Revisiting Wraith: The Oblivion—Part 7: “Concept” and Other Books

This entry is part 7 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. 

In this installment, I’m discussing what I think of as “concept” books: that is, books that were driven by a major concept. Many of these could technically be considered setting books, but I’ve arbitrarily decided that in some cases, the “concept” overrides the setting-ness of a supplement. Likewise, one of the books (Love Beyond Death) could just as easily be thought of as an adventure book, but I think it’s better seen in terms of its focus on the concept that drives it.   

The full list of books discussed in this post includes: 

  • Dark Kingdom of Jade by Richard Dakan and Markleford Friedman
  • Dark Kingdom of Jade Adventures by Tim Akers, Mark Cenczyk, Ben Chessell, Chris Howard, James A. Moore, Allen Tower, Richard E. Dansky
  • Charnel Houses of Europe: The Shoah by Jonathan Blacke, Robert Hatch, Janet Berliner, and Richard E. Dansky
  • Doomslayers: Into the Labyrinth by Bruce Baugh, Geoffrey Grabowski, and Fred Yelk, with fiction  by Matthew J. Costello and Lucy Taylor
  • Ends of Empire by Bruce Baugh, Richard E. Dansky, Geoffrey C. Grabowski, and Ed Huang

This isn’t really a natural grouping of books, though I think they are united by one thing: they all are “concept” books. The two books on the Dark Kingdom of Jade present an alternate setting for Wraith games (the Asian Shadowlands and Underworld), while Doomslayers presents a look at the Labyrinth and Spectres—essentially opening up dungeon-crawling of a sort for Wraith games. Charnel Houses presents a potential setting characterized more by theme, history, and memory than by mechanics and rules: it asks what happens to ghost stories if we refuse to ignore genocide on a mass scale. Finally, Ends of Empire is several books rolled into one, but conceptually, it’s also a concept book about the ostensible end of Stygia, released to end the game line. (And thus it’s fitting that it should be the las game supplement I review here.)  

With that out of the way, I’ll dive into the discussion.

Dark Kingdom of Jade

Dark Kingdom of Jade is a setting book, designed essentially to provide information for those who want to run Wraith: The Oblivion localized to an East Asian cultural context. It was the only other-culture/other-Dark Kingdom sourcebook to be released for Wraith, presumably because the game line was canceled early. It’s also a bit unusual in that it’s really part of a two-book set: this book details the setting, and the second book (Dark Kingdom of Jade Adventures, reviewed immediately below) presents some scenarios and adventures set there. 

I’ll start with the positives: I think there’s enough in this book to serve as the foundation for a game set in this part of the Underworld. The backstory n the first couple of sections is pretty good, and there’s a degree of loosey-goosey WTFery in parts of it that left me thinking, “Hey, Wraith needs more of that!

(The battle where Yu Huang gets cut in half, and a white dragon shaped like a Malfean he once fought surges out of his reined Corpus… and then he reforms, intact again? Yeah, I know the metaplot explanation, but that weird, enigmatic, rules-transcending scene is just outstanding.)  I’m sure some rules compleatists would hate that, but I like the idea that the full ruleset—every Wraith book you own—is just sort of the Mentzer Red Box of Wraith: that there’s wa y more powerful magic, weirder enigmas, crazier monsters and adventures to be had. I dig the notion that “Here, these are the things your characters can do,” isn’t the limits of what anyone can do. I think the metaplot points at that, too: Charon’s final end, for example, suggests it.  

Some of the material in Chapters 4 (“Life Among the Dead”) and 5 (“Unreal Estate”) are also cool—it was nice to see how Chinese communism was imagined to have impacted social organization among Wraiths, for example, and pushed things past the simplistic, “They still follow blood ties,” sort of formulation we see earlier on. Japan and Korea get an okay, if somewhat boring, treatment: I expected the Japanese Shadowlands to be way more of a hotbed of anti-Yellow Springs resistance, and while the weirdly moliated Korean troops of the “National Dragons” are a bright spot, the writeup on Korea generally is a bit boring.

Of course, because it was the 90s, there’s some deep weirdness with Tibet (maybe a little to weird, and maybe a little too simplifying and over-detailed all at once, but I liked how the metaphysics is warped in Tibet, and wonder what it’d be like if there were more of that—more glaring exceptions to the “rules”—throughout the Wraith cosmology. Likewise, the Bugis fleets are a really cool premise, and I can imagine a whole campaign (inspired by Master and Commander, say, or the Aubrey–Maturin books more generally) where Stygian seagoing wraiths on old WWII-era battleships and Georgian-era schooners hunt the Bugis fleets across the Pacific.

Some of the stuff in Chapter 7 (“The Quick”) would also be useful, or at least it’s nice to have mechanics and short writeups for things like street mediums, professional exorcists, Hell Money and familial memoriam (as per Confucian rites), as well as traditional festivals and talismans. I don’t know how I’d end up using the system for funeral rites in game, and I feel uncomfortable with mechanics that decide something as mysterious as whether a dead mortal becomes a Wraith, but it’s still nice to have a sketch of the process and how it can go wrong, I guess. One gets the feeling that, at the very least, the authors felt they should mention this stuff, as the trappings of dealing with death in East-Asian cultures that Western gamers might not know much about. Chapter 8 (“Systems and Stories”) is also loaded with nice material that could be used for enriching a game set in Yellow Springs: Merits, Flaws, Skills, Backgrounds, and a bunch of new, specific Jade Kingdom Arcanoi. The only thing in Chapter 8 that did disappoint me was that page and a half of vague campaign ideas at the end, which I think should have been a bit longer and more detailed, maybe with examples. But then again, they did have Dark Kingdom of Jade Adventures in the hopper, so maybe they felt it was unnecessary. 

Okay, so if that’s the (mostly) positives, I guess I’ll get to my criticisms.

Having read Kindred of the East (the equivalent East Asian setting book for Vampire: The Masquerade) a year or two ago, I was braced for some… let’s say, issues. Now, to get a few things out of the way: I think complaining about the importance of jade to East Asian Wraiths (and to the Kindred of the East) is a bit… silly. Jade was used a lot in ancient Chinese funereal rites, placed on the eyes the same way coins were placed on the eyes of people in various European cultures, and in Chinese (and some other East Asian) cultures, jade was believed to be a very important and magically-powerful substance of importance to the living and the dead.

