I scoured that entire PDF…for it to be simply to the left
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Did i miss where a initiate’s spirit mask is explained?
It’s in the Flame Without Shadow supplement, not in the book. https://www.dropbox.com/sh/bixbs5a100swklp/AAAGMxdWC6y--jsq89l2mLxFa?dl=0
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I’m not sure yet if I want to turn the one-shot I ran into a regular thing, but I was strongly considering making many (if not all) of the full Wardens into either Hulls or Hollows. Initiates who pass get the same treatment, and ones who fail or try to back out when they find out become a deathseeker crow.
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In our group’s Duskvol, the Spirit Wardens are the modern descendants of a powerful and revered element of Akorosi society, one of several Imperial Cults that formed around the Immortal Emperor in the early night after the Cataclysm:
The Spirit Wardens, as any child knows, keep us safe from the spirits of the dead. Each of us, in our holy, vital bodies hosts a corrupt spirit. A weak, selfish, depraved phantom, the source of our basest drives. When our loved ones die, this ghost is unleashed to wreck havoc on the living. The Spirit Wardens detect and contain these warped, parodic vestiges, collecting them at several Crematoria and destroying them in cleansing electroplasmic fire.
The Spirit Wardens guard the living from the terrors of death. They send the dead to peaceful oblivion.
And that’s truth. But it’s also a tidy lie that masks a darker truth hidden from ordinary citizens.
The truth is that Spirit Wardens aren’t just arcane dustmen. They’re not here to keep you safe from your dear granmam’s vengeful residue. They’re here protect all of us from an existential threat to civilization: the Demons of the wasteland that beseige our cities of light.
The comforting lie is that Bellweather is an incinerator, a final destination for the departed. The awful truth is that it’s a refinery, a waystop on a journey to a horrific end.
(q.v. The Bakoros Lectures)
Only Spirit Wardens and officers of the Leviathan Hunter fleet are initiated into this secret: That all who die in a city of the Empire are but raw material, crude spirit to be blended and refined into the highly concentrated form of electroplasmic consciousness used to manufacture Electroplasmic Lures. With these Lures, the Hunters entice Leviathan to the surface, intoxicate and stupefy them long enough to draw black blood to fill their holds.
This is the Leviathan’s Bargain: In exchange for the sacrifice of our dead, our selves, the Leviathan ignite the lightning barrier that makes modern cities possible, drive the industries that constitute the vital organs of the Empire’s holy flesh.
But – this too is a deceptive partial truth, masking a fact kept secret from everyone.
No one is allowed to know. Only non-people are trusted to understand it – the non-people who don the Cloak of Shadow, who set aside their false, human faces and bear instead the True Face, the bronze mask of the Warden.
The truth is that human souls have been harvested since long before the discovery of Sparkcraft. Before, some whisper, even the Cataclysm. No, not all ghosts are used to manufacture Lures. The very cream of the crop, the most vital, vibrant echoes, those who retain the brightest spark of who they were in life, this richest grade of electroplasm is siphoned off, raw and unrefined to preserve each spirit’s ineffable character. Individual containers are loaded under cloak of secrecy onto special, heavily guarded trains bound for the Imperial Capital, there to be consumed by an ancient and voracious hunger.
An insatiable hunger incarnate in an eternal silver vessel.
Its face is the oldest mask.
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Beautiful.
In my game, Spirit Wardens are ghosts, bound to particular bronze masks. The bodies walking the street are Hollows, controlled by the ghost in the mask that they wear.
Leviathans, like all demons, feed on human emotions, best exemplified by stress. When you indulge your vice, all the stresses and strains of your life rise up into the aether, where they are consumed by those who have no spirit. Some ritualists, the Dimmer Sisters among them, have realised that there are magical rituals you can enact when people are indulging their vice to capture the stress into a potent gem, which can be used as currency with the demons of Tycheros and other places.
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Spirit wardens ARE their masks is just genius.
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Pretty sure I got the idea from someone on here. 
Very interesting thread, fascinating interpretations. To me, the closes representation I get of the Spirit Wardens is the “Keeper Enforcer” from the fantastic “Thief - Deadly Shadows” game: I mean, keepers trained for combat and elimination, and endowed with telepathic powers or hive mind? Yes please. Even the artwork seems compatible:
A further question would be: is there the same degree of permeability between playbooks from the “Flame without shadow” supplement (or the others) as between the original playbooks? I mean, would it be possible to choose an ability from the “Spirit Warden” playbook for my Hunter (via “veteran” ability)? This could reflect a character originally trained as spirit warden but gone “rogue” afterwards or similar…
thx for inspiring ideas!
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