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Revisiting Wraith: The Oblivion—Part 1: Overview

This entry is part 1 of 12 in the series Revisiting Wraith the Oblivion

In 2017, I undertook the project of reading and reviewing all of my Wraith: The Oblivion RPG books. I dutifully read everything I had on hand and wrote up a series of blog posts about the books… and then, for some reason, I never posted them. 

Stumbling onto those posts now, I am baffled that I did so much work but never published it, and figured I might as well go ahead and do it. That’s what this series is about. If you think the last thing the world needs is a discussion of the books released as part of a tabletop RPG that died almost two decades ago, then this isn’t for you.

Otherwise, buckle up: this is the first in a series of posts where I revisit the Wraith: The Oblivion RPG (a White Wolf old World of Darkness game line), rereading the books from the line and thinking about some questions that have lingered in my mind since backing the 20th Anniversary updated rulebook for the game, the sole Onyx Path Kickstarter I’ve backed

I want to give a look at the rulebooks and supplements, with an eye to what made the game line so beloved, as well as what might explain its failure to achieve broader popularity. (Beyond the obvious gloomy and doom aspects of the game, that is.)

As such, this post will probably be primarily of interest to those who want to read about tabletop RPGs and questions of game design.

I’ve told the story here a few times about how a prized box of RPG books got lost while being shipped to my parent’s house, after I’d left Montréal to live in South Korea, and I’ve emphasized how the books I was saddest to lose were from the game system Wraith: The Oblivion. (Among the books in that box was almost everything in that game line up until 1998.)

It took me more than fifteen years to decide I was going to replace them, but last year I managed to get (almost) the entire series of books for the line.1 I picked up a few at a great price in Lawrence, Kansas, thanks to my friend Jeremy Tolbert pointing them out in a game store he brought me to, and I got the rest online.

Since (re-)acquiring this shelf-full of gamebooks (and picking up the rest that I’d originally never had), I’d occasionally dived into a random book, but I figured it’d be worth briefly recording my memories of each, and how it measures up both in terms of my nostalgic memories—how the game holds up in retrospect—and in terms of each book’s usefulness as a gaming product. When the Wraith: The Oblivion 20th Anniversary Kickstarter was still approaching fulfilment, I thought it might be an interesting project to log some observations and thoughts about these books, so others may find them of some use as they return to the game and its world. At the same time, I imagined that there may be useful lessons to be gleaned by a close examination of this—one of the more highly praised White Wolf game lines, but also the first of the old World of Darkness lines to be retired.

Bear in mind, as you read this, that when I was young, Wraith: The Oblivion was (along with Gamma World—yeah, 3rd edition, even though it was a mess—and 1st edition AD&D) among my very favorite RPG systems and settings. I’m trying to be objective, but that inevitably means noting both what I consider the hits and also mentioning what I consider the misses, as well as thinking critically about what can be learned from both. I’m not reading the books in order of publication or anything like that, either: it’s a case of whatever has caught my interest or struck my fancy since December 2015, when I received the last of these books and started reading through them. That said, I plan on presenting my reviews organized functionally: splatbooks together, core rulebooks together, tie-in fiction together, and so on.  

(That’s especially worth noting when it comes to this installment in the series: I do not gush, but while I touch on what look to me like they’re flaws I never noticed before, I also am trying to come to terms with what these books were meant to do, and trying to sort of unpack for myself how these books sort of attempt to embody a certain kind of Wraith game.

That’s not always easy, either: having returned to tabletop RPGing through Dread and Fiasco (which are story games, but are both quite minimalist) and OSR games (which are based on rules so familiar to me they’re basically second nature), I find Wraith and the Storyteller system is built on assumptions and a way of thinking that strikes me as much more unfamiliar now than it ever seemed to me in the 90s.

With that, on to some general observations about the game line…

I think it’s fair to say that D&D burnout is part of what made White Wolf such a publishing success in the 1990s. If people were already starting to tire of elves in the 80s—and those old Talislanta ads attest that some were:

—then by the 90s, a lot of people around my age were feeling a need not just for a break from D&D and epic fantasy RPGs altogether, but also from TSR products. (The suggestion that TSR’s products at the time were somehow YAified seems to ring true to me—and probably accounts for some of the widespread sense at the time that by moving to other games, one’s tastes were “maturing”—though back then I honestly just felt I’d gone off high fantasy settings and wanted to play a game set in the present-day.) I could talk about how White Wolf’s products tended toward a more R-rated type of RPG world, art, and products, but the truth is, I was living in Saskatoon and the (then nty-yet-old) World of Darkness was really just the main alternative available if you weren’t wanting to play TSR games. 

