Revisiting Wraith: The Oblivion—Part 3: “Setting” and “Adventure” Supplements

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. 

“Setting” and “Adventure” Supplements

In this installment, I’m discussing what a loose grouping of books that either serve to expand the general setting of Wraith: The Oblivion, or to provide adventure locales. You’ll notice that all of the books in this section: most of them are earlier supplements for the game. I have theories about why that might be the case, but for the moment, I’ll just set those aside and take them up when I am writing the series conclusion.

The full list of books discussed in this post includes: 

• Necropolis Atlanta by James A. Moore and Sam Chupp (with Jennifer Hartshorn and Shawn Carter)
• Midnight Express by Brian Campbell, Beth Fischi, Chris Hind, Ian Lemke, and Allen Tower
• Love Beyond Death by Harry Heckel, Phil Brucato, and Jennifer Hartshorn, with Cynthia Summers
• Haunts by Bill Bridges, Jackie Cassada, Richard Dansky, Harry Heckel, Ian Lemke, Judith McLaughlin, James A. Moore, and Ehrik Winters
• The Sea of Shadows, by Nicky Rea

With all of that out of a the way, I’m going to dive into the reviews:

Necropolis Atlanta 

Not counting the Storyteller screen and Character Kit, the first supplement for the newly-launched first edition of Wraith: The Oblivion was Necropolis Atlanta. The supplement expands on the sample setting (“Little Five Points,” apparently an Atlanta neighborhood) that was presented in the first edition of the core rulebook, and follows the example of the assorted “By Night” supplements for Vampire: The Masquerade and the “Rage Across…” supplements for Werewolf: The Apocalypse detailing a single city or urban area as a campaign setting. (Examples included Montreal by Night, Chicago by Night, New Orleans by Night, Vancouver by Night, and Rage Across the Amazon, Rage Across Russia, Rage Across Egypt.)

I remember reading Necropolis Atlanta in the 1990s, but not using it much—no game I ran was set in the United States, and Georgia in particular wasn’t of specific interest to me, and I’d in fact forgotten that the “Little Five Points” material was even in the first edition core rulebook—so my memories of it were vague when I picked it up… but I was curious to see how I felt about it a few decades later. After reading it, I can say that the answer is: this is the book that pretty much confirms for me how Wraith (and other original World of Darkness games) are supposed to work… I’d never use the Atlanta setting for my own game, but I think the book nonetheless provides a sort of implicit conceptual framework for building your own Necropolis for your own Wraith game. 

Note, however, the word implicit. As I mentioned a while back, one of the things I liked about the original 1986 Ghostbusters RPG was how it modeled adventure creation and design for you: if you read the Operations Manual from start to finish, you’d have a pretty good idea of how to build an adventure, a campaign, unique ghosts and other antagonists, and so on. That’s not how Necropolis Atlanta (or most other Wraith material) works: the stuff is built, instead, to provide you with an example of an already-built setting, which you can use as you like, or which you can emulate while building your own. The process implicitly modeled here seems to be:

1. Study up on the local history of your setting, preferably your own town or city, or a city you know well. 
2. Review the modern Wraith cosmology timeline, so you know how it mirrors cataclysmic events in our history (when the Great Maelstroms occurred, and what happened in their wake). 
3. Decide what mix of factions you want active and dominant in the city.
4. Think up an underworld history for your city’s Necropolis that gets you there. 
5. Populate the various factions with a (large) cast of assorted NPCs who are linked by shifting alliances and enmities: who are the Hierarchy bigwigs? The leading Heretic Cults? The biggest Renegade Gangs? How political is each group in the latter two categories? (Not all of them should be overtly political.) 
6. Who are the “Outsiders” in this Necropolis? Why are they outsiders? Include a few characters from other Dark Kingdoms, as well as others who’re just misfits and oddballs.  
7. Do up some geographical locations of interest—Skinlands, sure, but especially Haunts, Nihils, a station for the Midnight Express to use, and so on. 
8. If you want, think about some other local supernaturals you might want to use in the game, as NPCs or for a crossover game. 

