- Revisiting Wraith: The Oblivion—Part 1: Overview
- Revisiting Wraith: The Oblivion—Part 2: Core Rules & Expansions
- Revisiting Wraith: The Oblivion—Part 3: “Setting” and “Adventure” Supplements
- Revisiting Wraith: The Oblivion—Part 4: The Guildbooks
- Revisiting Wraith: The Oblivion—Part 5: Faction and “Meta-Splat” Books
- Revisiting Wraith: The Oblivion—Part 6: Alternate Character Concept Supplements
- Revisiting Wraith: The Oblivion—Part 7: “Concept” and Other Books
- Revisiting Wraith: The Oblivion—Part 8: Tie-In Fiction and Comics
- Revisiting Wraith: The Oblivion—Part 9: Other “General” Supplements
- Revisiting Wraith: The Oblivion—Part 10: Orpheus
- Revisiting Wraith: The Oblivion—Part 11: Play Resources
- Revisiting Wraith: The Oblivion—Part 12: Conclusion… for Now
Welcome to my revisitation of the Wraith: The Oblivion RPG 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 older RPGs, then I suspect you may want to skip this series altogether.
Starting at the Beginning
In this installment, I’m discussing what a loose grouping of general supplements that mostly provide adventure locales and crossover concepts for Wraith: The Oblivion and other old World of Darkness games.
The full list of books discussed in this post includes:
The Core rulebooks:
- Wraith: The Oblivion, (1st Edition) by Mark Rein•Hagen, Sam Chupp, Jennifer Hartshorn, with writing by Steven C. Brown, Phil Brucato, Sam Chupp, Brian Campbell, Jackie Cassauo, Graeme Davis, Dan Greenberg, Mark Rein•Hagen, Jennifer Hartshorn, Robert Hatch, Harry Heckel, Ian Lemke, Ken Rolston, Kathleen Ryan, and Teeuwyn Woodruff
- Wraith: The Oblivion (2nd Edition) edited by Ricard Dansky, with contributions by Bill Aguiar, Jackie Cassada, Mark Cenczyk, Ben Chessell, Richard E. Dansky, Graeme Davis, Rick Hautala, Ian Lemke, Steve Long, James A. Moore, Joshua Mosquiera, Nicky Rea, Ethan Skemp, Wendy Soss, Cynthia Summers, Allen Tower, Richard Watts, and Fred Yelk
The Player’s Guides:
- Wraith Players Guide (Wraith : the Oblivion) developed by Jennifer Hartshorn, with writing by Tim Akres, Nathaniel Barmore, Frank Branham, Phil Brucato, Shawn Carter, Jackie Cassada, Sam Chupp, Jeff Combos, James Cosby, Richard Dakan, Richard E. Dansky, Geoffrey Fortier, Markleford Freidman, J. Lank Hancock, Jennifer Hartshorn, Harry Heckel, Ian Lemke, Jennifer Lindburg, Kalina Mercer, Paul Mercer, James A. Moore, Heather Pritchett, Ethan Skemp, Matthew Skipper, Cynthia Summers, Allen Tower, Richard Watts, Teeuwynn Woddruff, and Chelsea Quinn Yarbro
- The Shadow Players Guide developed by Richard Dansky, with writing by Tim Akers, Andrew Bates, Jackie Cassada, Trevor Chase, Ben Chessell, Jeff Combos, Richard E. Dansky, Elizabeth Ditchburn, Beth Fischi, Ed Huang, James A. Moore, Nicky Rea, Cynthia Summers
Historical Supplements:
- Wraith: The Great War by Bruce Baugh, E. Jonathan Bennett, Mark Cenczyk, Richard Dansky, Geoff Grabowski, Dawn Kahan, John Maurer, Tara Maurer, James A. Moore, Greg Stolze, developed by Ed Hall
Assorted Screens and Screen Insert Material:
- Wraith Storytellers Screen (1st edition) by Sam Chupp, Jennifer Hartshorn, Phil Brucato, and Bill Bridges
- Wraith Storytellers Screen (2nd edition) and the included Buried Secrets booklet, by Richard Dansky, Beth Fischi, James A. Moore, Ethan Skemp, Lucien Soulban, and Cynthia Summers
- Wraith: Character Kit by Sam Chupp, Jennifer Hartshorn, and Zhonni Perchalski.
Thats’s a lot of material, but it feels like it belongs together, so that’s how I’ve grouped things.
The Core Rules—First and Second Editions
Rather than write reviews of the first two core rulebooks, I thought I’d write a bit about the differences between them.
Though one should never judge a book by its cover, the most immediately striking difference between the first and second edition of the core rulebooks is, of course, on the cover. The softcover first edition rulebook features grittier art—a background of chains upon chains—and a glow-in-the-dark logo on the cover. (My copy, second-hand, still glows in the dark several decades after it was first released.) The second edition, a sturdy hardback book, lacks the glow-in-the-dark logo, and has a more refined, glossy look to its art, which still features chains but against a murkier, more industrial-looking background. This isn’t intended as a criticism: I think both editions look good, but the 2nd edition, comparatively, feels a little more slick somehow. The grittiness is more my thing, but the slicker appearance of the hardback probably fit in better with the trade dress of the other classic World of Darkness lines, and I get the feeling the hope was that devoted World of Darkness fans would be purchasing at least part of each major game line.
That’s a pretty long paragraph, just devoted to the cover art. If I dwell on everything in this depth, this series will never get written, so I’m going to retreat to broader brushstrokes and talk about differences between the first and second edition core rulebooks. (I’ll be covering the Wraith: The Great War hardback separately, down below.)
It’s pretty fair to say that the second edition of Wraith: The Oblivion served as an expansion, a clarification, and as an adjustment to the game as presented in the first edition core rulebook. There were not a lot of rules changes, though: if you learned the game from 1st edition, there wasn’t much you would have to relearn after picking up the 2nd.
