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Revisiting Wraith: The Oblivion—Part 11: Play Resources

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This entry is part 11 of 12 in the series Revisiting Wraith the Oblivion

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, though perhaps you might find materials here of use in other games… who knows?

This installment of the series links a ton of fan-made play resources for prospective GMs and players of Wraith, or similar games. It’s intended as a roundup of online resources for those who’re returning to Wraith, or interested in giving it a shot. Hopefully, for the latter group, my discussion of the books in the game line suffice as a guide to what books you might want to get, and what you might want to do with them. The below is all supplemental to that. (And, note, most of it is very old: whether Wraith20 will inspire more Wraith-centric websites and fan-made material remains to be seen. If I find any new stuff, I’ll add it here, and I hope to archive copies of all the links below, so I can share them—with appropriate credit, and permission if possible—if and when the linked resources go offline.) 

Anyone reading this who has more resources to add is welcome to put them in the comments. I’ll add them to the main post when they come in. Note that links may die as time goes by, and indeed you may discover links that have died between the time I wrote this and when I posted it. The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine is your friend when that happens. 

Before we Begin, Something Personal

Before I dive into the Wraith stuff, I figure I’ll mention it here: I myself wrote some (not amazing) material for Wraith: The Oblivion. I’m not sure if I still have a copy, but it was an expansion to Arcanoi that allowed characters to travel into media (like TV, films, music videos) and a kind of undead “cyberspace” on the internet, among other things. Here it is, but warning, it’s very amateurish and terrible:

Terrible as it was (and jumbled! I think that PDF includes a few different versions of part of the text?), when White Wolf put out a call for submissions, I sent it in. I wonder what the “bad” submissions were like, because I received a letter back notifying me that I’d been added to the list of potential freelances for the line. No kidding! I even scanned it when I last visited home:

… well, unless that was just the polite form letter they sent everyone they didn’t intend to contact, so that they wouldn’t be hassled by them? (Ha, I don’t know.) I never heard back, anyway, but then, I’d pitched to write Wraith stuff not long before the termination of the game line. Also, I moved from Saskatoon a year later, and it’s completely possible my parents got a letter from them and never forwarded it to me, who knows? Still, I remember feeling very encouraged as a writer when I got that letter! 

Anyway, I was soon in grad school in a strange city, without a gaming group, so I never wrote more for Wraith, but I imagine in some other world, encouraged by that letter, I might have done freelance work for Wraith or at least contributed fan materials to one of the sites linked below. Alas, it was not to be. But a lot of other people wrote stuff for the game that never saw official publication, and you can find a lot of it below. 

Wraith: The Oblivion Resources Online

The original heyday of Wraith: The Oblivion—such as it was—is long gone, even on the internet (where everything was supposed to live on forever). Still, for those who want to play the game today, some resources remain online, albeit occasionally only through the auspices of the Internet Archive.

Although the Kickstarter for the 20th Anniversary edition of the game got broad support from backers, the fandom for Wraith (and Orpheus) mostly hasn’t played the game actively in years, and none of the the few fansites for the game seem to be actively maintained anymore. (Though I’ve lost track of the link, one old fansite actually had, as its last post from sometime over a decade ago, a posting advertising the website owner’s collection of Wraith books (in mint condition) on sale over on eBay.) 

Even so, there’s a lot of support materials out there, if you’re willing to do a bit of digging.  

That said, here’s what I could dig up in relevant resources:

Alternate Systems for Afterlife Games With a Similar Vibe

First, for those not excited about the ruleset, there are plenty of games offering afterlife gaming without the Storyteller ruleset, but among the most interesting to me is the Ghost Hack game created by Fen Orc, based on the old-school (nu-school?) Black Hack ruleset, which is (as the author explains here) inspired by Wraith: The Oblivion (“the 90s game that got away”). It’s rules-light, old-school based ghost adventuring, and features a lot of the same setting features as Wraith, but in a lighter and (arguably) much more accessible form.  It even has optional rules for doing stuff like the ghost-enslaving empire (i.e. Stygia from Wraith) and for an optional system for “Shadow play”—playing another character’s “Rotten Soul”) for those who want a more Wraith-like experience out of the game. At the time of writing this, a bundle that contains almost everything for Ghost Hack for less than $5.00 on DrivethruRPG. (It doesn’t include this supplement, or the 2nd edition of the game.) The advantages of this system are that the ruleset is very simple and familiar to most RPG fans, the metaphysics of the game are radically simplified, and the lore is pared to a minimum, all to make the game much more accessible to those who’re interested in afterlife gaming but not in the stuff that made Wraith rather heavier sledding.  

That said, Elizabeth Chaipraditkul’s Afterlife: Wandering Souls game also looks pretty promising in terms of preserving some of the feel of a Stygia game, but with a different ruleset.  I haven’t read it or gotten a chance to play it, though I backed the Kickstarter and have the books here on the shelf, waiting for me to dig into them. They look pretty and read smoothly, at a glance.  

Getting the Gamebooks: 

Fan-Made Materials (and More):

Some of these resources are probably gone. (More might have shown up online, but probably not many.)

Whew! That may not be every ancient, lost Wraith fansite that’s still accessible on the Internet Archive or some other means, or every major discussion held online about Wraith… but it feels like it’s probably pretty close. With that, I’ll move on to more recent resources.

(Also, note: I linked fanmade Guildbooks back in Part 4 of this series.)

Discussion of Wraith and Wraith20:

Actual Plays & Game Reports:

I don’t watch or listen to a lot of actual plays, so you’ll have to just try ’em and see. These are pretty much everything I could find available, though:

Podcasts & Audio:

Wraith also comes up regularly on a few RPG podcasts:

I’ll add more if I stumble onto anything interesting. 

Other Stuff:

If you’re trying to run Wraith these days, here are four things of note that have changed since the late 90s that you should integrate into your game in some way: 

That’s plenty to consider, I guess! Much of it is quite serious stuff, but then, Wraith was always a game that engaged with more than the usual amount of serious stuff. 

Oddities:

I only have a few entries for this, but:

Got More?

If you have more stuff to suggest for this post, please do so in the comments. I’m sure there’s a ton of stuff I haven’t turned up that might interest people. 

I’ll wrap up this series in my next post, for now at least. 

Series Navigation<< Revisiting <i>Wraith: The Oblivion</i>—Part 10: OrpheusRevisiting <i>Wraith: The Oblivion</i>—Part 12: Conclusion… for Now >>
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