Revisiting Wraith: The Oblivion—Part 12: Conclusion… for Now

This entry is part 12 of 12 in the series Revisiting Wraith the Oblivion

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. 

When I began this series, I started out with the expectation of writing a summation of my thoughts on the original Wraith game line, as a kind of final comment. I expected (woefully optimistic as I was) to finish before Wraith20 was released—and while I failed, I was still pretty happy to have written up as much as I had, and thought it would be a cool way to gather those thoughts and observations together before starting in on the new version of the game. 

At the moment, though, I find myself balking at any kind of expansive summary like that. I think shared enough of my thoughts and observations on the original game line in the ten preceding posts of this series, and, if I’ve interested others in looking into these books, or exploring these ideas in other games, then I’ll be happy. Hell, I’m happy just having reread all the books I once owned, and read for the first time the ones I never did own in the first place.  Where the reviews ran too long, well… getting through all that material was a bit of a challenge, given how busy I’ve been over the past year. 

After all, to sum up is difficult: most of these books (with the exception of The Quick and the Dead) didn’t really excite me about the idea of starting a Wraith game anytime soon, but then only one of them was supposed to evoke that response—The Face of Death. The others were supposed to fill out a world I was already interested in, and engaged with, and playing in already, and they all seem likely to do that to varying degrees if read under those circumstances, and with varying degrees of usefulness. I think The Sea of Shadows probably ought to have gotten an update when the 2nd edition core rulebook was released (and I think it is getting an overhaul as part of another book included in the Wraith 20 Deluxe reward tier, The Book of Oblivion).

But I think there’s also hints in some of these supplements at why Wraith was a tough sell on the gaming market. Aside from all the usual objections—the difficulty some groups found in Shadowguiding, the darkness and overwhelming alienness of the setting, the melodrama suggested by some of the character mechanics (like Pathos amd Angst having tracked scores)—I think there’s an issue of sorts with the supplement books themselves: some excelled in adding to setting lore, but were both GM-facing (making the richness hard to convey to players) and failed to model how that lore could play a part in a game narrative. Some of the books did try to answer this—The Sea of Shadows and Buried Secrets both include sample adventures, for example—but others didn’t so much. At some point, a reader could be forgiven for thinking certain books—like The Book of Legions—existed mainly to advance lore and metaplot, more than to provide fuel for gaming.

Maybe that’s why so many people regard Wraith as an RPG they loved to read, but never actually dared to play: it’s not just a failure of the players and GMs who were scared off, it’s actually an understandable reaction to specific design choices that narrowed the potential audience for the series, but I’m not sure how much of a flaw it is. I own plenty of OSR books, including loads of adventure modules, but I haven’t run a single one of those modules or played any of the prewritten settings straight from the book, unmodified. I’ve read them for enjoyment, ideas, shiny bits to steal and work into my own game, but I don’t feel badly not actually setting a game in Carcosa-as-written.

And after all, there weren’t really a lot of canned “module” adventures produced for World of Darkness—especially for Wraith—anyway. It’s funny that the OSR world, which extolls DIY as a feature of OSR gaming, derides White Wolf’s games when adventure design in the latter system was almost always DIY in terms of adventure designs, even if the denigration is rooted in other issues that OSR folks have with the game system and its aesthetics. (Like its focus on a top-down structured narrative that’s gamified, instead of as a game that organically generates story.)

I think there’s a couple of other observations to be taken from this: for one, that plenty of RPG products are written mainly to be read by GMs and either enjoyed as books away from the table, or mined for ideas to be ported into any game. That’s not a bad thing, even if game designers probably feel a little crestfallen when they hear someone say that this was how their book was used. I think the trick, though, is producing the book in such a way that people feel it was designed for use in play—that its non-use is a decision made by the reader, who is nonetheless enriched by it.

Also, design choices—especially about the delivery of information as related to gamer role—can either help or hinder the use of a game book in actual play. World of Darkness of course has an abiding fanbase, and a considerable one at that, but it’s diminished since the 90s from what I can tell, and I think part of that has to do with the design choices made across all the game systems, especially when it comes to the structuring of how information is dispensed to players. When writing an RPG book, one must always step back and ask, “Is this for players to see? Is it not? How does my text structure reinforce and support that?” I really think a lot of game books would have been better designed if they were delivered in paired slipcase editions, one player-facing and one GM-only.

Stepping into the future of the game line—or, really, the afterlife of the line—I think Lucien Soulban was conscious of this and it informs his work in the Orpheus series books to some degree.1 The problem also seems to persist, unfortunately—the player vs. GM divide often comes in the middles of sections, and some of the player-facing material doesn’t seem especially useful to players—but at least he’s consciously aware of it and openly addresses the issue within in the supplement books I’ve gotten around to reading. I’ll be including the Orpheus series books in this series, so I’m sure I’ll return to that question eventually.

While I have Wraith’s 20th Anniversary edition, I haven’t done more than skim it yet. It seems like a solid “Revised Edition” for the game, something the original never got unlike most of the original core White Wolf games, but I’d need to look more closely to see what I think of the changes made in the system. Perhaps I’ll get around to it (and the couple of supplements released for it), in which case there will be a section 13 in this series. Similarly, if I ever luck out and get my hands on any of the fiction I haven’t reviewed here, I’ll add comments to the relevant post(s). However, for now I think I’m done with reading Wraith: The Oblivion stuff, at least for a while, and… well, I think I’m tempted to design a game embodying my own take on the concept. 

Series Navigation<< Revisiting <em>Wraith: The Oblivion</em>—Part 11: Play Resources

  1. Orpheus was a mortals-centric follow-up to Wraith: The Oblivion after the latter game line died a premature death. It’s funny: many of the The Quick and the Dead-based Wraith games I ran more closely resembled Orpheus in that respect: players might eventually die and become wraiths, but they usually started out as mortals.

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