Ethereal and Essence Physics
in Mile Higher Club
As I’ve written before, once I’ve put something in play I will do my level best not to contradict it. Retcons, while sometimes unavoidable, are something I avoid.
That said, in “Sorcery, Purity, and other bits of loose canon” I posted that “An ethereal being that lacks a physical form requires belief to survive” and I still hold that as a point of common sense. The Ethereal Player’s Guide contradicts that, stating they get Essence at midnight. However, since at this point the ethereals and their followers are all NPC’s, I’m going to say they receive their Essence from their worshippers, and that if some god/image/ethereal were to run out of followers they would lose their Essence source, and eventually fade. As on pg. 19 of the EPG this starts with being forgotten and progresses to lost Forces. A chance of a Force per year strikes me as a bit slow…
An ethereal can hold Essence in caches, and the amount each
cache can hold varies widely on the nature of the thing holding it. A simple cache, kept in the
My friend A---, a devout Christian, is fond of reminding me that angels are as curious about us as we about them. This came to me as an insight into the celestial mind—the corporeal world is wholly alien to them. (I addressed something like it in paragraph two of the link above.) They’re going to miss the richness and depth of the corporeal world, including the unique thing that is Life, the confluence of an immortal soul with a fragile body. And in that they miss so much more.
In that body is the seat of emotion—overall health rather than just the heart itself. Without its body a human soul risks dissipating, having lost an essential part of its human being. Angels guide such souls to Heaven, demons to Hell, reincarnation is a happy event for most others who find an unoccupied baby in the womb. Very few simply dissipate and not all find this a bad fate; Buddhism posits this as a desirable state, the loss of the very last attachment. So what keeps a soul together? Essence. And what produces Essence? The nexus of the body and soul.
Living beings alone produce Essence, and they do so once a day. In belief, even ambient belief, they give that Essence to beings ethereal and celestial. Wise such beings horde it against the day their free-willed friends decide to withhold it. Unwise ethereals come and go like passing fads. Celestials? The monotheist G-d has gathered it carefully over the centuries from fanatics and casual believers alike, and sent his angels out to foster that belief. Where demons get it from is an interesting question. Contact with the divine ultimately feeds the divine. Exiling the ethereal gods from Earth assures their slow starvation.
As mentioned in the Sorcery link, some ethereals hid out on Earth, knowing from their followers more of the niches of the corporeal plane. There, in their temples and shrines, they built Essence caches against the days they might be forgotten. Some caches are as small as books; open such a book and you’re likely to feel its power. (Yes, your GM has been dipping into the Cthulhu bowl again) Some are as large as mountains. Size matters some on Essence capacity but so does complexity. Celestials have no particular sense for detecting these caches—unlike some humans—and the idea that they exist might come as a surprise.
Further off canon, that Essence isn’t purely for creating vessels. Certainly that’s one use, and there are few others. Those include, however:
*Luck charms. An ethereal can invest good luck or bad into an item within the cache, so that if that item is removed the Essence within it can be spent to punish the thief or reward the acolyte. The most obvious example of this is in the cursed Egyptian pyramids.
*Healing. The one being healed must be near the ethereal with its cache or another significant source of Essence. Healing must also be in the being’s repertoire; fire spirits are unlikely to heal.
*Contact with the outside world. This can take the form of maneuvering items of divination such as cards and pendulums, but can also take the more blunt form of possessing acolytes or animals. Possessing unwilling or unwitting sapient hosts requires a contest of Wills, requiring either a vessel or an otherwise clear manifestation. Further it creates a disturbance on par with the Song of Possession, drawing unwanted celestial attention to its cache. Few are capable of it, and fewer if any will risk it.
*Miracles, whether illusions or actions that fall more along the above lines. These are often cynical affairs, designed to gain more fervent worshippers to further add to the cache.
Funny, there are a lot fewer Godly miracles in the past hundred-some years since human beings got more cynical…