So very true, we never got farther than the first session...

Quote from: econobus;884217So when for example an Altaic "animist" undertakes a sky journey through nine to twelve celestial realms, it means . . . ?

False equivalency. Otherworlds are not spirit worlds. Spirits are the souls of things that exist in our world.

Quote from: jan paparazzi;884223What do you want to do with it btw? Some sort of paranormal investigation game?

Yes, I'm investigating the potential of the Gumshoe system for a fixed-length campaign, but I'm not sure if I want to use one of the existing settings like Mutant City Blues.

I want my game to have 'powerz' available to the players and I need some kind of nonhuman intelligence in the setting because that's how I roll. Some sort of spirit world to interact with could hit two birds with one stone.

Another option is Palladium's Nightspawn/Nightbane and the Nightlands dimension. It is more of a "nightmare" dimension but for an horror oriented campaign, it could work.

Quote from: Shipyard Locked;884332I want my game to have 'powerz' available to the players and I need some kind of nonhuman intelligence in the setting because that's how I roll. Some sort of spirit world to interact with could hit two birds with one stone.

Unknown Armies, FTW.

Wraith: The Oblivion: (1st ed?) This had a pretty nifty spirit world with a whole society and culture if the dead.

d20 Ghostwalk: Heard some good things about it but never seen it so cant say from personal experience how well it played off or not. Sounds like it was similar approach as Council of Wyrms or the BECMI Creature series? PCs as ghosts/undead?

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;884201Shamanism was made up by anthropologists, neopagans and con artists who misappropriate other cultures. The spirit world is and always has been a metaphorical world, like the criminal underworld, and not a literal otherworld like Heaven, Hell, Purgatory, Underworld or Fairyland.

That's far from true, even though the opposite of this wouldn't be absolutely true either.

Between the Shadows sourcebook for Nightbane contains pretty decent write-ups for the Dream world and the Astral Plane, along with methods of manipulating each. Even if you take out all the crunch, it is a goldmine for ideas.

There's the Dreamlands from CoC, but I never actually really liked those much as an actual astral/dream plane.  Just doesn't fit my experiences, I guess.
Pretty decent as a weird fantasy setting, though.

Yes, I'm still reading these suggestions by the way.

I think Chaosium's RuneQuest (and the Nomad Gods board game) did a fine job, matching many an archaic conception. There are spirits of disease, ancestral spirits, patron spirits of tribes and places, and greater gods. Beyond the earthly realm of mortals -- conceived in ancient terms, as a plane floating on the Deep -- is the domain of unearthly powers. Besides heroes being able to reach that simply by faring far enough over the land, or perhaps through portals joining the interior, shamans can withdraw their spirits from their bodies wherever those may be.

Dragons are sort of like shamans in reverse: Their "substantial" forms that men see striding the earth or flying through the sky are but the dreams of slumbering Dragons.

The HeroQuest line, with a notably different rules set (and a different approach to play emphasized more over the years), has published more details of Glorantha's supernal world, its parts and their relation to the primordial fundament "prior to" the compromise of Time.

Quote from: Shipyard Locked;883802Which games have especially interesting and well thought out spirit worlds?

What makes an effective 'gamable' spirit world?

I've always loved Exalted version of Hell (called Malfeas), and how demons interact with each other.

On the upper side you have the Yozis, all-mighty titants who built Creation but were imprisoned by the Gods and their Chosen. They are not just trapped in Hell, but their bodies are Hell.

Each Yozi has multiple souls, for their spiritual essence is to powerful and complex to be contained within a single body. These are Third Circle Demons, the Lords of Hell.

But on turn, each Third Circle Demon is too powerful, so their souls are split into lesser demons as well, each expressing a part of their own personallity in a way. These are Second Circle Demons, lesser than their superiors but still quite powerful.

Finally you have First Circle Demons, the "spawn" of the Second Circle, not individuals but whole species.

I've always liked this and how demons interact with the world at large.