Revisiting Wraith: The Oblivion—Part 4: The Guildbooks

Welcome to my revisitation of the Wraith: The Oblivion RPG book line. I’m reviewing the whole run of gamebooks in this series of posts. If you’re new to the series, I recommend starting with the first post.

If you’re not interested in reviews of older RPGs, I suggest you skip it. 

In this installment, I’m discussing Wraith’s the most obvious “splatbooks”: that is, the supplements detailing the various guilds of Stygia.

The full list of books discussed in this post, in the order of their numbering, includes: 

• Guildbook 1 : Artificers by Richard Dansky
• Guildbook 2 : Sandmen by Beth Fischi 
• Guildbook 3: Masquers by Ethan Skemp 
• Guildbook 4: Haunters by Lucien Soulban
• Guildbook 5: Pardoners & Puppeteers by Elizabeth Ditchburn and Heather Grove, and Jackie Cassada and Nicky Rea
• Guildbook 6: Spooks and Oracles by Mark Cenczyk and Dawn Kahan

I’m also going to discuss several other “guildbooks” in this post:

• The “Guildbook Mnemoi” chapter of Ends of Empire, and
• A few fan-made netbooks offering Guildbook coverage for Guilds that never got their own splatbook, or revisions for post-Sixth Great Maelstrom for popular/important guilds.  

One more thing: I’m going to make an exception to my tendency to skip the introductory fiction in RPG books, because the stories in the Guildbooks form a single narrative thread that illuminates the metaplot for Wraith. You’re welcome!

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

Guildbook: Artificers

It makes sense that the first Guildbook would be the Guildbook: Artificers, since they play such a crucial role in Stygian society: they’re the ones who forge everything material there… out of the souls of other dead people.

Richard Dansky’s treatment of them is good: it’s brief where it ought to be, and in-depth in places that make sense. The opening fiction isn’t really astonishing, but it’s fine for what it is. The following couple of Chapters discuss the Guild’s history and internal politics, and its relationships with other guilds and organizations. Both of these sections give what information seems useful and necessary, without much that isn’t. 

The fourth Chapter deals with the ethics of soulforging, which is a touchy subject, since the only material Artificers have to work with are the souls of their fellow dead. I think it’s called for and worthwhile, in a splatbook, since this is sort of the Artificers’ moral Achilles heel, and any player who’s interested in playing an Artificer should put some thought into how his or her character justifies—or rejects—this kind of work being a part of normal life in the guild. 

Chapter 5 is about Artificer-specific mechanics: a few ancient and new Arcanoi (powers) for guild members, a soulforging skill, and the like. This is the stuff that someone playing an Artificer will be referencing at the game table. It’s followed by the typical collection of sample character templates, and a brief appendix containing some prominent members of the Artificers’ Guild. 

My only real complaint about this book is really that in Chapter 2, which purports to contain excerpts from the Book of Nhudri (the first Artificer), the layout is problematic: the passages from the Book of Nudri are laid out on the right pages of each spread, but in a very small font and against a greyish background. It’s not easy to read them, and when the same narrative is being recounted in all essentials (but without the thees and thous) on the left side of the two-page spread—yes, by someone who’s injecting critical commentary—the temptation is strong to just skip the difficult-to-read Book of Nhudri material and just read the stuff in modern English. (To be clear, the conceit is fine—and one we see again in other Guildbooks—but the layout is a problem in this case, at least for me.) 

Guildbook: Sandmen

Guildbook: Sandmen is about the dream-intruders and entertainers of the Underworld, playing out their dramas in the dreams of the living. If you’ve seen Dead Like Me (which I loved the first few times I watched it), the character of Daisy Adair would have been one of these, to the point where one of the character templates in the back feels like it could be used pretty much directly to run Daisy as a character. 

The quality of the book is no surprise: Beth Fischi’s work in Wraith books was consistently to a high standard, and the material here is very evocative of the Sandman Guild. That said, I feel like it’s rich enough one would be tempted to just run a group of Sandmen for a campaign, as a sort of double-life narrative: on the one hand, they use their Arcanoi to connect to the living and create beautiful art; on the other, they grapple with the muck and horror of living in the Underworld and dealing with the Powers That Be down in Stygia, as well as the forces of Oblivion and various Renegade and Heretic groups that come after them either in the hope of using them, or putting their artistic work to a stop. The character templates are pretty much indicative of that, too: you have the Troubled Genius, the Scheming Ingénue, the Drama Critic, the Film Queen (which is the Daisy Adair character) and the Impresario.  