To acknowledge this in a game isn’t racism, it’s an attempt at fidelity to cultural source material, albeit maybe somewhat one-dimensional fidelity. To me, this doesn’t feel like an instance of willful ignorance, much less racism or disrespect. It might be fair to say it falls short—though, by what standard? Does Stygia fall short of the Western cultural traditions linked to death by that standard? Does this standard make sense? How much deep, detailed verisimilitude is it reasonable to demand from a tabletop roleplaying game about the afterlife? Some of the criticism I’ve seen of Kindred of the East seems fair; some of it struck me as kind of over-the-top. 

Now, I am a white man speaking, to be clear. The fact I live in Asia, have been immersed in a couple of the cultures discussed in this book, that I care about respect in the treatment of those cultures, doesn’t give me authority over the people who are offended by failings in game designs. But I do feel like at some point, we should differentiate between kinds of failings, and intention. I think the intention here was good, even if the result may be a little unsatisfying for those who know more than the average North American gamer about East Asian cultures.

Take, for example, the nastiness of the Yellow Springs setting: it isn’t really surprising, is it? Stygia is also downright nasty, to the point where a lot of Stygians were never sure, before the disappearance of Charon, whether he hadn’t “gone over to the dark side” and become a Spectre. Stygia is based on slavery, on hammering souls into coins and blades and bricks and hunting beasts and, if you’re lucky, enslaved workers or warriors to be thrown out into the darkness to fight against the ever-encroaching forces of Oblivion. Yellow Springs isn’t worse, so much as it’s awful in its own way. 

That said, there are some issues in the book. Most of them are relatively minor, but did rub me the wrong way. For one thing, look at the art accompanying the opening fiction is what I guess we might call both exoticizing and just plain male-gazey. It’s not that I hate depictions of pretty women, or that it’s wrong for characters to be Asian in an East Asian setting book, but the fact is that this is literally the only time in the whole game line that we get a recurring depiction of a character as naked and attractive… and somehow it’s an Asian woman. Contrast that with the depiction of Erik in The Book of Legions and Ends of Empire, and you’ll see my point. It’s a real departure from the game line as a whole and I don’t feel like it’d help sell the setting to your average female player.

Likewise, there’s moments of what feels like teeth-grinding generalization about culture here and there, mostly in broad declarations of what “Chinese” people are like: superstitious, family-oriented, ancestor-worshipping… I mean, I understand how this could sound “interesting” or “good” to white, North American game developers and white, North American players alike, and I can even see where things like this might be a culture’s reaction to the horrors of the World of Darkness.

I mean, when I first got to Korea a few decades ago, I was surprised at how many people seemed to believe in ghosts in a literal sense—like, they’d avoid places at night that were believed haunted (like Iksan’s train station), or avoid whistling at night (and demand I not do it, too). I was astonished at how many fortune-tellers seemed to be able to support themselves off hocus-pocus alone, and, well… the government here still subsidizes an alternative-medicine system based on claims centered on invisible, scientifically undetectable “energies.” (And don’t get me started on how mainstream shamanism was just before I moved here, or how shamanic a lot of mainstream Christianity still is here.) However, the belief wasn’t universal, and I wouldn’t want to generalize about it. 

Still, it’s pretty hamfisted at times, I have to admit. Take this passage:

The Chinese, both living and dead, are a superstitious people in general. Some ignore superstitions entirely, but many let them rule their lives. As such, there are penalties that follow the avoidance of bad luck. 

I’m sure the intention is not racist here, but… well, the wording really makes it read that way. Better wording, that is to say, would do a lot more to dispel the obvious problems there. This could easily be a much less racist explanation that appeals to cultural difference, such as, say:

In the World of Darkness, modern Westerners tend to take refuge in mass denial of the supernatural (or in organized religions), denying the experiences of those who encounter the world’s stranger sights and denizens. The prevailing tendency in many Eastern cultures, however, is instead to develop many more direct methods of dealing with these pervasive supernatural forces. Some (like denial) are relatively effective, but others are mere superstitions that hinder believers.

The phrasing of the original passage (I imagine, unwittingly) takes what could have been an interesting observation of broad cultural differences in the gameworld (and, arguably, our world)—that Westerner culture tends to insist on a single model of the supernatural that they accept or reject (while collectively rejecting everything beyond it), while Eastern cultures tend toward a more syncretic melding of various supernatural belief systems, and tend to be more comfortable with the self-contradictions that arise from that (and thus less likely to just reject the supernatural wholesale)—and instead turns it into an embarrassing and somewhat insulting generalization. But, you know, even my rewording is still problematic, because on some level the idea is that Asians are superstitious while Westerners are less so… a deeply problematic assertion. 

The book isn’t full of gaffes like that, by any means, but there are a few passages that made me wince. I was reminded of how I picked up Kindred of the East thinking it might be fun to try get Korean friends into RPGs… until I read it, and knew there was no way I could pitch it to them, at least not without a lot of work fixing the setting and system. Also, the treatment of East Asia as a cultural and political bloc is confusing: sometimes, “China” means China, and sometimes it seems to mean all of East Asia. Yellow Springs is a Sino-Centric empire, but it uses Japanese (and only Japanese) historical events on its timeline, and sometimes the subjugated wraiths from the greater East Asian sphere who aren’t Chinese still get called “Chinese.” It’s more confusing and inconsistent than it is offensive, to me, but I also suspect the authors maybe don’t grasp how deeply the nationalisms of East Asia would probably carry over into the afterlife. Also, since Dark Kingdom of Jade was a Wraith 1E book, it happens to contradict the 2nd Edition rules in a few ways, mainly in its assumption that the language of the dead isn’t universal. (Not just in flavor text, but in game terms: if hun and p’o are essentially the same as Psyche and Shadow… why aren’t they just called Psyche and Shadow?)

