Revisiting Wraith: The Oblivion—Part 8: Tie-In Fiction and Comics

Welcome to my revisitation of the Wraith: The Oblivion RPG book line. I’m reviewing the whole run of gamebooks in this series of posts. If you’re new to the series, I recommend starting with the first post.

If you’re not interested in reviews of older RPGs, I suggest you skip it. 

In this installment, I’m discussing what I think of as “alternate character concept sourcebooks”: that is, books that were designed to facilitate play using characters outside the standard range described in the main Wraith: The Oblivion core rule books and rules expansions. I’ve also thrown in the LARP guide, since it didn’t seem to fit in anywhere else. 

The full list of books published as tie-ins with Wraith: The Oblivion includes: 

• The Face of Death, by Mark Rein•Hagen and Sam Chupp
• Beyond the Shroud by Rick Hautala
• Sins of the Fathers by Sam Chupp
• Caravan of Shadows, and the Dark Kingdoms trilogy by Richard Lee Byers
• Death and Damnation (Wraith anthology) by Staley Krause
• “Except You Go Through Shadow”, in The Essential World of Darkness, a novel (novella?) by David Niall Wilson 
• City Something something

I should start with an admission: for most of my life as a tabletop gamer, I haven’t had much interest in the tie-in fiction, or, at least, after bingeing on a certain amount of the stuff I swore off it. (I never would have even binged on it except one of the players in my middle-school RPG  group read a lot of it, and shared it with me. So, yes, I know all about Drizzt.) After that, I was turned off so profoundly that I stopped reading tie-in fiction altogether, and even stopped reading the “fluff” fiction sections of tabletop RPG rulebooks and supplements. (Which, as you know by know, White Wolf tended to include a lot of.) I mean, it’s not a secret that lots of game fiction is bad: Phil Brucato has actually commented about how White Wolf went to the trouble of trying to recruit actual fiction authors—like Owl Goingback and Richard Lee Byers—to write tie-in and fluff fiction pieces for the company specifically in order to address that problem.

I have tended to make an exception if the fiction snippets are short, or if they somehow illuminate the metaplot of a setting—the bits that are interspersed throughout The Book of Legions, for example.) But most of the time, even when the prose is passable, the stories they tell don’t do much to illuminate gameplay: they almost always focus on a single character going solo against antagonists, which… well, that’s not how your typical RPG works. It might be a good way of laying out the gameworld, but I find it less than useful for illuminating the game as it’s designed to be played. Likewise, when a narrative doesn’t fall prey to that, it usually fails by leaning too hard on the “discovering the world” theme: it’s like a training montage that the editor forgot to cut up and edit, so you have the protagonist befriending their party, and then learning all the in-game “argot” and terminology set out in the rulebooks… which is also pretty hard to render as fiction in a way that isn’t clunky and boring.

I contemplated not reading the tie-in fiction for the game line, therefore. The one thing that gave me pause was that I’d found a copy of Rick Hautala’s novel Beyond the Shroud in a box while we were visiting my mom a few years back, and brought it home with me. It’s… well, my thoughts on it are below, but I feel like it’s at least better than the tie-in books that turned me off the subgenre, years ago… so I figured, eh, I’ll give these other books a look and see what I think, without committing to reading all the way through if I absolutely hate them. I’ve committed to not reading them in a hostile way, but… its a stretch for me, since usually, weak prose makes me set down a book and not look back pretty quickly.  

One more thing: I didn’t read the books in order of publication, and they’re not listed that way below. Pretty much it was a case of picking up whatever seemed interesting to me, and reading that. 

With those caveats aside, I’ll dive into the books I have: 

The Face of Death

The Face of Death  (1994) was a very oddly-sized graphic novel that got published shortly before the first Wraith: The Oblivion core rulebook was released. As such, it was intended as a preview of the game world, and as an introduction of sorts. In theory, that’s a great idea: Wraith has a weird cosmology with a number of settings that are unfamiliar to new players, and there’s a lot to unpack for them, so a comic book that does this work in an entertaining fashion would be a great thing.

Unfortunately, this isn’t that comic book. It’s not even really a comic book, to be honest, so much as a kind of, er, an art book, I suppose? 

It’s not terrible, but it’s not really stellar either; it’s just sort of there. Some of the major ideas come across, but there’s a lot of vagueness and the story’s both confusing and more than a little clichéd. Some of the art is really great, at least on the standard by which we judge RPG game art, but it’s not exactly always crystal clear how it’s supposed to illustrate the setting or characters. The mood of the narrative, of course, does fit your typical Wraith chronicle, but so do plenty of ghost stories.

