- Revisiting Wraith: The Oblivion—Part 1: Overview
- Revisiting Wraith: The Oblivion—Part 2: Core Rules & Expansions
- Revisiting Wraith: The Oblivion—Part 3: “Setting” and “Adventure” Supplements
- Revisiting Wraith: The Oblivion—Part 4: The Guildbooks
- Revisiting Wraith: The Oblivion—Part 5: Faction and “Meta-Splat” Books
- Revisiting Wraith: The Oblivion—Part 6: Alternate Character Concept Supplements
- Revisiting Wraith: The Oblivion—Part 7: “Concept” and Other Books
- Revisiting Wraith: The Oblivion—Part 8: Tie-In Fiction and Comics
- Revisiting Wraith: The Oblivion—Part 9: Other “General” Supplements
- Revisiting Wraith: The Oblivion—Part 10: Orpheus
- Revisiting Wraith: The Oblivion—Part 11: Play Resources
- Revisiting Wraith: The Oblivion—Part 12: Conclusion… for Now
Welcome to my revisitation of the Wraith: The Oblivion RPG. I’m reviewing the whole run of gamebooks in this series of posts… and just a little bit beyond, as you can see from the featured image of this post. If you’re only after information about the Orpheus RPG White Wolf published in 2003, then this post is for you. However, if you’re new to the series and interested in Wraith, then 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 the Orpheus game line, which was a sort of spin-off of Wraith, launched just before the rebooting of the World of Darkness. It was promoted, at the time, as a revolutionary idea in game design: a mini-series, for which a core book, a short run of supplement books outlining a specific campaign arc, and one tie-in novel were all that was ever going to be released. If you want a very short review, Age of Ravens has one that’s really succinct says a lot of what I think and feel about it.
Some people felt (and some still feel) strongly negative about Orpheus, though most of those feelings seem to be primarily rooted in a sense of frustration that Wraith: The Oblivion was canceled, and then Orpheus was launched not long after. Other criticisms, though, include arguments that Orpheus amounts to a simplification of Wraith, and that it focuses too much on Mortals and the Skinlands, especially in earlier books.
Personally, neither of those things bothers me: for a game that’s focused on interactions between mortals and ghosts, some simplification on the ghostly side is a good thing: complexity in ghost kits and builds was fine when it was expected most or all PCs would be ghosts, but when half your group is mortals, it makes sense to balance things out and make them manageable. Likewise, I often ran mortals-centric games of Wraith, so seeing a system that was designed to handle that more naturally was a good thing as far as I was concerned.
There was some debate in discussions of what people wanted to see in the Wraith20 book, regarding whether material from the Orpheus line ought to be integrated fully into Wraith20, or to be relegated to the appendix. Apparently the final decision was a deeper integration, which is interesting. Those who’re not crazy about the idea, of course, are completely free to leave it out anyway, so I don’t have an issue with it.
I’ll be discussing the full run of Orpheus gamebooks and the tie-in fiction book in this post. That includes:
- Orpheus (core rulebook) by Lucien Soulban with Bryan Armor, John Chambers, Genevieve Cogman, Richard E. Dansky, B.D. Flory, Harry Heckel IV, Ellen Kiley, James Kiley, Matthew McFarland, Dean Shomshak, C.A. Suleiman
- Crusade of Ashes by Lucien Soulban with Kraig Blackwelder, Tim Dedopulos, Jacob Docherty, Leonard Gentile III, Allen Rausch, Guy-Franceis Vella, Genevieve Cogman, Ellen Kiley, and Matthew McFarland
- Shades of Gray by Matthew McFarland with Kraig Blackwelder, Brian Campbell, Chris Hartford, Michelle Lyons, Dean Shomshak, Lucien Soulban, Genevieve Cogman, and Harry Heckel,
- Shadow Games by Lucien Soulban with Kraig Blackwelder, Ann Braidwood, Sharon Cichelli, Tim Dedopulos, Bruce Graw, Jonathan Leistiko, Jesse Scoble, Zev Shlasinger, and Adam Tinworth
- Orphan-Grinders by Lucien Soulban with Kraig Blackwelder, Elissa Carey, Sharon Cichelli, John Geoff, Jonathan Leistiko, Matthew McFarland, and Allen Rausch
- End Game by Matthew McFarland, Kraig Blackwelder, Genevieve Cogman, Michael A. Goodwin, Dean Shomshak, Greg Stolze, and Lucien Soulban
- Orpheus: Haunting the Dead (tie-in fiction anthology by Stefan Petrucha, Seth Lindberg, Allen Rausch, and Rick Chillot)
Oh, and one more thing: though it’s probably unnecessary for a discussion of an RPG that’s fifteen years old now, this review contains loads of spoilers. I mention this since, unlike most of the material I’ve discussed in this series so far, Orpheus is an investigative mystery adventure as much as it is a game system: it’s not just metaplot, but also adventure plot that I’m discussing below, since the supplement books trace a specific, and very “spoilable” campaign arc.
If you’re a player and you haven’t played it, but think you might someday, I’d skip this post. If you’re a Storyteller and you’re curious about the game, the campaign, and both what’s good about it as well as the design problems it suffers from, then this post is for you.
With all of that out of the way, I’m going to dive into the reviews:
ORPHEUS
I have to admit that I really liked the premise (and, generally, the core rulebook) for Orpheus. The premise—at least on the outset—is that the player characters are employees of the Orpheus organization. It’s a “projector” company: they use people who can astrally project (either under their own steam, or during induced comas) to go around doing stuff that ghosts can do… along with employing ghosts and spirits when it suits them. It’s a creepy, fun concept.
The game is set in the World of Darkness, kind of, but unlike Hunter: The Reckoning, there’s no sense that it’s mortals versus all the other WoD game lines: the game is about mortals projector agents and the ghosts they work with. I like that focus, and honestly that was my default with Wraith: The Oblivion, too: I never included a werewolf or mage or vampire, and they never really seemed like something our game needed.
Chapter 1 lays out the basics about what the Orpheus organization is and what it does, how it fits into the World of Darkness, and who its main competition (Terrel & Squib) is. The chapter has some exposition, but also lots of false-document stuff, and I think if I were running the Orpheus campaign, it’d be worth having a copy of the PDF just so I could hand pieces of it to the players in the weeks leading up to the first session, so they could have an idea of the milieu. (I’ll return to the subject of how having the PDFs of these books would be useful again, to be sure.) It’s interesting how the game sets up its own metaplot, and doesn’t connect to the large World of Darkness metaplot until later on: eventually, you can see how the events of this series figure into the post-Stygia underworld, after the Sixth Great Maelstrom, but at the beginning it’s just, “So… in the last few years, some firms using employees capable of astral projection have cropped up. You work for one of them.” Also, the mystery of Pigment, a kind of spiritual drug that seems to cause people to see ghosts when they’re high on it (and become ghosts of a certain type when they die) is pretty compelling, and could be a huge plot arc on its own even if you didn’t want to run the adventure series in the supplement books.
Some hardcore Wraith fans objected to the changes imposed on the metaphysics of how wraiths and spectres work, and the focus on mortal player characters, but since I liked running Wraith with mortal PCs involved, it seemed natural to me, and a fun angle to explore. Orpheus is shady—they do corporate espionage and black bag operations, wetwork (assassinations by ghost, imagine that), and worse—but they’re generally not as horrible as their competition, or so it seems. It’s an organization with a ton of secrets, though, and I can imagine running a long-running Orpheus chronicle without running the adventure in the supplement books, just having player characters take on missions and stumble onto clues about the mystery of who their employers really are and what they’re really up to. I think I’d actually start things out that way: send PCs on a few missions, get them invested in the idea of Orpheus, before ever proceeding to the campaign. But you’d have to be careful, because if you get them too invested in unraveling that mystery, you either need to get them most of the way to resolving it, or risk them feeling like it was a huge McGuffin, because of the events that happen in in the first supplement (Crusade of Ashes, see below).