Still, my biggest issue with the book is that it didn’t really inspire me in terms of games I’d be interested in running. That’s subjective, of course, and I don’t think that’s because of a lack of cool ideas, mind you: I think it’s more about the economy of presentation (or, in places, the lack of it). I love the idea of the “Earth Hel” presented in Chapter Six. But while it’s very, very detailed, most of those details are focused on how powerless anyone who goes there effectively becomes. Mrs. Meng (a kind of goddess/judging spirit more powerful than Yu Huang and all his armies put together) is a wonderful character that PCs are supposed to run into, but beyond their encounter with her, most player characters will find themselves helpless throughout much of Hell… and then they get smelted down into White Jade. As a snapshot of an awful regime, it’s effective, but as a game setting… er, what’s the point? (I know, I know: there’s an adventure set in the region in the follow-up book, Dark Kingdom of Jade Adventures—see below—but aspects of that adventure actually fly in the face of how it’s presented here.)  

Likewise, though of course the entirety of the Jade Palace is (purposefully) unmappable, I felt that the breakdown of all the departments of the Jade Kingdom’s bureaucracy and the Jade Palace (in Chapters 3 and 5, respectively) could have been conveyed in a somewhat more economical and interesting way with, say, a colorfully annotated org chart or some kind of conceptual (or even a literal) map of the core (or “known”) area of the Jade Palace, with different department offices and torture zones, prisoner holding pens, and so on all listed on the map, implicitly revealing (through their layout and geography) a lot about exactly how those departments actually work. Perhaps I’m spoiled, having read later Wraith books where the authors did get creative about presenting things as in-game texts and accounts in the way I’m thinking. 

Likewise, early on the book gets bogged down in what I think is an overdetailed history of Yellow Springs (in Chapter 2), and its government system (in Chapter 3). In Chapter 3 particularly, we get statblocks for “sample tax collectors” and “sample judges,” which I think kind of misses the point of sample NPCs: I’d rather have a few example NPCs I could use out of the box, or use to inspire other NPCs, to be honest, and would be happier accepting a much briefer summary of the ins and outs of each branch of the government in exchange for that.. or, even better, for a chunk of advice and adventure seeds about how to build Chronicles around government intrigue, around Yellow Springs’ colonial activities, its legal system, and so on. Of course, maybe it’s just that my return to gaming was via the more stripped-down OSR/DIY route, but I feel like the amount of prose spent on detailed worldbuilding is more than I would need, and the amount spent on stuff-to-use-in-game is much less than I’d like to have.  

Finally, this book is a setting supplement, rather than a separate rulebook: Wraith wasn’t ready for a whole separate stand-alone rulebook for a change of location and time period, not yet. I think that’s a good thing, since the mechanics of Yellow Springs wraiths are basically the same as with Stygian ones. (It’d be tougher to do a supplement for the Bush of Ghosts that didn’t revisit large, fundamental chunks of game mechanics, for example.) That said, a little more illumination on how hun and p’o relate to Psyche and Shadow might have been nice, along with other material on how the settings relate to one another. It’s said that Stygian Arcanoi are known in Yellow Springs, but some are not widely practiced outside resistance groups. How were Western Arcanoi transmitted to these groups? How do most Wraiths in Yellow Springs make do without what seems like pretty crucial Arcanoi that are so common and indispensable in Stygia? And why, given the fact that possession and trance-channeling rituals were common in traditional folk religions both in China and Taiwan (as well as in Korean and Mongolian shamanism), would the Inhabit Arcanos go widely unused in Yellow Springs?  

I guess I’ve made it clear that the book has issues. It’s not that I think it’s outright terrible (like Kindred of the East often was), but especially with several decades’ hindsight, there’s a few ways that this book hasn’t aged particularly well, and a lot of ways I can see where this book could be redone to be much better. I’m curious how many people actually used it to run Wraith Chronicles that were set in, or passed through, Yellow Springs and the rest of the Asian underworld. While I’ve seen a fair number of online accounts of games set in Stygia and the Shadowlands, I’ve only seen passing mention of Yellow Springs-based games, with a few exceptions where people seemed to like this book more than I did. Then again, 1995 was a long time ago, and I imagine most such Chronicles would have been played through to the end long before play reports were a popular thing online, or were posted anywhere they’d still be available now. 

Dark Kingdom of Jade Adventures 

This is the companion book to Dark Kingdom of Jade, offering a series of adventures that can be played as stand-alone or as a series. Pretty obviously, you need that book to get the most out of Dark Kingdom of Jade Adventures

It’s a curious book, and definitely a mix of really inventive stuff and, well… some disappointing stuff. The first two “adventures” in the book—actually, they’re both adventure locales, that is, Haunts, because the first half of the book is subtitled “Places to Go”—exemplify the kind of mixed-bag this book is. 

The first, “The Odyssey of the Prince Alexsei: Flagship of the Tsushima Floating Renegades,” details a bizarre haunt that characters are likely to encounter somewhere in the Tempest, or in an East-Asian port in the Shadowlands. The haunt is the Prince Alexsei, one of the three doomed ships sent from Russia to take on the Japanese after the two nations fought of Port Arthur. I’ve read about this conflict, and about the doomed “fleet” of three warships that traveled a year to reach the vicinity of Japan, only to be rapidly beaten in a single battle. (Well, two of the ships were beaten; one simply fled.) Knowing some of the history, I found this haunt fascinating: it houses a group of Rebels (mostly Japanese, but some Russian) who’re bent on taking down Yu Huang and tearing apart the hegemonic rule of Yellow Springs. It’s mobile, it’s got a fascinating mix of NPCs (Russian and Japanese, mostly), a tense peace, and an agenda for player characters to get sucked into or to avoid, as the group desires. About the only thing I could ask for is a few more adventure hooks. 

The second haunt, though, is disappointing overall. It’s in Bangkok, Thailand: another outlying region of the Yellow Springs empire, and one supposedly rife with rebels and movements against Yu Huang. But it feels like a mélange of (among other things) Miss Saigon and that Murray Head tune “One Night in Bangkok” (sigh):

I mean, it’s set in a brothel named “The House of the Fallen Sun.” If you were looking for the one overstereotyped aspect of Bangkok to center a game on, well, look no further.

I’m not trying to personally slam Tim Akers (the author of this particular section of the book): for all I know, this topic was assigned to him, and besides, the World of Darkness was a place that banked both on grimy, nasty sleaze, and on familiarity: gameworlds based on known stereotypes are more easily parsed and quickly immersive to players, so they’re “easier” to write and sell. Still, one can’t help but notice that the farther from North America one goes, the more readily these kinds of stereotypes got deployed, typically by white authors, and presumably for mostly-white players. To me it looks like a missed opportunity to go beyond the stereotype the average white, Western Storyteller would think up on his or her own. 