Note how late in the process the geography needs to be introduced. This is, after all, a game in which the primary Underworld setting, Stygia, never got an official map… though one was made a Stretch Goal for the Wraith20 Kickstarter. Seriously: geography is kind of an afterthought. That said, I think if you’re coming from an old-school mindset, a useful analogy is to think of the social terrain—the factions and the history—as the general map, and of the individual NPCs as the hex that the PCs will be crawling. The actual locales in the city are just stages for action, often social but sometimes literally action (as in fights and such). 

This explains the massive amount of NPC detail provided—including a statblock for each NPC, even those one is unlikely to use as a combatant against the PCs: the stats are just minimum due diligence in content design, since each NPC is a hex and you never know what PCs are going to get up to in a hex. Likewise, factions allow for linked hexes—storyline hexes, as it were: one NPC’s alliance with another brings characters into a Six Degrees of Anacreon Bacon situation, in other words. 

What else? Well, speaking of Factions, there’s a chapter for each of the major ones: Hierarchy, Heretics, Renegades, and “Outsiders” (meaning those not aligned with the three major factions). It seems pretty clear that Heretics were supposed to be developed into a major faction, probably with a book or two devoted to them (maybe one for major Heretic cults and a few minor ones, and a second book for Far Shores locales) but that just never happened. It would have been cool if it had, though. 

It’s interesting, though, how in earlier Wraith supplements is how much the Heretics seem to be poised to be developed into a major gameworld faction. In later books in the game line, the Heretics still come up sometimes but things become more about Renegades vs. Hierarchy vs. Spectres. Still, in this book the Heretics get their own chapter! That’s more in-depth treatment than Heretics as a faction get almost anywhere else in the game line.) The most interesting of the Heretic groups deserves a mention: it’s the Life on Mars Society, which is basically a group of sci-fi nerds who banded together into a semi-religious cult of geekery: the NPCs detailed for that group include a teenaged nerdy Arabic-American Trekkie (who died in the 1970s), a (stereotypical) doughy white RPG fanatic, and a horse-faced college girl in love with SF literature. (So meta.) I think this group could easily be transplanted to any North American setting and be a ton of fun. I do have to admit, though, that I hit NPC/Faction writeup fatigue somewhere around this chapter, and started skimming for interesting bits. There are just so many NPCs in the book…  

The book closes with with a chapter that’s basically a mini-Atlanta By Night, details the vampires of the city, along with basically one adventure seed and couple of vague ideas. I don’t know how well the crossover would have worked—crossover was notoriously difficult for old World of Darkness games—and I had no use for it. Wraiths usually no more than glimpsed anything but fellow Wraiths or the mortals they haunted. 

This is followed by a set of errata for Wraith: The Oblivion‘s first edition core rulebook, released just two months earlier in August 1994, along with ads for various White Wolf products that include White Wolf magazine, some books from the Borealis fiction imprint they ran (including their reprint of Thomas F. Monteleone’s Borderlands books, which was the edition I first read them in at the time—and I loved them), plus the then-upcoming Wraith supplements Haunts and Midnight Express.  It’s to the latter that we turn next.

Midnight Express 

If you’re thinking about the movie that messed up the Turkish tourist industry, think again: Midnight Express is an early Wraith supplement that deals with a special recurring “setting” for the game, but in fact mainly is made up of a series of five linked adventures set on the train. That setting is a sort of undead version of the magical train trope: the Midnight Express apparently pulls into whatever station Wraiths need it at, at the stroke of midnight, everywhere on Earth. Like many Magical Trains, it travels through a very hostile and dangerous landscape—the Tempest, crammed full of leering Spectres and monsters and such—so in effect, it’s a sort of oasis/prison. If you’re now thinking of Snowpiercer, well, you have the exterior right. But the interior is surprisingly genteel, incorporating all kinds of train cars (including a car from the Orient Express, as well as an NPC’s VW Bug). There’s a dining car, and a conductor who’s under the protection of a Ferryman, and… well, yeah. 