Chapter 2 unpacks the supernatural stuff for this setting. While some of it is brand new, some of it is recognizably remixed from Wraith, though it’s fully retooled for the changed focus and setting. This is where those who objected to the changed metaphysics mostly focused their comments: hardcore fans had issues with the narrowing of available character types and the discontinuity with Wraith, but if you ask me, that slimming-down makes sense when mortals are the focus. I do have to agree, though, that some of the characteristic terms were a bit confusing, being not particularly descriptive of what they categorize… and those are the main new character traits of the game. Respectively, they are:
- Shade: The type of spirit your character manifests when she or he either projects or dies: options include Banshee, Haunter, Poltergeist, Skinrider, and Will-o’-the-wisp/Wisp.
- Lament: This categories how your character manages to be a ghost. There’s four types: Skimmers (people who can astrally project because of spiritual or psychic talent), Sleepers (people who can astrally project, but only while in a medically induced coma/hibernation), Spirits (essentially wraiths, but tweaked a bit), and Hues (people who somehow got trapped in ghostly form due to having taken the drug Pigment at least once: they’re low on vitality but better equipped to use their dark feelings to fuel their powers).
If you know Wraith, you should be able to find rough correlates to things in that game here. For example, Spirits are like wraiths, except in Orpheus their powers work a little differently, and their “Shadows” exist as “Doppelgangers,” separate from them), and you may even see some parallels between the Shades and certain Wraith guilds. There are some other interesting changes, such as “Stains” which are weird plasmic modifications to the “bodies” of all spirits (even the spirits of skimmers or sleepers) seem to manifest, as an unconscious expression of their own deep-seated insecurities, doubts, and fears. Characters start with a few of these, and accrue more or lose them as they balance out the differential between their Vitality and their Spite, say, through careful use of their Horrors.
That’s a load of new game terminology, right? Let’s see: “Horrors” are in Orpheus what Arcanoi were in Wraith. Likewise, “Spite” is Orpheus’ version of what was, in Wraith, called “Angst” (probably the most mocked character stat name in all of RPGdom at the time, though it actually is appropriate to the game). Orpheus’ “Vitality” seems to combine both “Corpus” and “Passion” ratings in Wraith, if I’m not in error. I’m far from the first person to say that some of these terms feel a little off, and not totally descriptive of what they describe in the Orpheus game, compared to the terms in other World of Darkness games. Well, that, or it just feels odd to be seeing familiar things being renamed, even if it totally makes sense that there’d be some shuffling around of how mechanics work, with such a big a change of focus in this game—it being centered on the living world, at least in the main core rules.
Awkward terminology aside, I found the reduced range of ghost types, and the wider array of character natures, a good thing; from what I hear of the New World of Darkness, this is something that became the norm for all the major game lines, and for me, it makes sense. I’ve always felt like old World of Darkness splats/factions were a a lot to wrap one’s head around, and that a smaller number of splats would be more manageable both for a GM who wanted to really do something with each faction, and for players who’re new to RPGs and trying to get a handle on the world. I think, though, that the differences between Shades are more flavorful and chewier than the differences between Laments: there are compelling story-differences between the latter types, but they’re not as profound or likely to influence play as the former.
Chapters 3 and 4 cover character generation and game mechanics. I’ve read that Orpheus was the last new game line to come out before the revised rules of the New World of Darkness games, and that it was something of a test bed for those rules changes. I’m not really up to date with that stuff—and expect I never will be—but I can say that if you’re familiar with the Storyteller system, there’s little that’s completely new or surprising here, except for the things unique to this specific setting. 1
Chapter 5, on the other hand, is basically a guide to how to run an standard (i.e. non-plot-arc) Orpheus chronicle with PCs as employees of Orpheus carrying out assigned missions and such. There’s a lot of useful information about the Orpheus organization and the world, a broad overview of the kinds of missions Orpheus often assigns its agents, a random ghost generator section composed of a four tables (which is pretty old-school for a White Wolf game!), a set of categories for types of ghostly threats, information on Spectre antagonists, and still more of the book’s loads of false-documentary material a GM might want to throw at players later on in a chronicle, as they begin to peel back the layers of the onion at the heart of which lie the Orpheus group’s deep, dark secrets.
The book closes out with an Appendix offering a handy collection of sample mission ideas: they’re short and simple, but each one sounds like it’d be a cool mission to send PCs on, with lots of room for complications, setbacks, twists, and problems.
Reading through the core rulebook, two things hit me: the first was Storyteller system fatigue: actually, not the system, exactly, but the text-heavy style of the books, where you’re reading a paragraph to glean what could probably be summarized in a single line of text or bullet point—for example, the pages and pages of explanation of the various skills involved in the game. (Maybe I’m spoiled by more recent games in which this stuff feels like it’s stripped down to a really simple summary of a few lines, and where a general rubric of how many points equals how much mastery is generalized for all skills.) Nonetheless, the other thing that hit me is that Orpheus as written in the core rulebook is a really, really cool concept for a game: I felt that familiar tingle of excitement that tells me the concept has legs, and would make a fun game, something I’d be willing to run (or even just play) for a while.
Oh, one more thing: the art isn’t totally consistent throughout the core book and supplement books, but it’s mostly really good, mostly stylistically consistent, and very evocative of the mood and tone of Orpheus. I also like the cover art on the supplements, though that’s a bit surprising to me since it feels somewhat different from the interior art: a little more cartoony, almost manga-flavored. Still, it’s good and evocative, without giving away too much about the contents.
I also really liked the layout of the books: where in a lot of the older World of Darkness rulebooks I’m familiar with, you had one border-illustration that that consistently through the whole book, this one changes things up a little: there’s four or five different designs, and they get switched around depending on the content. (An especially nice touch was the use of chains in shadows (a Wraith callback) in “Players Guide”-like sections, and shadowy nuts and bolts for the game mechanics sections. I don’t know if that approach was followed through in the New World of Darkness books,2 but I will say it’s appealing, and not only that, it was subtly helpful for when you’re flipping through the book and trying to find a specific section. Whether this is something Orpheus picked up from another game line or was the first to use it, whoever had that idea was thinking about organized presentation of information in a way that is handy and useful.
ABOUT THE SUPPLEMENT BOOKS IN GENERAL
Before I dig into the supplement books specifically, I want to make a few observations about the full line of supplements for Orpheus: they’re pretty consistent in structure (with an extra “coda” added to the last supplement in the series). That structure is:
- Prologue: A (usually passable) fiction piece setting the tone for the next chunk of the adventure.
- Introduction: An overview of the book.
- Chapter 1: Scenario material for a key event that advances the plot of the story to the next stage, usually involving a big surprise, twist, or shock.
- Chapter 2: A Players Section, detailing how to grapple with the “new normal” after the kickoff scenario, followed by a Storyteller Section that details specific threats and ideas for how to proceed through the aftermath of the scenario in Chapter 1.
- Chapter 3: “The Unearthed Players Guide”: a player-facing section detailing new material for player characters, not all of it specific to the scenario.
