Advantage on Arcana

Prep for a Ghost Game

In anticipation of a supernatural mystery game (a session of the "Three Friends Horror Game," described here), I thought I might need information about high church Anglican occultism. I asked for help from the mostly autistic folks at the Christianity on the Spectrum podcast's associated Discord server (see also here), since some of them would know a thing or two about esoteric Christianity. They, in turn, wanted to hear about my game. I decided to write up something properly, both for them and for my own use later. What follows is that write-up, lightly edited. I'm throwing you a bit into the deep end here, I realize, and it may be hard to follow without context, but perhaps you can find something to steal from it. (I think the curse I came up with is nicely distressing, for instance.)

The players have given me permission to post their session notes, so those will soon follow, too.

If you're one of those players, please don't read the "Preparation" section of this post. You haven't yet learned everything there!

anna-stampfli-afuyh3KVpWg-unsplash Source: Anna Stampfli, 2020, Unsplash license.

Background

This game was a continuation of the story of two previous games, played in October 2024 and March 2025. In advance of the 2024 game, I gave one of the players, playing Nadine, a handout that I've reproduced here. You can read more about that game and the ones that preceded it at my blog post, "How I Plan Horror Games." The three PCs are Nadine Mercredi, a skeptical Metis woman who works for a local historical society; Amber Brubacher, a sweet beautiful ditz who worked her way out of the trailer park; and Pansy Hamedani, a buff judoka who is very into New Age stuff. In preparation for the February 2026 game, I wrote a recap at the players' request, reproduced here.1 For even more context, see my post, "What My Games Look Like," or the handouts I made for the game here.

The earliest games used the Storytelling system and Chronicles of Darkness concepts, but by 2024 I was using Fate Core and doing my best to convert the Chronicles of Darkness concepts to that system.

What the players had not yet learned by the end of those sessions is that Brian Candler had used his newly-learned necromantic rituals to summon doppelgängers to harass Donna Filsinger, weakening her resolve and making her easy to push around, and Danmeet Singh, his main opponent in the local race for MPP.2 He has also made various deals with various ghosts, and he plans to publicly remember them at the upcoming Remembrance Day celebration, whether it makes any sense in that context or not. He has two reasons for doing this. First, he must make good on his promises, or no ghosts will trust his promises in future. Second, ghosts get stronger if they are remembered, and so he will strengthen those ghosts in his service if he gets people to think about them. However, none of this is why he wanted to do the Remembrance Day celebration in the first place; that was just regular conservative Alberta politics (i.e. the normal attempt to use the dead to bind the living to his own ambitions).

Preparation

I had a number of false starts coming up with what to do for this game, mostly focused around a threat coming out of Anglicanism: previously I had chosen villains loosely associated with the New Age movement, Spiritualism, and evangelical Christianity, and I thought I had better hit something closer to home. But eventually I bothered to look at the Discord for the game, where I saw the players express a desire for closure in their conflict with Brian Candler, and that was fair. Specifically, they hoped to break into his campaign office, using a skeleton key they wanted to make from a ritual they found in William J. Candler's book, and get information about what Brian was planning to use his newfound necromancy to do. Therefore I decided to focus on what obstacles they might encounter along the way, what they might find there, and how Brian would try to steal back the things they took from him.

Before I was clever enough to reread the Discord conversation, however, I had started designing an Anglo-Catholic-derived Mystery Cult. Inspired by the historical connection between the Oxford movement and Christian occultism, I had turned to the Christianity on the Spectrum Discord server and asked for more information on that connection. Based in part on those conversations and in part on established Chronicles of Darkness concepts, I was landing on a Mystery Cult that had some connection with ghost-eaters and was once an Anglo-Catholic krewe that had lost all the Bound leading it.3

I had planned for an ancient ghost-eater to be the main antagonist, but upon thinking through what my players actually wanted, I realized this wasn't right. However, I had always planned to bring the ghost-eaters into the story through a tie with Brian Candler, so I thought I could still keep that element of the story. In fact, it made a kind of real-world sense: many evangelical Christians seem intrigued by Anglo-Catholicism but also skeptical of it, and I can easily believe that Brian, having always been curious about necromancy, might have found himself in the company of an Anglican occult society but quickly parting ways, finding them much too Catholic for his tastes. Now that he doesn't know how to get his property back, he's turned to the mystery cult again, and they are happy to help – for a price.

