[GtS]Geist: the Sin-Eaters, Что известно о четвертой "четвертой" игре.

[Alexius]

Standing on Death’s Threshold
Death was not the end — it was a transition. Still alive but bound to the forces of death, you are now one of the Sin-Eaters: gatekeepers of the Underworld, possessed of the strange and powerful geists. The gates to the realm of the dead yawn open. You hold the keys.

Rulebook for Geist: The Sin-Eaters™
• A rulebook for playing the Sin-Eaters, mortals who have passed through the gates of Death and returned, bonded with the unusual shades known as geists
• An expanded look at death and the Underworld in the World of Darkness, from simple ghosts to strange threats such as the Kerberoi
• Provides new player types and antagonists for crossover chronicles as well as chronicles focusing on Sin-Eaters

Page Count: 320 (hardcover)
Authors: Alan Alexander, Jess Hartley, Jesse Heinig, Wood Ingham, Matthew McFarland, John Newman, Malcolm Sheppard, Christopher Simmons, John Snead, Travis Stout, Chuck Wendig
Developer: Ethan Skemp
Cover Artist: Aileen E. Miles

Еще несколько цитат из Summoners:
Doors. Corridors. Archways. Shadowy chambers; ranging from caves, to vast mausoleums, to vaulted cathedrals, and more. These are the things that ghosts speak of when they are summoned up from the Underworld. So, too, do they tell of societies of the lost and forgotten dead, most of whom have long since given up hope of being claimed by the heavens — or even hells — of which they were taught. Then again, many of them believe they are in Hell, having been judged and found wanting, and cast into exile from life, along with countless millions of others.
And when, at last, a ghost in the Underworld has dwelt for too many interminable centuries among her kind, she is taken by an urge to wander downward, ever downward, into the parts of the realm of the dead never chronicled by its unhappy shades, there to open one last door and step through, into a Fate that not even the wisest know. Some few, extraordinarily strong-willed, ghosts manage to stave off this calling, but rare, indeed, are those who last more than a handful of centuries, let alone stand fast against the crushing tide of a millennium… or longer.

When a ghost’s anchors are finally gone (or when it otherwise loses its tenuous connection to the material realm), it falls, inexorably, into the Underworld. Upon arriving in the realm of the dead, however, a strange thing happens: the ghost regains some measure of its volition, becoming once more capable of thoughts, emotions, and deeds that are no longer defined by set responses imprinted at the instant of physical death. Theories abound as to why, exactly, this is, but some Awakened scholars believe the soul somehow “glances off” of the Underworld after the body dies, leaving a bit of its substance there, a fragment of the self that merges with the spiritually empty template of the psyche encapsulated within a ghost. This miniscule shard, say such willworkers, returns a measure of sentience to a restless shade when it finally descends to the realm of the dead.

Dead, But Never Born — Chthonians
When willworkers first began to explore the Underworld, they discovered things that they did not expect: inhuman things, dwelling amongst the dead. These beings were powerful and jealous… and hungry. Mages who dared to ask questions of them (and who survived long enough to return to the living realm with news of their answers) reported that these entities had no recollections of having ever been alive.
At frst, they dwelt among those dead, feeding upon those unhappy shades as they desired, but the sheers numbers of the dead eventually grew overwhelming and the entities fed deeper into the endless corridors of the Underworld, there to hide themselves from the ghosts that they came to fear and whom they envied, for having ever known life. Over the ages, the so-called chthonians delved so deeply into the realm of the dead that they became all but impossible to locate for any Underworld explorer and were forgotten by all save the most sagacious (and powerful) of summoners.

[Alexius]

Еще один (неожиданный, по крайней мере, для меня) момент: будущий Пожиратель Грехов отличается от других людей еще до смерти.

Those who will become Sin-Eaters are different almost from the start. One girl has an imaginary friend in childhood. Her parents don’t think anything of it, until they realize that when the girl describes her “friend,” she’s describing the grandmother that died three weeks before she was born. A boy is committed to a mental institution for increasingly-frequent panic attacks. Medication doesn’t work — no anti-anxiety pill can shut out the barrage of hellish whispers, of dry sepulchral voices howling demands into his ear. Another is shunned throughout elementary school for being a creepy loner. It’s not until she’s thirteen that she realizes it’s not normal to be able to see exactly when and how someone will die just by looking at them. By then, it’s far too late to convince herself it’s just her imagination.

Every single one of the Bound manifested some sort of supernatural connection with the energy of death before the Bargain. Sometimes it’s present from birth (like the old wives’ tale that babies born with part of the amniotic sac covering their eyes will be able to see ghosts and spirits), sometimes there’s an event that triggers it (perhaps an echo or a precursor to the Bargain that binds them to a geist, or maybe an encounter with some supernatural force), and sometimes it just starts happening one day and the proto-Bound has no idea why or what it means. Unlike, say, a vampire, whose first brush with the hidden occult world was probably when his date grew fangs and started chewing on his neck, Sin-Eaters come out of the Bargain with at least some awareness of what’s really going on in the world.

Sometimes, the mortal is intensely curious about her ability. She might believe it’s a gift she must understand in order to use, or she might be driven purely by a desire to know how this is possible. She might try to communicate with the dead in some way (which, given that she lacks the full gifts of a Sin-Eater, is likely to be imprecise and prone to cause more trouble than it solves), try to help them resolve whatever keeps them here, or her actions might be motivated more by personal gain or other petty motives. She might delve into the occult, seeking an explanation for her abilities. Her investigation might even lead her to some of the stranger denizens of the shadows: A pale young man with bewitching eyes who tells her he answers to all her questions lie in the blood. A group of urban primitives who claim they can speak not just to the dead, but to Death itself. The parish priest who tells her to be wary of deceiving demons — after she tells him about the ghosts she’s seen, they disappear.

Others withdraw from their ability, seeing it not as a gift but as a curse. It might be due to upbringing (many religions teach that trafficking with the dead is a mark of evil), or being unable to reconcile ghosts and hauntings with the apparently rational world around them, or just because what they see and experience is too horrific.

How the nascent Sin-Eater reacts to their “gift” often determines how they use the greater powers that come with binding their souls to a geist. The girl who talks to her Nana’s ghost withdraws into herself after her violent near-death at the hands of an abusive boyfriend; now she’s more comfortable with the dead than the living. The boy grows up and leaves the mental institution, but the voices aren’t gone. After he slits his own wrists, he can hear the voices more clearly than ever before — only now he has the power to make them shut up. The girl who sees people’s deaths realizes she can use that for her own ends: she becomes the perfect black widow, and the police can never finger her for the deaths of her husbands because she doesn’t kill them. She tells herself she’s doing a service, giving these doomed men a few months of pleasure before their time is up. Padding her bank account is just an added boon.