Which… does that sound like a compelling campaign? Definitely… but you’d need the right group of players. Probably in the 90s it wasn’t hard to find them: I think that one of the interesting things about the World of Darkness games was how they appealed not only the doughy gamers who’d started out with classic games like D&D and Call of Cthulhu, but also seemed to satisfy something that people from other groups—artsy types, college drama clubs, and so on—seemed to want. Sure, lots of art school and drama club people played D&D, but I think they gravitated toward the White Wolf games because it was trendy and because of a sense, right or wrong, that there was more room for “role-playing” characters, by which I mean doing voices, putting on character mannerisms, and so on in a way a lot of D&D fans I know tend not to do. (This seems especially true of the LARP branch of the World of Darkness games.) Sandmen (like the Toreadors of Vampire: The Masquerade) were probably an exciting option for players like this, who were interested in campaigns tied to stuff they were authentically interested in. 

Still, I can say for absolutely certain plenty of RPG groups would not be down for running a game of Actors & Artists, especially not one played in a dismal Afterlife setting. All of which leaves us with the question of how much one of this material could be integrated into a Wraith campaign where the Sandmen were merely a single Guild among many. I never had to worry about that, since I mostly ran Mortals-centric games, but it would be foremost in my mind if I were to run a game now. Especially with adults, since I think it’d be impossible to get most players to sit down and read the splatbooks. 

Oh, and while I neglected to comment about it, the introductory fiction here wasn’t like in the Book of Legions, where a very clear thread is traced through the various installments focusing on the same main character. Here, it jumps to a new perspective, though one connected to the events from the first story, and following straight on after it, and it deals with the same issues—in terms of themes and the central mystery that seems to be unraveled regarding the fate of Charon, the missing ruler of Stygia—but the series is looser and more freewheeling. It is, though, one of the better RPG fiction texts I’ve come across. 

Anyway, I really liked the Sandmen guildbook: the history and guild information were interesting to read, and the Arcanoi and Artifacts were flavorful and made sense. Overall, the book was a good read, and gave me some ideas for what one could do, for a certain kind of Wraith campaign. The book made me feel a little sad that the RPG business has lost Beth Fischi  (who is still alive and well, from what I’ve seen, but no longer seems to write RPG materials). 

Guildbook: Masquers

Guildbook: Masquers deals with the Wraith guild specializing in Moliate, the Arcanos that is used to warp the flesh of the Wraiths, known as Corpus. This speciality has made the Masquers unpopular for obvious reasons, since they tend toward trickery, spying, and other deceitful business. 

Ethan Skemp’s text is clear and relatively concise, and highly readable: like Beth Fischi, he adopts in parts of the book the persona of a Masquer explaining the guild to an imaginary audience (in this case, the Masquer is an infiltrator explaining what she’s learned to outsiders). The “callings” section—which details specific professions and interest groups within the guild, has a few options that are quite adaptable to different kinds of playstyles, ranging from combat-focused Warsmiths to politically inclined Arrangers and Fetches. 

The guild history is presented in the next chapter as an archaic text with critical, modern commentary. As I said, the conceit is fine when the layout’s alright, as it is in this case, though by the third iteration I’m starting to wonder whether things are going to get changed up a bit. That said, Skemp puts some effort into fitting in enough material that might be red herrings that after the introductory chapter—which the imaginary author claims has been seeded with red herrings—one’s imagination is drawn toward exploring the question of what might be purposefully misrepresented in both accounts. Chapter Three is the inevitable discussion of how the guild relates to other guilds, and what’s notable here is that Skemp breaks things down in a way that reflects the guild’s thinking, not the game-designers: he starts with how Masquers see themselves and their role in Stygian society, and then proceeds to the Hierarchy and Renegades and Heretics; then he touches on “other guilds” but separates the more legitimate guilds from “The Forgotten Three” (the Alchemists, the Mnemoi, and the Solicitors), who are the most heavily repressed and distrusted of all the guilds. He proceeds through the usual remainders: Oblivion and Spectres, one’s own Shadow, and denizens of the mortal world—starting with mortals. 

He finishes with a good selection of alternate Arcanoi (many of them seemingly useful in a range of typical RPG situations, including combat, parley, and so on), skills, merits and flaws, archetypes, and a few artifacts—the crunchy mechanics and character-generation stuff—all of which seem likely to be useful in play, and a set of template characters and NPC Masquers. I feel like the problem of “But how would I use this in play?” is less pronounced here: the character concepts are more given to a broader range of adventures of a sort more familiar to longtime gamers, ranging from political intrigue and spy missions to Labyrinth-based combat missions. 

Again, a good book, and I was surprised how much I liked it, and how well it compared to Guildbook: Sandmen—not because I thought poorly of Skemp, but just because I liked Sandmen so much. If you’re running a guild-heavy game with players who’re willing to read up or at least engage with the mysteries and materials, so far the guildbooks seem well worth having. 

Guildbook: Haunters

This book is the last of the single-guild Guildbooks to be published—the remaining four guildbooks were published doubled-up in two volumes—and was penned by Lucien Soulban, who would go on to be the lead developer of the Orpheus gameline, the “spiritual successor” and spinoff of Wraith: The Oblivion that was one of the last old World of Darkness games (but which anticipates elements of the New World of Darkness reboot that was to come).