Hashing this out, I decided that this Mystery Cult would be the Sodality of Saint Cuthbert. (I originally said Saint Osgyth, because she had miracles about coming back from the dead, but she's also a cephalophore, and I thought the players might draw connections between that and Hazel, the hippy ghost. That's a false lead and I try to avoid those. Cuthbert is also an English saint, and his incorruptible body and reburial are good enough to suggest him as the patron of an Anglo-Catholic krewe.) The Sodality was once a krewe whose doctrines were a blend of the Oxford movement, Christian hermeticism, and half-understood Sin-Eater truths; in particular, apostolic succession was combined with the hermeticist idea of the esoteric transmission of secret wisdom, though where the hermeticists say this wisdom came from the rebel angels, the Sodality says it comes from the original apostles of Christ. However, over a generation ago the Sodality's Bound were all killed, leaving the krewe severed from contact with other krewes and Sin-Eater experiential knowledge. They have devolved into a Mystery Cult, and were quickly suborned by a centuries-old ghost eater, who uses them as cover and protection from the Bound who would object to his eating of ghosts. He's taught the current members the practices of ectophagy, though he's told them they are binding lost souls to their own, so they can carry them up to Heaven.

My idea, then, is that when Brian asked for help, the Sodality lent him the assistance of Samantha "Sam" Rossiter, a tweed-wearing, pipe-smoking Tory lesbian in her early thirties, who has eaten a few ghosts and has a few powers as a result; she also knows some basic rituals. I looked through the abilities a ghost-eater can have in the 2nd edition Geist the Sin-Eater gamebook and immediately saw the utility of one ability:

Know Vice
Ghost eating arises from avarice, and they know their own. By spending 1 point of Plasm, which boils out of a character’s mouth, the Eater may identify a character’s driving Vice or equivalent Anchor.

The ritual Brian used to summon doppelgängers is simple enough, and I think he'd remember it even without William Candler's ritual book; however, in order to perform it, he needs to know the vice or sins of the target. He doesn't know Nadine or Amber well enough to know their vices. Sam can learn them, though. (Although it surely will not come up, I decided that Sam vomits weird objects up when she wants to learn someone's sins; she can read the vomit like an augur reads a bird's entrails. This seems like a sufficiently Christian concept that the Sodality is able to accept it. I also gave her the Learn Memories ability, on the grounds that it fits with their beliefs about binding ghosts to their own soul.) Giving Sam the Know Vice ability allows me to justify Brian summoning doppelgangers to harass Nadine and Amber.

He doesn't primarily want to harass them, though. He wants the mask and ritual book back, and it seems obvious to me that he'll phone them and demand the return of those items, making vague threats should they refuse to comply. So I sketched out a brief timeline of the actions he'd take at what times. But, essentially, he'd summon a doppelganger every day until they caved and complied. He doesn't know this, but doppelgangers of the same person attack each other on sight, but also immediately fuse into a single ghost when they touch. So, in effect, unless the PCs destroy the doppelgangers first, each time Brian does the ritual, the doubles will get stronger. He also can't control the doppelgangers, and though they will instinctively try to torment their originals, he can't direct how they do so. I struggled a bit figuring out how the doppelgangers would act and, before I did so, I switched to other preparations.

First, what about that campaign office? I thought at first that it had a guard-ghost, and I designed a Great War soldier, until I remembered that I accidentally gave evidence earlier that there was no ghost hanging permanently around the office. But then I realized that Sam could, as part of her services, put a curse on the office – or, more accurately, put a ward on the office that cursed anyone who entered unwelcome. It would feel cheap to let the players walk into that unawares, though, but it was easy enough to come up with a clue that felt fair: I'd say that, whenever they showed up to break into the office, they'd see Sam in there, casting a spell. What would that look like? I figured I'd go with something appropriate to a once-Anglo-Catholic cult: she was using a pine bough as an aspergillum, flicking water around the office. And what does the curse do? After some humming and hawing, and looking through various Chronicles of Darkness books to no avail, I came up with this: it would make them feel an overwhelming urge to confess to entering Brian Candler's office illegally, which they could either carry out or suppress. If they carried it out, they'd feel they had to tell someone who would understand what they were being told, but didn't already know what they'd done. If they suppressed the urge, it would manifest in their body, as a small metal object just under the skin, which they could either leave in (causing one mental stress every scene) or cut out (causing one physical stress and requiring whoever did the cutting to roll to avoid taking mental stress). I knew they'd try to confess to someone unrelated to the crime, so I figured I'd say that, as time went on, they'd feel that only a confession to someone close to themselves or to Brian would suffice, or to the authorities, would suffice. This curse would affect only Nadine and Pansy, because Amber has in fact been invited to enter the office – unless they postpone their B&E, after Brian bothers to tell Amber not to return.

