And why should I care?

In the RP environment

Sin is a mechanic used in the House of crimson wings to give all players a common thread in the environment that they can use as a tool to get involved with other players easily and quickly.

Sin serves to give your character several things immediately, regardless of if you are brand new or an old school player.

1. A reason to be at the house
2. A problem they have to deal with
3. Enemies and allies
4. Something they need to get

Number 1, is easy. Everyone who is at the House of Crimson Wings has been touched or afflicted by Sin, either as an illness or as sort of taint in the case of ghosts and demons. In away, everything there shares this ‘affliction’ and sickness, just they experience it in different ways. So everyone in the house has something in common, regardless if they are human, undead, ghosts, demons or whatever.

Number 2, in becoming afflicted with Sin, everyone becomes trapped in the house and needs to either find a cure, or purge themselves of sin. The only way to do this is to unlock the secrets of the house and discover the cure. However, demons and ghosts grow more powerful when afflicted so they aren’t really interested in curing themselves so much as finding more sources of their delicious sin.  So humans and other living things tend to want to find a cure, where as spirits and demons want to find food or suffer from terrible wasting hunger. Each has a problem they are immediately faced with. This provides basic motivations to each character. Additional motivations are of course up to the players.

Number 3, Sin is attracted to like sin. Demons and ghosts like to feed off the sin they themselves are afflicted with. This means its easy to tell who’s going to eat you, and who’s probably not. (or at least less likely to.) as far as ghosts and demons are concerned. Humans who share similar infections tend to ally with each other, as to demons or ghosts with the same sin. So this provides an instant set of enemies and allies to new and established RPers to work with simply by looking around. This is why wearing your sin color on your avatar is very important.

Number 4, is providing an immediate, tangible thing for your character to do when they arrive. This varies a little by race, but for humans its stay alive and find a cure. For Ghosts and demons its find prey or sin to eat while avoiding more powerful entities who would feed off you.

So that is why Sin is important as a mechanic for the game.

What is Sin in the story?

Sin in the context of the environment is a sort of supernatural illness. It affects humans, demons and spirits alike, although it has different effects.

For humans, it is a fatal disease. Left untreated it will consume a human’s soul and damn them to an eternity of suffering as restless spirit. Most people want to avoid dying, so its generally in their best interest to cure.

It also makes humans a target. For both spirits already damned and demons that are hungry for the power of sin. As the disease progresses it becomes more and more alluring to demons and spirits and increases the chance that one of them will kill you to eat you if you don’t succumb to the disease first.

The secrets of the house may save you, but can you uncover them in time?

For spirits and demons, sin is also a disease, but because these beings are immortal, they can’t die. So they are afflicted with a terrible hunger. They must feed on sin or starve and lose their strength. Unlike humans however, feeding on Sin makes demons and spirits much stronger than usual, making them able to manifest themselves physically, possess humans, manipulate objects around them, perform magic, and do all sorts of other scary things. Nothing is a greater delicacy to a demon than human flesh. If a spirit becomes powerful enough to eat a human, they can become a demon themselves.

But Sin also binds them to the house, and regardless of how powerful a demon or spirit is, they are beholden to the greatest demon of them all. The Sin Eater, whom they must serve and feed so long as they are bound by Sin to the House of the Crimson Wings.

There is more information specifically about the illness and its nature at the house. Clues are stashed around for players to find, in order to unravel the secrets of what happened there so long ago and how to free themselves from an eternity of servitude to a hungry demon.