- Chapter 4: “Storytelling the Dead”: a Storyteller-facing section detailing thematic concerns, and questions about how to proceed-story-wise, along with rough sketches of more events and missions that could follow in the wake of the event in Chapter 1, NPCs and organizations that could come into play, advice on handling a range of player responses and approaches, and other chronicle-enriching material.
(Chapters 3 and 4 have consistent titles throughout the supplement series.)
The issues I have mostly come into play in Chapters 2 and 3: I don’t think mixing Player-facing material and Storyteller-facing material like this is a particularly good approach, especially when you’re dealing with print books, and especially when you’re dealing with a big mystery scenario and a twist-filled scenario like Orpheus. But worse: the player-facing stuff is after the surprise scenario twist in each book! I think White Wolf ought to have taken their cue from… well, you name the game—most books that have both player-facing stuff and GM-only stuff put all the player-specific stuff first, and then clearly advertise, “Beyond this page, it’s GM-only stuff, so stop reading here!”
That’s not my only issue: I think in a lot of cases, the material in the Unearthed Players Guide could have been either put into a player-specific supplement (in the case of stuff that is suitable for play from the get-go), or just folded into the Core Rulebook, perhaps in an appendix marked, “Don’t read this unless you’ve completed the adventure in Supplement Book X.”
Likewise, I think it would’ve made more sense for the material in the Player section of Chapter 2 of each supplement book to have been put into its own book, or into an Appendix in the Core Rulebook, or at least partitioned off in each book somehow, instead of plugged into Chapter 2. Of course, the whole idea of Orpheus is a limited-series run of books, but… I don’t know, I don’t see this as an excuse for the kind of organization of information used. There has to be a better way to do it… even if that “better way” is just putting everything that could be considered Core rules (i.e. most of the Players Guide Unearthed material) into the Core book, and then structuring the adventure scenarios so that players wouldn’t realize its significance until they’re fully mired in the scenario.
Were I running Orpheus now, I’d probably collate (and expurgate) the Players’ Guide Unearthed stuff into a PDF, and make it available to players from the start except where it doesn’t make sense. As for the Player Facing stuff, I’d probably just run off the stuff as handouts for players to take home between sessions, at a moment appropriate for the story. I’ll comment on the Player-Facing sections a bit more, case by case, below.
All of this isn’t to cast aspersions on the material, which I actually like. It’s just that organizationally, the supplements and their relationship with the core rulebook leave a lot to be desired. I’m not in the know about what went on inside the sausage factory—how much of the Players Guide Unearthed was even planned out before the Core Rules were published, say—but, well, maybe that wouldn’t be an excuse either: if you’re doing a seven-book series, there’s a lot of incentive to plan it out in great detail, and get the structure right. I see no compelling reason why the Shades that are presented in later books (the Phantasm, the Marrow, and even the Orphan Grinder) couldn’t have been included in the core rulebook, albeit maybe in an appendix labeled, “For advanced play,” in the case of the Orphan Grinder; likewise, I think the Third- and Fourth-tier Horrors could easily have been put into the player-facing part of the rulebook, and that the Crucible Horrors and Emblems could have gone into an appendix (or, at least, in a single Player Supplement).
Likewise, sometimes there’s stuff in the Unearthed Players Guide that probably belongs in the Player Section of Chapter 2—the scenario-specific advice and tips. For example, the Unearthed Players Guide for Crusade of Ashes starts off with a commentary on how the group needs to figure out who the characters are without Orpheus (now that it’s been destroyed), why they’re sticking together, and what they plan to do next. It seems to me this would fit in better thematically with the Player section of Chapter 2, which delves directly into the issues facing them in the wake of Orpheus’ destruction. Moving that material to Chapter 2 seems like a no-brainer to me, and I’m puzzled why it wasn’t done.
But hey, it might just be me. I saw some grousing about parts of this set of concerns in reviews from when the books were new, like here, for example:
My main complaint with this section of the chapter was that the key event in the book is mentioned several times. This chapter is meant to be for players regardless of the storyline – and I had to photocopy and edit it so that when the players were making characters nothing about Crusade of Ashes was given away.
…but generally it didn’t seem to bother people that much, and honestly I was a bit surprised at the fact I found no complaints about the handholding in these sections: in the first supplement, for example, there’s an extended explanation about how to go off the radar and evade authorities. Granted, the Storyteller section adds threats and dangers that the player-facing section doesn’t handhold players through, but… it feels a little strange to have a players guide to stuff like “how to deal effectively with upcoming threats” as an infodumpy handout. If I were running Orpheus today, I’d probably either give the players an NPC contact in the organization would would give them a heads-up or advice occasionally, and/or point players instead at films or novels that sketch out the necessary skills, or maybe have one of their characters stumble onto a nonfiction guide to the subject—one of those guides on how to hide or disappear yourself or go underground, spy guides or whatever. As the series goes on, some of these player-facing sections get even weirder: there’s one in a later book that explains stuff the PCs should actually be figuring out by investigation, or by dredging up old case files (i.e. handouts), or anything but an infodumpy, “Here’s some stuff you know now,” section of a book.
There are some consistent sections that turn up within these chapters, too: for example, throughout the series, there’s a recurring set of questions that get posed at each stage of the adventure, sometimes in the player section, and sometimes in the Storyteller one: “Who are these characters now?” (as in, how have they changed given the new circumstances?), “Why are we sticking together now?” (when splitting up would make survival easier?), and “Where do we go from here?” This is kind of interesting but also kind of odd: I feel like the first and second questions might have been better implemented as some kind of character mechanic: like, maybe characters could have had some trait like “Drive” that detailed their relationship to Orpheus, or to the PC crucible, and with each ramp-up or major change in circumstances, players are asked to reassess the trait? There’d be a chance to reinforce roleplaying these changes in relationship and drive in-game, too, since it’d be made explicit by the mechanic. The last question, I feel, is one of those things where people are psychologizing characters in a way that most players would never think to do: they stay together because they’re characters in an RPG, and most players are well trained not to split up the party more than (or longer than) necessary.
I just want to talk about on more thing, though, before I turn to the supplements individually. That’s a recurring notion throughout the books that Orpheus supplements are modeled on each 20-minute chunk of a blockbuster thriller. This “nth 20 minutes of a movie” thing, I think, could work, but I feel like the setup for the first twenty minutes of the movie would work a lot better if you did occasional Orpheus missions, as laid out in the core book, over an extended period of time—say, as one-shots with your regular group when too many players can’t come, or when you’re between major adventures in your regular game. Just regular mission-of-the-week play, occasionally over an extended period, would allow your players to get used to the system, invested in their characters, and familiar with some of the mysteries of Orpheus… and would make the plot arc of the supplement books that more surprising and powerful. A series of spaced-out one-shot missions would also help achieve that lived-in, “This is how things start out” feeling… to get a sense of the rug beneath their feet being dependable, the better to pull it out from under them.
Most of the books include a lot of NPCs, each one heavily detailed.
Okay, with those general observations out of the way, I’ll tackle the individual supplement books from now on, just giving a vague idea of the contents and my reaction to each book.
CRUSADE OF ASHES
The first supplement for Orpheus starts with a bang! Plot-wise, it consists of pulling the rug out from under the characters: they end up burned, on the run, and desperate to figure out what happened.
Key content:
The key event in Chapter 1 (“Orpheus in Wane”) is the key event of the book. It’s a brutal, dual-pronged assault (both paramilitary and spectral) on the Orpheus group’s HQ (with a rare map of the HQ layout included!), resulting in the organization’s destruction and the PCs become the subject of a manhunt (by a number of antagonists all at once).
