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FIRST IMPRESSIONS

At 6 feet 2 inches, Josh Larue is built like a contact sports athlete: solid, steady, and someone who looks like they work out often enough to stay fit.

When he moves, one of the first things perceptive people will note is how comfortable he is in his own skin. He presents well, with a well-modulated voice and the practiced air of a mediator. To some, it's disarming; he's someone you can trust with secrets, even if it might be the most out of this world story you have to tell. To others, it sets them on edge. No one is this good, this kind, and this understanding without an agenda.

For the most part, both are true. The kindness isn't an act, but Josh always has an agenda: whether it's getting information by gently ferreting out details or setting a spooked individual at ease with a kind word and an easy smile.

People who spend enough time with him though, eventually discover that the air is always a little bit more chilly around Josh. Sensitive types might pick up on faint, vague whispers when ghosts are about, or see blurry figures out of the corner of their eye.

Josh tries to make up for this unpleasant side effect by offering warmth: in personality, in keeping an eye out for folks—particularly if he's semi-adopted them as his people.

ROOT & BLOOM

Where regular, normal, mundane people have Virtues and Vices, Josh ascribes to what Sin-Eaters refer as their Root and Bloom. A Bound's Root is the affirmation that they are well and truly dead. It is how Josh has come to terms with and face Death itself, and it is a philosophy that guides all his interactions with the dead. A Bound's Bloom affirms how they choose to approach Life. It is the living, flowering, and public soul of who they are—the sum total of how Josh chooses to life his life after losing it.

𝐁𝐥𝐨𝐨𝐦: 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐁𝐚𝐫𝐭𝐞𝐧𝐝𝐞𝐫
By being available and reliable, Josh has made a niche for himself among the living. Everyone needs a bartender to tell their woes to, to mix them drinks and trade stories with. While the most "well-known" of Josh's establishments is an old warehouse-turned-bar called ᴇxɪᴛ, there are other places that Josh owns, giving him access to a steady stream of income—and a potential funnel of clients in need of his specific set of abilities.

This kind of position allows him to be a bit of an enabler. By giving others either the tools or simply permission to work out their doubts or desires, he gets to experience a little secondhand living.

𝐑𝐨𝐨𝐭: 𝐉𝐚𝐜𝐤'𝐬 𝐋𝐚𝐧𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐧
Across the world, lights in the dark have been symbolic for guidance. The candle at the window or the porch light shining in the night has been an offer of respite for weary travelers. In unfamiliar spaces, these are the willow-o-wisps that guide others to either safety or death.

The Dead who seek out Jack's Lantern are often looking for some kind of closure. That can mean that Josh contacts the living and lays down plates before he presides over a Dumb Supper. Or it can mean banishing ghosts in places they shouldn't be haunting.

This has made ghosts both fear and actively seek him out, largely because Jack's Lantern always means they get to take the next step. Maybe that means passing on. Maybe that means something else entirely.

OVERVIEW: WHAT ARE HAUNTS?

The Bound are not merely people possessed by the dead. A Sin-Eater’s geist is a conduit through which she can draw on the power of the Underworld itself.

All Haunts draw their power from the Underworld. The Sin-Eater (or their geist) weaves Plasm into a form that befits the Haunt; whether that’s invisible strings that fling objects around a room, or black-iron talons wrapped around her fingers. How visible the effects are depend on the Sin-Eater. Once she releases the power of the Haunt, the Plasm dissipates. Other Sin-Eaters cannot consume it.

Josh's primary Haunts are the Caul, the Memoria, and the Tomb. After the events of the Haunting of Apartment 7E, he acquired the Boneyard.

THE CAUL

The first words a new Sin-Eater often hears about the Caul are, “you want to do what?” Sin-Eaters may be fusion of a dying mortal and a geist, but they are still two separate beings capable of disagreeing, conversing, and even someday coming to understand the differences between the two of them.

While the Caul is invoked, all of those possibilities die.

The Sin-Eater and the geist are one being, not just Plasm and flesh melded in a loving union but of one mind as well. Their bodies fuse together as Plasm permeates every layer of fat and muscle, transforming it into rubbery Corpus or fibrous ectoplasmic flesh that begins to sag when the hybrid’s attention lessens.

From the outside the Caul is the literal stuff of nightmares. From the inside, it is the most intimate a Sin-Eater can ever be with their geist partner.

Some of the Bound speak of the peace both feel when they are one being, no longer tormented by the hungry pangs of what the geist has sacrificed nor the anxiety about what lies in the Sin-Eater’s future.