At least, nobody I knew was running Call of Cthulhu or Paranoia, and I guess interest in other TSR games like Top Secret, Star Frontiers, and Marvel Superheroes had either died off locally or been steamrolled by the success of AD&D 2nd edition… and you can forget more obscure games like ParanoiaSkyrealms of Jorune, or Toon: I saw those advertised in the pages of Dragon, but that was as close as I ever got to seeing any of them at the time. Basically the only games I had any access to were World of Darkness (mainly Vampire and Werewolf) and various editions of AD&D and D&D. I’m sure some people in the area did get their hands on such games, but I never got the opportunity myself. What I saw in local shops in the 90s was mostly AD&D and World of Darkness.  

Returning to these books after almost two decades, after my reentry was mainly relatively minimalist story-games like Dread and Fiasco, followed by a full dunking in OSR gaming, and then some PbtA and Blades in the Dark, what I find most interesting about the Wraith books is the difference in apparent conception of what a tabletop RPG product “should” contain.

In contemporary “story” games, mechanics are simplified and get the hell out of the way, and characters are constructed in such a way as to immediately suggest the type of game one will be playing: The note cards in Fiasco are both the building blocks and the tensile wire of the story that unfolds. In Dread, the character sheet is a questionnaire with a mix of characterization questions (which the player freely answers) and leading questions (usually used to define conflicts and antagonists for the game). A D&D character sheet tells you right away what characters are going to be doing: combat, survival, and exploration as a member of a team of profession-specialized characters.

A White Wolf character sheet seems more GURPS-like, in a way. Take Wraith:

Characters have the typical Attributes (“ability scores” for the D&D-minded), Abilities (“skills” or “proficiences”), Arcanoi (“spells” or “racial special abilities” would be the closest equivalent in D&D), Corpus/Willpower/Pathos (a bit like differentiated “hit points” and “luck points”), plus some narrative-driving, plotty features with no real D&D equivalent, such as Fetters (people or things the character is bound to back in the world of the living) and Backgrounds (stuff like allies, wealth, handicaps, etc).

The thing is: that apparent flexibility also leaves it less self-evident what kind of adventures Wraith characters are inherently built to deal with.

There’s a similar dynamic I’ve noticed with a number of the supplement books in the game line. Don’t get me wrong: I love Wraith, and I went to a lot of trouble to collect the whole series. I certainly have a picture of what a good Wraith chronicle would look like if I ran it… but the books I’ve read so far from the series haven’t really confirmed or discomfirmed that particular sense of how the game was supposed to work, even if I sense on some level my ideas run at odds with how Wraith is built to run (and always have done so). How it was supposed to feel, yes—the mood is clearly signaled. But the structure of the game-as-played seems to be left up to the Storyteller, in a way that I think (perhaps more than in games like Vampire or Werewolf) can be intimidating… especially since the stories don’t exactly write themselves in Wraith, the way they often can in Vampire or Werewolf.

Here, again, the contrast with D&D and more recent story games is interesting. Most recent story games bundle the adventure concept into the pitch: Dread is visceral horror. Fiasco is about Coen Brothers-y heists gone wrong. D&D is more flexible, of course, but a thread runs through all the various types of supplements available—at least for the first few editions of AD&D, which was what I played most back in the day: monster books, Handbooks elaborating possible builds for various player-character classes, campaign setting books, and “module” (canned adventure) books all center on a few specific conceptions of adventure: geographic exploration and survival; exploration of buildings; urban settings for adventure; and combat with monsters and non-player-characters. Of course some groups go heavy into role-played interactions with non-player characters, or romances, or political games, or a gothic horror mood, but the game is designed primarily to handle combat, exploration, and survival. The books have maps (of regions and buildings to explore), monsters and NPCs with new powers and magic (to encounter and flee or fight or master), and hazards (to survive).

Viewed from that paradigm, White Wolf’s “gothic punk” World of Darkness seem mostly to be “campaign setting” books, sometimes surprisingly light on mechanics. Some elaborate extensively on specific aspects of the setting, such as the Sea of Shadows, or Midnight Express, or Necropolis Atlanta. These books aren’t exactly like the campaign setting books in the traditional D&D approach, mind you: instead of maps, you get abstract descriptions of regions, and modular descriptions of places that can easily be moved to another city or locale within your game.