Chapter 2 (“Dead Men Running”) details some predictable threats for players, and some less-predictable ones for Storytellers to deploy against them. From both the player’s point of view, there’s it has lots of tips about survival strategies for those one the run and trying to stay off the radar; on the Storyteller’s side, it’s about other antagonists that are also hunting the PCS: rival projector organizations, supernatural threats, media organizations, and law-enforcement groups. Some of it’s a bit dated—I expect Homeland Security would play a bigger part today—and I think pointing players toward the Bourne trilogy films or Burn Notice might be just as effective as the player-facing material here. Actually, I also think that as long as a couple of players are competent with this stuff and you as the Storyteller are competent at giving them out of character feedback and suggestions, the whole group doesn’t need to be adept with this burnt-spy stuff. (The Tribes of Tokyo podcast—an actual play of Nights’ Black Agents—demonstrates admirably how a few players who do have a sense of how to play this sort of game can take charge and lead, without overshadowing other players, and also how the rest of a group can get the hang of it by playing with them, and by paying careful attention to GM Feedback.)
Chapter 3, the “Unearthed Players Guide” section, details some new merits and flaws for individual characters and for crucibles, as well as details on about Artifact creation. It’s useful, not crucial, but includes things I’d want available for the players earlier on, even though some of the point-pricing for specific Merits and Flaws seems a little out of whack, being hideously expensive as written. (As an example, the Flaw “Ward” is a six-pointer, and thought it’s likely to introduce a ton of story complications—in a good way—I have trouble imagining most groups of players willingly purchasing it: I don’t think Three Spooks and a Baby + The Fugitive is a campaign concept a lot of players would go for.)
Finally, Chapter 4 (“Storytelling the Dead”) is GM advice about how to run the Chronicle after the destruction of Orpheus: it has a lot of material about how this should change things for the PCs (for example, such as how can sleepers project their spirits without cryosleep tech to keep them alive after they flatline?); loads of NPCs (almost too many, really), suggested lines of investigation and “adventure” hooks for each, and even some sample “missions” to give the PCs. It’s a solid chapter that is designed to help the Storyteller handle the radical shift in story and tone that Crusade of Ashes brings about.
In all, a pretty satisfying book once you accept or overlook the issues with the structure of the supplement books.
SHADES OF GRAY
The second supplement for Orpheus strikes me as slightly weaker: the key event in the first chapter (“The Pale Rider”) is somewhat railroady—the advice to try make it feel not-railroady kind of lampshades this—and more sketched out than detailed. It involves a shipment of tainted Pigment hitting the city, and characters getting wind of this and, presumably, doing what they can to cut down the casualties. (The dilemma mostly boils down to whether they decide to minimize casualties—which will also mean tougher fights with the Spectres in the locale, which (speaking of dated) is at a warehouse rave—or they try block the attack in the easier venues, and settle for saving fewer lives. Either way, the Storyteller will need to either improvise a lot, or do significant prep.
Chapter Two is titled “The Living Ensemble”, and deals with the aftermath of the ambush attack on the city’s Pigment users. The player-facing section and the Storyteller section both give an overview of a number of specific organizations the crucible will likely have to deal with (or avoid): an undead street gang called The Blasphemers; the DEA; the FBI; the Media; Spectres; and Terrel & Squid, a competing “projector” organization.
The player-facing material consists of an overview of each seemingly-hostile group, some thoughts on various ways they might deal with each (including making allies out of them), and the potential costs of alliance, while the Storyteller material basically provides extra twists on some of what’s told players. This is odd, and combined with the equivalent material in Crusade of Ashes, I started to feel like maybe the player handholding was excessive. Traditionally, one would expect information about these factions to emerge in play, and that players would figure out for themselves the likely costs of doing business with any one of them in play. Most of it, I think, could be conveyed through run-ins with various antagonists, tips from NPC contacts, and information uncovered in research or investigation. That said, the factions—allies and antagonists alike—are all pretty useable in a game, and I especially liked the Pigment Cults and “Radio Free Death,” a character who broadcasts regularly on the radio in the city where the game takes place.
As for Chapter Three (“The Unearthed Player’s Guide”), it adds a new Shade available to players, the “Phantasm.” It’s a type of spook concerned with dreams and pretty clearly a riff on the “Sandmen” Guild of Wraith. Along with that are provided new Horrors (Arcanoi) for all ghosts and projectors including the Phantasm, along with well as third-tier Horrors for characters who’ve mastered the first two Horrors common to their Shades. There’s less-useful material on new “role” types for player characters, some of which (Bounty Hunter, Social Worker, [War]Veteran) feel like they fit better than others (Hobo, Sadomasochist, Stockman). The chapter ends with new Backgrounds—stuff like Fame, Fast Reflexes, Haunts, and Passions—that again, I think should be made options for players right from the get-go.
Chapter Four, “Storytelling the Dead,” rounds things out with a continued discussion of how to handle the evolving situation the characters find themselves in. Here, there were some bits I can’t help ut look askance at, including advice on railroading more subtly and effectively and advice about the importance of PC goals to roleplaying—stuff I think is either obvious to experienced GMs, or maybe bad advice. There’s also material on Spectre Hives, the supernatural drug Pigment (and one specific pigment cult), and a collection of “Missions” (some set after the fall of Orpheus, and some set before it—either to be used as records dedged up from broken database, or in a game where Orpheus somehow survives the pivotal event in Crusade of Ashes).
This book is more of a mixed bag: there’s enough stuff you’d want even if you weren’t running the adventure arc, but you’ll also find you can take or leave a certain amount of it.
SHADOW GAMES
In the third supplement for Orpheus, it is, to use a phrase from Winston Churchill, not the beginning of the end, but the end of the beginning. Though no longer fugitives, and probably better-informed about their antagonists, the characters have new circumstances to deal with… which is bad news, of course.
Chapter 1, “Ghost Quake,” details another single pivotal incident: a “ghost quake”—a storm hits town, and some kind of tower gets thrown into the living world from the Underworld, slamming into two skyscrapers and causing a local disaster. It’s obviously not 9-11, but it feels like it’s supposed to echo it, in a creepy, gonzo way. Of course, there are supernatural nasties (Spectres) stowed away inside it and coming along for the ride, and as local authorities and volunteers struggle to save lives, members of a Pigment cult gather ominously nearby, looking on creepily.
Chapter 2, “Cult of Personality” has the requisite has two sections: the Players’ portion is basically a handout providing an overview to what the world has become since evidence of ghosts and the supernatural has become public: how it’s affected media, religion, entertainment, business, governments, and so on. It’s a bit over-written—for example, summarizing the real-world version of each thing before summarizing how it differs in the world of Orpheus—and, well, again, I feel like it’s something that should’ve been in the core rulebook, or could emerge during play. The Storyteller-facing portion mostly focuses on one specific threat to the player characters, a Pigment cult, and it also feels a bit overwritten: among the things it covers is a pretty comprehensive summary of cult brainwashing techniques. (I guess these days, we have Wikipedia and this sort of infodumping just seems unnecessary in a rulebook, when maybe it was less so in 2003?) There’s a little more than that—some stuff on spectral artifacts, for example—and some cool material about “The Flatliners,” an interesting “organization” (well, “faction,” anyway) made up of victims of a secret government-funded experiment much like the film it’s based on. The Flatliners would be handy in your game even if you only ever played Orpheus straight out of the core rulebook without touching the supplement arc.