What did seem to change a lot was the clarity and wording of how things were explained. Looking at the first chapter of the first and second edition core rulebooks side by side is pretty instructive in this regard. The order of the material presented is different. Both chapters start out with a sort of quick run-through the what is an RPG? text, and then dive into the setting of Wraith: The Oblivion. But while they both start with the psychogeography of the afterlife, the first edition text next jumps into its history (that is, the story of Charon and Stygia). In contrast, this section comes later in the 2nd edition book, preceded by a discussion of core concepts of the modern-day afterlife (like, say, soulforged objects, and what remains of the guilds).
In addition to this, it looks like the text was wholly reworked. Not rewritten, though a lot of the text was reworded extensively and parts were definitely rewritten, but it’s clear if you read some of the entries, say, on the Tempest or on Necropoli, that the person writing the copy for 2nd edition core had the 1st edition rulebook on hand. Many times, the same kind of thing is being explained, but in slightly different (and often slightly clearer) terms. I don’t mean to slight the 1st edition book, by the way: it’s just that the 2nd edition definitely does achieve a degree of refinement of the same material. Also, it’s worth noting, the 2nd edition explanations of these core concepts to the setting are often slightly longer than the explanations in the 1st edition, occasionally as much as twice as long. I suppose this in part accounts for proportion of the apparent expansion we see in the 2nd edition core rulebook: 1st edition was just over 260 pages long, while the 2nd edition core rules were just over 290 pages long… and that’s not just 30 pages more, it’s instead more than forty, since the “Little Five Points” setting material from the 1st edition appendix got cut (with a revision of it included in the 2nd edition GM screen booklet Buried Secrets, reviewed below).
That said, though I’ve emphasized that 2nd edition feels more like a refinement, that doesn’t mean it’s really the same. In 2nd edition, I found a substantial change in the feel and the setting conception. The 1st edition rules (and early supplements) tend to present Stygia and the Tempest as faraway, horrible places that player characters mostly wouldn’t want to visit. The deeper Underworld is sort of the nightmare that haunts the dead, in 1st edition, and Stygian politics are sort of a distant, somewhat removed concern, while player characters are more caught up in dealing with their Fetters—those people and things that tie them to the world of the living—and with the factional disputes and perils of the Shadowlands, the part of the afterlife that lies directly contiguous with that world. Things like Harrowings are described more vaguely in 1st edition, and the major factions of the setting—The Heretics, the Renegades, and the Hierarchy—all seem about equally horrible and equally worth avoiding, whereas in 2nd edition, it seems almost assumed that characters will have to engage with the Hierarchy, either by being active members of it, or by resisting it as Renegades. (Heretics consistently got short shrift in the game line, unfortunately, so it really does become a question of serving the Hierarchy or fighting against it… or, you know, serving some other Dark Kingdom which ultimately means resisting or fighting against the Stygian Hierarchy too.)
This greater clarity is something that’s consistent throughout the rest of the rulebook. And that’s fine, and not a damning thing for me to say about 1st edition at all, in my opinion: it’s natural for a game to shift focus slightly as it is more fully developed, and nobody sensible complains that D&D Expert edition added wilderness settings to the dungeon crawling of the Basic red box. After all, adding Wilderness didn’t remove dungeon-crawling from the general repertory of the game: it just expanded the number of tools in the DM’s adventure-crafting toolkit.
Speaking of which, some of the adjustments in the second edition involve a more thorough rearrangement of material in the book, as well as adding to it. A couple that come to mind include the number of Underworld-native creatures added to the last chapter in 2nd edition, “Drama”: the fact these creatures (and the various other Mortal and Supernatural antagonists) were given space in a proper chapter, instead of being relegated to an Appendix, is telling, since after all antagonists are important for the game. Again, this seems to be a shift from the assumption that most Wraith games would be Shadowlands/Skinlands-focused to a sense that the game should involve trips into the Tempest and Stygia. In addition, the treatment of the various mortal antagonists is slightly more thorough, which again seems to have been aimed at providing more stuff for the Storyteller to throw at the players… a good thing.
Likewise, the “Storytelling” chapter is moved from Chapter 3 in 1st edition to Chapter 7 in the 2nd. Along with the way this content was reworked, I think the move makes sense: the structure of the 2nd edition book ends up being three big clumps of material, roughly following along the lines of Setting stuff, Character stuff, and Systems and Storyteller stuff. That makes a lot more sense, and having read the two rulebooks back-to-back, I think it makes the system as a whole much easier to digest.
Beyond that, the layout is better in 2nd edition, to be certain. The first edition falls prey, even in its earliest pages, to the pitfall that troubled so many White Wolf books: the tendency to print a certain amount of black text on dark grey backgrounds. I don’t think it bothered me in my 20s, but that’s just asking too much of a reader any older than that. That’s too bad, because the text introducing Stygia and the underworld in 1st edition isn’t bad… it’s just very hard to read as laid out.
I wasn’t crazy about the comic that’s used in Chapter 9 of the 2nd edition book: though the technique is good, and the art is fine, the writeups of action in the panel were a bit verbose, when simplicity would have perhaps been more instructive. But hey, maybe that’s just me.
Ultimately, though, I think the relationship between the 1st and 2nd editions of the Wraith corebook is pretty normal and reasonable: the first edition set out the game, a bit rough around the edges but bursting with ideas, while the 2nd edition refined that game, accented different aspects of it, but didn’t dispel all of what made the earlier edition what it was. Still, if you had to choose between editions, you would obviously want to go with the 2nd edition.
You might, though, want to look at Wraith: The Great War, which I’ll discuss below. But not right away, for reasons I’ll explain when I get to it. Next, I want to look at the two players’ guides that were released for the game.
