Emotional Focus
Description Source:
Occult Adventures
Each phantom has an emotional focus—a powerful emotion based on some experience in life that keeps it tethered to the Material and Ethereal planes. This emotional focus also grants the phantom abilities that it can use while manifested. The type of each ability and its power are determined by the spiritualist’s level.
The emotional focus determines which bonus skill ranks the phantom gains, as well as the skills in which its spiritualist master gains Skill Focus. It also determines the good saving throws of the manifested phantom and the special abilities the phantom gains as it increases in level.
While phantoms tend to appear much as they did in life—at least as they did at the time of death—each emotional focus twists a phantom’s visage, mannerisms, and even personality in its own way. Unlike with most creatures, a phantom’s emotion aura often manifests for all to see, even those without the benefit of spells or abilities. Often phantoms manifest these emotion auras in unique ways, some of which are described in individual emotional focus descriptions.
| Name | Summary |
 Anger | Phantoms with this emotional focus are filled with seething anger from events in their past lives. |
| Dedication | Either through a sense of love or the desire to finish some unfinished task, a phantom with this emotional focus has an undying devotion to something or someone in the world. |
| Despair | Some creatures die in such horrific ways, or live such pointless and senseless lives, that despair grips their very beings. |
| Desperation | A phantom with this emotional focus died desperate and panicking—a victim of drowning, suffocation, or some other inexorable and traumatic death. |
| Fear | A phantom with this emotional focus suffered from overwhelming fear in life. |
| Greed | A phantom with this focus voraciously coveted gold, gems, and hedonistic possessions in life. |
| Hatred | Few things draw a spirit toward the Negative Material Plane like the emotion of hatred. |
| Jealousy | A phantom with this emotional focus is covetous of everything—its master, those who wish to do it harm, and any who do not pay attention to it. |
| Kindness | A phantom with this emotional focus was a being with a generous heart in life and continues to remain that way well after death. |
| Lust | A phantom with this focus aches for the intoxicating pleasures it experienced during life. |
| Pride | No phantom is as arrogant as a pride phantom, which in life was an insufferable braggart and egotist. |
| Remorse | Spirits of creatures that died with heavy weights upon their consciences manifest with the remorse emotional focus. |
| Suffering | Phantoms with this focus stand on trembling legs, with hands quivering and tears constantly streaming from their eyes. |
| Whimsey | Phantoms with this emotional focus carry a simplistic, childlike wonder and are fond of games and playing tricks. |
| Zeal | A phantom with this emotional focus fixates on every task given as if it were the phantom’s last. |