Dark Days is the game I'm working on. I'll explain it the way I came up with it, so that it makes sense.
Dark Days is a game about people with supernatural powers, that investigate and battle horrors in a world filled with the occult and the supernatural.

Are they magicians? No. They're people that died and then came back from the dead imbued with powers. Where do the powers come from? Darkness.

Darkness is a non-sentient force, one that affects our lives and pools where bad things happen. It's like a disease that spreads out as series of events unfold

A guy is an alcoholic and drives drunk. He hits you wife and she dies. You get depressed and kill yourself. It all starts with one guy but spreads out. That's a mundane example. A supernatural example is when a guy kills five people in a house and you move in. This ends up making you crazy and you chop up your family. Both are valid.

This is where the problem comes in. Up to now, the idea was that the Darkness, even as a non-sentient force, strikes a ''deal'' with the characters. They become a vessel for Darkness and they get to come back to life to pursue their goals (revenge, a different life, whatever). The powers are just perks. The more the Darkness takes a hold on your soul, the more powerful you become.
The problem is that it doesn't make much sense. It implies that Darkness wants a chance to spread out misery by using you as a vessel, but you have so much control over it that it's really a bad dead for the Darkness. It's also not very non-sentient thing to do.

I have three alternative ideas:
1. The characters gain an understanding of the Darkness. By looking into it, they accept a part of it into them. The whole ''When you look into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you'' thing. I like it more, I think, but I don't know how to explain it well.

2. The characters are slowly corrupted by Darkness, as it offers them a way to do something they can't do on their own. Like exact revenge on a big time mob boss. This way the characters starts on the path of Darkness on his own and he accepts it into his heart in order to gain the power needed to finish what he started.

3. The characters never die per se. They make a deal before they die (along the lines of #2) that costs them dearly, in order to both survive and continue the path they chose.

---Spoilers for Punisher Born follow------

As an example, in Punisher Born, Frank Castle is a soldier in vietnam. He loves war and he loves killing. He hears a voice in his mind that offers him the chance of an eternal war. All he has to do is agree. In the end, while the camp is being overrun, everyone is dead except Castle and he's been shot 4-5 times. The voice offers him the chance to both survive, and get his wish, to eternally wage war, if he agrees to pay the price.
He agrees and survives, returns to the US. Later his family dies of course.

This example covers alternatives 2 and 3 more or less.

I'm looking for both general feedback on the concepts and your ''vote'' for one of them. Any feedback is welcome.

*crossposted to praxis.