Wraith Players Guide
Ultimately, two Players’ Guides were released for Wraith: The Oblivion. One was the standard Player’s Guide, similar to those released for the other World of Darkness game lines; the other was Shadow Player’s Guide.
According to the book’s copyright page, Wraith Player’s Guide was Jennifer Hartshorn’s final project as the line developer, and the last one before Richard Dansky took over. 1 The book does some of the kinds things that players guides did for all old World of Darkness game lines: offering a passel of expanded character Skills, Talents, and Knowledges, a selection of new Shadow Archetypes, and also (in a later chapter) a bunch of new Merits and Flaws. This book has a ton of that stuff. If that sounds cynical and dismissive to you, I don’t intend it that way: for players and Storytellers who want a resource like that, it’s all there, and you can just have a look and find lots of cool options if you’re stuck for ideas.
One good thing about how the Shadow Archetypes were done is how the writeup for each one included a sample Harrowing of the kind that the particular Shadow would orchestrate. Whether you’re running on the fly and have to improvise, or you’re prepping for upcoming sessions and want some ideas, it’s a solid resource. That said, I was pretty surprised that the book had over fifty pages of this kind of material. Not that it’s out of line with Wraith (or other World of Darkness games, or indeed other games of the time), but I feel like rules-light games are popular today in part as a response to all the lengthy skills and archetypes writeups we all read over the years. I know what a Lockpicking Skill or an Occult Lore knowledge entails, after all. Of course, part of the design issue is that Wraith aims at high-versatility: unlike dungeoneering characters, a wraith player-character needs to be able to handle a whole range of adventure types: espionage, war, psychodrama, a love story, a quest for Transcendence: it wouldn’t be unusual for a single character to be expected to face all of the above at some point in a long-running Chronicle.
I think I would at least do up lists of Skills, Talents, and Knowledges to present to my players as options or ideas for their own character generation. I might not actually give them the Wraith Players Guide at that stage, though: seeing the very long lists of Skills, Talents, and Knowledges in this book, I also felt slightly overwhelmed…. and let’s not forget, these are supplementary to the lists in the core rulebook! So, yes, I also felt a new appreciation of rules-light skills and proficiency systems of OSR games. A handful of skills that covers most things you’d need, and with a few more houseruled in, you have the skillset for the milieu covered. I don’t think the skillset could quite get boiled down to that point for Wraith, for the reasons I’ve already noted… but I’d certainly long for something simpler, I think, perhaps more along the lines of Investigative and General skills in Gumshoe, where certain skills cover a slightly larger range of possible actions. (If I didn’t redesign the system, I’d at least collate all the Skills, Talents, and Knowledges into comprehensive lists, instead of having all those various Abilities all taking up space in my brain.)
Beyond the expanded character options, there’s a section on other Dark Kingdoms, which is an interesting read, and sketches out an interesting—if at times odd—view of the afterlives of non-Western wraiths. I’ll be honest: White Wolf had a funny way of dealing with characters of non-Western cultures, usually ending up at some weird and uncanny valley place equidistant between thoughtful sensitivity to certain elements of the supernatural, religious, and folk beliefs, mythology, and cosmology of other cultures, and garishly monolithic and stereotypical depiction of people and supernatural beings from those real-world cultures and regions. I’d argue that’s a significant issue that mars the Kindred of the East game, especially (or primarily) the core rulebook. It’s not anything like so serious in this book, perhaps in part because the treatment of each Dark Kingdom is so brief. I found myself left with questions about why and how the afterlife could be so different from one Dark Kingdom to another, and found some of the depictions a little baffling, but mostly I found this section one of the more interesting ones in the book.
There’s a section titled “Rules” which has an odd focus—not bad, but odd—since it mostly covers stuff that’s briefly discussed in the core rulebook: some of the afterlife setting’s cosmology and specific wraith Powers (Deathsight, Lifesight, and so on), as well as how Fetters and Passions work, all of which is well-written as player-facing material for those new to Wraith. But there there’s a long section (five pages, including several unrelated illustrations!) on the various ways Wraiths can interface with computers, which kind of surprised me.
The book also fills out those missing “splats” (Stygian Guilds and associated Arcanoi) that weren’t included in the core rules: specifically the Alchemists, the Proctors, and Mnemoi. I was in fact surprised to realize that those Guilds weren’t written up in the core rulebook, and had to go back and check to be sure they hadn’t been added in 2nd edition, but I suppose in the interests of maintaining backwards compatibility, that was the case. They’re sensible and useful to have, but the treatment of the guilds is like in the core book: pretty basic, leaving a lot of questions for the reader. (Sadly, only one of the three guilds covered here got its own Guildbook.)
The last chunk of serious material in the book is a series of short essays on gameplay. Most of them are relatively useful—especially the first four. Ian Lemke’s suggestion on mortal player characters is also fine, as is Sam Chupp’s short discussion of how meaning can be created in the game, though I think it’s stuff most Wraith players would already have considered once they’re at the point of buying this book. Chelsea Quinn Yarbro’s essay, though, didn’t impress me at all: she seems be a little confused about the irrelevance of people believing in ghosts to the playing of a game about ghosts, and she skates back and forth between discussing the ostensible real-life existence of ghosts and literary treatments of fictional ghosts. Somehow, that one essay really rubbed me the wrong way, and felt as if Yarbro didn’t really know what Wraith was about at the time when she wrote it, so she just sort of held forth on ghosts and stuff.
Finally, the set of Arcanos reference pages in the back of the book are excellent and commendable. I know that if I do finally get around to running Wraith myself again, I’ll be sharing an updated list with all the Arcanoi I intend to use my in my chronicle, because I think they’ve be invaluable to players and Storyteller alike. (So, for that matter, would function-specific Arcanoi lists: what’s useful in the Tempest? In combat? While in the Labyrinth? The Skinlands? What are some Spectre favorites?)