It’s too bad, since Bangkok has all kinds of other interesting stuff that could have been worked into a setting: stuff involving the real-world politics of the region, like ethnic conflicts within modern Thailand, or the kingdom’s having managed to avoid Western colonial occupation (well, sort of: there’s been talk the idea of semicoloniality as a better term for what Thailand experienced)… there’s so much, if you do your research, and if you trust your audience to be interested in going deeper than the media-inflected stereotypes.  After all, your average player or Storyteller already knows about (or thinks he knows about) the brothels and the sex shows and the infamous “ladyboys.” But what about the puppet shows where the puppets are inhabited by Wraiths nightly? What about the spirits of the drowned and the Pathos to be garnered at the floating markets? Or the ghosts of all those Cambodian refugees who fled into Thailand, only to be returned to Cambodia to die at the hands of the Pol Pot’s thugs? How about the Necropolitan politics of a capital through which foreign traders passed as far back as the early 1600s, which fell under French control for a while in the 17th century, which had a huge Chinese immigrant population, and yet still somehow managed not to formally fall under Japanese control during that country’s imperial adventure in the 20th century? 

I’m not arguing that Bangkok or Asia in the World of Darkness setting should be sanitized, but there’s a hell of a lot more to Bangkok than its admittedly enormous sex trade… the Necropolis is, after all, thousands of years old, and besides, one or two hundred years ago, the streets of Western metropoli like New York City and London also teemed with prostitutes of many kinds, including children, the vast majority of whom lived and died in conditions that’d ensure many became Wraiths, but they never show up in the writeups of Western Necropoli. My point being that my objection isn’t so much the inclusion of this element, but the selectiveness (and, I’d argue, the “laziness”) of its inclusion in Bangkok alone.   

That said, there is something interesting in the backstory of the House of the Fallen Sun—something involving Tremere vampires and experimentation with wraiths—which also included mention of the Camarilla Prince of Bangkok, and Sabbat in the city. Apparently in 1995, when Dark Kingdom of Jade Adventures was published, the cosmology of the Kindred of the East game line that was launched three years later wasn’t yet even a twinkle in anyone’s eye; it seems to have been assumed that the vampires inhabiting East Asia were of the same variety as we find in the West. It’s an interesting thought, and I kind of wonder what it’d have been like to see more of that.  

The third section of the book is also more a locale writeup than an adventure (though it does have some story ideas tacked onto the end): this is a closer look at the Jade Palace of Yu Huang. It’s… fine, I guess, in its way. Yu Huang is particularized as not just a truly horrible autocrat but also a truly horrible old pervert and sadist. Is that a racial stereotype? Maybe… we don’t get a sense that Charon has a harem or is into real-life torture for kicks, for example. Nonetheless, both the East and the West of the Underworld is ruled by assholes in this game, so it’s not a total stretch of the imagination. That said, I did find myself wishing again—for this locale as for the previous two—that White Wolf had include maps of some sort. Not elaborately keyed maps, but just something simple, like the conceptual maps in Charnel Houses of Europe: The Shoah (to be discussed in a later post of this series) or the couple of pages that mapped out the Sub-Basement of the Orpheus HQ complex in the Orpheus supplement Crusade of Ashes. (More on that whole game line later in this series.)

After having internalized some elements of the OSR philosophy in the past few years, I’ve come to see that maps, however vague or conceptual, can be a great way of conveying a lot of implied information—if they’re well-done, they can actually get across a lot more than one can work into a few short paragraphs. But in 1995, White Wolf apparently didn’t really have an interest in maps. Maybe part of that was the hangover from D&D being so focused on maps, I don’t know.  

The second half of the book (“Things To Do”) contains actual adventure scenarios of the sort familiar from other early-line Wraith books like Midnight Express. I mostly liked these better than I liked the locale writeups, though the first, “A Hope In Hell, or The Mask and the Mirror” (by Ben Chessel) is kind of railroady. You could rework it into a more open-ended investigation scenario, though, and the version of Ti Yu (the Earth Hell) here is much more compelling than the version presented in the Dark Kingdom of Jade book. (Precisely because it contradicts parts of the earlier book’s account of the place.)

A second “scenario” (by Tim Akers, mentioned above) is more of a grab bag of possible “missions” involving a group of war-dead wraiths calling themselves the Lost Legion. They’re basically westerners who died in various historical wars in Asia and remained in the Dark Kingdom of Jade; they’re essentially a Heretic/Renegade group dedicated to taking down Yu Huang. Though there’s a specific adventure trajectory written up—a sort of endgame for player-character involvement with the Lost Legion—I think you could easily expand this seed into a great campaign frame if you have a group who digs Vietnam War movies (or is interested in the Korean war, or the Pacific theater of WWII). The assumption is the characters will mainly be Westerner Wraiths trapped in Asia, which probably is an easier way to approach Yellow Springs for a lot of Western players, too. It shows signs of how US-centric narratives about the Vietnam War were in vogue in the late 80s and 90s, but even so it is solid material that could be used in a game.  

The final scenario of the book (“In the House of Pika Don,” by James Moore and Allen Tower) is essentially Dark Kingdoms of Jade‘s quick-capsule Asian prefiguration of Charnel Houses of Europe: The Shoah (see below). It’s set in the area of Hiroshima, which, in the Shadowlands, and is a creepy, mind-twisting, body-horror take on the aftereffects of nuclear denotation. The bestiary of twisted monstrosities could easily be ported to the Tempest if you didn’t want to run the scenario, too. It’s good stuff, and sympathetic to the horror undergone by the people of Hiroshima, without pulling punches about how horrific the thing was that was inflicted on them.   

The book ends with ads for the Risen supplement and the first couple of Guildbooks. If you wanted to use this book, you’d probably want the Dark Kingdoms of Jade book too—for the weird Arcanoi of the region, and for some ideas on the local culture—but it’s a book that probably mostly pays off for a Storyteller who’s willing to put in the work to expand the material out into a form that could be used for a longer-running game.  