While bound together the Sin-Eater and geist share more than just a body. Memories, passions, relationships, and even ambitions flow across the connection. Even when separated some Bound cannot help but seethe with rage at a betrayal by men long dead while the geist can’t help but feel a longing for the love shared between a Sin-Eater and their spouse.

As horrifying as these moments can be, some truly believe they are the first step to understanding and communicating on common ground. If nothing else, it gives the two of them more to talk about.

Other Bound tend to look askance at those who have become masters of the Caul. No other Haunt demands so much of its practitioner, nor leaves them so exposed to even the potential for manipulation by their own geist.

There are those that spread rumors of krewemates that came back from the transformation not quite themselves. Rumors of Sin-Eaters that seem more than willing to bend to their geist’s every demand even as they grow more sinister. Many respond that if a Sin-Eater can share an apartment with their krewe without losing it, they can tolerate 10 minutes together with their geist.

THE MEMORIA

The Memoria allows the Sin-Eater to give body and substance to the events of the past. If the Oracle is flashes of insight into the surface of a problem, Memoria is the process by which one of the Bound can crawl deep into the mystery, experiencing it firsthand.

They might witness a coal mine collapse as it happened 20 years ago or the tense family Thanksgiving that marked the last time a local crime lord’s son was ever seen. Any memory of death, or of an event that led to a death, can leave stains in Twilight. As long the Sin-Eater can enter a place where the memory still lurks, they can coax it back to life.

At the most basic level, this allows the Bound to experience it firsthand, from the perspective of the dead.

It only works on events that actually happened—false memories or lies can’t produce a revelation. The Bound must know what memory they’re trying to draw forth to have any chance of success, requiring at the very least the premise of the memory and when it occurred, such as the murder of Emile Robinson on that cold winter night in 1959.

The Memorial is a fickle power and the practice of “channel surfing” in historic buildings rarely succeeds, drawing forth only a confused Plasmic miasma of hundreds of minor tragedies. This can of course be the cause of some difficulty, as not everyone remembers an event the same way and more than a few of the Bound have had to attempt to console a ghost whose entire conception of their untimely demise was based on a mistaken premise.

Some krewes retain a Memoria specialist simply because they’re afraid of what they may leave behind. It’s disturbing enough to think about being recorded by a camera on the end of every block and in every pocket, but it’s another for your actions to be bled into the walls themselves. Others coming along and harvesting moments of hard choices without knowing why the krewe had to make them can be a source of frustration.

What inscribes a memory can be difficult to say. It might happen when there is a tragedy, but some theorize that any sufficiently emotional moment should be sufficient. The fact that Sin-Eaters rarely ever find events caused by joy or happiness goes unsaid.

The Memoria is not a pleasant experience even for the most jaded Sin-Eater. When the Memoria is unlocked the memories surge forth, inundating the Bound in a life that seems to supersede their own. It’s hard to focus on mundane things when ancient passions play out around them. With so little information given, it’s up to the Sin-Eater to personally decipher the mystery of the event.

Who is the dark-eyed woman and why is she protecting the teenager who will become the Keyless Boy? Why does she look that way at him? It’s common for some Bound to become obsessed with these visions, playing them over endlessly in their mind. Some of them even develop attachments and fondness for the people they watch, yearning to find them (or at the very least their ghosts) so they can ask what ever became of them? Why did this moment matter to them? Who are they?

THE TOMB

The Tomb is the Haunt of things lost to time, allowing a Sin-Eater to spin Plasm into things touched by death, returning to a prior state. They might restore a torn painting, repair their father’s Mustang, or create a perfect physical replica of their son from a lock of his hair.

They can make broken things whole once again, but they must have some symbolic representation of the object in order to use the Tomb at all—a powerful Sin-Eater can recreate the gun used to murder their brother from just a shell casing, or their brother’s finger bone, but could do nothing with a piece of a new gun.

The Bound doesn’t need to know about the precise electronic components in a laptop to restore it from a smashed wreck; the Plasm they infuse will return it to full functionality even if they have never used or even seen a computer before. They can also restore parts of an item, restoring the blood stains in the trunk of a murderer’s car, even if the killer has completely replaced the lining.

The Tomb can also restore—or at least create a reasonable facsimile of—the dead. To recreate a dead person, the Sin-Eater needs something of them to work with. Not even the most powerful Sin-Eater can summon a simulacrum of their ex-wife ex nihilo. With a lock of hair or the cremated ashes of a body, they could trust the rest to the Tomb, but without that physical connection to a memory, the Plasmic constructs of the Tomb wash away like tears in the rain.