But the vast majority of the supplement books elaborate on specific subsets of whatever supernatural society (game line) to which they pertain. For example, in Wraith you have guildbooks and books on the Hierarchy and specific Legions within the Hierarchy, the Renegades who oppose them. The guildbooks introduce new Arcanoi (magic) but the emphasis is on the politics and culture of the guild, and how to play a character who belongs to that guild. Though they’re commonly referred to a splat-books—because they tend to detail a specific “splat” or subtype of character available to players—they’re also campaign setting expansions, and (to a lesser degree) mechanics expansions.

Let me make that a little clearer: the World of Darkness books from this time were so social-/political-oriented that the splatbooks were supplemented with what could be thought of as “meta-splat” books.  

There are also a few books that supply the familiar sorts of mechanics expansions, like the Player’s Guide and the Shadow Player’s Guide. Even these books, though, contain a certain amount of campaign setting material… and just not the kind your average D&D player would expect. “Campaign setting material” in a White Wolf Game seems almost always to be about social groups in conflict, not geographical terrain: even in Wraith, which has the most amount of otherworldly real estate, there weren’t really maps. (The first official map ever of Stygia, the main city in the Western Underworld, only got made because of an achieved stretch goal of the Wraith20 Kickstarter!) 

Of course, that  makes sense, since the dangerous territory the players must really negotiate is the social terrain that separates various rival factions and political groups that play tug of war with the PCs, rather than dark alleys or mountain ranges and rivers, or weird delves under the earth.

All of this is to say that these kinds of conflicts seem to be the expected central conflict of a Wraith game… sort of. It’s hard to say that definitively, though, because there are relatively few example adventures I’ve come across so far while reading these books. (So far, but I’ve skimmed through all of them and can confirm it’s generally consistent in the line.) As an example, the Hierarchy book ends with an “Appendix” providing some plot hooks… but it’s a single page of plot hooks, in a 120-ish page book, though, and they’re mainly pretty straightforward “missions.” (Albeit with the advice that characters should also get some character-driven adventures, interspersed among the Hierarchy missions.)

The thing is, the adventures that are presented—like in the final pages of the Sea of Shadows book, or the Midnight Express, feel like they’re pretty intensive railroads: they’re written as what feels like an inevitable series of scenes, which must proceed in order, regardless of what the characters do—which most people agree is downright anathema to good gaming.

What’s going on here, then?

I have to admit, I find that very interesting, because despite the fact that the OSR has claimed for itself the do-it-yourself (DIY) spirit in gaming, running a Wraith campaign necessitated huge amounts of DIY work: if you wanted a canned module, you might find one or two provided as sample adventures in books like Midnight Express or The Sea of Shadows, but they were thin on the ground, and not particularly great: you had to come up with stuff yourself, and if you were giving players character agency, you really had to both be on your toes, and take prep seriously. 

The problem with that is that most young GMs are already prone to crafting adventure concepts as railroads, and the tendency is supported by the examples I’ve just mentioned. But railroads—while they can be fun—have to be run exceptionally well to be fun—they must feel, at the very least, as if they’re not railroads at all, which means you need to have a pretty good set of GM skills to pull of that illusion. I didn’t appreciate the hexcrawl approach to adventure design till I tried it and saw my players creating story from random events… but I also saw how a tweak here and there could allow me to connect things spontaneously to help that along, and how a little more energy could allow me to form the shape of a potential story that formed organically out of character actions.

Therefore, reconsidering Wraith, I wonder what kind of game I would try to run, if I ever ran it again. Indeed, though I don’t generally care for the fiction preludes to the supplement books, they too seem to compound this problem: many of them focus on an individual character’s adventures or struggles… when, presumably, a Wraith game is about a group of Wraiths working together to solve one or more problems in the afterlife.

This is, I suspect, is probably part of why so many people online (and offline) explain how they loved the Wraith game setting and books as reading material, but didn’t dare run a game: the social world was especially complex, and while the supplement books make wonderful reading material if you dig the world and its metaplot, there’s a certain level on which it’s easy to finish reading a book and find yourself wondering, “But how do I work that into a game?” Likewise, there’s a certain lack of player-facing material that got published: while that’s not a problem for some of the other game lines—Vampire and Werewolf especially, which are largely set in a world basically like ours but darker—Wraith’s complex cosmology (and the even more complex social worlds that straddled various regions within it) presented a bigger challenge to players and Storytellers alike.