Charnel Houses of Europe: The Shoah 

Charnel Houses of Europe was notorious online before it came out: Richard Dansky has written about how rumors flew on message boards, and how trolls attacked him and White Wolf pretty much from the moment the project was announced, making false reports to the Jewish Anti-Defamation League for example.

The debate (er, mass brawl) that took place over at rec.games.frp.misc is still online, and starts with this comment, on 2 February 1997:

Black Dog Games is publishing a Wraith sourcebook about the Holocaust. You know, with Nazi death camps, gas chambers, mass graves, 6 million murdered  Jews, to say nothing of Gypsies, Blacks, Homosexuals, and everyone else the Nazis didn’t like.

And Black Dog is making a game about it.

Does anyone else find this as offensive as I do?

– Michael Schloss

The debate goes on for many, many pages. Skimming it is instructive about how the internet (or parts of it) have always been a Mad Max Wasteland of self-righteous outrage, in case you thought that was new with social networks; it’s also instructive in that similar things are still happening within RPGdom today. Still, though, most of the arguments against hinge on the idea that making a game about the Holocaust is simply impermissible, because making games about serious, painful aspects of history is automatically and inherently disrespectful.  

We’ve kind of gotten over that idea now, haven’t we? Yes, people can make disrespectful, shitty, awful games about serious issues and human suffering, but it’s not taken as given that all games dealing with such subjects are disrespectful, insensitive, and bad, right?  We have Jason Morningstar’s The Night Witches (about female Russian war pilots and their sufferings and sacrifices), and Cthulhu Confidential (which invites players to try Lovecraftian mystery-solving in the 1930s, playing characters whose experiences in that time period are rife with the horrors of racism and sexism); I recently reviewed That Dragon, Cancer, a computer game about what it’s like to have a kid suffering from cancer (and about what it’s like to process that though a Christian worldview).

Well, wait: some people did rail against someone turning pediatric cancer into a game. I guess the trolls will ever and always be with us, and the things they’ll rail against are always going to be the things that make them uncomfortable. Still, I think mostly we’ve internalized that games can deal with important, serious subjects in all kinds of ways (even schlocky ones) without being “teh evol.” Most of us know now on a deep, internalized level what Janet Berliner and Richard Dansky felt they had to directly address at length, in their respective pieces in the book: that games are another way of exploring these issues, and when they turn to historical events, they’re a way of telling the story again: keeping alive the flame of memory, in no small part so that repetitions will be that much less likely to happen.

Of course, the Holocaust isn’t necessarily the darkest moment in European history: any Congolese person, or descendant of an African slave, can tell you that. The “special” status of the Holocaust is obviously Eurocentric, and based in a specific kind of historiography that is slowly fading from prominence in the academic world though it still holds sway in general society. Which is to say, I suspect the Holocaust occupies a special place in the Western mind probably more than a little bit because it involved white people killing other white people in Europe. Of course, Wraith goes some way to reminding us that every death is ultimately tragic: that the mass deaths in Russia and China and Cambodia and the Korean War and in Africa and in each of our World Wars would reverberate just as profoundly as the Holocaust.  

Still, at least in Wraith: The Oblivion, there’s a partial in-game justification for the focus on the Holocaust: the focal setting is Western—the underworld of Western civilization—and the wraiths from other civilizations have their own genocide-tainted underworlds. The Holocaust is special for Stygia because it’s the biggest genocide that occurred in Stygian territory. Would White Wolf have done an equivalent supplement for the dead of the transatlantic slave trade? I doubt it, but they never got far enough to do a Bush of Ghosts book, so we’ll never know. 

All of that’s abstract theory, though: how is the book? I think it’s very, very good. It avoids hagiography of the victims—a dehumanizing thing, I always find. It tells a lot of history in a pretty compressed form. It goes beyond the death camps to the ghettoes and the political and social history of oppression in fascist Europe, spending some time on the homosexuals, “gypsies,” dissidents, and others who were fed to the maw of the Holocaust, too.

In no small part, it achieves this because it focuses, for the gameplay elements, not on the Holocaust itself, but on its reverberating after-effects in the Shadowlands. While the text is about half historical summary—very sensitively written, but also brutally honest—the other half is imaginative confabulation of the afterlife of the worst genocide ever to occur within Europe’s borders, as observed in the afterlife decades later. Sections deal with a couple of Jewish ghettoes—the Theresienstadt and Warsaw ghettos—as well as Babi Yar and Auschwitz-Birkenau, all of which ended up being Fetters to enormous numbers of Wraiths, and which Stygia set aside as a sort of independent special political zone for the victims of the Holocaust, as well as their allies and hangers-on.  

Anyone who expected the book to revel in or make fun of the Holocaust, or to “turn it into fun and games,” must have been sorely disappointed when the book actually came out. Parts of it are harrowing to read, not because I didn’t know of the horrors, but just because the horrors are harrowing to read about no matter how often one does so. I’m not sure I could really handle running a game in this particular setting: The Dark Kingdom of Wire—the networked ghettoes and death camps of the Holocaust—is too gloomy and depressing and pain-filled even by the reference frame of an already darkly-themed game. The authors also make no effort to engage in hagiography: some of the dybbuks (as the Wraiths who were victims of the Nazis and their collaborators ironically call themselves) were absolutely not-nice folks, and did horrible things themselves inside the camps. But neither is it implied that these imperfect, human victims were any less the victims of an evil, unconscionable, horrifying system. 

It feels pretty timely, reading this book in a time when people, not so long ago, were arguing about whether it’s okay to punch a Nazi. That, I think, is the least of our problems today, this book suggests. What we should be worrying about is how to stem the flow of disaffected, ignorant young white men who are attracted to neo-Nazism—who’re willing to label themselves with the name of a group of human beings so depraved and sick that they threw infants at electrified fences, threw them into the air and impaled them on bayonets, or tore them apart in front of their own heartbroken mothers. Punching Nazis is nothing: how do we ensure their ideology and rhetoric ends up stillborn forever more? (And, of course, every other racist, violent, and hate-driven creed like it?) That’s a task worth thinking long and hard about. Including it in a game probably isn’t for everyone or every group, but not including at least some comment about it in a game line about ghosts and death would seem off. The theme somewhat necessitates addressing the subject. 