Here, the apparent disconnect between the key event in the story and what follows is, presumably the ground that the characters need to cover: what a tower tumbling out of the ghost world and slamming down into the middle of their city has to do with a Pigment cult isn’t immediately apparent, and I don’t think players would immediately say, “We should start looking into Pigment Cults more deeply,” even if the cultists did start hanging around the tower in an eerie, persistent manner.
Chapter Three (as always, “The Unearthed Player’s Guide”), covers two general areas: Spite (explaining the concept a little more, explaining what happens when spooks “tap” it to power their Horrors, and explaining how Spite-theft works), and some new Stains (Spite-associated disfiguring conditions that manifest in your ghostly body, and which give both advantages and disadvantages). The Spite section is interesting: tapping spite does carry risks, but it also transforms the Horror you’re using, usually in a more intense and negative direction, some less powerful than others but all pretty flavorful and interesting. As for the risk, it’s also a little different from obtaining Shadow dice from your Shadow in Wraith: what you risk is gaining extra Spite, which also gives you more Stains. The list of added Stains—many of them really weird and ugly and cool—was a great addition to the (somewhat short) list in the core rulebook.
Chapter Four (also, as always, titled “Storytelling the Dead”) has tips on this stage of the campaign: how to breadcrumb clues for players, trace the connections between the Ghost Quake and the featured pigment cult, how to introduce to new PCs at this stage, and more. The new NPCs get particularly horrifying illustrations here, in a good way, and we finally start to see deeper into the setting, learning about the Grandmother, sort of a über-Malfean who has awoke and is now active (in the worst way). The book ends with a number of “missions” at the end of the chapter, some of which serve uncover mysteries, and others to put leads in the hands of the players. They could be dug up from the ruins of Orpheus, or—if Orpheus survives in some form—missions that could be assigned to the PCs at this stage of the adventure.
All in all, this is a pretty solid entry into the line, and I think there’s a fair bit to use, though I do kind of wish that the connection between the Missionary Works of the Holy Ghost and the Ghost-Quake were a little more explicit before Chapter 4.
THE ORPHAN-GRINDERS
The fourth and penultimate supplement in the Orpheus line, The Orphan-Grinders, things go pretty much where I expected. That’s not to say it’s a bad book, but like Shades of Gray, it felt a little sketched-in sometimes—in that way that necessitates more GM prep heavily lifting, I think. The “big event” is more of a pivotal few weeks during the outbreak of a war between Spectres (finally called the “Spectre Breed War”), involving a big event at the middle. Also, I found it disappointing, if not exactly surprising, that the Flatliners are just sort of suddenly no longer important. I’ll say more about that in my concluding remarks about the game line.
Chapter 1: “Swarm Storm,” digs into those pivotal few weeks. The basic idea is that the Spectral Hives that have cropped up around the city start to swell and multiply, going through some kind of transition stage in their, er, “unnatural” life cycle: after a few weeks of growing weirdness, they pop like pimples, seeping out awfulness, and suddenly there’s a Spectre war rocking the Shadowlands of the city. The buildup is an interesting process to put the characters through—a creepy, foreshadowing-heavy sort of mystery—but (does this sound familiar?) there’s a lot of prep work you’d need to do to pull it off. Chapter 1 actually kind of feels more like backstory about which the Storyteller’s supposed to drop hints. There are “mission” descriptions, but… they’re thumbnail sketches, in most cases. I wish the background material were a little more condensed and more had been done to ease the load of figuring out how to turn it into a set of game scenarios.
Chapter 2, “All-Out War, ” is the usual half-player-facing, half-Storyteller-only chapter. The player facing section is mainly about Crucible Horrors—a neat mechanic that allows multiple characters who have the same Horrors to combine their powers… not to amplify them, but to produce alternate effects. Some are so-so, others are astonishingly powerful, but the idea itself is so cool I found myself hoping that it gets engineered into the new edition of Wraith, because it’s a very interesting approach to diversifying ghostly powers. The rest of the section is basically a survival guide to life in the time of the exploding Spectre Hives… again, a bit handholdy and unnecessary in my opinion.
The Storyteller-facing part of Chapter 2 is a grab bag of stuff: some weirdly late advice on mood-setting (pacing, minimizing distractions, cutting down on OOC interaction, multimedia tricks), how to run the Spectre Brood War as an effective game scenario, handling haunts and other “sacred” places Spectres can’t go; and the very interesting process of “rescuing” Spectres and returning them to their original “spook” state (that is, turning them into Orphan-Grinders). This last idea, that rescuing Spectres is a way of reducing one’s own Spite, is great, even if I think the process is a bit over-complex and too drawn-out to be easily gameable. (I’d substitute a much shorter process, maybe spanning a session or two at most, personally.)
Chapter 3, “The Unearthed Players Guide,” deals with the new Shade “Orphan Grinder,” a rehabilitated Spectre, along with their various Horrors and other considerations for characters of this type. Like the Phantasm in Shades of Gray, it’s a cool addition to the original set of options, and in this case it actually makes sense not to have had it in the core rulebook—or, at least, not in a player-facing part of the core rulebook. (I do think it could’ve fit well in an Appendix.) Orphan Grinders are a cool, dark, interesting take on the reformed villain, and they make an interesting option for players as well as for NPC. Also interesting is the use of Malfean Emissaries (like the NPC Mr. Jigsaw): Spectres, generally the enemy of the player characters, show up hoping to make use of the characters by alerting them to an even worse threat on the horizon, in the form of a godlike Neverborn being known as the Grandmother, and offering to “work together” against her. Players shouldn’t trust the Malfeans, of course, but… they may need to work with them for a while, to survive long enough to take on the Grandmother.
Chapter 4, “Storytelling the Dead,” begins with a return to familiar character-development questions, with an unusually long and deep psychoanalysis of possible answers where I feel like generally the answer boils down to, “Because they’re player characters in an RPG,” or “Because it’s heroic,” or “Because they have nowhere else to go.” In fact, if the first reason is unsatisfying, then maybe the problem is that the rules allow too much freedom to the kinds of characters that can be created for the game? (I’m thinking, as a contrast, of the Drives mechanic in Trail of Cthulhu, which does limit the types of characters one plays, but does so in a positive and useful, game-enabling way.)
There’s also now-familiar advice (to use Radio Free Death/Terrence Green as an infodumping hint-dispenser, for example, or to use Lazarus Redux as a way for characters to get safe haven) followed by a bunch of Spectre-filled “Vignettes of Horror”—that is, short, rough adventure scenarios set during the Spectre War. There’s also backstory about the Grandmother and what she’s up to, Mr. Jigsaw (a new Orphan-Grinder NPC), information on Spectre types and the functions they play in the invasion, a new Horror for Orphan-Grinders allied with Malfeans (“Song of the Hive”), some new Spectre types, a new campaign option centered on “Operation Black Mercury”—sort of a The Men Who Stare At Goats version of Orpheus—and some sample missions/adventures characters could have dropped in their laps for the buildup and aftermath of the Hives bursting open. This final chapter closes with NPCs of note.
Though the book isn’t much longer than the other supplement books, it feels like a long book. I feel like with some aggressive editing, it could’ve fit into a book half its size, and could at the same time (that is, as a result) have been twice as useable for Storytellers. That’s probably true of most of the other RPGs from the Old World of Darkness, mind you, but having read all my Wraith and almost all of my Orpheus books in just a few months—and the Orpheus books in the space of a couple of weeks—my fatigue at the highly verbose writing style of White Wolf gamebooks (combined with the sparseness of material directly useable at the table) is really, really hitting hard now. (I know, that’s ironic given the length of this series of reviews.) I’ll return to that below, in my final summation comments.