I also think that, for a 21st century RPG, a constantly updated set of official Arcanoi quick-reference sheets like this would be a nice thing to maintain, as a kind of service to fans of a game. (It really wouldn’t take much work, if one did up a template and used software to output a formatted PDF from the maintained lists in a text file that just got updated every time a new book or supplement got published… though of course one would have to have a pretty good idea how to characterize “alternate” Arcanoi of various kinds: core rules, Guild secrets, historical, and so on.
That said, I’d also be tempted to do up Arcanoi cards with a point-count and Guild sigil on the back, and a short writeup of the associated power on the front. I think players would probably struggle much less with keeping their characters’ powers straight in their heads—as well as choosing Arcanoi during character generation—with this as a tool. The problem, of course, is that you’d want to have multiple decks, or at least a number of duplicates of the lower-dot Arcanoi, since more than one player might end up choosing the same one—and that means Arcanoi cards would not be an affordable proposition. This would be a really hard sell as a product, I think—most of the Arcanoi cards in given deck would anyway go unused—so players wouldn’t want to buy them—but a GM would probably hesitate to buy a deck unless it came with enough spares to supply both players and NPCs alike with everything needed. Maybe, though, if it were digital cards with a serving app, it would be of some use in a game. (That fits with other card-as-resource and card-as-reference things I’ve seen.)
As I’ve already noted, the Wraith Players’ Guide does what other game lines’ Player Guides usually did in World of Darkness games. You might not find a use for everything in the book in your game, but I think it’s still a pretty great resource overall, collecting a lot of things that might have ended up in the core rulebook if they’d been making 400+page rulebooks back in the 1990s, the way they are these days.
Shadow Players Guide
Just to be clear, the Shadow Players Guide was for secondary player role, essentially a sort antagonistic subsystem that made Wraith famous: each player is tasked with roleplaying the Jungian Shadow (or Freudian id, if you prefer) of another player’s character.
This is the system that gets mentioned most often in discussions of, “Why didn’t you play this game?” or “Why did your Wraith game fizzle out?” as well as, “What’s the best game you’ll never run?” People seem pretty convinced that having each player run another player’s dark side will inevitably give rise to real-life tensions and antagonism. And these aren’t just people who play only Pathfinder in heroic-fantasy mode, or something: this is something old-school gamers, Call of Cthulhu fans, and even World of Darkness enthusiasts argue.
Of course, some people have floated other suggestions as to how the Shadow could be handled: for example, that the Storyteller run them all (which is understandably a very heavy load to bear), or that a single Storyteller’s Assistant run them—that is, have one player dedicated to running all the other player’s shadows, and no player character of their own. This seems a sensible approach for the rare Wraith: The Oblivion LARP, but since Shadows are only supposed to be active for a small portion of each session—they’re opportunistic, and they don’t harp on constantly—I feel like having one player do it would be boring for the assigned player.
It’s unusual for a single game subsystem in a game to get its own players’ guide. The assumption here seems to be that players will (a) read it, and (b) use it in-game. Which, well… most of my players over the years haven’t read the core rules to the games I ran, let alone player supplements, and, I suspect, even if they did, unless they were very excited about the prospect of Shadowguiding, they probably wouldn’t retain enough of it to use it on a regular basis, because the Shadowguiding occurs so infrequently.
As for the book: I hope you like white text on a black background. Yep, this was the 1990s, when people did that on websites all the time. (Indeed, as you’ll see in the Links & Resources post I plan to end this series with, white text on a black background is a pretty common choice for Wraith websites, too. However, while it’s usually not more than a few paragraphs in the core book and other rulebooks, the Shadow Players Guide is like that pretty much all the way though. The only exceptions are the sidebar texts, which are black text on a white background, but usually with a busy watermark graphic. I don’t mean to rag on the design, mind you: it’s appropriate to the theme and subject matter. It’s just that I’m in my 40s, and this design choice makes it harder to read, at least for me.
The book, though, is pretty good. It’s billed as “A Mean, Vicious, and Nasty Sourcebook for Wraith: The Oblivion” on the bottom of the front cover, and that it truly is. The opening story is fine, as good as for other books, but with some chilling art. (I don’t know which of the artists listed did the piece on Page 8, but I’ve always found that piece—and the others by that artist I feel like I remember from other books published by White Wolf—most perfectly captured my sense of how Wraith is supposed to feel: warped and deeply ugly, queasy and brutally uncomfortable. I’d never hang the thing on a wall, but as an illustration, it’s pretty much perfect.)
The first couple of chapters—”The Big Picture” and “Systems and Dirty Tricks”—are great. I say that unabashedly: if you’re running Wraith in the usual way, where players are running one anothers’ shadows, it’s worth having them read this stuff early on: there’s some wonderful new Shadow archetypes (my favorite being “the Innocent,” who unlike the usual Shadow characters just sort of bumbles into peril, innocently and without meaning to do so…) and there’s a great set of tricks and strategies a Shadowguide can pull on a player that very much fit into the range of things Shadows would do but might not occur to players who, after all, aren’t always used to the kind of nasty conniving awfulness demanded of a Shadowguide. This stuff is great.
The next chapter provides Shadow-related material for the various alternate Wraith cultures and metaphysics of the other Dark Kingdoms that were explored in the Wraith Players Guide. It’s not a small supplement, either, as the chapter runs about sixty pages long—the longest of the book, and with a lot of detail that goes beyond just Shadows. I feel like this was taken as an opportunity to cover the other Dark Kingdoms in more depth, including Shadow-related material, and its usefulness would, I suppose, depend on how interested you are in running a game in one of these other Dark Kingdoms… or on how much detail you want to get into running player characters (or NPCs) from these settings in a game set in the standard, Stygia-dominiated setting for Wraith.
