Everyday thousands of people die unfulfilled, unable to move on. They abandon their bodies and eel out a miserable existence as a spirit until they can find the peace of mind or strength to cross into the world beyond. Some never make it. Perhaps they just won't take the risk or they won't let go of life, maybe they feel obligated to watch over the living or they become comfortable in their new lifestyle. They can hang on like this for centuries distorting away from what they were as humans becoming elemental, ancestral or demonic forces or clinging on to life by seizing fresh corpses and wandering undead at night.
Whether it's a blessing or a curse their are those who can see them. Both the newly-deads limited by a life time of perception to forms resembling the living and those that have gone on to go bump in the night. The gift tends to manifest in childhood and is probably linked to perception of mortality, it's most common in those who've had a brush with death themselves or a close loved one die. It is enough to drive some mad and cities are the worst for it but in the modern world it becomes increasingly hard to stay away from them.
San Francisco. Fog City. The Paris of the West. The most haunted city in all the America's. The quake that hit in 1906 was among the worst disasters in the countries history, it killed more than 3000 first while they slept and later in the fires. More than half the city was destroyed and the rest was rebuilt on the ruins. Fifty years earlier droves of Chinese immigrants had come for empty promises of gold living and dying in the disease and poverty of America's first Chinatown. The Letterman army hospital treated the combatants in all the wars of the twentieth century. The Golden Gate bridge has more suicides than any other site in the world. Thousands of ghosts make the pilgrimage to the AIDS memorial grove before they pass on. And no medium in their right mind goes near Alcatraz.
The city has quality as well as quantity, the self proclaimed Emperor Norton is the closest thing the dead of the city have to a leader. Mary Ellen Pleasant of the underground railroads learned voodoo in New Orleans to ressurect herself in death as the dreaded Mammy Pleasant. The spirit of Bruce Lee is often seen wandering the Chinatown where he was born and is quite philosphical for someone stuck halfway between life and death. Rumour has it the Zodiac killer recently passed into the ghost realm becoming quite comfortable in theirnew exisistence. One brave medium says Al Capone still plays the banjo in Alcatraz's shower room to keep the mindless spirits of his fellow inmates at bay. A headless figure runs alongside cars on the baybridge and in Golden Gate park a policeman hands out tickets even in death.
As you'd probably guessed from the above the idea of my RP is that we're all mediums in San Francisco. The only power mediums have is they can see the dead just to clarify, they can also sense spirits that don't takevisible forms and the dead might tell them things about the past or future or move things for them to give the appearance of other powers but they don't have these. I have some ideas for plot (you can probably guess one place we'll end up going at some point) but i'd also like to hear what everyone wants from this RP as well. The setting of San Francisco I think is a good fit and I'm open to any suggestions of other spirits that might lurk there as I am to suggestion and criticisms on my ideas, writing etc:
Thanks for reading, KS
P.S. Just looked back over what I'd written, sorry for the bad grammar I typed it quite fast and on my phone. Too tired to edit it tonight though.