There are times when a piece of RPG writing transcends the game it’s written for, and aspires to be something more profound entirely. This is one of those books. I’d argue that it’s a work of painful, heartbreaking art. I don’t know whether it actually played any role in our collective discovery that gamebooks can tackle serious, historical, painful subjects… but it’s probably the first gamebook I ever read that did do so, and dared to do so despite loud criticism online. It’s worth getting, and reading, and studying. I would love to know how often it actually got used by game groups, but I think in some ways that’s not even its primary raison d’être

Doomslayers: Into the Labyrinth

If you’ve looked at reviews online, you’ll know that (a few criticisms aside) Doomslayers is a book widely beloved among Wraith fans, and for good reason: it blows open the Labyrinth, the dark underworld in which dwell the Spectres who serve Oblivion, and in doing so, it also opens up a whole range of different styles of play that I think weren’t necessarily apparent to Wraith GMs and players prior to its publication.

If you ever wanted to do “dungeon-crawling” with Wraith, this book would be your ticket. Same goes if you’re thinking about espionage missions into the den of vipers called the Labyrinth. It wouldn’t even necessarily have to be a long-term setting: Wraiths sent to infiltrate a Spectre Amphiskopolis might be an interesting phase of a longer chronicle, if you dig deep-cover espionage games. (Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spectre, Spy, anyone?)

Want to actually play a Spectre? While the mechanical side of that is largely handled in Dark Reflections: Spectres (which I reviewed back in Part 6 of this series), Doomslayers is the supplement that heavily details what life among the Shadow-Eaten is really like, and gives chewy ideas about kinds of campaign arcs would make sense for characters of those types. (That’s not for everyone, of course: I think to some degree the idea’s a hold-over from when “evil party” campaigns were sort of put off-limits in 1st Edition AD&D, and everyone immediately wanted to play them. I don’t know that a Spectres campaign would really be very fun, or that it could even last very long: it’s one kind of Wraith campaign I haven’t seen anyone discuss 

Aside from the (serviceable) fiction and in introduction, the book can be broken down into four parts: a few chapters on Doomslaying, ranging from the origins and present subculture of doomslaying to tactics, special Arcanoi, and equipment commonly used by doomslayers. It’s relatively solid stuff, though it’s always weird to receive the setting information in the form of a sort of orientation workshop presentation. It’s a bit long for the information you get, but it’s an alright read, and by this point it’s apparent that wordy worldbuilding was just kinda White Wolf’s default style. The second part, Life in the Labyrinth, examines the Shade-eaten, ranging from their social and cultural organization, their power-hierarchy, and the role way plays among them, as well as the war they’re fighting and the population of spectres—new types of Spectres, as well as the relationship between them, and new Dark Arcanoi. 

The third part, The Great Maze, details a few locales of interest in the Labyrinth (or even just the Shadowlands), and offers some fairly hands-on, in-depth discussion of features of Labyrinth, not just beneath Stygia (though the Veinous Stair area does get discussed a bit) but also in other Dark Kingdoms (and even beneath the Shadowlands of the moon, where things get bewildering), and what the Labyrinth is specifically like in an immediate, sensory-experience kind of way that’s promisingly useful for GMs hoping to set the scene in a partiularized way.

Finally , the Appendices detail various Shadowed Plasmics of bewildering types that dwell in the Labyrinth, and the NPCs of note there. Unusually, there are no advertising pages at the end of the book: it simply finishes at the last page of the supplement text.

Given the ultimate relevance of both Oblivion and its servants, and the Labyrinth, to any Wraith game, I think it’s an invaluable resource. That said, it’s occasionally annoying to notice the degree to which material is recycled from previous books—or, rather, partially recycled with a note identifying which previous supplement from the game line contained the information for a given Relic or Dark Acanoi. This is a bit frustrating, since one prefers not to be flipping through one book only to be redirected to another book. That’s unavoidable in a game line like this, where supplements didn’t get multiple editions: in some ways this book serves double duty as a kind of second edition of Dark Reflections: Spectres, but had to be written so that it wouldn’t render that previous book useless.

Still, it’s a minor quibble: if you’re running a game that will involve Spectre player-characters (something I daren’t contemplate), or Wraiths that will be traveling in the Labyrinth, this book still has lots of great stuff you can put to use in a game. That kind of game isn’t for everyone, of course, and naturally it’ll still take work by the GM to make a workable chronicle out of this material, but it’s a great book if that sort of thing appeals to you.

Personally, I think it’s one of the more workable ways to use the deeper-underworld aspect of the game: instead of Stygian politics, characters just get recruited and sent off on suicide missions into the Labyrinth, while struggling in their off hours to resolve their unfinished business back in the Skinlands/Shadowlands (without falling foul of Renegade shenanigans and Hierarchy patrols or succumbing to the temptations offered by Heretics).

In fact, in some ways, I’d go so far as to say that this book represents White Wolf momentarily getting over the need for the World of Darkness to be not-D&D. This is, point blank, an Underdark/dungeoneering supplement for Wraith, a game that many saw as being the Angstiest of the World of Darkness games. A lot of people online have ranked it one of the most crucial and useful supplement books in the line. I can see why: I never ran Wraith this way, but I think it’s a perfectly valid approach, and would be fun, if not as the only mode of one’s game, then certainly as an occasional or recurrent one. The horror of the Labyrinth and the Spectres is a rich seam, just waiting to be mined.  

One more thing: I think Doomslayers is actually the high-water mark for production values in the Wraith: The Oblivion line—which already had really high production values. The art at the beginning of each chapter—if I’m not mistaken, all done by Larry MacDougall—lends a unified quality to the book, as well as setting a really creepy tone, and the writing is really solid. 

Ends of Empire

Ends of Empire is, as I mentioned above, was the last book of the game line. It’s also several books rolled into one:

  • an adventure module about the end of Stygia (and of the Wraith metaplot);
  • a book about the Ferrymen; and
  • the final Guildbook published for the line, detailing the Mnemoi guild.

The latter section of the book, I’ve already reviewed in the Guildbooks installment of this series, and I won’t say more about it here. That still leaves the rest of the book to discuss, though.