All in all, it’s an okay book, with a good Shade, some cool Spectre-rehabilitation mechanics, and a creepy plot development, but also a lot of unnecessary verbiage and so much sparseness in the parts needed for running a game that ultimately it left me somewhat unsatisfied.
END GAME
The last supplement for Orpheus attempts to close off the adventure arc set out in the preceding books, essentially by plunging the characters through the Stormwall and into the Underworld. The Stormwall is a feature of the setting that is new to Orpheus: it’s sort of like the Shroud, but it instead exists between what Wraith called the Shadowlands and the Tempest/Stygia. Essentially, it seems to have come into being after the Sixth Great Maelstrom destroyed the Underworld, as a sort of security against Oblivion penetrating into the Shadowlands and Skinlands.
The book’s inciting incident is about that: as the Spectre Breed War rages on, a breach is found in the Stormwall, and the characters get a chance to go down into the Underworld. As metaplot, it’s splendidly creepy: Stygia’s a kind of ghost city, a haunted ruin that was left empty when all of Wraithdom was slaughtered by the Maelstrom, and got overrun by Spectres when things cooled off enough. The Nameless City is a glorious, creepy riff on horrible, beloved old Stygia, and the Emperor—seemingly the echoing presence of long-gone Charon—haunts it in a distressingly wonderful way.
Among the other creepy offerings in the book is most of the Unearthed Players Guide: here a new Shade is introduced, the Marrow. The name’s weird, but the ghost and its Horrors aren’t. Marrows are the ghosts of people with highly flexible or changeable personalities, and they have Horrors that reflect this: their primary Horror is a fair bit like the old Wraith Arcanos Moliate, and the others allow them to do things like summon animal familiars (in a ghost story way, not a D&D way), transform themselves into a swarm of vermin; their Crucible Horror actually allows them to animate zombies, of all things!
Now, the Marrows’ forth-tier horror, Nightmarish Gestalt, is especially weird, but then, all of the brand-new Fourth Tier horrors presented in this section are quite weird. I’m not sure about a couple of them (including one that allows characters to take on the form of a supernatural car: that just seems silly to me), but most of them feel like the Orpheus equivalent of 9th level D&D spells, if they D&D’s magic system was thought up by someone on LSD: terrifyingly powerful, but also absurdly freakish. Like any “high-level” game material, it needs to be handled carefully, but could make for some really epic play, especially since the consequences for Fourth-Tier horrors going wrong are also fairly horrendous. There’s also another interesting power widget added to the game, in the form of “Emblems”: spectral powers (defensive, offensive, illuminating, and restraining) that characters can learn and use only after they go into the dangerous, spiritually toxic ruins of the Underworld.
Actually, once I read End Game, it became clear to me that Orpheus kind of follows the trajectory sketched out in the BECMI D&D books: characters start out as relative nobodies—just a little tougher than the general population—but end up, through adventures, both capable of and tasked with the job of taking on gods. The Grandmother is definitely like something out of the old 1st print run of Deities and Demigods, where Cthulhu was statted up. Or, well, the prospect of having PCs actually run across her feels a bit like how it used to feel when one turned to the Tarrasque character entry in good old Monster Manual 2:
Beyond that, one thing that’s central to this chunk of the arc is the premise that the player characters will find out the true nature of the Spectre Brood War if they haven’t already—that it’s a battle between the Malfeans who want the world to continue on as it is, and the forces of the godlike “Grandmother” who basically wants to eat (and obliviate) reality. As characters learn this, the stakes are raised to “save the world” and they presumably hustle down into the Underworld to level up and to seek out the Grandmother. There’s a lot of (to me, kind of tedious) stuff about the strengths and weaknesses of the Malfean and Grandmothers’ armies and powerbase, which I’m not sure how I’d use in a game.
Of course, the book emphasizes flexibility: even in this last volume, there’s blurbs about how to handle the plot arc if Orpheus never was destroyed, if the characters are still fugitives, if the Pigment Cult still exists, and so on. In fact, the writeup of these possible scenarios here is better than in some of the earlier books, strangely enough. But that said, a lot of the pagecount is dedicated to the minutiae of the Spectre Breed War and the machinations of the Malfeans and the Grandmother, and it’s kind of hard seeing how the storyline could incorporate much of that without dropping those earlier threads… at least, not without some much work on the part of the Storyteller that she or he might as well have written their own scenario arc from scratch.
The book ends off with a discussion of how to tie off your Orpheus chronicle: various ways the player characters might choose to head off the Grandmother’s plans and save the world. This stuff is all pretty over-the-top and feels as if a certain amount of subtle Storyteller choreography would be necessary to pull it off. For my part, I found the material on the Nameless City—obviously Stygia—far more interesting. The Nameless City is downright creepy, wonderful, and compelling: a ghost town in the underworld, haunted by its long-gone founder and by the ghosts whose very spirit-stuff was reworked to use as building materials? Gaaah. That’s spooky, and this take on Stygia is worth the price of admission alone.
ORPHEUS: HAUNTING THE DEAD
This book is an anthology of tie-in fiction for Orpheus. I’m generally not really big on tie-in fiction, as I mentioned in an earlier installment in this series, but I figured since it’s just a single collection of shorter work, it may be worth a look. That said, I have a copy but haven’t read it yet. If I ever get around to it, I’ll update this post.
A WORTHY SUCCESSOR TO WRAITH?
A lot of discussion about Orpheus revolved, at the time, around whether it was a worthy successor to Wraith—and that continued when it became apparent that there wouldn’t be a relaunch of Wraith within the rebooted New World of Darkness line. (There was an attempt to make an alternate Wraith-ish game, Geist: The Sin Eaters, but it didn’t get very far, and I never really looked into it, since the concept didn’t particularly appeal to me.)
Personally, I think that kind of pressure is a little unfair. Orpheus is obviously a spin-off of Wraith, but it’s conceived with a very different set of goals, a different sense of scope, and a different design conception. Lucien Soulban may, on some level, have wanted to tie off some of the loose ends left unaddressed by the abrupt conclusion of the Wraith line—and many Wraith fans may have hoped the new game line would do that—but Orpheus isn’t really supposed to be Wraith Revised, and doesn’t try to be that… and that’s a good thing.
I must also note that I haven’t managed to run a game of Orpheus, let alone run the campaign arc described in the five supplement books. Honestly, I’m not sure I’d be interested in running that particular campaign arc: I’d be likelier to glean whatever mechanics and innovations suited me from those latter books, and run a more “straight” Orpheus campaign of the sort that the core rulebook seems to suggest, perhaps with characters investigating the Pigment drug trade and tracking the supply line back to its (supernatural) source, without all the crazy metaplotty stuff. If I did end up running the arc of the supplement books, it’d likely be as a way of ending a half-year campaign that had mostly been about grimy corporate intrigue and ghost/mortal interactions. Somehow that stuff—the grimy corporate intrigue (and crazy ghostly missions)—interests me more than a save-the-world scenario anyway.
