As a further aside, I came up with this idea because I loved the way Kitsune in Werewolf can use paper magic to create false worlds, and I wanted to make something that resonated with the feeling you get when you get lost in a book - or the haunting experience of having a character from a novel feel as if they’ve escaped into your head. I was also thinking about holodecks when I came up with the idea, but I wasn’t happy with how being in a holodeck lowers the stakes of the story artificially (and then artifically raises them again when you deactivate the safety features - that’s cheating). The stakes involved in a phantome are based in its circumstances - the actual prisoners waking up and entering your mind, or if the pages get damaged the story doesn’t have enough room to unfold properly and they start to pick at the edges of your false reality. I would love holodecks as a real technology, but as a storytelling device all the tension is undercut by the knowledge that it’s all simulated and any stakes can be negated by a toggle switch (deus ex machina). Phantomes are meant to be more along the lines of The Matrix, except in this case the protagonist is the jailor and the erstwhile baddies are the sleepwalking inmates. A demonic spirit could become like a “Neo” and try to liberate the other spirits in the book, but they would still be the baddie. It puts the good guys into a questionable moral position and a tenuous position of power at the same time, which is always a fun circumstance to investigate. I was also drawing from history in a sense, because part of what inspired me was the ancient Roman legal proceeding of a “fatal charade”, in which the condemned is forced to put on a play where their character’s death is carried out on stage in truth. Of course, for an inkbound spirit condemned in this way, the punishment can be repeated as often as anyone can be bothered to read the passage.