This is a guide that I’ve been wanting to write for years, and so with the upcoming Kickstarter of East Texas University: Fresh Blood, I’m happy to finally share this with the world.
I’ll start with the elephant in the room: talking religion is always a touchy subject. While we make a point of steering clear of those topics in ETU and Pinebox Middle School, any supernatural setting with ghosts, demons, souls, monsters, and magic can’t help but be religion-adjacent. This article is an attempt to lay out a consistent framework for how I see these things working in our fictional setting.
First, I’ll start with the big G. Regardless of our personal views, Ed and I don’t specifically address the existence of a supreme creator in the game. The last thing we’d want to do is “gamify” our players’ religions. For at least some people, it’s one thing to play a cleric in a fantasy setting, but it gets a bit uncomfortable to pretend to wield divine power in a game based on our real world. If your gaming group is in complete agreement about treading that ground, then of course that’s at your discretion.
Souls & Spirits
While we don’t talk about a divine creator in the game, souls are frequently referenced. Souls are the invisible spark that drives existence, paradoxically fueling and fueled by our intellect, empathy, and creativity. Other living things may also have souls, but human souls burn brightest. While souls are generally immortal, they are not incorruptible nor entirely indestructible. Souls can be corrupted by repeated evil acts and external forces such as black magic or demonic influence (more on demons later).
While this ephemeral spark is bound to a physical form, it is not strictly limited to it. When the body fails, most immortal souls “move on,” but a few remain stuck in our world. We call these stuck souls “ghosts” or “spirits,” and they can spend decades or centuries trapped between worlds. Some ghosts have greater awareness of their surroundings than others. For instance, some only know what they knew up to the time of their deaths while others are voyeurs as the world passes around them. Some lost souls can briefly affect the world around them, including communicating with the living, but at the cost of their own limited energy.
Understand that not all ghosts are lost souls. Sometimes what we observe as a ghost is no more than a strong psychic echo or imprint upon a location or object. The soul has moved on, but the echo remains.
Demons & Undead
The Pinebox, TX setting also makes frequent references to hell, demons, and undead. I’ll tackle each in turn.
For gaming purposes, hell is a separate dimension populated by evil entities which thrive on the suffering of those with souls. In this setting there are multiple hells, only some of which are interconnected.
The entities populating hell are called demons, and they come in all shapes and sizes. Demons do not have souls of their own, but gain strength from feeding upon the spark of human souls. While a normal, healthy human soul is a poor meal, one that has been corrupted or subjected to suffering is like Red Bull for their kind. It gives them a dose of power and vitality they use to grow stronger and conquer their demonic rivals.
Fortunately, the barrier between our world and the demonic one is not as easy to overcome. Most commonly, it takes someone from our world performing a summoning ritual, sometimes intentionally but more often accidentally while trying to contact the spirit world. If not properly contained, these evil creatures can roam free to cause mischief and misery, including opening a window to more of their kind. To further complicate matters, some demons appear in physical form whereas others enter our world as immaterial spirits (operating similarly to lost souls).
As I mentioned earlier, human souls are bound to human forms, but not strictly limited to them. The reverse is also true. Under certain circumstances, a human body can be reanimated without a soul. We call these undead. Without the spark of humanity, these shells have no empathy for human suffering. In many cases, they hunger to consume in living humans what they instinctively feel missing in themselves.
Cryptids
Cryptids are an entirely other class of monster. Cryptids are creatures not commonly recognized by modern science but are otherwise part of the human world. Bigfoot and chupacabra are two examples of cryptids. Cryptids can have supernatural abilities, but, unlike demons and undead, are not inherently evil.
Fae
Fae are only very rarely mentioned in the Pinebox setting. Like demons, fae are supernatural beings who live in dimensions adjacent to our own. Unlike demons, they do not feed upon souls. Fae are neither inherently good or evil, but do enjoy mischief and can be best considered agents of chaos.
Conclusion
I hope this peek behind the curtain helps you understand the supernatural framework of Pinebox. There may be times when Ed and I break our own rules, but it’s almost always in service of telling a great story. If you have questions or comments, please shout out on Facebook, Discord, or anywhere else you can find Ed or myself.