Ends of Empire is an odd book, both because it’s the last book in the original game line—and thus is crammed with stuff, in an attempt to tie together some of the various loose ends that would otherwise have been left dangling with the end of the Wraith: The Oblivion line—and because it’s part of the Year of Reckoning series from 1999, which as I understand it was a large shift in the World of Darkness where metaplot started becoming less about background color, and more about actual, game-impacting shifts in the cosmology of the game world. I could be wrong, but I feel like it was also maybe the first overt step toward the 2003-04 Time of Judgement series of books, which officially ended in the in-game “destruction” of the Old World of Darkness. 

The first thing to discuss is the thread of game fiction that runs through this volume, concerning a recurring character named Erik (who most memorably appears in the thread of game-fiction that runs through The Book of Legions) and his transformation to a Ferryman. It’s fitting, since one of the chapters details Ferrymen and how to run one as a player character, and the fiction’s relatively good, as game fiction goes. I used to skip the fiction sections of gamebooks, especially the really long ones in Wraith, but I think Erik’s story actually ties together the book quite well, as well as suggesting what kind of games might be possible for a group who decided to embrace the idea of the end of Stygia.    

Like Doomslayers: Into the Labyrinth, there’s a part of this book that seems to act as a kind of update and expansion to a previous book in the game line. That’s the first chapter, titled The Last Hour of Jade: it’s kind of a combination of some more history for Yellow Springs and Yu Huang, and an update on what’s happened there (metaplot-wise) since Dark Kingdom of Jade was published. Essentially, it’s setup for the adventure in the second chapter. 

That adventure, titled The Last Danse Macabre, pretty much is designed to put player characters front-and-center at the collapse of Stygia. I’m sure the prospect of having PCs help defeat Coldheart (one of the great Malfeans of the Labyrinth), and then meet Charon and have him invite them to build a new Stygia, with themselves as Deathlords, appeals to some people. However, I don’t think that’s the way I’d run the fall of Stygia: it’s a bit too D&D Immortals boxed set for me, I think. There’s issues with the adventure leading up to that end, too. I mean, the first part—when Yu Huang attacks London just before a Maelstrom strikes—is interesting. The Dark Kingdom of Jade uses some advanced Arcanoi to attack London, Pearl Harbor style, but a Maelstrom strikes, cutting down the degree of advantage that the surprise attack gives the Yellow Springs troops.

Part II of the adventure, though, is where things get a little more problematic. There’s a trip into the mind of a Mnemoi NPC which is supposed to reveal a bunch of Charon’s secrets, but in play, I’m not sure how compelling it would be: there aren’t really puzzles or many moving parts, just the expectation that characters will wander through a memory palace receiving infodump after infodump about Charon’s memories and backstory. Were I running a game where this stuff was meant to come to light, I’d have let it come through in dribs and drabs over the entire chronicle. The PCs turn out to be the “prophesied” heroes of the story (a tired trope), and one that’s sprung onto the PCs pretty late in the game. Interestingly, the least railroady section of Part II actually involves a literal railroad—the Midnight Express, which is left option and open-ended as characters journey toward Stygia, hoping to arrive before it falls under Spectre assault. (Here, I think another route to getting PCs involved could be using the “In The House of Pika Don” adventure in Dark Kingdoms of Jade Adventures.)

Part III, similarly, is open-ended in one sense, but with a definite outcome: the Midnight Express derails, and characters have to make their way to Stygia on foot. They arrive in time to witness the return of Charon, and then take part in a big war council as a wave of Spectres is about to be unleashed against the city. Finally, in part IV, the PCs must face and defeat Coldheart—a Malfean Spectre—and then Charon basically names them the new Deathlords before he Transcends.  

Basically, here the idea is that characters’ personal story and the Wraith metaplot intersect by the characters becoming the new core characters of the metaplot. Does that appeal? Eh, not to me, not really. It feels a bit contrived, and I think it’d be more interesting, if I were to include the Fall of Stygia and the Sixth Great Maelstrom into my game, to do so by having PCs be nobodies who have to try survive it, maybe doing thankless grunt work. That feels more like the Wraith I know, and less like a superheroic, high-fantasy approach that, if I wanted, I’d probably play a different game to get. Of course, that approach would probably make it harder to integrate all the action going on in all those different places: The Tempest, the Labyrinth, London, Stygia, all in tight sequence become hotbeds of activity. Still, there’s an infinite number of stories you could explore that don’t involve characters fighting Coldheart, meeting Charon, and being handed the reins of the Western underworld.

Maybe the metaplot isn’t so inexorable, either: what if the PCs managed to intercept Xerxes Jones before he detonated his nuke down in the Labyrinth? What if they were in Yellow Springs, saw what was going on, and reported back to Stygia in time for London to be ready for the assault? None of that requires an “ancient prophecy” be shoehorned into the game.

Likewise, I feel like if the desire is to have Wraiths be the new Deathlords, why not get them there through play: start them as mid-level members of their Legions, and have them work their way up through service, skullduggery, and luck? Again, that’s a different game than a lot of Wraith Chronicles.I’d probably be giving Gareth [Ryder-]Hanrahan’s Paranoia: High Programmers a look for techniques in organizing and creating mechanics for play as über-powerful Deathlords in Stygia. I imagine being a High Programmer in Paranoia has a lot more in common with being a Deathlord than one might think, though of course with less comedy. An Apocalypse-Powered approach might also be good—maybe something riffing off Blades in the Dark or Legacy: Life Among the Ruins, where players run individual characters and whole factions.)

There’s one other problem with the way this adventure ties to the metaplot, incidentally, and that’s in the role Enoch plays. Those who’ve read all of the Wraith books so far will notice that Enoch has barely been mentioned—most prominently, it appeared in Erik’s story, in the tie-in fiction for The Book of Legions. However, the actual writeup of Enoch is in a supplement titled Dirty Secrets of the Black Hand, which is part of the Vampire: The Masquerade game line. Doubtless when Ends of Empire came out, those who were into Wraith  but weren’t into Vampire must have been a bit puzzled: Enoch gets mentioned in The Book of Legions, in passing, but that’s about it. I think Ends of Empire needed a brief writeup in this book, for those people, especially since it’s such a weird, interesting place. Xerxes Jones also presents problems, for any GM who wants to include him in an adventure: he’s a “Void Engineer,” and if you want to know what that means, you need Mage: The Ascension. Still, at least as a character he’s only tied to the Wraith line: his previous appearances were specifically in books from Wraith, not Mage, and any imaginative and resourceful Storyteller ought to be able to fake together a Mage NPC for a Wraith game if needed.  