That said, the stuff here is interesting, and includes a new Arcanos (Conaissance, the Arcanos of the Caribbean “Serviteurs”), as well as some interesting material on other afterlives. I think one would also be fair in saying that these other Dark Kingdoms and the alternate systems and traits designed for them pose interesting questions for the question of the cosmology of the World of Darkness—just as does the whole game Kindred of the East, for that matter—but that doesn’t make it any less interesting, and, I mean… on some level I can’t get too torn up about consistency issues in what is after all an enormous Bangsian fantasy game setting… plus I don’t think it’d be any less problematic if other cultures’ conceptions of the soul and afterlife were just sort of tossed aside with a vague, “Eh, they were just wrong, okay?”
The remainder of the book offers much quicker looks at playing Spectre player characters, Doomslayers (a topic that gets covered in much greater depths in a later supplement I’ll get to later on in this series), Shadowguiding Risen characters, and some material on using Eidolons in your game. Most of it is good and usable, though again, it’s the kind of thing where I wish there’d been revised supplements that integrated this material into the relevant book. Just as I’d have been happier to see each of the Dark Kingdoms get its own book, I’d have liked to see some this material get folded into revised versions of the appropriate supplement books: Shadowguiding Risen into a revised Risen supplement, the material on Spectres put into a revised Dark Reflections: Spectres, and so on. I think a book on Transcendence & Eidolons would have been a cool one too. Indeed, I’ll have more to say about this in a later installment in this series.
Okay, I suppose the game line just didn’t last long enough to get revised supplement books into print, and that’s one of the difficulties with having a game line where new supplement books need to be backwards compatible with older ones written when the setting was less fully-sketched out. When a setting and cosmology are taking shape as the game line gets written, it’s hard not to end up having to do at least one or two piecemeal-built supplements that cover an assortment of bases, I guess. I suppose that’s ultimately why new editions of whole game lines get released, and people line up to buy them.
Anyway, the book ends, like the Wraith Players Guide, with a series of essays about the Shadow and its significance in a Wraith game. The essays here are okay, some of them better than others, though I found that the best were those by James Moore (who has some trenchant things to say about what constitutes true horror), Laurah Norton (who meditates on practical ways for players to design a Shadow by looking into themselves), Cynthia Summers (who deals with the issue of sexuality at the game table—a contentious issue even today), and Trevor Chase (who actually calls out White Wolf and Wraith for certain, er, excesses).
Ultimately, this book is a bit of a catch-all, and while it’s worthwhile, you need to know going in that it’s not totally unified, or, rather, that the unity here is thematic rather than functional. It feels a little odd that almost half of it is devoted to Dark Kingdoms material—yes, Shadows in other Dark Kingdoms, sure, but not only Shadows—but even if you don’t use that in your game, there’s a significant amount of material here that would be useful to anyone playing or running Wraith. That said, the book is, I think, worth having and very interesting for anyone who’s a serious Wraith fan.
Wraith: The Great War
Next, I thought I’d look at Wraith: The Great War, which, in many ways, ended up being the equivalent of the Wraith: Revised 2nd Edition that never was, at least in a lot of people’s eyes. Not quite one, but pretty close. Incidentally, it’s one of the few Wraith books I currently own that I managed to pick up brand new—well, meaning not-pre-owned, during a visit home to Saskatoon in 2005. I think the book had been out for four or five years by then, but it was unsold and priced to move, so I grabbed a copy.
One reason for the “not quite” is that it wasn’t a complete rulebook in its own right; you still needed to have a core rulebook, a fact that is noted among the earliest pages, where, under “How to Use this Rulebook, it notes, “Wraith: The Great War is a historical supplement for Wraith: The Oblivion… Rules specific to Great War appear here. Rules common to both games appear only in Wraith: The Oblivion.” That’s pretty definitive. I wonder if people liked or disliked the fact that what was effectively a period-supplement book (and an incomplete ruleset) got a hardcover treatment, but to me it definitely deserves it.
That said, the incompleteness of the rules within it is also why, despite having the book all these years, I never considered running Wraith: The Great War: I wasn’t playing RPGs anyway, but even if I had been, I didn’t have a copy of the core rulebook, so while I could (and did) read through this supplement book for enjoyment, it really didn’t contain enough for me to actually run a game. You definitely do need at least one of the core rulebooks—preferably 2nd edition—to use this book.
As you can see from the font I used above—a font I’m guessing I’ll only ever use once on this blog—the trade dress is slightly different, to suit the Great War era. It’s a weirdly neo-Gothic feeling font titled Frankenstein, which makes a lot of sense for this book, because The Great War (what we now call “World War I”) was a weird tipping point of sorts between the old Victorian world and a much more shockingly modern one… though it’s worth noting that “The Great War” of the title isn’t World War I, but rather a decade-long conflict that followed it—a war that took place in the Shadowlands and the Underworld, between Stygia, Renegades, Spectres, and various Dark Kingdoms of the Underworld.
So what do I think of it?
It’s a great supplement for the game, providing a lot of material for those who want to run games set in this time period, but also contributing to the expansion of those Dark Kingdoms first explored in the Wraith Players’ Guide. It adds rules for “Tempered Arcanoi” (that is, effects that combine two different Arcanoi together), how to handle air and mass combat (which could easily be reskinned for other situations, like naval battles in earlier eras of history), setting and game material for running a Great War-era chronicle (such as a lot of cool Fourth Great Maelstrom-related material), more metaplot, and a slew of artifacts and objects for a game set in this period. Obviously, anyone who’s into deeply interested in the metaplot will want to read it, as will anyone who wants to run a game set in the aftermath of World War I. As well, like Charnel Houses of Europe: The Shoah (which I’ll discuss in a future post in this series), it’s a pretty vivid reminder of the horrors of war, which, though one might not come to a game for moral lessons, nonetheless is pretty fitting and on-point for a game about death.