Worse, the layout is not really effective: black text on dark grey images is just plain hard to read. I suppose I was more patient about this when I was young and World of Darkness felt like a new and edgy alternative to AD&D, but now I’d prefer not to have to work so hard to pick out what words are actually being used to tell the story.

I think if I were to start a Wraith game, I’d probably look to other means to introduce players to the setting, as I feel like The Face of Death might turn them off, or just plain confuse them. Then again, it was the first product for the line, so maybe I’m misreading it in terms of purpose. Maybe this was less a player-facing book than a sort of loud, flashy press-conferencey way of announcing a new game lines? And, as I’m sure we’ll see when I look at later books in the game, much of the setting and cosmology was still in development (or to some degree hadn’t been conceived yet) when this book came out: by the time you get to the 2nd edition core rules, the game has changed its focus quite a bit, so in any case the shelf life of this book—or at least its usefulness—was never meant to last all that long. The thing about long-running franchises is that earlier books do diminish in usefulness as the franchise develops. (Something we’ve seen before in this series.)

That said, I do think that using a comic-book styled approach—as White Wolf and other game design companies came to use over time—to quickly convey large amounts of worldbuilding, game concepts, and background is a good idea, especially when you’re dealing with a cosmology and game mechanics as ornate and unusual as the one we find in Wraith. If I remember right, this approach was used in more straight-up comics form in other White Wolf books later on: at the very least, you can see it used in various editions of Exalted, and there’s a short comic that illustrates a few turns of play in the 2nd edition Wraith corebook, too.  

Still, The Face of Death is more a curio than anything else, and its rarity doesn’t justify the prices people are asking for it online… especially when a version of this story is apparently included in the first chunk of the new 20th Anniversary rulebook. Unless you can find a copy for cheap like I did (it’s possible, but you need to search hard and be patient), or unless you’re a helpless compleatist (like I unfortunately am at times), then I think it’s safe to call the book unnecessary. 

Beyond the Shroud

Rick Hautala’s Beyond the Shroud (1996) was published the same year as the 2nd edition of Wraith: The Oblivion, and if I’m not mistaken, chunks of the novel got excerpted throughout the 2nd edition core rulebook. The idea—both of this novel, and of tie-in novels for RPG lines generally—is similar to with The Face of Death: they’re another way to introduce players to a gameworld, especially an ornately alien setting, in a way that’s entertaining and gives a sense of how the game should feel and look when run. It’s an alternative to infodumping a bunch of setting information in a text.

That’s the theory, anyway. 

I don’t know the work of Rick Hautala, but from what’s said in his obituaries, he was a good choice for Wraith, as an horror author whose work was rooted in fear of loneliness, abandonment, and other domestic fears. (He received a Bram Stoker Award for Lifetime Achievement in 2011, just a few years before his death, and his debut novel was a massive bestseller, so at least some people thought very highly of his writing. That said, his work generally seems to have provoked mixed responses: some people love it, and some really, really don’t like it at all.)

As an introduction to the world of Wraith, the novel fares better than The Face of Death: its protagonist dies in the first scene, just as a Wraith character usually does in the “Prelude” to the game, and the book definitely does set out clearly the mood and feel of Wraith, as well as a lot of elements of the setting and game mechanics. That said, to some degree the story includes a lot of what I think in most groups would be consigned to the pre-game “Prelude,” where the protagonist grinds away at surviving as a wraith, figures out stuff like his basic ghostly powers (Arcanoi), learns how to deal with a few powerful strangers (like a putative Ferryman), his Fetters (his especially ex-wife), searches for his deceased daughter, struggles with his own dark side (his Shadow), and so on.

All of this works, to a point, though maybe because I know the game world well, I found it a bit clunky in places: I guess the problem with hiring a Real Writer™ is that they may not be used to working with RPG game terminology and properties in narrative form. Likewise, they’re often used to telling stories about solo protagonists, where typically a Wraith game will feature multiple characters who’ve already been through all of that and are established in the world, which means the novel doesn’t quite  model gameplay. One ends up wondering how a story like this could be run as a game with a group of three or six player characters.