If you’re thinking, “A train? So the adventures must be railroads, right?” I have to admit that it was also something that crossed my mind.  In fact, the first adventure in the book, “Into Midnight” is utterly railroady—a lot of the plotted “scenes” are mise en scène infodumps about action the characters can’t do anything about, and one of them includes instructions to actually stretch out the non-action as long as possible to build tension… something I think works in media, but not in a game where characters’ actions are the whole point—and the most frustrating part is that you can see how it would have been possible to construct the same adventure skeleton around the idea that characters ought to be able to act or do stuff every step of the way. It’s a terrible model for adventure design, but, happily, the adventures that follow are much better. The next, “Six-Guns and Soulfire,” is sort of a Western (think High Noon or “3:10 to Yuma”) set in a ghost town in Arizona, and the one after that, “Midnight Run” is more of an espionage mission (one of those “All you need to do is drop off a package for us with this guy,” that goes horribly wrong—but in a way that’s pretty easy for a group to manage, as it’s more action than investigation). 

The remaining adventures include the following:

• “Next Stop: Oblivion”: a sort of a scouting/infiltration mission on board a sham Midnight Express run by a Spectre whose competing train lost out to the authentic one, and is now trying to collect passengers for Oblivion; a little more railroady, to be honest, though I think some of the ideas are very stealable in building a less railroady adventure.
• “The Price of Vengeance”: an investigative mystery involving a complicated backplot regarding a conspiracy that resulted in the introduction of trench warfare and chlorine gas into the mortal world around World War I; it has a lot of fiddly bits and moving parts and yet every effort is made to keep it open-ended, with the result that it’s not a railroad, but would probably be very challenging for a novice Storyteller and inexperienced players… and I can’t help but wonder if it might work better if run by someone who knows Gumshoe or bolted bits of the Gumshoe system onto it. (I’d love to read a play report of this one, if anyone ever ran it…) 
• “Shadow Play”: an adventure that’s actually more of a straight-up orchestrated Harrowing, set up as a test for the player characters by the Ferryman who rules the Midnight Express; it is highly structured, but then it’s a bit hard to get around that since that’s the nature of Harrowings anyway; I suspect it could be made to work with any group that’s willing to play Wraith, since Harrowings are an important-if-occasional set piece item in this game. 

The book closes with an appendix offering more details and material on the Midnight Express train itself as a setting for game action, though by this point it’s been made very clear that the train is a shifting, malleable sort of narrative construct that changes to suit the group’s narrative needs. Oh, and at the end is what looks to be a repeat of the errata for the 1st edition core rulebook included at the end of Necropolis Atlanta, as well as ads for the Haunts and Love Beyond Death supplements (reviewed below). 

The adventures in this book indicate the range of types of games that are possible in Wraith: The Oblivion, and (with the exception of the first one and one or two later ones), many of them involve prepared scenarios (with notes on likely contingencies), rather than prepared storylines. This, I think, is a key to avoiding railroads, along with avoiding any hint of “no matter what the PCs do…” logic: my misgivings about the adventures on this train being railroads turned out to be mostly unfounded, and in fact I wish I’d read the book more closely early on, when I was getting used to Wraith: The Oblivion as a game system, because I think it gives one a good sample of possible game/adventure flavors—espionage, Western, scouting mission—that work well for the game-as-written. (With Wraith PCs, that is, instead of mortal ones.)

Though it’s a good supplement—and perhaps the first for the game?—it’s not perfect, of course. There are some layout problems in the book, I should note: White Wolf hadn’t yet figured out that people skim statblocks for NPCs, so the adventure text runs together with the ends of the stat blocks in some of the texts. But the book itself seems like a pretty indispensable one for someone trying to figure out what they want to do with Wraith, and the Midnight Express is a cool, flexible, and Storyteller-configurable mini-setting that can be used as an adventure space in its own right, along with being useful for ferrying Wraiths from one Shadowlands locale to another.

(Oh, and as a final note, I’d be very curious to know who wrote which adventure. The contributors are listed in alphabetical order, so I’m guessing it’s not the order of the adventures. I couldn’t find any information on that anywhere online, though.)

Haunts 

Haunts seems to have been the third-ever supplement book released for Wraith, when the game line was still being consolidated and developed, and the company was trying to attract gamers familiar with the World of Darkness but not sure what to make of Wraith.

