Wendigo wrote:How am I "sealing" their wounds? In V:tM a vampire could "lick" a wound closed, but I don't want to assume that's the same here. Also, can any vampire seal any bite wound in this manner, or only ones caused by their own teeth like in V:tM?
I'll be honest with this: when I first made the game I intended it to be slightly more basic than it turned out, and when I wrote that I didn't put a lot of thought into it. Having to choose now that I look back, however, I have to go with the explanation that the wound seals automatically without any need for a lick. It's possible that you could attach a scientific explanation to that, regarding how a vampire's wounds heal faster, and their saliva would contain some of their blood and therefore seal up the wound shortly afterwards, and that would make sense.
However, with vampires in Path lore I prefer not to go with any pseudo-scientific explanation (contrary to the style of my previous projects), and would say that the wounds close up for the same reasons vampires in Path are able to morph their teeth into fangs at will (ie. nobody quite knows, but they are spirit creatures, so nothing is beyond the realms of possibility for them). Up to your characters which of those spins they put on it.
The spirits that Mediums see, what are they? Are they deceased humans? Can Mediums speak to them? What happens when they are "dispersed"? How do they compare to the Spirits in the Shadow Realm? Do deceased humans go to the Shadow Realm?
The spirits vampires see are indeed deceased humans. Mediums can sometimes speak to them, but like the ghost stories of our own world, the spirits don't always give very direct replies. When "dispersed" (drained of anima) they temporarily lose the power to manifest any kind of image or power over the physical realm. Some go on to what ever afterlife they have waiting for them (if there is an afterlife for humans), and some stay trapped in a limbo reality and can re-appear once their anima has built back up.
As for the spirits in the shadow realm, these are also humans, but these are spirits who have been dragged into the shadow realm by the proximity of the rift. No human who ever died outside of the area surrounding Harper Rock ever ended up in the shadow realm, and the Shadow Realm only began swallowing human spirits a decade or so before the sundering.
As for zombies, they are re-animated by spirits due to the proximity of the shadow realm rift. Although I originally said that humans cannot return from the shadow realm, I realised that it would have made zombies an impossibility, according to their wiki description. As such I've amended the wiki article regarding the shadow realm and human spirits. The shadow realm swallows humans spirits, and some of these spirits are lost forever, but others are released and often take hold of their dead bodies.
What is the current human understanding of the Quarantine Zone? What actions, if any, are the authorities/government taking with regard to it?
I believe I've answered that elsewhere, but I can't find it on the wiki.
The government's official stance on the QZ is that it was the site of a virus outbreak, which they are studying in order to understand. Unofficially, they know something isn't right about that area of the city, but they also know that blowing it up would cause too much attention, and would likely cause major problems for Canada. They were able to catch the "outbreak" before it spread outside of a concentrated area of 2-3 city blocks, but they shut down the entire district to be safe.
The government, as you can imagine, sees the potential for studying this anomaly, and so they are trying to play the seriousness of the situation down as much as possible, while they study victims of this "virus". They have no immediate plans to re-open the area, as they realise that the dead are still rising in that district, so they are simply using the site for research. They have longer term goals, but I can't reveal those just yet.