On the bright side, one of the more interesting things about this adventure is the fact that we (finally) get a sort of mini-gazetteer for locations Stygia. The city had remained quite vaguely defined, and it was interesting to see specific locales of interest within the Onyx Tower as well as in the streets surrounding it, and to learn more about those streets themselves. Again, I can’t help but imagine Stygia might have gotten a city book at some point, if the game line had only gotten its full eight-year run. 

The third chapter of the book—By Charon’s Oar: The History of the Ferrymen—is a sort of “guildbook” for Ferrymen, detailing their secrets, their powers, and how to make a player character Ferryman. As the narrative of Erik’s becoming a Ferryman suggests, this is obviously one of those expanded play options that becomes especially relevant if you are integrating the fall of Stygia metaplot arc into your game: Ferrymen are, after all, powerful and enigmatic enough to exist outside of the sphere of influence of the rulers of Stygia. This means that if you wanted to have any intra-factional politics at all in a game where Charon hands the torch to the PCs, Ferrymen are going to be important and useful. 

Though the writeup is certainly complete enough to get the idea across, I feel like I can see the outline of the supplement that would have been written: Arcanoi section, initiation rites, a brief writeup of their city, Dis, major Ferrymen NPCs, and how to run a Ferryman as a PC (which is noted as being especially useful for “solo play”). It’s an interesting read, and explains a lot about Ferryman motivations… but it also demystifies them in a way that I can’t help but feel a little put off by: I think the Underworld could have done with more enigmas, and more stuff that couldn’t quite be quantified and made to square exactly with game terms. Seeing the systems for statting up Ferrymen felt a bit like seeing the stats for Gandalf or Elminster or Cthulhu: like, okay, wow, powerful… but somehow it feels like statting up these powerful, mysterious beings robs the setting of some of its enchanting strangeness. RPG settings aren’t, after all, computer games: we don’t need to generate fixed stats and systems for everything, including the most exalted of the setting’s mysteries. (Still, I know some GMs and players would find that idea off-putting.)  

Skipping the Mnemoi Guildbook section, which as I mentioned, I discussed earlier in this series, the book ends with Appendix: Epilogues and Final Fates, which traces the outcome of the Fall of Stygia for various NPCs featured throughout the game line and metaplot (which will be more or less compelling depending on how much you care about the latter), followed by some suggestions about types of games and campaigns that make sense in the wake of Stygia’s destruction. The suggestions are a little fuzzy, and I think a little more material, as well as some discussion of the whole post-Stygia paradigm, would have been nice, but as Rich Dansky notes in his brief, bittersweet afterword, the book was stuck tying up what was originally envisioned as an eight-year series of gamebooks. There’s a comment, at the beginning of the last section of the book, Storytelling After the Fall, which suggests it wasn’t perfectly clear that Wraith wasn’t going to return eventually: 

Just because the books may stop flowing for a while doesn’t mean that you have to stop playing, or that there’s nothing more to say.

This is repeated in Dansky’s afterword:

So, this is the end, at least for now. 

That optimism is interesting: I wonder why Dansky used those qualifiers: did he imagine or hope Wraith might come back? Had he been given reason to hope it might? Had it been discussed whether it might continue, as a low-priority line? Was he just expressing his own personal hope? Was he, perhaps, alluding to Orpheus, Wraith’s follow-up game that didn’t see print until 2003 but which could have been kicked around, at least as an idea, all the way back in 1999?

As far as I know, Dansky’s never commented directly on those comments, but it’s hard not to find it interesting that the sentiment shows up a couple of times in the last pages of the game’s final book. Whatever the case, it gives a kind of optimistic spin on the “death” of the game line, which is truly fitting given the optimism at the heart of Wraith… which, of course, was a game about endings and afterlives. 

The last page of the book, a little heartbreakingly, is an ad for the game line that the death of Wraith: The Oblivion made room for: Hunter: The Reckoning. It’s water under the bridge, now, but I wonder what it was like to turn the page and see that ad for hardcore fans of the game. I imagine more than a few felt like it was a twist of the knife.

(That’s not to dismiss Hunter, of course: hell, most of the campaigns I played with Wraith actually were, or at least began as, mortals campaigns. Had I still been playing in 1999, I probably would have grabbed Hunter and run with it. I wasn’t, so I haven’t actually read the rules, and would be likelier to use some other ruleset to run a game with that concept today. Still, Hunter was the game that took the spot previously occupied by Wraith, so I can’t help but feel some people felt a pang of sadness, seeing the advertisement end the book).  

(…deep breath…)

Wow, that ends my discussion of the actual game books from the Wraith: The Oblivion game line. I’ve reviewed pretty much everything directly billed as a Wraith supplement, as well as books that were aimed at Wraith and other gamelines.

There are probably a few books one could argue deserve to be discussed in this series—say, Clanbook Giovanni or the Giovanni-centered adventure module books—because they involve wraith characters as NPCs, or invite Wraith crossover. However, I don’t have those books, and personally I was never too deeply interested in crossover games with Vampire, Werewolf, Mage, or Changeling, so I’m going to just leave those out. Likewise, though I have a copy of Kindred of the East and especially its supplement The 1000 Hells—the guide to the Yomi world, presumably part of the Dark Kingdom of Jade underworld—I’m going to leave them aside. If I get around to rereading them, or the Exalted book on the Underworld that I’d seen mentioned occasionally, I’ll add an appendix to this series, but those books are not queued up now: this reviewing task has been herculean enough just with the books from the Wraith line alone.   

The happy (and also bittersweet) news is that there’s not much left to cover, now. Next time, I’ll address tie-in fiction (the five Wraith: The Oblivion fiction books that were published) as well as the “comic” book that launched Wraith as a game line, The Face of Death.

Series Navigation<< Revisiting <i>Wraith: The Oblivion</i>—Part 6: Alternate Character Concept SupplementsRevisiting <i>Wraith: The Oblivion</i>—Part 8: Tie-In Fiction and Comics >>

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