The emphasis, then, seems to have been on modeling major features necessary for a Shadowlands-centered game: Necropoli (the cities of the Shadowlands) in Necropolis Atlanta; adventures (and a nifty recurring setting) in Midnight Express. Haunts—those places were the Shroud that separates the Skinlands from the Shadowlands grows thinner—were next in line. This is an assembly of pieces by various contributors, with a short introduction (on Haunts and the book in general) and appendix (briefly detailing how to create a unique Haunt for your game). But I also get the feeling that, in this book at least, the emphasis is also on modeling the potential versatility of the game itself: want to run a game focused on family politics in a crumbling Rhode Island manse? Or how about a game of Wraith pirates as a Renegade band fighting back against the Hierarchy? The inheritors of the Irish Civil War, struggling to forge a peaceful coexistence between Hierarchy and Renegades? A group of Heretic kooks haunting a semi-failed casino in Atlantic City, or another haunting a crypt beneath a church in Portugal? A political game centered on an abandoned castle on the border between Scotland and England, that serves as an rock-solid bastion of the Hierarchy? How about a social/political game set in Richmond, Virginia, centered on the Richmond Capitol? Or a dark, serious game on the site of a genocide in what is now Belarus?

(The latter, I have to say, feels like a small prefiguration of the Charnel Houses of Europe: The Shoah book, which I’ll be reviewing later on in this series.)

As you’ve probably gathered, instead of approaching this task by presenting adventures that demonstrate features of various haunts, the approach I might have expected, the book details a series of Haunts, including history, information about the locale, a roster of NPCs who use the Haunt as a base of operations, and a list of suggested story hooks. I feel like the specific Haunts presented vary in terms of their usability: Harry Heckel’s “Khatyn Mir” (the one set in Belarus) is interesting but would make for a tough, dark game to run; Bill Bridges’ “Blackbeard’s Cove” (the one featuring Blackbeard and a host of other pirate Wraiths) sounds likeliest to be a fun time, and in fact seems to have inspired at least one very interesting-looking recent online Wraith campaign (and extensive reenvisioning of the game). I don’t know that I’d get much mileage out of a game set in Richmond, Virginia, but then, tastes vary, and I feel like this product was supposed to hit as many notes as possible, providing material and models for people across a wide range of interests and tastes. 

I think that maybe the book would’ve been slightly more useable by people across that range, though, if the History and NPC roster sections had been a little more condensed, and more work had been put into the story hooks… perhaps even including a sketched out scenario for one of the more promising hooks. Likewise, I think the Appendix could have been a little more helpful if it had modeled the creation of a unique Haunt, perhaps as a step-by-step process (modeled in text boxes throughout the explanation, with the result being one more Haunt). And while it’s unfair to wish the book had anticipated things like Tony Dowler’s How To Host a Dungeon or some of Charles Ferguson Avery’s books (those that aid in wilderness and city adventures specifically), I also think a multi-page worksheet or questionnaire designed to help a novice Storyteller design a new Haunt for his or her game, perhaps using a point-buy system, would have been really useful. In fact, I think this kind of procedural support is maybe something the old World of Darkness games in general lacked. (Even with Vampire: The Masquerade, you can still find people complaining about insufficient support for new Storytellers.) 

Of course, I think that by the 90s, this was an industry-wide problem: the idea of modeling the D.I.Y. process of game content design wasn’t normal in way we now take for granted, which also made Wraith a much tougher sell, since the setting and concepts were so exotic compared to what else was out there that probably many prospective players and Storytellers were simply daunted and didn’t know where to start… because, though they published a ton of material for their game lines, White Wolf’s old World of Darkness games actually expected a huge amount of D.I.Y. for the Storyteller.

Anyway, given the paradigm that ruled at the time, I think Haunts did a decent job of at least modeling a range of interesting Haunts (and a range of flavours of game) possible in Wraith: The Oblivion, and gesturing at how they could be used in stories. But while I think it’s an interesting book, it’s probably the kind of thing you read once, and then just skim when you’re preparing a campaign’s Haunts. In other words, unless you’re a collector, probably the PDF would be enough for you to get what you need out of it, though you need to be prepared to deduce the process from the finished products presented in its pages. 

