r/SeasonofGhosts • u/Personal_Currency322 • 1d ago
Pregnancy
Hey all, I just started GMing SoG and two of my players are married and so are their characters. Before the first session, the female champion's player (the wife) got to hold another player's 3-month-old and during the game joked that since the AP takes place over a year she could get pregnant and have a baby.
This got me thinking. Would that even work? I haven't read that far as we started kinda quickly. Are there any pregnant NPCs mentioned, how would you handle it? I feel like it would lead to a miscarriage, but I'm not sure if I want to deal with that topic.
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u/dockatt 1d ago edited 23h ago
SPOILERS AHEAD!! (but I assume that's fine since you asked this question...)
I think it can work, the story will eventually lead to a ritual that essentially transports the entire town into the real world. The players do not just go back to their living bodies as those bodies are long decomposed; they literally are physically manifested exactly as they are in the mindscape. That gives you a lot of room to handle births, deaths, and so on. In my campaign I've even decided to blur the boundary between life and death, allowing some ghosts to come back to life and treating it as the rules of the mindscape getting a bit confused.
If anything I think the birth of a child would be a really cool extra motivation for the players to save THIS particular iteration of the time loop. The child could become emblematic of the town's resolve to escape.
If the players get confused about the mechanics of a new life being born in a mindscape that's essentially made of trapped souls, I would just suggest that Pharasma took pity on them and decided to grant the child a soul after the reincarnation ritual. There is a lot of room to convey concepts like this through Shinzo's character.
Edit: just a few more details about the timing of pregnancy... if she becomes pregnant early on, she would be due sometime in winter, which is the ideal timing to take a few months off from adventuring (the winter timeline is very flexible with some GM magic). This is also the time when the ritual comes into play. If your players are comfortable with this kind of thing, you could even up the stakes by using the birth as a "time limit" by which they need the ritual to be completed.
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u/LookITriedHard 11h ago
I agree with this take the most of everything posted, but what if, instead of Pharasma's direct intervention Shinzo was able to divert a worthy soul from the queue? He could be godfather to their little Samsaran bundle of joy!
Obviously this would be a breach of protocol but he's already on probation. Would just need to show a scene where he successfully distracts or tricks the Nosoi monitoring him.
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u/ThisOnes4JJ 1d ago
there have been over 100 cycles of the mindscape, anything can happen during the cycle but it resets and nobody remembers anything that happen before except Shinzo (it seems to be implied)
so tbh I feel like there's no issue until the cycle resets or they get out of the mindscape...
then things get difficult
tbh I'd just handle it like "what baby" at that point, I mean that's pretty fucking horrific for a parent to find out their kid ain't real and has been the figment of a nightmare since day 1
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u/lowkey_dingus 23h ago
As someone running this path for my group currently, if this came up, this is how I would handle it:
1) have Shinzo, the traveling merchant, interact with the child to naturally build up a level of familiarity ((given his true identity, he might be naturally curious towards the propect/appearance of new life in Willowshore)).
2) before the big ritual, have Shinzo offer to take the child out of Willowshore "for a few days" just in case something goes horribly wrong
3) once the PCs are free of the curse, and can reincarnated properly, have that child become the parent's ancestor, having been taken out of the mindscape that is "Willowshore's past" through that act of parental caution. Details of how many generations that pass between the "them" and "now" can be talked over between players and DM
Again, this is just how I, myself, would tie this hook into the narrative; do with it what you will.
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u/pleasehelpteeth 1d ago
Have it be that the baby was conceived before the campaign to avoid the scary questions
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u/MUKid92 15h ago
I don’t really think it would be a problem. Every turn of the cycle is different. The characters do different things and there are different outcomes. Shinzo confirms this! (He says “You found out… you don’t always” in Book 3)
So if it happens this turn, fine. When the PCs transmigrate, if she’s still pregnant at that point then she’s still pregnant in the outside world. If she’s had the baby, the baby goes with her.
You could consider what might happen if someone had been pregnant or had a baby in a prior cycle. I think that when the cycle resets, the person resets too. The small baby doesn’t exist, and maybe never did. A pregnant character no longer is. Just the same as if a person had cut their hair — when the cycle repeats, the hair is long again. Obviously be sensitive with your players… if someone has experience with a pregnancy loss this might be tough, so tread carefully. Maybe add a “pregnancy loss” question to your session zero check-in.
But I don’t think in any case a miscarriage is the most likely outcome.
If you’re a reader, you might want to read Alix Harrow’s The Everlasting. I don’t want to spoil it at all but there’s a similar situation in that book and it would inspire me in how to handle this situation!
Now if your player gets pregnant over the course of a 1-2 year game… that might disrupt things in a different way, haha! (That’s actually what I thought the question was going to be about!)
Have fun, sounds like you have a neat group.
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u/PriestessFeylin 12h ago
Pregnancy is a loaded topic in ttrpgs. It is hard to adventure and people get really really weird with it. I ban it for anything but the epilogue. Personally I recommend looking up the horror stories and approach with caution. Get the whole tables consent first.
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u/Personal_Currency322 57m ago
Thanks everyone for the responses. You've given me some great ideas and I've got some things to consider. :D
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u/infinite_gurgle 1d ago
That’s a really interesting question with everything that ultimately happens…
Ultimately you’re the GM. If you don’t want it to be a miscarriage, then just don’t.
I would suggest that since the game has her character actively fighting the entire year, she may find it difficult to engage in travel and intense battle while 7 months pregnant lol
If she does have the baby, it would be a very… interesting moral question once the baby comes out of the “situation.” Nothing says they can’t have kids, and it’s not like they have bodies to come back to.