In addition, the protagonist’s “adventure” (which kicks into high gear about halfway through the book) is nicely interwoven with his adjustment to the afterlife, but has at its center a somewhat cheesy magical relic that had passed through the hands of a pretty overused and clichéd boogeyman in horror: Jack the Ripper. Here, it’s a bit complicated: one thing I’ve realized in recent years is that stereotypes and clichés that we actively deride in fiction, we kind of embrace in RPGs. When you’re improvising a character or a plot line, when you’re building a world for players to interact with, clichés give them something to hang onto, something familiar and grippy. They’re not always the annoying, boring thing they can be when we encounter them in fiction. Still, even in that context, Jack the Ripper’s blade seems a bit… well, like I said, cheesy.    

Meanwhile, there were twists that I, as someone who knows the setting well, expected (and seemed obvious) that Hautala didn’t include, and on some level the adventure portion didn’t develop too deeply because there was really only one protagonist on the journey: a lot of the time when he’s not on the trail toward victory, he’s in some dark corner meditating on lonely sadness and his own powerlessness. (Which of course is part of Wraith: part of the game’s dynamic is that you’re individually not powerful enough to beat Oblivion, or your own Shadow, or even just the forces of death and time. Still, with multiple characters in a group struggling against those forces, angsty sadness dominates a bit less.)

I’d be somewhat more willing to give this book to a new player as an introduction to the setting than I would The Face of Death, but I’d still be reluctant: I think the bleakness and even the pacing of the book might pose problems there. (Also, there’s the simple fact that most adult gamers just have less time and patience with RPG tie-in books: too many sloppy Forgotten Realms novels long ago left a bitter taste in many mouths.)

I am curious, though, how this novel compares to Hautala’s other work, since I haven’t read any of it. A few writerly tics seemed to show—somehow both of the male characters who meet the protagonist’s ex-wife obsess about her breasts in the same way, even with the same words in their minds, for example—and to some degree I felt like I could see Hautala struggling with the inherent restrictions necessitated in a game tie-in.) I suppose if I were going to try to make comparisons, his most commercially successful novel—Moondeath—would be the place to start, but we’ll have to see if I ever get around to it: it’s not like I can just pick it up in a used bookstore over here in Korea, after all. 

Sins of the Fathers

Sam Chupp says of Sins of the Fathers (1995) that it was a licensed gig.

This novel was written on contract from White Wolf. I was given specific parameters and told, “Write a novel.” It had to be set in Atlanta, had to be about Wraith, had to involve certain characters. All in all, I feel I did OK. I wish I could have re-written the book a few more times, it would have improved drastically…

I’d agree with his assessment. The book is actually not bad, as tie-in game fiction goes, and works well as a short introduction to the setting as well as to many of the terms used in the game. It also has less of the problem of being a single-hero story than Beyond the Shroud, too: almost immediately, the primary protagonist (a former drug dealer/biker/guitarist who got killed on the roof of his old high school) teams up with a child-wraith who’s also a Renegade, who gently recruits him into a Circle of fellow Renegades. If you’ve read The Face of Death, you’ll recognize that this drug-dealer guy as a variation on the sorta-protagonist of that book—a lot in common, but not quite everything. Likewise, it has some of the characters from Necropolis Atlanta—Hierarchy Magistrate Jedebiah O’Rourke, and James Rourke, captain of the Greyboys Heretic cult—but they’re written well enough as characters that they don’t feel shoehorned in… in fact, they’re tied to the protagonist in an interesting way.    

As for the novel, well, there’s some clunkiness here and there—the way in-game elements are introduced into the setting, and Chupp’s (to my ear, pretty off) rendering of the protagonist’s onetime parole officer, who speaks in really exaggerated version of some kind of African-American English dialect—but given the way Chupp talks about it (saying he thinks he could’ve done better if he’d had a chance to rewrite it a few more times), it’s really not bad. High literature? Well, no: there’s a kind of ripped-from-the-evening-news quality to some of it, like how Kirk’s infant son is, in late-80s/early-90s style, a “crack baby.” 

Still, you don’t pick up RPG tie-in books looking for high literature, for a lot of obvious reasons. Still, the book does give us a look at how some game-mechanics could look in-game as characters experience them, and evokes the Atlanta setting nicely. Definitely it gives a better sense than Beyond the Shroud of what Wraith was supposed to look like in terms of the game-as-played-by-a-group, though I was surprised to see a certain amount of “prophecy” and “destiny” put into the narrative that feel very un-Wraith-like themes to me. In contrast, though the handling of Kirk’s fetters, though, is quite fitting: he has to watch his former girlfriend go off the rails, putting herself in danger and the infant son she bore after Kirk died in mortal danger too. Kirk’s utter need to protect the child,  and his the fact he was mostly unable to do so from beyond the grave without terrible risk or a lot of (expensive, life-complicating) help, is the very stuff of Wraith. 