Love Beyond Death

Love Beyond Death is an odd book: it doesn’t really provide much in the way of settings, but it does contain a number of planned-out adventures, along with meditations on how themes like love and sexuality might work in a Wraith game (or an RPG in general), as well as a chapter’s worth of suggestions as to how to integrate love, romance, and sexuality into a Wraith game without things descending into farce or comedy on the one hand, or awkward, upsetting-to-players ickiness on the other. That advice is mostly solid, though if you’re an experienced GM with any sensitivity for your players, then some of it will strike you as a little obvious. (You may also just be uncomfortable with the whole thing, which is valid. I am, I have to admit.) There’s also a little Appendix (two pages long) at the end in which a few Artifacts and NPCs get detailed, which is a nice little closer for the book. 

The bulk of the text, however—much more than I remembered—is taken up by a series of adventures in which love of some sort is an important theme. The adventures follow the general, somewhat railroady-looking structure of most of the sample adventures published for Wraith: The Oblivion. Note that I said railroady-looking: there’s actually a notable degree of effort put into contingencies, and a lot of scenes are discussed not in terms of when the player characters enter into them, but rather if they do. That is, a number of the “scenes” in these adventures are really more like “situations” in which character action can propel the story in a number of directions. Still, there are rails, and “a number of directions” that I mentioned will in a lot of cases mean going off those rails. One thing I did appreciate about these particular adventures is the effort put into suggesting aftermath consequences, as well as alternate ways of using these scenarios: instead of a Heretic hunting down his beloved, what if it’s a Spectre being drawn back from the edge of Oblivion when he thinks he’s found the woman he loved in life?   

In other words, I think this book provides what’s probably is a pretty a good snapshot of how the people at White Wolf thought adventures for Wraith ought to look. I also think that in the hands of an experienced, flexible Storyteller who wanted to make the characters central to the story, these adventures probably could be used as story springboards and wouldn’t necessarily feel railroady at all. Maybe somewhere out there among the resources for other World of Darkness games—or other games—someone devised a way of preparing and planning out social/political games in a less-constrained, more flexible way, though I think probably a lot of it hinges on knowing the NPCs and their motivations and needs…. in other words, it requires having an idea how they would react in any given situation.) 

That said, I think the most useful material in this book, long-term, is found in Chapters 1-3. There’s stuff about cultural history (the Romantic period, for example, and how it relates to the Gothic as well as the World of Darkness Gothic-Punk aesthetic, as well as thoughts on things like boundaries, inclusion of players (who wants to sit around while two players roleplay out their characters’ love story?), handling thematics in a game, and more. I think the book is worth recommending. It’s also a very short book, being only 68 pages long (not including the advertisements that takes up the last four pages). I am happy to say this is a focused, strong little book overall, even if one might not expect it or find it useful in their own game. 

Oh, and unusually, this volume has no opening fiction, which as I think I’ve suggested already, I tend to prefer.  

The Sea of Shadows

Nicky Rea’s The Sea of Shadows is a setting supplement for Wraith, and an early one. At this stage in the game’s development—when the core rulebook was still 1st edition—Stygia and the Tempest were supposed to be otherworldly places, occasionally visited but largely mysterious and places of interlude: most of the action was focused in the Shadowlands, meaning “the other side” that is directly contiguous to (or intertwined with) the world of the living.

Therefore, it made sense at the time for Nicky Rea to be a bit vague about the Tempest, that roiling “ocean” (not all nautical) through which travel between major locales in the Wraith cosmology occurs. A fair bit of the book is basics about the Tempest, Spectres and other beings found within it, how to run Harrowings (hallucinogenic psychologiocal assaults on a Wraith by his or her Shadow and its Spectral allies)—subjects that get expanded on in later supplements to the game. It would therefore be unfair to judge the book too harshly, since it was laying out the markers for this territory, but I found especially the section that discusses regions of the Sea of Shadows, and theories about its ultimate nature, to be frustrating in its vagueness. Several sections describe regions that seem a lot like other regions described before or after, and there’s a frustrating tendency to use certain terms interchangeably at one point, but as distinct terms elsewhere. In that section of the book, I really felt like it was unclear how one would use the information in-game.