Additionally, I think the campaign is written in a way that has problems: each new book seems to introduce a whole new set of enemies for the PCs, a whole new set of circumstances, but it also assumes that the enemies and circumstances from the previous book necessarily should peter out or become irrelevant as soon as the characters proceed to the next stage of the story (in the next book). Instead of a Conspyramid, you get more of a ConspiraPath or something: PCs need to go on the lam in Crusade of Ashes, but that mostly gets set aside for Shades of Gray. While support is included for making these threats from each stage of the plotline persistent, the basic assumption is that they aren’t. Beyond making things easier for the Storyteller to juggle, it’s not totally clear to me why this destructive process is taken for granted as good or necessary: I, rather, feel as if the foes of previous stages of the story should persist and keep putting on the pressure as the PCs delve deeper and gain new insights.
What’s especially frustrating is that the PCs don’t necessarily need to “vanquish” or “beat” those foes: they just need to survive the threat, gain certain information, and deal with certain specific events, within a certain timeframe, in order to ensure the major threats in a given stage get bypassed. For me, layering the story problems is more interesting, especially since it forces players to think through hard decisions about priorities—”We need to do X to beat threat Y and achieve objective Z, but that means risking threat W is going to pick up our trail and start hounding us again.” That kind of pressure seems likelier to push characters in compelling, story-worthy ways. Having problems temporarily fade to the background is fine, sure: but I feel like some persistence of threat from earlier stages of the story can help drive things forward, making the hostile new normal matter on a low-level, in the background, in a more organic way than the books seem to suggest. (And yes, I’m also saying that it feels artificial for threats from one book to fade as characters face a new set of threats from the next book.) Playing Blades in the Dark really hammered that home for me.
Likewise, I found the general campaign advice in some of the books amusing: a fair bit of it seemed to amount to saying that the Storyteller shouldn’t railroad… except when the Storyteller totally should (or needs to, or had better just) railroad. Lucian Soulban’s explicitly talked about his desire to make Orpheus a game in which player decisions (and player-character actions) matter, so I guess he made some effort to directly address this issue, but it’s funny, reading those bits: I felt like maybe instead, the writeup could have included stuff like outlining the difference between outright railroading and more subtle ways of directing characters toward hooks, clues, and so on. (There’s some of that, but there’s also some puzzling encouragement to railroad in parts of it.) Similarly, sometimes the book outright tells the Stoyteller, “Hey, go right on ahead and infodump such-and-such information via NPC X,” which, again, I think makes for unsatisfying (and not very useful) mystery design. Players want to uncover stuff themselves; when they get it out of NPCs, they want to work to get it out of them, or at least should have to overcome some kind of challenge to get it or figure out what it actually means.
Ultimately, I think a certain amount of the material in those later books, not just the mechanics and expanded character options, but also the NPCs and various factions involved in the arc as written, could be worked into a “straight” Orpheus game anyway, possibly even to greater effect. I also think the idea of Orpheus persisting: surviving the attack, and maybe burning agents who worked for it but uncovered just enough to know something wasn’t kosher about the organization, or even attempting to throw them under the bus. It’s be interesting for player characters to be part of that persisting Orpheus for a while, seeing much-liked colleagues outed as “traitors” or “industrial spies” and burned, and then slowly uncovering enough to see why the bad guy isn’t those colleagues, but Orpheus… and then getting burned themselves, in turn, in the way Crusade of Ashes sketches out. I think a really fun approach would actually involve Orpheus continuing to exist, but cutting off the player characters when they dig too deep: Orpheus becoming an antagonist of sorts, in other words, while Terrel & Squib, Nextworld, and the other organizations and factions of the setting instead come sniffing around, looking for a way to use the players against Orpheus. A massive betrayal and cover-up, unsteady alliances that sour, characters being lied to, give half-truths, used for a while and then discarded… I think it’d be a great way to motivate characters, acquaint them with Orpheus’ rivals and competitors, and give them access to more information, some of it true and some of it false, mistaken, or only half-true.
Also, I think that the implicit reasoning for having additional player-facing material in the later supplement books (instead of, say, in appendices to the Core rulebook) was, in a sense, to bottleneck some of the mysteries in the setting, and also to allow for a sort of “leveling-up” of player character power in the absence of an explicit class/level system like we have in traditional RPGs. More than in any other White Wolf game I know (which, admittedly, is pretty limited), this felt like a campaign arc with characters going from low level to high. The fact that player characters are only supposed to figure out how Crucible Horrors work late in the game, for example, feels like something that, in a D&D game, would simply be earmarked as high-level spellcasting: only allowing characters to group-cast a spell once they all hit “seventh level,” as a crude analogy. There are probably other ways one could have designed around that game-mechanic need: say, noting that characters cannot use Crucible Horrors them until some set of character-specific criteria are reached: a minimum number of points in a given Horror for each character participating, or a minimum number of points total for the first three uses; or, say, requiring characters to collectively purchase points in Crucible Horrors ability, and not letting them do that initially at the beginning of the campaign.
Speaking of which, I can’t help but think that, to make the game a little more digestible for new players, someone running Orpheus today could take a page from modern games like Beyond the Wall or Apocalypse World and do up modular playbooks for the various Shades and Laments, explaining just the Horrors that the player’s character can learn. As players acquire more Horrors, or learn about crucible Horrors and Emblems, they simply get new pages to add to their playbook. Hell, you could even organize the character Skill lists so that it’s clear which ones are usable when projecting, versus when characters are manifesting or in their bodies (depending on their Lament).
Maybe I’m thinking about that because, after reading my whole collection of Wraith and Orpheus books in the span of a few months, I’m feeling outright fatigued by the amount of verbiage in the books that isn’t directly usable at the game table. I mean, old school dungeons are a totally different beast and it’s an unfair comparison, but by contrast, Tomb of Horrors managed to be absolutely infamous while being, at heart, a map, some pictures, and nine pages of (admittedly cramped) text. Something like that would be hard to write for Wraith or Orpheus without it being an outright railroad, of course, but it’s an example of the kind of “rich sparseness” I’m wishing Orpheus (and, yeah, Wraith) had aspired to. Less backstory, more stuff you can use directly in-game, and books that reduce (rather than increasing) the amount of extra prep work necessary to run the game. That’s absolutely not to dismiss gamebooks written to be read as books, of course: my collection of XP-edition Paranoia books has mostly been pleasure-reading so far (warts and all), and I dug the Wraith metaplot as much as anyone. But at this stage in my gaming life, I find that I mostly want game books as in books I can use to play a game, not gamebooks that read like books I could turn into games with a ton of work.
On the subject of books being usable and complete, I think Shades like Phantasm, Orphan-Grinder, and Marrow should/could have been included in the core rules, if only in a Storyteller-only Appendix marked off as “Material for Advanced Players only” or something like that. It’s fine to have Laments that are “unknown” at the start of play, of course, and Orphan-Grinders especially seem to have been withheld for a specific, plot-related reason… they specifically ought to be earmarked for Spook PCs who became Spectres and were rehabilitated—that is, not a Shade available for newly created characters. Either way, though, whether you’re running a larger Orpheus Chronicle with or without the supplement plot, you might find it more interesting to introduce some of these things long before things get crazy, and compensate for whatever in-game challenges this introduces by adjusting the difficulty of other story tasks. (Which is to say, if the ultimate reason for withholding these Shades is because their Horrors ruin the difficulty level of earlier segments of the adventure, then maybe the adventure design is the problem, not the Shades?) Phantasms and Marrows, especially, are Shades I think ought to be available right from the start of gameplay.