Caravan of Shadows

Another early Wraith novelization, Richard Lee Byers’ Caravan of Shadows (1995) tells the story of boxer who ends up as a wraith. I’ve never seen it, much less read it, but I down own a copy over on DTRPG. I’ll update this if I ever get around to reading it. 

Death and Damnation

Death and Damnation (1994) was a short fiction anthology edited by Stanley Krause and Stewart Wieck; it was also the first tie-in book for Wraith. I had a copy and read at least some of it back in the day, but couldn’t remember much about it. It doesn’t seem to be available on DTRPG, so if you want to read it you’ll need to find a secondhand copy. I’ll update this post after reading it, if that ever happens.

The Dark Kingdoms Trilogy

The Dark Kingdoms Trilogy is Richard Lee Byers’  follow-up series to Caravan of Shadows, though as far as I can tell it’s not connected to the earlier story. The Dark Kingdoms Trilogy (1999) actually collects three Wraith novels: The Ebon Mask (1996), The Onyx Tower (1997) and The Obsidian Blade (1998). So, what we have here is actually a sort of Wraith epic of about a thousand pages.

How does it measure up? I dunno. I haven’t read this one either, though I am curious. Like the other novels I’ve missed, it’s available on Drivethru RPG. 

“Except You Go Through Shadow” from Essential World of Darkness

I didn’t even know this anthology existed until  I stumbled onto a mention of it in  a list of Wraith and Orpheus Books. If I ever find a copy and read it, I’ll add an update here.  

I’d like to return to my comments at the beginning, about the disconnect of how RPGs often are a group activity, but tie-in novels tend to model the experience of a lone character in the setting. IT’s a weird disconnect from most traditional RPGs, even if it does provide the deep-dive into a single character that I suppose a lot of story gamers privilege as the way to roleplay.

Which is funny, because I feel like a lot of the fans of the World of Darkness (new and classic settings alike) actually share that predilection for story-gamey deep-dive roleplaying, and that the books obviously privilege it, despite being mechanically heavier than we tend to think “Story” games are. Not that it’s a new insight to note that White Wolf seems to sort of have been the place where “trad” RPGs with skills and complex mechanics and lots of funny dice sort of diverged into modern RPGs with skills and mechanics and some number of dice on the one hand, and mechnically simpler, roleplaying-focused story games on the other hand.

Yes, diceless, low-prep RPGs and story-focused games existed before that, but I feel like the Storyteller system and the World of Darkness fandom was where the RPG world sort of split, and that the World of Darkness ended up being a weird, transitional form, to use a term from evolution. I’d even argue that the railroads we see in some WoD adventures are not characteristics of the way the system privileges story, so much as holdovers from D&D, where we’ve had railroads since the beginning. If you actually take the time to look at story games, you’ll find many of them have a structure—sort of like trad fantasy RPGs have the “dungeon crawl” as a structure—but they eschew railroads just as vigorously as OSR games do, if not more so. (I mean, any game with zero prep, or with collaborative world description, is going to make railroading of the sort we mean practically impossible by definition.)

And hey, if you look around in story game discussions, you’ll see there’s even direct acknowledgment of this in the case of Wraith: Ben Lehman actually comes out and states that his own (very interesting story-game) Polaris was “intimately derived from Wraith” (and from Kindred of the East.

Errr… anyway, I think the nature of a lot of White Wolf’s tie-in fiction as being centered on single characters relates to this transitionality. There’s an interesting divide between deep-character narratives (like most of the tie-in fiction explores) and troupe-based or “party” narratives (which would comprise the majority of games-as-played, as well as basic design features of the game). It’s especially notable since, even in tie-in books for D&D games, you tend to have a party of characters accompanying the protagonist-narrator. Yet in Wraith’s tie-in books, the tendency is toward single individual characters without backup from a party or circle of peers. 

That’s it for the tie-in fiction and comics I’ve got on hand. If I ever get the rest of it, I’ll definitely post reviews here, and mention the update in a new installment to this series as well. 