However, I think the biggest value of this book is actually of a more implicit nature: I think it’s sort of a proof-in-concept or exemplary guide to how one ought to go about building the material for some other historical setting in which to set a Wraith game chronicle. Think about it: the book doesn’t recapitulate the core rules. That, I think, would be much harder in use if you were looking to skin Wraith for, say, ancient Rome, or even for sometime, say, before the founding of Stygia, or Mississippi in the 1940s, or in the Caribbean during the Age of Piracy (as one enterprising Storyteller did over on Obsidian Portal). If I were setting out to create the material I’d want for some other historical setting, Wraith: The Great War would be my (very instructive) first stop in terms of tricks and tips for reskinning the game.
In that, the table of contents is worth recapitulating here, again from “How to Use This Book” on page 15:
- Chapter One covers history in a big infodump of a familiar format: first the Skinlands history, and then a second layer of history outlining events in the Underworld.
- Chapter Two adds rules for setting specific things likely to come up in-game: in the case of Wraith: The Great War, that’s stuff like land, sea, and air combat, and material on the Fourth Great Maelstrom.
- Chapters Three and Four respectively offer material for creating period-appropriate wraiths, and then making period-appropriate Shadows to dog them. There’s alternate Skills and character Archetypes, as well as period-appropriate alternate Arcanoi, and even slight tweaks to things like the sample archetypes.
- Chapter Five explores other Dark Kingdoms and their role in Stygian history at the time, as well as alternate character types appropriate to the era, specifically PC Mortwrights, and some alternate historical Arcanoi for characters from other Dark Kingdom characters.
- Chapter Six discusses running a Chronicle set in this time: it’s basically campaign notes and ideas for Great War Era games.
- Chapter Seven offers an overview of period-appropriate antagonists, and more metaplot in terms of their activities at the time.
- Chapter Eight is an appendix of material for the period: locales like haunted battlefields and different European cities, Relics ranging from entrenching shovels and gas masks to relic aircraft and warships, as well as a timeline of events leading up to (and continuing through) the Underworld’s Great War.
As I say, it’s a pretty instructive list of what kinds of materials you’d want to put together for any historical game, even in the cases where the Great War setting didn’t necessitate a huge change. (For example, the sample character Archetypes and Shadow archetypes are only slightly tweaked in this book, but were you creating material for running Wraith in early Georgian London, or Medieval Spain, or ancient Greece, you’d have to look at those aspects of character creation a little more extensively.) You would probably want to at least think about what’s going on in the other Dark Kingdoms, especially since a lot of interesting things would be happening in those ambiguous fault lines along which members of different Dark Kingdoms would end up interacting, whether in espionage, cooperation, or conflict.
(If, like me, you think that aspects verge on being a bit too exoticizing—like the African ibambo losing their fourfold psyches and morphing into dyadic Wraiths of the Stygian variety when they spend too long in Stygia, or how specialized Arcanos exist that can only be learned by members of certain [“exotic”] Dark Kingdoms—you can dispense with it, but nonetheless, you’ll want to particularize the differences between being a Wraith from the Bush of Ghosts, the Jade Kingdom, Karta, Swar, and the other Dark Kingdoms. Otherwise, what’s the point in having different Dark Kingdoms in the first place?)
You’d also want to consider how the changed historical and thematic setting in turn changes the play dynamics, in the same way that this book does. For example, the Arcanoi presented in this book are of a “more martial nature” because of the wartime setting: likewise, if you’re doing some kind of investigative game, or a game of political intrigue, or a naval piracy game, you’re probably going to want to tweak those Arcanoi a bit to fuel, and to be useful to, the kind of game you want to run. This is even true for a modern-day Wraith game, come to think of it… or at least, it’s one way to amplify the usefulness of Arcanoi, Relics and Artifacts, locales (like, in the Great War setting, battlefields and war-impacted European cities, along with the factions operating in them—adventure hooks galore) and so on. You’ll probably also want to think up new “monsters”—that is, non-Wraithly creatures that are prevalent or at least noticeable in your setting but aren’t in the standard Wraith books, like the excellent Plasmic Lice, Tin Ants, Fireflowers and Redfish, Mired, Plasmic Gas horrors that are added to Wraith in this book.
You wouldn’t have to write it all up in anything like the amount of detail that the book’s creators’ did—not unless you were putting together some kind of commercial product, anyway—but you’d want to at least cover all of these bases, and I think, basically, that this book really does a great job of sketching out each general area that you’d want to think about.
But even if you’re just out to play a Great War chronicle, I think the book offers loads of great stuff. The period-specific Arcanoi and Dark Arcanoi, as well as those from Swar and the Dark Kingdoms of Ivory and Jade (respectively the afterlives of India, Africa, and East Asia, all of whom were drawn into this conflict) are cool additions to Wraith, as are the alternate skills and talents—something I can easily see players of older Wraiths wanting to use even in a game set in a more contemporary era.
Beyond its use at the game table, the book is also beautiful, with loads of period-specific art (most of it at least pretty-good and a lot of it great) that really sets the mood and tone for a Great War-era Wraith game. That doesn’t mean it’s a perfect book, of course: the gothic-styled header font (which, again, is used above) is sometimes a little challenging to make out until you get used to it, and some of the layout choices were a bit annoying. (I especially dislike text boxes that interrupt the flow of the main text, especially when they necessitate more than one page flip to read, and then to return to the main text.) Likewise, the depiction of the Dark Kingdom of Jade somewhat exacerbates my problem with that subsetting: it’s very, very Japanese-focused, and has Itō Hirobumi as a major figure, which, if you know anything about Korean history, leaves me wondering just how many Korean wraiths end up willing to play along with the folks running the Dark Kingdom of Jade… surely some, during this time period, would simply accept Japan’s power over Korea implicitly (as some people did in real history) but I feel like by the logic of the gameworld, there’d be a pretty strong contingent of Korean wraiths out to finish the job started by Ahn Jung-geun (the Korean who assassinated Itō).