Still, the material on Spectres is worthwhile if you want a big-picture view, and the stuff on Harrowings was, I’m sure, invaluable for someone trying to run a Wraith game when the book first came out. (With what was provided in the 1st edition Core Rules, a lot of people reportedly found it tough to actually run Harrowings in-game.)

Also, there’s a sample adventure that does what too many game books seem not to do these days: it provides a kind of picture of how one might use this material in the book in-game, or rather, it provides a kind of snapsot as to what a game adventure is supposed to look like. I’ve never actually run that particular adventure, but that’s less the point that providing a conceptual map for how the book’s material could be applied to a game scenario. I also thought the new Arcanoi, Artifacts, and Relics in the appendix were cool and useful for game purposes. It’s probably worth a read, but it’s not likely to be a book you’ll be constantly referring to if you run a Wraith Game and have other supplements that expand on the stuff within.

Overview

As far as these books are concerned, my impression is that they’re good examples of why I prefer the books earlier in the Wraith: The Oblivion game line: they’re slimmer and they way information is presented in them is more focused (read: less padded-out), with a stronger tendency to put things into terms that would be applicable in-game. They also feature more sample adventures and more direct advice about game-running and integrating the new elements they contain into a game. 

That’s not to say they don’t have issues: some of the terminology in The Sea of Shadows was confusing when I first read it decades ago, and it remains confusing now. All of the adventures seem to suffer from the railroad syndrome that so many have criticized the World of Darkness games for in the years, as gamers have increasingly split up and taken to holding up either a traditional/OSR aesthetic (where railroads are seen as pure evil and the hexcrawl is held up as the ultimate good), or indie/story game aesthetics, which have made significant inroads into figuring out how a “story” political or social game could still be player character-driven and player-centric. (That is, removing the mantle of “Storyteller” from the GM, as, for example, the Apocalypse Engine games do, or doing away with GMs completely, as in games like Fiasco.)

Likewise, some of these books were made partially obsolete by later installments in the game line. Again, The Sea of Shadows seems to have been superseded, at least in most people’s games, by the later Doomslayers book that I’ll be reviewing later in this series. Likewise, though parts of it are good, Love Beyond Death seems, since it’s mostly  sample adventures, mostly to be of limited reusability, and perhaps a more catch-all guide to integrating all kinds of themes into a Wraith game would have been a nice update. 

That said, I think the early developers had a tough job ahead of them: they were literally figuring out and detailing the gameworld as they wrote these books, often for what was in effect the first time. It’s not unusual for a game to need to go through a couple of editions (or a lot of content) before things get nailed down and good, solid campaign setting supplements start to be produced, but these books all strike a pretty good balance between providing setting information, mechanics, and play advice. If the authors of later books (like The Book of Legions, The Hierarchy, and Renegades, which I’ll discuss later in this series) had stuck to that approach a little more, I think their work would have been more directly useful to players and Storytellers alike. 

I think, if you’re assembling a collection of Wraith: The Oblivion supplements, all of these are worth having, but only a few are essential: if you can only afford three, I’d probably skip Necropolis Atlanta and Love Beyond Death, not because I don’t like them, but because (in the former case) you’re unlikely to be running a game in Atlanta unless you live there, and (in the latter case) it’s the least useful long-term. Then again, if you want a set of example adventures, I’d swap Love Beyond Death for Haunts, which, again, mostly details prewritten Haunts for locales you won’t use. Sea of Shadows, I think, is still useful despite how much of it gets discussed again, and in greater detail, in later setting supplements. 

Which I guess means that, as far as I’m concerned, the best of this set of five books is Sea of Shadows and Midnight Express, with Haunts and Love Beyond Death following, and Necropolis Atlanta last. That said, I think I still prefer Necropolis Atlanta to some books later on in the line, like The Book of Legions. We’ll get to that later, though.   

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