Happily, in the age of the PDF, chopping up the book and combining parts of different books is relatively trivial to do… but in a time when game books were print-only, it was kind of a strange set of design decisions that lay behind the formulation of these books. I’d be really interested to see what Lucian Soulban had to say about it at the time, and whether he thinks any different now. (In interviews, he’s spoken vaguely about certain mechanics that didn’t work so well, or (much more recently) about how he learned a lot about editing through the project, but hasn’t spoken about this structural organization at all, from what I’ve seen.) Though I’m just speculating, I feel like chances are good that when the core book was published, some of the stuff in the later supplements was still in development, and that at the time, it seemed sensible to withhold certain elements of the mechanics and areas within the range of character types for the sake of ramping up character empowerment alongside the increasing perils of the plotline, so I suppose how you feel about that will depend on whether you’re excited about that particular plotline and arc.
If I sound negative right now, remember: when I was reading the core rulebook, I felt interested and even excited to give the setting and concept a spin. Mind you, having read the whole set of supplements, I also ended up wondering whether I could file off the serial numbers and use a different system to play it. Whereas I think the Apocalypse Engine would be the way to hack Wraith into a more rules-light, wildly phantasmagoric game, I can’t help but wonder, for Orpheus—especially because of the amount of investigation and spying that is involved—whether a Gumshoe hack wouldn’t be a better fit? I am especially thinking of Nights’ Black Agents.
Of course, you’d have to port over (or invent) rules for ghostly powers and so on (perhaps riffing on the psychic powers in Fear Itself, the mutations of Mutant City Blues, and some of the alien abilities in Ashen Stars), and probably also adjust things so that characters could do more in terms of Skinlands investigation and backup. Still, Night’s Black Agents feels like a good fit: from Crusade of Ashes on, the PCs are supposed to be agents without a support system anyway, and one of the weak points of the supplements is how a Storyteller is supposed to actually run the investigative stuff, session to session, beyond dropping hints and leads into the players laps from the mouths of NPCs or in “other” ways (like in dream visions, comments from other projectors, case files dug out of the half-corrupted Orpheus Group databases, and so on). The mechanics of investigative games—working with and recruiting sources, puzzling through intel—seems to need to be extremely simplified if you’re running Orpheus with the system as written. But, I dunno, maybe I’ve just sort of fatigued by the Storyteller ruleset or something, or enamored of Gumshoe since I recently had a good experience with.
Then again, maybe just gleaning some tricks from Night’s Black Agents—like mapping out the Conspyramid for the scenario, and filling in some of the blanks (say, using the free blank Conspyramid form from the Pelgrane Press website, and Kenneth Hite’s helpful explanation in the core rulebook)—might do the trick. I guess it really depends on how you feel about the Storyteller ruleset: if you and your group are comfortable with it, maybe trying a different system would be no bother. Personally, I don’t hate the system, but neither am I particularly devoted to it, while I’ve become quite a fan of Gumshoe recently, at least as a player, for how it simplifies a lot of things and streamlines the investigative process. I haven’t GMed Gumshoe, though, so I don’t know how I feel about what I imagine is somewhat more intensive GM prep.)
(In the Age of Ravens review I linked up top, some other systems suggested for porting Orpheus along with Gumshoe include FATE, Savage Worlds, and True20: I don’t really know any of these systems, but those who do will doubtless have their own opinions. If you do, feel free to drop a comment down below.)
All of that said, there’s one thing I will say: Orpheus does a lot of things that I literally tried to make Wraith do when I was playing it with my groups back in the 90s. I think that says a lot about whether it’s a “worthy successor”: the answer depends on whether you were getting what you wanted out of Wraith, specifically whether you were interested in what a mortals-centric game in that milieu would look like. Personally, I sometimes really wanted a mortals-centric ghost story game, where mortals could become ghosts, or interact with ghosts, Orpheus did that pretty directly, where with Wraith it took a lot more work because it wasn’t designed for that.
Orpheus has a tight focus, a cool plot/metaplot (at least, when viewed from a distance), it’s nicely cordoned off from the other supernaturals of the World of Darkness, and the adventure in the supplement books is at least fixable, if you’re willing to do the work and want to do so—and even if you’re not interested in this specific plot, there’s plenty of material in the supplement books you could use in any Orpheus game. The supplements have an unfortunate internal structure, but in 2018 we can certain snip out pages from PDFs and assemble a players handbook of sorts, with the material we think is useful.
I guess that means I really liked the concept, was okay with the system in the core rulebook (though I found it incomplete), liked the supplementary material more than the plot sketched out in the supplement series, and am kind of lukewarm on the Storyteller system for an investigative game of this sort. I guess that about sums it up.
ADDITIONAL RESOURCES FOR PLAY
For those interested, Mr. Gone made not only a bunch of character sheets for different sorts of Orpheus characters, and campaign management/tracking worksheets, and they’re available via the Wayback Machine, starting on this page. (The site also hosted a whole slew of resources from the now-lost Project Flatline website, for Storytellers who wanted to introduce a little verisimilitude into their games, but I couldn’t find those files on Wayback machine: they included rules errata, job application forms, ID badge templates, and more of that sort of thing that’s not critical but fun for an in-person game.)
Not all of the links work anymore, but Ravil’s Project Flatline webpage (not available anymore, but the site was archived on the Internet Archive and that is still available) also has plenty of materials, including some of the stuff at Mr. Gone’s and much more, such as Mission writeups, New Laments, Merits and Flaws, and Stains, and more. For someone running an Orpheus game just out of the Core rulebook, especially, what remains here looks like it’d be a fun resource. Some of the material is also available over on RPG.net.
Another fansite that’s still out there—not maintained or updated since 2004, it seems, but still online—is Edward Phillips’ Orpheus Guild. The site is pretty bare-bones, but there are a few interesting Spectre concepts (under “NPCs”) and a conversion guide for porting Orpheus to New World of Darkness which I’ve not seen before (under “Downloads”).
Especially recommended is the Terrel & Squib fanbook (by Rob Engen, Adam Wells Davis, Steven MacLauchlan, David Plank, Jason Wallace, Tuukka Hurmeranta, and Tome Wilson) which introduces enough material for the rival projector firm to either become a major antagonist in a game, or be an alternate, nastier employer for PCs in an Orpheus game. It’s quite an impressive piece of work considering it was just a fan-creation explicitly made for free distribution online.
For currently available actual plays, there are a few on Youtube. Here is this one of them, done by Mayday Roleplay. Also, Sponsored by Nobody also did a short (three-episode) actual play presented as a “Netflix series.” I haven’t listened through these, but they’re available out there. System Mastery also did a segment on the game, many years ago.
And, with that, I’ll end this post. That’s the Orpheus game line in… well, not a nutshell, I can’t really day that after all the pixels I’ve spilled, but anyway, that covers all things Orpheus.
Next time, I’ll return with a roundup of available online play resources for Wraith, similar to this little collection above for Orpheus.
Oh, but before I go, one last thing, dug up from the guts of the internet. Here’s the trailer that appeared on White Wolf’s website when Orpheus was about to be launched. It’s… from a long time ago, as you can see:
I can’t help but think the idea White Wolf had to create a setting-agnostic core rulebook for basic rules and mechanics for the New World of Darkness system was a good idea, and you know, it’s the only New World of Darkness rulebook I have, but it’s a good one… though don’t ask me why they kept including the equivalent material in the game-line-specific core books anyway.↩
The closest thing I see among my own books from the company is an assortment of background watermarks in Kindred of the East core rulebook, which seems to have dispensed with the idea of border art altogether in favor of behind-the-text background art (something I think reduces readability and was a bad idea).↩