campaign, but I suggest different ways of playing them as well-intentioned or outright dastardly, depending on who the Referee wants them to be working for.

NPCs and antagonists get a makeover, replacing the cryptic entries in The Ghost Hack. Demons, of course, of both the Judeo-Christian and mind-shattering Lovecraftian sort. Necromancers too, from frustrated Goths through noble shamans to narcissistic liches. Ghost Hunters and Psychics get several pages, looking at the hunters' technological toys and the psychics' extrasensory powers. A very nasty monster, the Skinreaver, can pose a particular problem for ghosts if it every develops psychic powers (by snacking on a psychic brain, since you asked).

And Wights, of course. The Ghost Hack vaguely alluded to different types and the scenario Upon a Midnight Dreary clarified those: now we get the full explanation. Harrow-Wights are the things you turn into when you've been bashed to 0HP and you exhaust your Grave Die: off your go, screeching through Hades, homing in on your Mortal Coil to do hideous stuff to the people and things you love the most. Maybe, just maybe, a friendly Anubian can intervene and send you off instead to savage the Mortal Coil of one of his ex-clients. It sucks being the ex-client of an Anubian.

Hades is a vast world - perhaps an entire universe - that ghosts can enter through Portals. The Ashen Path offers safe travel, better still if you can find one of the paved Necroducts that hint at some long-vanished Civilisation of the Dead that no one remembers. Off the Ashen Path, the Dread billows and swirls: freezing clouds of ectoplasm-shredding acid with nasty Wights capering inside it. Every now and again, the Dread rises and you had better hurry on to the nearest Fane or Tollbooth. Just your luck if it's run by the Misericordium and they make you work of your entrance fee at their awful ledgers!

Precious Soulfire gets more consideration, as well as different types of Fanes and other realms in Hades: Pyrocrypts and Mausoleums, Infernos and Paradises, Fantasia dream-realms - and the great River Lethe that separates the Hades we know from the Tartarus we can only guess at.

Hades is filled with everything that was ever lost, sacrificed or violated. A group of ghosts can travel through the bombed out villages of WWI Flanders, pick over the ruins of Minoan temples, flee across the plague-pits of 14th century Europe and take shelter in the burning buildings of London's Great Fire. Soulfire needs to be mined and the only way to transport it is for ghosts to immolate themselves in it - and the only fuel to keep it burning is the Kindling made from the shredded ectoplasm of ghosts. It pays to have some mindless Echoes in tow because, hey, better them than you, right?

DO NOT GO GENTLE takes the basic ghost-story mechanics of The Ghost Hack and builds them into material for a full RPG campaign in the afterlife. These rules take the game in a distinctive direction, with new adversaries, political factions, fantastic worlds and mystical powers as well as rumours about what lies beyond the final frontier of death itself.