#ghostge

the west half of north america (barring alaska, which is like russian canada) was never successfully colonised. america won the war of 1812 and lost the civil war, so it extends upwards into the maritimes but gets cut short underneath the mason-dixon line. the confederacy has been plagued with problems since it became official and had another civil war in the 1900s, which fractured it even more. there are a few other city-states within the confederacy and a couple areas have seceded back into the north. mexico got involved and took most of texas back with them when they left, and still occasionally threatens to devour more of it. america resembles regular america/canada but isn’t considered a world power because it’s too much fo a hot mess. i don’t think they participated at all in WWI because they were too busy with a war on their own continent. WWI did happen though because it was a complete shitfest, which is exactly what i want in ghostgame.

russia won the space race and successfully put russian astronaut/hero nikolai silanog on the moon. unfortunately they did not stock the rocket with enough soviet traitor hearts and although it made it to the moon, it never made a return trip.

a few decades later singapore got its own mundane rocket up there and confirmed the moon landing was real once and for all due to the russian remains. then one astronaut killed the other one with a moon-rock or something, and it was fucked up

his name is biff wellington and he punches poltergeists into submission.

it’s safe to say that if a service or business exists in west salem it is probably involved with organised crime. not necessarily willingly--there are some people out where who are just trying to make honest livings, but their businesses couldn’t survive without dealing with a gang or two. that was basically the point of case 1. that restaurant was a family-owned place that tried not to associate with any Bad Guys until it was in dire straits, got fucked over when they did, and then the place was accidentally destroyed by a tiny dumbass robber anyway so none of their efforts mattered in the end. also, the daughter now has a bald spot on the top of her head like a monk. the only person who “won” in that situation was mace, who got to keep the robber’s severed arm eventually.

i can’t say more about the police because it’s spoilers aside from the fact that there are definitely crooked cops. the deputy chief tries to keep them out of her division (or at least away from the important jobs) but she is not always successful because there’s just so many and they are not always easy to detect. i guess it’s ok to say that the police, fire departments and hospitals are some of the few openly municipal services though. others like ambulances and trash pickup are privatised and the main companies are pretty territorial about who is allowed to operate in what neighbourhoods during what time, and the territories completely coincidentally tend to line up with gang territories for some reason.

the post office is notoriously awful in corvus. they probably are here too but i don’t have any plans to include any mail-related things at this point. the problems in corvus are more like the guys who are trusted to keep mail safe from highwaymen sometimes turn out to be highwaymen themselves. in west salem it’d be more like gangsters send out a package to a rival labeled “definitely not illegal cow intestines with a trigger tag that activates when someone open the box” and the mail guys are like “alright sounds legit” and deliver it, but they also snoop around in harmless mail and “lose” packages they want to keep themselves.

not to mention the guest pc who lost her medical license but is still allowed to hang out in the wards unsupervised

that too.

yeah, at least culturally. her family has its roots in lebanon but she hasn't been there herself. she is not very good at being religious and i don’t think it’s very easy to believe in a benevolent god when you’ve grown up in west salem, but she kinda tries, mostly to feel closer to her family (who she is not currently in contact with). technically the player characters have not seen her in hijab yet--not “onscreen” anyway-- because she’s only started wearing it since she joined the police force. it is a visual character development thing that doesn’t exactly work because ghostge is all text... after the case 2 events she’s found a real purpose, which she didn’t really have before, and the road is gonna be dangerous and unforgiving, so she wears this thing that gives her a connection to her estranged family and is a symbol of commitment to her cause and divine protection.

ofc the actual reason i decided to give her a headscarf was because i wanted her to wear a thing that looks like the black cowl charon the ferryman is depicted with.

the only other character we have who has any obvious ties to religion is hendrick, who is a pc. he is in a cult that worships a god named heth and followers generally believe that the human body in its entirety is sacred including like toenails and stuff, so any magic using human materials is prohibited. hendrick’s solution is to carry a bag full of volatile animal blood and parts to use instead of using human entrails like normal people.

whats the scariest ghost u fought

they freak out at every ghost i throw at them. they think im out for blood. idk what their opinions are about Scariest Ghost though

the ones that have done the most damage to them so far are:

a very violent one from the first intermission case they named nosferatu, because they keep and name every ghost they catch. it came from a corpse pile in a little serial killer burrow in a subway tunnel. it scalded a few of them but mostly alfonzo who wanted to hug it.

right now they are dealing with a very large grief ghost that covers an entire house. one of them stuck their hand into the center of a very angry part of it and it ripped all the skin on her arm off. i told her player not to do this but he did it anyway. it is still ongoing so there hasn’t been any fallout yet.

its my favourite npc in ghost detective tabletop game

she was a mediocre bar singer and a witness to a murder in the second case. after the player team accidentally discovered a secret room full of drugs in the bar and one of them drove a car through the wall, the murder went unsolved and she couldn't go back to her old job for several different reasons. the case has since been handed over to the narcotics guys and she joined the police force as a rookie detective to bring the murderer to justice. (she has no experience whatsoever doing this but the standards for recruitment is not very high.)

she is very earnest and very emotional and wears very cheap makeup. her name is sharon fayette, and her name and appearance is a riff off of charon the ferryman. the second case had a styx theme going on.