Quote from: Telarus;557224Speaking of the base power-level of the D&D1/2 "Ghost"....

How many times to you think ["Don't go THERE, it's Haunted!", scream the villagers] turned out to be kobolds/goblins?

Running into an actual corporeal spirit of a dead person, after 10-15 "ghost hunts" which actually turn up humanoid bandits, puts a little bit of context back into the Ghost's stats.

There's a Zombie tricked out to look like a Lich in S1 Tomb of Horrors; there's a goblin in mummy wrappings (if not a couple of) in A3!  U1's "haunted house" is all full of Scooby Doo tricks just like that as well.  So, probably a lot.

The first encounter with incorporeals is a massive deal, and should be.

In my game last night the party (six people, 1st-3rd level) ran into a wraith.  One.

And after both clerics failed to turn the thing, they ran their asses off, as they should have.

Will they return to that area with magic weapons?  Maybe, but they might wait a while.  Or recruit some backup.  Or, best option, do some legwork and see if that particular haunty-haunt has some psychological or fairy-tale type weaknesses they can exploit.

Quote from: VectorSigma;557504The first encounter with incorporeals is a massive deal, and should be.

In my game last night the party (six people, 1st-3rd level) ran into a wraith.  One.

And after both clerics failed to turn the thing, they ran their asses off, as they should have.

Will they return to that area with magic weapons?  Maybe, but they might wait a while.  Or recruit some backup.  Or, best option, do some legwork and see if that particular haunty-haunt has some psychological or fairy-tale type weaknesses they can exploit.

I threw nightmares at the player who'd gone in the cave during last night's game; more on it later, but yeah.  Gotta mess with their heads a bit.

I've said this before, but making a ghost story is surprisingly one of the most attempted and seemingly hardest tasks in literature. It's so easy to have it collapse on its own weight. The best maxim I can give to ghosts and incorporeal threats is to remember: implicit over the explicit. The monster of their imaginations will almost always be more horrifying than its revelation. Grounding it in the knowable removes a lot of the anxiety.

That said, the challenges in rpgs are akin, though not as similar. Since you (ideally) don't have a fixed construction of events (a story v. rpgs), you have to structure the coincidental reveals, especially in a sandbox, as uncanny tidbits within a swath of quotidian. Basically, keep it living world and let either PCs or NPCs stumble upon it.

But you also have to leave them time to 'organically' stumble upon it. Just because an NPC runs across something doesn't mean they'll immediately run to the PCs reporting something seemingly crazy. Things gotta marinate... Letting the players freak themselves out is a big challenge, but an awesome reward. And one of the bigger challenges is providing player incentives to stay around long enough, or at least periodically return, to feel that suffocating feeling from implicit horror.

You may want to try occasional, possibly even cyclical, expansions of sphere of influence. Like, the ghost occasionally has a surge of power and wanders out to kill a traveler on the nearest road. Or wrap up a spooky bundle of sticks to hang on a tree. Or leave a dead squirrel staked and posed into a tree near the cave. Little things that shows 'its' attention is wandering further afield -- and 'it's' still actively hostile.

I've rarely used Ghosts compared to other undead, but when I do I try not to make them just be your generic dungeon monster or the likes, it should be essential that at least IN THEORY, the PCs could have a way of putting the ghost to rest without just kicking the shit out of it.

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I agree Pundit. Thats one of the reasons I'm making it a behind the scenes big bad in the RC campaign I'm cooking up. I think people (and perhaps Im making an assumption) dont always take into consideration of a "monsters" INT. The ghost in RC has an INT of 14. Why wouldnt it plot, plan, and have goals? As in my games case. Where the ghost knows what it is, and wants more. Wants to be a god, or at least treated like it. At first it will be behind the scenes, then eventually coming to the fore front. For perhaps the final showdown, so to speak.

Quote from: RPGPundit;558207I've rarely used Ghosts compared to other undead, but when I do I try not to make them just be your generic dungeon monster or the likes, it should be essential that at least IN THEORY, the PCs could have a way of putting the ghost to rest without just kicking the shit out of it.

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I think this is essential. For me he great thing about a ghost adventure is investigating him (looking into his past, his behavior, circumstances of death, local legends) in order to find a way to bring him to rest.

Quote from: BedrockBrendan;558259I think this is essential. For me he great thing about a ghost adventure is investigating him (looking into his past, his behavior, circumstances of death, local legends) in order to find a way to bring him to rest.

AD&D Haunts fit this category better than Ghosts.  Ghosts are decidedly evil beings.  A Haunt can really be "laid to rest".

EDIT: for comparison's sake, here's the lowdown on Ghosts, from the Monster Manual:

Quote from: Gary GygaxGhosts are the spirits of evil humans who were so awful in their badness that they have been rewarded (or perhaps cursed) by being given undead status.  Thus they roam about at night or in places of darkness.  These spirits hate goodness and life, hungering to draw the living essences from humans.  As ghosts are non-corporeal (ethereal), they are usually encountered by creatures in a like state, although they can be seen by non-ethereal creatures.  

(Pure mechanical discussion of the Ghost follows...)

Now compare the Haunt:

Quote from: Gary GygaxA haunt is the restless spirit of a person who died leaving a vital task unfinished.  A haunt inhabits an area within 6" of the site where it died.  The haunt's sole purpose is to possess a living body and use it to complete the task, thus gaining a final release.

[...]

The haunt will use the possessed body to complete its unfulfilled task, which need not necessarily be dangerous.  Once the task is completed, the haunt will pass on to its final rest and the victim will regain control of its body.

[...]

If the possessed victim has an alignment opposite to that of the haunt (good vs. evil) the haunt will try to strangle the character.

[...]

Haunts may not be turned because they are linked to the site of their deaths.  [...] Exorcism will destroy a haunt forever.

(The rest was pure AD&D mechanics)

Quote from: thedungeondelver;558266AD&D Haunts fit this category better than Ghosts.  Ghosts are decidedly evil beings.  A Haunt can really be "laid to rest".

EDIT: for comparison's sake, here's the lowdown on Ghosts, from the Monster Manual:



(Pure mechanical discussion of the Ghost follows...)

Now compare the Haunt:



(The rest was pure AD&D mechanics)

I was thinking more about the 2e guide to ghosts which sort of opened them up to greater customization.

Thanks to this thread I realized that I didn't have Ghost on my dungeon encounter table, now fixed.

Quote from: BedrockBrendan;558276I was thinking more about the 2e guide to ghosts which sort of opened them up to greater customization.

okay, whatever

And I was thinking more from the Rules Cyclopedia, though I know that has three different classes of "ghosts" as well.

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