I can’t really draw conclusions about the tie-ins overall, though I will say that in the 21st century, I think players can’t be expected to take home a tie-in novel to get up to speed on a setting, even a gloriously complex one like that of Wraith. A comic, maybe, but I almost feel like in this day and age, video and maybe some kind of interactive website or app might work better as a kind of easily-accessible, freestanding introduction to a gameworld, when that world needs such a thing in the first place. The interactive audio scenario The Orpheus Device, by Earplay, is an example, though it’d have to be a little more deeply developed to serve the purpose I’m describing:

Also, I think another thing we can maybe get from this is that extreme uniqueness in an RPG setting might not be a real favor to the game’s longevity or prospects for success.

Think of it this way: if I’m explaining Paranoia, I’ll say, “Imagine a city-sized bunker underground that’s a cross between Nineteen-Eighty-Four and Logan’s Run, except it’s run by HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey.” People can get that in an instant, even if grokking Paranoia takes a little longer. Likewise, I feel like I could pitch a 19th century game of Hunter: The Reckoning as being, “Kind of like Penny Dreadful meets The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen” and people would be able to get that right away.

Hell, even with more obscure series, like Taboo, you can show people a trailer and they get the highlights: creepy supernatural stuff, London, late 18th century: I think you could easily use the trailer, or the first episode of Taboo, as a way of pitching a certain kind of historical-fantasy OSR game set later than the usual period, or The Witch or A Field in England, say, for the same purpose.

A lot of other very successful games, far too many to name here, are also in some sense conceptual mashups… and very few are so utterly unique that it’s hard to sum up their core concept in the form of some kind of mashup. Even Numenera is kind of a mashup of Vance’s Dying World books, Olaf Stapledon’s Last and First Men, Gamma World, and the Strugatsky Brothers’ Roadside Attraction. Plus, for Numenera, there was for a while actually a game trailer. It’s gone now, but it struck me as a great intro to the gameworld. 

And yet at least some of the tie-in-fiction for Wraith—the examples I have—failed to really capture what are, in retrospect, really crucial aspects of the game’s cosmology. Likewise, though there’s lots of movies about ghosts, if you’re having trouble thinking of a film or you’d use to pitch your proposed chronicle to your group, well… you’re not alone. I love how the game inverts the traditional ghost story: if you think it’s tough being haunted by a ghost, you should try being a ghost for a while. The afterlife ain’t for the faint of heart.  

Now, how many models do we have in other media do we have for this? There’s tons of Bangsian fantasy out there, of course, but very little of it resembles Wraith, flavor-wise: most pictures of the afterlife are actually kind of consolatory and encouraging, like, say, Lovely Bones. (Good book, alright movie, but it’d be boring as an RPG.) The closest I can think of, really, is the first few seasons of the UK series Being Human, especially when Lenora Crichlow’s character Annie ends up visiting (and at one point trapped in) “the other side.” 

As a side note, I suspect the makers of Being Human—at least the UK version, which is the only one I saw—included at least some fans of the old World of Darkness games. They even did “preludes” for the characters:

But of course Wraith is much more alien than anything in any TV show. One of its finest features—the stunning uniqueness of the worldbuilding—also makes the game a bit of a hard sell for a lot of groups.

This forces the books and the tie-in material alike to spend a lot of energy explaining and illustrating setting, and makes it harder for the fiction to model gameplay, in some ways… and modeling gameplay seems to me to be an important part of the purpose of tie-in fiction. Except, when you have a setting this unique, it’s hard not to go with a newbie wraith being introduced to the world. It’s the natural place to go, which is, I think, why the first few books I’ve discussed here immediately went there.  

This challenge isn’t lost on those involved in the 20th Anniversary Edition of the game, by the way: one of the stretch goals that was achieved was a “Handbook for the Recently Deceased.” I haven’t read it, but I imagine it’s a bit like the Little Red Book that was released for Paranoia XP: an in-game artifact book that explains the setting to players. 

I can’t help but think, though, that some kind of video introduction to the milieu would be the way to go. That Numenera video I mentioned above really went a long way to introducing a lot of the feel and mood of the setting, with minimal special effects and only a single actor. You’d need a few more for Wraith, but it might not require too much more, if you scripted and shot it cleverly. (At least, I don’t think it would!) But of course, media production is a whole different ballpark, and, well, if you’ve seen the old Shadowrun ad, you know how it can go hilariously wrong:

Well, that’s it for now, I suppose. Next time, I’ll dig into other “general” supplements for Wraith. 

Series Navigation

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