Even so, the look of the book is both exemplary and beautiful, right down to the interior endpapers with their implicit, watercolor invocation of the poppies of Flanders’ Fields. For anyone who has an interest in the Wraith game, I think the book is well worth owning, and the only book in the line that I think is at all close to it in style and gravitas is Charnel Houses of Europe: The Shoah, which, again, I’ll discuss in a later installment of this series.
Screens & Insert Booklets
As for the GM screens: there were two published for Wraith, specifically one for each edition.
As for the screens themselves: uh, I think they’re fine. When I look at either of them, I think, “Hmmm, it’s a GM screen.” I can’t say much more than that, since I don’t tend to use them much, but each seemed to include an interesting selection of tables: stuff on relic firearms and other weapons. for example, suggested Shroud ratings for different locales, qualitative descriptions of Fog ratings for mortals of different levels of Willpower (and a sense of how common the distribution is in the populace), as well as suggested difficulty ratings and dice pool success outcomes, health levels, combat stuff, and a block of text on Harrowings. On the second edition screen, there’s a fair bit more text than I would expect on a GM screen—I expected mostly tables—but I’m sure for the average Wraith Storyteller all this stuff would be handy pretty often.
Laying the screens out side by side, one can see that very little is changed in the 2nd Edition Screen: some material on Mortals and Brawling replaces on the 2nd edition screen the material on Experience Point awards from the 1st edition screen, and beyond that basically it’s all just formatting (which is much improved on the 2nd edition screen) and perhaps the odd update on details in the tables. (I didn’t notice any updates, but I’m guessing there were a few.)
Each screen contained a supplementary book, with the first edition being a coverless, staplebound booklet titled Wraith Storyteller’s Kit. The booklet bundled together some rules clarifications, crossover rules, and a chart of all the Arcanoi that had been created for the game by that point. The material here isn’t really intended to expand the game or provide anything new, just to:
- clarify some of the game’s more exotic mechanics and conventions,
- suggest how in more detail than the core rulebook to integrate creatures from other game lines into a Wraith chronicle, and
- provide a quick reference chart to the Arcanoi included in the core book
That being said, unless you’ve decided to run a chronicle using 1st edition rules, I’m not sure the booklet’s of any use to you. I think the things that needed clarifying in the 1st edition core rulebook mostly got ironed out in the 2nd edition—though, as I mentioned above, it had its own issues to be addressed in a second GM screen insert booklet—and crossover games in Old World of Darkness were notoriously hard to really pull off.
As for the Arcanoi quick reference, the list quickly became dated, since many of the subsequent rulebooks integrated new Arcanoi into the game… something that continued right up until the very last supplement saw print. Again, if you’re confining your group just to the 1st edition core rulebook, that might be useful… but you can also find that chart online if you look around. And in fact, twenty years on, the internet is likely a better source for Arcanoi summary charts, I’m guessing. (The Wraith Arcanoi pages at the wikia.com site, for example, are a pretty thorough list of all arcanoi in every product, for example.)
An actual book—perfect bound and everything!—was included with the 2nd Edition Storyteller’s Screen. The title was Buried Secrets, and it was written by a big group of credited contributors including Richard Dansky (by then, the developer for the game line), Beth Fischi, James A. Moore, Ethan Skemp, Lucien Soulban, and Cynthia Summers. In the long tradition of supplements included with GM screens, its purpose is not to be an incredible new resource, so much as a supplement to the core rulebook. (There’s actually a disclaimer to this effect in the introduction, which is fair enough.)
Since GM screen inserts are usually somewhat unimpressive, I found this book quite refreshing. The emphasis is very much on what’s useable in-game, and there’s very little metaplot or fluff to bog it down. There’s new Artifacts and Arcanoi (and clarifications about existing ones… in the form of a FAQ because it was, after all, the 1990s), specific guidelines about how to run a Harrowing, new antagonists, and even some tentative sketches of a few sample Far Shores locales.
(In fact, it’s the most I’ve seen anywhere about Far Shores, those strange Heretic-ruled islands far out across the Sea of Shadows, which is a shame since they’re such a tantalizing part of the afterlife geography of this setting. Given how often they were touted as a “major” faction in the afterlife, Heretics got very little coverage overall. I think they deserved a more thorough treatment than they ever got—a point you’ll see me make again later on in this series of reviews—and I do hope that’s rectified in the new Onyx Path revision of the game, or at least in a supplement for it at some point, if supplements are indeed forthcoming.)
Also included is a sample play setting, “Little Five Points,” which was discussed in the 1st edition core rulebook but not included in the 2nd edition, presumably for reasons of space. I guess this was supposed to make the setting available to those who, starting out with 2nd edition, didn’t have the writeup in the 1st edition core rules. This is actually a smaller sub-setting within the Necropolis: Atlanta setting supplement, so I wonder if part of the point wasn’t also to ensure a greater degree of backwards compatibility with that supplement book. The material is alright, and definitely could be used either for inspiration for your own game, or (for the most part) ported into a Wraith game set someplace else. Nothing here’s particularly world-shattering, but that’s fine, since I don’t think it was ever supposed to be. Instead, it’s apparently meant to be of use to people newer to running games (and to running Wraith specifically) and as such, it does what it’s supposed to do. It does reinforce my sense, which I’ll talk about more in a later installment of this series, that in World of Darkness games, the social fabric of a city—both in terms of individual NPCs, and in terms of opposed factions—is what players are supposed to “crawling” the way D&D characters crawl hexes and dungeons. It’s a fine enough proof-in-concept sketch, though there’s still a clear expectation for the Storyteller to do a lot of the heavy lifting when it comes to designing adventures for his or her own group.
