In death, we are remembered fondly… which is why some secrets should be guarded forever.

A bed-stricken sick teenager uses the last ounce of his strenght for the day to run around while his parents are away shortly. He breaks their favorite vase, which he hides in his mattress. He blames a drug addict uncle for stealing it. Weeks later, his sickness catches up. He dies, forever remembered as a poor, innocent, sick kid who never did anything wrong.

A man breaks his wife’s favorite watch by accident – a memento from her dead mother. Their mariage is already close to falling appart. He needs her. He wants to keep what little love is left between them. He can hear the accusations that’ll surely come once she comes back – how he did it on purpose, how he’s always mean to her like that. It’ll be over, and then he’ll be all alone. Desperate times ask for desperate measures. He buries the watch in the garden.

The wife comes home. She is pissed about the watch, but there is no proof that it’s the husband’s fault. Months pass, things get better between the two of them. The man is happy. Yet, he knows that the watch is buried in the garden. There is no doubt in his mind that, should she find it, things would go astray again and their mariage would be over. Things keep getting better and better between the two of them, and the man becomes more and more obsessed with the secret burried in the garden. Then, one day, he gets hit by a car. A fatal accident.

A single mother smothers her 5 years old daughter – she was crying too loudly, and she had a headache. Panicked at her deed, she decides to hide the body. She punches a whole in one of the walls of her apartement with an old shovel. Stuffing the body into that whole, she uses plaster to repair the wall, and then paints over it. The next day, she calls the police to report the abduction of her child.

People are suspicious at first, because she had been reported before for child abuse. After a few weeks, however, things calm down. She got away with it. Yet there is but an inch of plaster hiding the truth. Anybody else moving in would discover the child while hanging a picture or fixing a shelf on that wall. And then there’s the smell. No matter how much she cleans the house, burns incense, sprays air freshner, she keeps smelling just a whiff of the stink of putrefied flesh whenever she gets close to the wall. She becomes reclusive, quits her job. She has to guard the appartement. What if the landlord comes in and smells it? She has to stay right where she is, she needs to keep cleaning. Soon enough, welfare isn’t enough to cover the rent, the groceries, the various cleaning products. She takes up prostitution, becoming an escort. A few months pass. Then a bad client comes along. He strangles her to death. There is a cursory investigation by the local police, but the body of the five year old girl is never found. Dead hookers happen all the time.

The Unaccused are the revenants of people who died trying to keep a secret, a secret that they felt needed to be kept in order to avoid punishement of some kind, be it physical, legal, or affective. The discovery of some secrets can hurt people even after death, and it is that kind of secret that creates the Unaccused. They might want to go on being fondly remembered as a loving husband, or to keep burried their guilt in the disappearance of a child.

Most of the time, they will be haunting a single location or a single item. When multiple clues exist, however, they will manifest around each one – sometimes randomly, sometimes focusing on which is closer to being discovered. Oddly enough, clues can never be people. If someone knows the truth, that person will be left untouched, though the same cannot be said of any evidence he or she might possess. The Unaccused are concerned with the secret being kept from loved ones and/or the general public. Thus, they haunt evidence, clues, hints. If a stranger knows the truth but keeps no proofs around, he is left alone.

The Unaccused stick around in our world for either a very short or a very long time. Unnatural phenomena beyond their control tend to happen around them, mirroring their fear of their secret being discovered by hinting at it. What that means is that most will disappear beyond the veil fairly quickly, as their secret is discovered and then revealed. Therefore, those that stick around for a longer while tend to be of the nastier variety, as they will be the ones who manage to scare off people enough that they will keep the hell away from the secret and its eventual discovery.

To those of a Soul stat above 60, the Unaccused appear roughly as they were, but listless and nervous. Most often, they go through the motions of trying to hide their secret even better, or they just stand there looking at its hidden location, trying to make sure that no clue can be found. Usually, around 4 to 6 unwitting unnatural phenomena happen around them each week, hinting in some way at the hidden secret. In the case of the more competent Unaccused, they can summon up an additional 3 or 4 minor unnatural phenomena per day, plus 4 or 5 significant unnatural phenomena per week. Of course, these are under their control, and are usually used to either distract the people getting too close to the truth or to scare them away.

(The stats provided below are for the latter kind, as the former type of Unaccused are mostly powerless victims of their obsessions, going through the motions.)

Revenant : The Unaccused (Significant)
Guardians of the Tell-Tale Evidence
Points: 60 + a percentile roll (1-100)
Body: 0
Speed: 10-40
Mind: 10-40
Soul: 40-80