Editing Campaign:Underland (section)

==Anchors==

For all their vaunted powers and potential invulnerability, in some ways Sin-Eaters are nothing more than ghosts who have managed to stave off death for a time. Like ghosts, the Bound possess Anchors: people, places, or things which hold great emotional or metaphysical significance to their lives. While a Geist may knit a person's broken body and keep it going, Anchors are what keep that person's soul from the Underworld.

On creation, designate an Anchor for a Sin-Eater; Anchors must hold great significance for that person, and tend to "belong" in some way to that person. Places that become Anchors tend to be private and no larger than a house; no matter how important work may have been to a Sin-Eater, the office building he worked in fails to be an Anchor -- it's just too impersonal and public to have a connection to him. Examples of valid Anchors include: a Sin-Eater's child, the tree under which that Sin-Eater had her first kiss, or a sculpture she created as her most important work.

Anchors reinforce the value of the Bargain and give Sin-Eaters the strength to continue with their second chances at life; once per day, a Sin-Eater in the physical presence of her Anchor (close enough to see it with her own eyes) gains one Plasm as her soul reinforces her connection to the living world.

However, Anchors can also prove to be a Sin-Eater's undoing; if all of a Sin-Eater's Anchors are destroyed, the Sin-Eater cannot cheat death. If a Sin-Eater dies without any connections to the living world, the Geist loses its hold on the person's soul, which is immediately banished to the Underworld as a ghost. There can be no revival or restoration from this turn of events.

Destroying an Anchor requires damaging it to the point where it is unrecognizable as what it once was. For a person, this may mean killing them and reducing the body to ashes. (Curiously enough, a person's corpse remains an Anchor; there are stories of deranged and Wretched Sin-Eaters who have killed their Anchors in order to have better control over them.) A place which serves as an Anchor must be damaged to the point where it is unusable; while the line between a damaged house and a pile of rubble may be a blurry one, the Sin-Eater's soul knows when that line has been crossed and reacts accordingly. In any case, fire tends to be the most efficient way to destroy most Anchors.

Because of the power an Anchor has over its Sin-Eater, anyone who carries a piece of that Anchor gains similar power over that Sin-Eater. Anyone who carries a piece of an Anchor (for example, a lock of hair from a person, a brick from a building) gains a +2 bonus to all rolls made against that Anchor's owner. This weakness often leads Sin-Eaters with many enemies to abandon their normal lives to keep their Anchors a secret. They end up becoming metaphorical ghosts in their own lives as they stay away from those they love for their own safety, yet with a need to hover nearby and keep a watchful eye over the one thing that could lead to their permanent deaths. A Sin-Eater has an innate sense of when her Anchor is in danger, even if she may be thousands of miles away, and feels an instinctive need to protect it.

As a Sin-Eater grows in power, they require more and more connections to the living world, even as they must spend more time away from it. At Psyche 1, a Sin-Eater has a single Anchor; they gain a second one at Psyche 3 and an additional one for every 2 Psyche up to a maximum of 5 at Psyche 9. If a Sin-Eater with multiple Anchors loses one, they suffer the loss of half of their current Psyche dots, rounded down. These dots regenerate at the rate of one dot per week; once this damage is fully healed, the Sin-Eater's soul seeks out a new connection and a new Anchor is created. The bonuses for Anchor control stack, meaning someone can reduce even the mightiest of the Bound to mere thralls.