One thing remains constant: They cannot cheat death.

Nothing that they repair with the Tomb is truly permanent—no matter how much they try to reinforce something, Plasm is the residue of death, and everything has its time.

The Key used to unlock the Tomb changes how the Sin-Eater effects repairs. The Key of Beasts sees insects swarm and blur together until they coalesce into the object, while the Key of Chance builds the result of the Tomb from tokens of luck and ill-omen. The end result is always the same: after the infusion of Plasm, the object is what it was. The knife that murdered, recovered through the Tomb, has the same blood stains—and they have the same DNA markers as the blood on the actual knife.

THE BONEYARD

The Boneyard allows Sin-Eaters to perform the most common trick of ghosts—the haunting of a location. Plasm leaks into the environment, staining it with the Sin-Eater’s deathly essence and allowing them to spread their consciousness across a building or similarly sized landmark.

At its most basic level a Sin-Eater instinctively knows both the layout of his Boneyard as well as who is currently within it. He can tell if they are living or dead as well as where they are, but without a greater expenditure of Plasm he’s left unaware of precisely who or what they are.

Cautious Sin-Eaters know that just because somebody is alive doesn’t mean they’re harmless, or even all that human. Given a great enough expenditure of Plasm, a suitably skilled Sin-Eater may become a true master of his Boneyard, learning to bend the domain to his will.

The domains of Sin-Eaters are as varied as those that take on the Bargain, limited only by their imagination to cause havoc for rival krewes and organizations. Some Bound make soft uses of the Boneyard for personal gain, performing mock exorcisms for the living or casing a building for an easy burglary.

Others use their powers for more extreme ends, trapping their enemies and consuming them within their own hideouts or causing phantasmagoric nights of revelry, allowing the living and the dead to rub shoulders as equals.

Bound that have explored the Great Below sometimes share rumors of the strange effects of claiming portions of the Underworld. Some claim the stone walls of the Underworld actively resist those that seek to twist them, answering to another unseen master that is unwilling to share. Others report that the lands of the dead were enthusiastic to be shaped by the Sin-Eater, as though waiting for their new master to define them.

THE GEIST

The Flower Girl represents the loss of innocence and a life cut short. It's all the maybes and what-ifs, because death came too soon and the future was taken off the board. She resembles a little girl about eight years old, all scraped palms and skinned knees. Her face is blurred of all distinctive features, and her hair is threaded through with the small white flowers that funeral homes add to bouquets as fillers.

The Flower Girl's Virtue is Empathetic and her Vice is Curiosity.

UNIQUE BAN & BANE

The Flower Girl's Bans include playgrounds and vintage children's toys from before the World Wars. She is compelled to linger in playgrounds; the lure of a swing set means she will play until the sun goes down. A yoyo's string laid across passageways prevents her from moving through. Her Bane is yellow carnations, which is what her killer planted and bred over the graves of all his victims.

REMEMBRANCE

The Flower Girl's Remembrance is the scent of a summer fading into fall: sweat drying on skin and earth and grass. The crunch of leaves underfoot, the chill creeping up on you. The sound of a child's laughter right around the corner before it halts in a half-scream.

Remembrance Trait: Empathy

CRISIS POINTS: UNIVERSAL TRIGGERS

Take damage from your geist’s bane.

Deliberately ignore the geist’s ban.

Suffer a wound in one of your rightmost three Health boxes.

CRISIS POINTS: HELPLESSNESS (UNIQUE)

Hazy: Face a situation that harms you (materially, socially, or physically) that you cannot mitigate or control.

Vague: Dramatically fail a contested action.

Specific: Watch a loved one die despite your best efforts to save them.

WHAT'S THE UNIVERSE LIKE?

There are no such things as monsters. But the truth is, there are. And they live—quite comfortably—among us. If you want to learn more about Josh's universe you can check out this section on [THE WORLD]. Alternatively, if you want to know about the kind of supernatural Josh is, you can learn about [THE BOUND]. Finally, if you're curious about Underworld specifics, you can proceed to [THE COLD BELOW].

WHO ARE THE PEOPLE JOSH MENTIONS?

No character lives in a vacuum. I create have a terrible habit of creating NPCs on a whim, to the point that a handful of them have character journals of their own. If you're looking to get to know Josh's inner circle—as well as the other quirky characters that populate his universe—access their information over at [PERSONS OF INTEREST].

As for key events from his past, you can proceed over to the [CASE FILES].