And yet, the books do make enjoyable reading. On some level, that’s what they seem to be designed for: long historical surveys of a given organization or institution are almost never going to be of use at the game table, but they can inspire a GM in adventure-crafting, or even just evoke a certain sense of the setting that can help make it easier to render that world in a compelling way… if the Storyteller manages to figure out how to run a Wraith game, that is.

Still, even now I feel a little unsure what a successful Wraith chronicle was supposed to look like as far as the designers were concerned. (I ran the game for an extended series of sessions several times and considered those chronicles to be “successful”, but they were also probably not much like the way the game was intended to run: often the PCs were mortals, or at least started out that way, and probably I was running Wraith the way the New World of Darkness Ghost Stories supplement was intended to be used.) I suppose the answer is, “It’s supposed to like like whatever you want!” but that open-endedness kind of makes it hard to figure out the strengths of the system… and meanwhile, there’s so much setting even in the core rulebooks that one starts to wonder, “Am I supposed to include all of this in my game?” 

Which is to say that Wraith felt like it lacked an equivalent to the classic adventure-that-teaches-you-the-game: the B1/B2 modules included with Moldvay’s edition of D&D Basic (or the solo choose-your-own-adventure in the Mentzer edition), or the countless later examples that came with other games. It’s an innovation I admire a lot: a simple “adventure” setup that provided a clear example of what proper adventure design was supposed to look like.

Or, rather, I didn’t recognize that the “Little Five Points” section in the Wraith 2nd Edition hardback was what was intended to provide that. There are sample adventures in a few Wraith books—including some I discuss below—but they mostly look like plot arcs: how they’re supposed to work in-play remains a bit mysterious, and I think for a lot of us, the assumption seemed to be, “Well, I suppose the Storyteller assembles a story and characters participate in it to the extent of their abilities and inclinations.” Except that kind of inevitably led to the railroad, because we weren’t exactly trained for any other sort of adventure design. It seems to have been a common problem with the “Story”-based approach to scenario design. 

Mind you, I think to some degree that vagueness was also there by design. I suspect these old World of Darkness games were supposed to be just as sandboxy as older RPGs were, except the sandboxiness isn’t geographic: it’s social and sociopolitical. Well… maybe that’s not what was designed, but it at least feels like it could’ve been a way to run these games. I think people tended not to, because it’s a tough challenge, but the guy who introduced me to White Wolf games ran things that way: he gave us lots of social conflicts to get embroiled in, sure, but never forced us into things. We were free to resist, avoid, sneak off, go a different route, and uncover clues to the mystery before us without being pushed in any given direction. Society-as-sandbox is a tough game to run, but it is doable. 

To say that the World of Darkness games could be run as “sandboxes” in this way will probably rub certain RPG enthusiasts the wrong way—those who are less interested in playing out personal character dramas, and more interested in military simulation, high or low fantasy adventure, and so on—but a certain amount of the vitriol perhaps seems misplaced. While I didn’t manage to figure out how to make such a game work, and the packaged scenarios in some of the supplements absolutely did model railroaded, plotty adventures, they didn’t all do that.  

Which is simply to say, this game probably isn’t for everyone, but even for those it is for, there’s a serious cognitive adjustment to be made if you’re coming at it from the territory of traditional adventure RPGs. I, for one, think a person can love multiple games: OSR, story, board, and so on. However, if you fail to adjust your habits and expectations when you move from one type of game to another, you’re likely to end up confused and disappointed by the experience. And probably some of the fault lies with White Wolf as a company, for not having been as concerned about shepherding GMs and players into the new paradigm they apparently thought they were creating. 

Or maybe I’m just imagining this, because my onetime love for Wraith, and enduring interest in it, overwhelms my critical faculties. You tell me. 

As for this series, next time I’ll be turning to the core rulebooks (plural!) for the game, plus rules expansions and core GM/player support materials. 

Series NavigationRevisiting <i>Wraith: The Oblivion</i>—Part 2: Core Rules & Expansions >>

  1. There’s vaguely-related three books I haven’t picked up: World of Darkness: Tokyo; World of Darkness: Hong Kong; and World of Darkness: Blood-Dimmed Tides. I might pick them up eventually, but they weren’t such a high priority for me, as I’ve not been too crazy about the way classic World of Darkness dealt with East Asia and I didn’t even know about the last book until after I’d picked these ones up.

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