Though I don’t tend to use GM screens very often, I’d say for anyone running a game with the Wraith 2nd Edition core rulebook, the 2nd edition screen package is worth picking up. I’m not sure how much of it ended up being rendered obsolete by (and/or integrated into) the 20th Anniversary rules, though I know it’ll be getting its own GM screen, so it might be less useful for people using that ruleset. But Buried Secrets may remain a useful resource: although I’m pretty sure it didn’t revolutionize anyone’s campaign, I imagine it did provide some people with just enough ideas and conceptual “grippiness” to improve their handling of the setting, mechanics, and so on.
Wraith Character Kit
Finally, there’s the player-targeting Wraith Character Kit. This is a simple affair, but at least it’s a stylish one: the package contains a Deluxe four-page character sheet printed on beige, high quality paper, along with a Certificate of Death that doubles as a character backstory worksheet, a “player screen” (which is really just a half-sized screen containing a step-by-step guide to character generation, but which players can use during play if they like).
Finally, it includes the Wraith Players Kit booklet: a small, coverless stapled booklet of the sort familiar to most RPGers (much like the booklets in a lot of older RPGs, where the cover was an unattached map or screen), which does the following:
- summarizes the setting of the game, and major character mechanical systems like Pathos and Corpus,
- explains some speciality weapons of the Underworld, especially firearms, by not-coincidentally presenting a sort of capsule history of the evolution of handheld firearms
- sums up all the Arcanoi of the 1st Edition core rulebook in a single chart.
Since the writing credits for this go to Sam Chupp, Jennifer Hartshorn, and Zhonni Perchalski, I’m guessing each wrote one of the sections, though who did which is anyone’s guess. (I also strongly suspect “Zhonni Perchalski” is a pseudonym of some sort, since pretty much the only references to this name online are in connection with this product.)
I’ve already effectively mentioned the Arcanos chart once, since this is essentially the same as the one included in the 1st edition Storyteller’s Kit. While it does sum up the original set of Arcanoi well, the list rapidly became incomplete as later supplement books added new Arcanoi types and new effects to the existing ones.
The firearms rules get (mostly, and in less-excessive detail) folded into the 2nd edition core rulebook, and I’ve never seen players want to use a screen, in play—what would they be concealing, anyway?—so it’s really only the summary of the game setting and the fancy-pants character sheets that are of much use here. And are they worth it? The text explaining the setting is really just a clarification of things that, to be frank, were also clarified in the 2nd edition core rulebook, and though I rather like the straightforward explanation of the systems for these character traits, I don’t think these three pages of text can justify buying the thing now, twenty years later, even though one sees copies—sometimes even in shrinkwrap—available from time to time online or in RPG stores that deal with out of print games.
Besides, in this day and age I think it’s pretty easy to do up a fancy-pants character sheet if you want to… though I rather suspect Mr Gone’s form-fillable sheets would be more likely to excite players today. (That, or a semi-automated character generator where one could do the point buys using an online interface that spits out a proper character sheet.)
That said, I still think the Certificate of Death is a nice touch, a pseudo-documentary tool that gets the player thinking about how his or her character’s life and death were understood by the living: it’s the kind of thing that a Storyteller can give players as an exercise in generating story hooks, or just in filling out the character a bit prior to the first proper session of play. Fortunately, one can get a copy of that page as a form-fillable PDF from the Mr. Gone site, too, and easily print it off on decent quality paper to achieve the same effect. My guess is that only a collector would really want to have this thing as a physical product—and having bought it, they would never end up using it. For most of us, the printable copies available online are more than sufficient.
To sum up is difficult, because this post covers a massive amount of content: three versions of the core rulebook, each representing a stage in the game’s development, supplemented by two major players’ guides and several screen booklets and other supplements… but also because while this is the first installment of actual reviews of the line, these are some of the last books I’m actually rereading as I work my way through a whole shelf of books from the Wraith game line.
I can say that these core rulebooks and supplements established a lot of things for the game line—some of which held true, and some of which didn’t.
1. Excellent art and prose. These books lay out a very dark underworld that is palpable on almost every page. Even the art that I feel turned off by mostly on some level supports and fills out the setting and the mood of the game. This holds true for all the the supplements: one reason Wraith was such a deeply beloved game even among those who never got to play it was because the books were so damned beautiful.
2. A lot of attention to characters’ past lives. This is something the game line drifted further and further away from as it developed, perhaps inevitably. The character design, right from the start, emphasized things like the individual’s passions, what waskeeping them around as wraiths, and which people and objects continued to be meaningful to them in death. Even in the 2nd Edition core rules, where the Hierarchy and Stygia grew in importance, there was still a strong element of that aspect of character design. But the supplements for the game tended to fill out the afterlife setting, and with each piece, they established an implicitly different view of what the game was really about: the horrible Underworld.
3. An expectation that the three major factions of the afterlife were the Hierarchy, the Renegades, and the Heretics. In actuality, the third group kind of faded out of importance as the line developed; perhaps they would have gotten their own major “meta-splatbook” if the line hadn’t been canceled—I imagine so—but they never did.
Right, I think I’ve said enough about this chunk of the game line. I’ll be back soon with more.
In fact, Hartshorn apparently was supposed to switch over to being the developer of Vampire: The Masquerade, which surprised me for two reasons: one, because that doesn’t seem to have happened (!), and two, because why doesn’t her name come up more in retrospective discussions of the World of Darkness games? She may not have taken over Vampire: the Masquerade, but she was the developer for both Wraith: The Oblivion (at the start of the line) and Vampire: The Dark Ages (for the first book). I’ll leave that as an exercise for the reader, though I’ll note that she’s not the only female designer who contributed to Wraith and other great games, but received less Memoriam than she should have.↩