It is important to me that I include at least one sufficiently creepy image in the game. I hoped this could be it. Here's a list of small metal objects that could manifest under their skin:

Of course, once they know they're cursed, they'll look for ways to remove it. So I looked through Geist the Sin-Eaters again, and saw there was already a curse-removal ritual in there that looked pretty cute, actually, and involved chakras, which fits with Pansy's New Age convictions. I clarified a few details and wrote it up as though they found it online, in case they passed an Investigation check and spent some time combing the Internet for a plausible-looking ritual.

Now, there was another thread, too. I had already decided that Hazel is friendly with an active krewe in Edmonton, who would have had a member watch over her on Hallowe'en. That means someone saw them talk to her, and they absolutely would have known that one of them wore a death mask. The krewe does not know who the PCs are, but they are definitely trying to find out. It was Nadine who wore the mask, though, so even if they got as far as the historical society in their search, they wouldn't be able to identify Nadine that way. So how could they? If need be, I thought, maybe one of Pansy's students saw her in a picture of the party on Instagram and tagged her. That means the krewe would send one of their members to her dojo one night. Over Discord I asked Pansy's player to tell me what the dojo's hours are.

Who is this krewe? I fussed with that a bit, but eventually decided on the Urban Nighthawks, based partly on the practice of night birding and partly on the article "Welcome to Birdpunk: A Subculture of a Subculture," about punk birders. After all, what better cover for ghost-hunting than night birding? I thought this krewe probably also had jam sessions, what with the punk connection, and recruited from troubled teens, street kids, and recovering addicts. I stole a Bound from preparation for another campaign, a straight edge woman generally called Grim Grace. I must have had a Geist in mind for her, but couldn't find it in my notes; if it came down to it, I'd probably use a bog-mummy-looking guy I had come up with for something else. And that was enough to go on for this session.

When I heard back from Pansy's player about the dojo's hours, I wrote up a schedule for what happens outside of the players' control:

Thursday 31 October

Friday 1 November

Saturday 2 November

Sunday 3 November

Monday 4 November

Tuesday 5 November

Wednesday 6 November

Thursday 7 November

Friday 8 November

Monday 11 November

(Sam's warding of the office doesn't appear on this list because it happens whenever the party arrives there.)

What could the PCs find in Candler's office? It doesn't make sense for him to leave a draft of his evil plan in his desk. The following does make sense, though, and is also enough for the friends to act on:

Finally, I needed to build the doppelgangers. I looked through the ghost creation rules in Geist the Sin-Eater and after crossing out a lot of things in my notebook, I eventually landed on the following:

I also wrote a lore document in case they ever decided to research ghosts.

As a flourish, I decided to add an activity at the very stat, in which the players roll on a table to see what they dream about. After some fussing, I came up with the following possibilities, obviously representing a d6:

I didn't give the chart numbers, however; I knew I wanted one person to dream of two Ambers, as foreshadowing for the clearest doppelganger threat, so I decided that when the first person rolled, I would assign their result to Amber x 2, and then I'd assign numbers to the rest of the table based on that, so subsequent rolls would actually be random. After each player rolled on the table, I'd tell them the result and ask them to describe the dream based on what they got. For those who got a doppelganger result, I would specify that any kind of fighting would be sufficient: sparring, stage-fighting, arguing, attempting to murder each other, etc. They could choose just how displaced the violence would be.

At this point, I figured I had done enough prep and could run the game.

  1. Looking at the player notes, I think I must have this timeline wrong somehow? That's weird (but actually normal). I wonder if I will be able to reconstruct it accurately.↩

  2. A Member of Provincial Parliament, or MPP, is a regional representative to the provincial government. It is not a major political position but it can be part of an establishment politician's ascent to higher offices.↩

  3. In CoD, Bound are people who would have died, except they made deals with powerful ghosts who allow them to live again and grant them ghostly powers. Those that call themselves Sin-Eaters try to help both ghosts and the living, in one way or another. They run krewes, ritual societies of Bound, mortals, and ghosts. Neither Bound nor their krewes fully understand the world they're living in, and krewes interpret their experiences and the lore shared with them through the lens of their individual, highly specific Doctrines. These Doctrines are derived from, but not identical to, real-world religions, philosophies, and/or subcultures.↩

  4. Spirits are a CoD concept that we explored in a previous installment of this game. The PCs have a vague idea of what spirits are, with concrete memories of at least two such beings.↩

#Chronicles of Darkness #Fate Core #for GMs #horror #religion