Phantom

Phantom can be taken to mean several things.

It could be talking about The Phantom, a mask wearing comic strip superhero that got his start in the 1930s. He’s the first superhero to wear a skin tight spandex costume, and the first to wear a mask where his pupils didn’t appear. Both of those have become a standard in the comic industry.

It could be talking about Erik, the primary antagonist of the 1909 French horror novel The Phantom of the Opera.

And, I’m sure there are plenty of other things I could point too… Hell, just Google the word Phantom and see how many responses it comes up with. I did just that, and it came up with 55,700,000 results in some .44 seconds. The first three things that I saw marked was a movie named Phantom, a car by Rolls-Royce, and the Phantom Fireworks Company. After that came the Wikipedia page Phantom which is more or less a disambiguation page that gives brief description of the word and then lists the number of different things it refers too. It’s a rather extensive list.

Anyway, in the context I would look at it in, a phantom is a type of ghost, which is a type of incorporeal undead which can be used effectively in both fiction and table-top gaming. I was looking for a specific link to a creature simply titled phantom to one of the SRD (System Reference Document) websites, but the search sort of came up empty. I got a Phantom Steed, a Phantom Fungus, a Phantom Trap, but no creature simply titled Phantom, and it would be my guess that the rules for a ghost and a specter would be the same exact rules you’d come across for a phantom. In fact, for a table-top game, or a work of fiction (any genre of fiction), the best use of the term phantom would probably be to describe a corporeal foe who is very stealthy and moves about like a ghost or specter would.

I can actually sort of see a villain like that. I’d leave him undead, because that would just go well with the name (and hearken back to The Phantom of the Opera where Erik had a face that looked like a decomposing corpse), and I’d give him two magical items: a cloak of greater invisibility, because how else would someone calling themselves the phantom want to get around, and a ring of incorporiality (yes, I just made that word up) which makes it possible for this corporeal creature to move about in the exact same fashion a ghost would. Using the ring he would be able to shift from the physical plane to the ethereal plane and pass through solid objects as though he were a, for lack of a better term, ghost. Give him a pair of boots that supply a bonus to his move silently check and he’d be damn impossible to find if you weren’t using magic to look for him…

Hmm…

I might have just figured out the proper antagonist for the adventure my Dungeon Crawlers are travelling through right now…

Shit…

This is a public forum.

You saw nothing!!!

Absolutely nothing!!!

It was just a phantom, a figment of your imagination, now go back to bed…

I know that’s where I’m going.

Ryan

7-20-14

Ghosts...

Alright, so I asked my lovely Cupcake for a topic and she said ghosts with a question mark at the end of it. I’m not sure why the question mark was there. I guess that’s probably an indication that she wasn’t sure, and I should take the post wherever I felt it was necessary to go. As for where that is… I couldn’t tell you. Lol.

I guess I could just start talking and see where that gets us.

Ghosts are believed to be a paranormal occurrence that is often cited as proof of an afterlife. The belief is that ghosts are the remains of a person’s soul, what was left over when their physical body died, and usually, it’s believed that ghosts are created when someone has a violent death or where they die in a way that they weren’t exactly ready for it. And, as such, their soul tries to continue to exist without the body, trapping their soul here on the material realm and preventing it from moving on to the afterlife. Even though the soul tries to remain on the material plane it isn’t one hundred percent successful. You see, ghosts are immaterial; they lack mass, and exist merely as a collection of energy that shifts between our plane (the material plane) and this other second plane called the ethereal plane. The ethereal plane kind of overlaps ours and exists basically as a field of energy that connects all life… yes… the ethereal plane is the Force.

Now, that’s pretty much what I know textbook wise about ghosts.

Have I ever had any experiences with ghosts?

I can’t rightly say that I have. Not one hundred percent to my knowledge. I’ve never seen one in person. I’ve never been in the room when a strange voice comes out from nowhere. But, that doesn’t mean I don’t believe in ghosts. Just because I’ve not seen one, doesn’t mean I’ve not felt one.

The ethereal plane, or the Force if you prefer, is something we’re all in contact with. And, as such we have the ability to “sense” certain things about it and our surroundings. That feeling you get when somebody is staring at you, and you’re not looking in their direction, that is information transferred via the ethereal plane. Or cold spots, when a suspected spirit is in the room it will drain the energy away from the point of its manifestation and anybody near that spot will feel the air get cooler. Think of it this way, heat is energy, if it’s getting cold the energy is going away. Then there’s the doom and gloom feeling. The moment when you simply know that something’s wrong, that there’s something that’s not natural in the same room as you. I’ve had that feeling many a time… usually in graveyards. This is why I stay far far away from graveyards.

Now… what else can I say about ghosts…

They make interesting enemies when it comes to table top RPGs. Why? They’re almost impossible for the PCs to hit without special weapons, and if used right, they can really force some wonderful role-playing moments. Convincing a ghost that it’s dead, and trying to help it move on to the afterlife; that would be a killer trip for anybody. And, often, the PCs will loot whatever corpses are left after a battle. This can make for an interesting recurring villain as a ghost will hunt down the person who stole from it and do whatever they can to get what was stolen back. And, in that same vane they can make excellent quest givers. I could cite examples of the latter in a wide array of games on the market today, and yes, many of those examples would be RPGs.

Now… what else… I could probably go on… but I really don’t want to. It’s getting late, and I want to go to bed now.

Gnite kids.

Ryan

7-12-14