The Taxonomy of Ghosts
From the novel by Chisato Funabashi
The game we see here
Victorian field taxonomists take cases from the morning post: a scullery where unseen dishes are washed at 3 a.m., a drawing room set for a tea no one attends. Measure the cold, name the ghost by sight, sound, touch or scent, lure it with the right note and record it for the museum. Help it finish its task and it goes free. Doubt what you saw and something white and empty starts to grow.
Why this world
Collecting creatures by rarity and short co-op horror runs are two of the strongest patterns on the platforms we build for. This novel comes with the system: a ghost taxonomy of phyla and classes, 847 catalogued specimens, a museum whose floors are sorted by kind of haunting, and exact lures, from a tuning fork struck at 432 hertz to the chime of china on china. Its villain, a blank white ghost that feeds on disbelief, is a ready season boss, and the night every jar breaks open is a ready event.
The book · Fantasy & Mythology
At fourteen Marchmont Street, behind shuttered windows in gaslit Bloomsbury, Dr. Cordelia Voss labels the dead. Bell jars hum with cobalt residue. Phonograph cylinders preserve the murmurs of forty-year-old housemaids. Eight hundred and forty-seven species, catalogued in fourteen hundred pages, dismissed by the Royal Society as fever dreams in fairy stories. Her assistant Aldous Finch, eleven years immaculate and unaging, brings the morning post and the afternoon tea.
Then the skeptics begin to die. A debunker collapses mid-lecture as cobalt light pours from his chest. A newspaper editor goes silent at his desk. A chemist is found bleached pale among his exposed plates. Each death attends the precise moment of denial. Cordelia's instruments record an absence rather than a presence — a hole in the world shaped like the conviction that ghosts cannot exist.
Into this cold geometry walks Helena, the daughter Cordelia raised among specimens and lost to the séance trade. Helena sees what her mother has trained herself not to: that taxonomy has its blind spots, that some classifications are kept open as acts of mercy, and that the entity feeding on London's rationalism may be unkillable precisely because to disprove it is to confirm it.
A novel about the cost of seeing clearly, the small dishonesties that hold a household together, and what a scientist owes the things she has chosen never to name.
Games set in this world
Game adaptation is considered per title when the world-building can support it. Pitching is the first step; it is not a licence. See rights at Greenlight Publishing.