Guildbook: Haunters comes out of the cage hitting, and hard, with one of its main goals being to drive home the fact tat the Haunters are, well… kinda crazy. After all, Wraith society is strictly bound by the Dictum Mortuum—the somewhat poorly-enforced Stygian law that forbids Wraiths to interact with the living, reveal themselves to them, or effect their “crossing over of” into the world of the living. Haunters are having none of that: their aim is pretty much rip apart the Shroud that separates the worlds of the living and the dead, and their Arcanoi match that aim. 

Which is also to say, they’re mostly crazy. The book drives this point home in a few ways: one of them is typographically. One has to read the book to figure out where so many of the section headings and subheadings look (for example) like this:

Why We Haunt Humanity ytinamuH tnaW eW yhW

But eventually it becomes apparent that both the Haunters’ Shadows and the Wyld, a sort of insanity-inducing pseudo-insectile force that links them all, act upon the minds of Haunters, twisting their psyches the way their own Arcanoi are so often used to twist the psyches of the living. 

The book follows the structure and format of the other Guildbooks, and is on a par with the others in terms of quality… mostly. There’s once again an regrettable font choice that was made to render some passages that are supposed to be handwriting—far too tiny to be comfortably read—but overall, the layout is really good, and Soulban made some interesting and useful choices when particularizing how Haunters view themselves and everyone else—whom they consider “Aliens”; he handles their alliance with the Spooks (which seems natural when you consider it) and their enmity with the Dannati (those Benandanti who bear fennel swords and hunt ghosts in the hope of “killing” them), both choices that feel like they can be used to good effect in a game. I found the Guild history section a bit overlong… partly because it’s written in first person and that tends to stretch things out unnecessarily. (An issue that isn’t just noticeable in this book, but which hit me harder reading this one than the previous ones I’m discussing.) I’m sure there’s an argument for doing it this way, since it leaves open the question of how truthful any one account is… but the argument against, especially today, is that a lot of people who used to have the time to read and reread setting material have gravitated to pick-up and rules-light games because they don’t have time for more involved player prep.  

That said, I like the various sub-factions and callings within the Haunters’ Guild, and feel like it’d be fun to role-play characters who’re part of them as members of a bigger group of Wraith player characters. I also think there’s some great, horrible Arcanoi introduced in this book that anyone playing a Haunter character (or any character using the Pandemonium Arcanos) would love to use in-game. 

Guildbook: Pardoners & Puppeteers

In a sudden change of pace, the next installment in the line, Guildbook: Pardoners and Puppeteers, was a double-header. Presumably it became apparent that the Wraith game line was going to shut down sooner than expected, and scheduling necessitated consolidating the four upcoming Guildbooks that were in the pipeline. Oh, and one thing: it might be the only RPG book I own written by a group of authors who were all women, many of whom also wrote other books in the same game line. Coming from TSR-era D&D, that’s notable: the majority of TSR products that saw publication in the 70s and 80s were written by men. Another thing that’s notable about this particular guildbook is that the cover art differentiates it from all the others: the cover is printed in bluish ink, where all the others use a sort of darker brown on lighter brown cover.  

First come the Puppeteers (despite being second in the title). This portion of the book appears of have been the part written by Elizabeth Ditchburn and Heather Grove, though I’m just guessing from the order of the credits on the title page, as well as the character credits. (Heather Grove’s character Yaeko features in the first introductory fiction piece, which is alright as fiction but doesn’t connect to the earlier segments of “A Road of Steel and Souls” as clearly as the previous installments did to one another.)

The Puppeteers are the Wraith Guild specializing in the Puppetry Arcanos, which makes them rather unwelcome in Stygia, as their focal power involves a direct violation of the Dictum Mortuum: at higher levels of mastery it allows what’s commonly called “possession,” but also other forms of immersion in the world of the Quick (that is, the living), but even at lower levels of power, it allows pretty significant interference in the Skinlands. Little surprise that the first few sections of the book present a look at the Guild’s culture and history indirectly: the former, as a report by an attempted infiltrator (as in Guildbook: Masquers, reviewed above). The guild’s history is related as excerpts of a series of taped interviews between a Puppeteer’s unwilling Consort (someone repeatedly possessed by the same Puppeteer) and a psychiatrist. These sections make what might otherwise had been a little boring pretty readable.

There’s a chapter on the secret connection between the Puppeteers and the Risen, expanding on the material discussed in the earlier sourcebook The Risen (for which the review is forthcoming in Part 6 of this series), and another chapter offering some new Puppeteer options in terms of new Arcanoi, Merits and Flaws, Character Archetypes, Artifacts, and material about Hosts and Consorts. The book closes out with the usual selection of sample character archetypes and significant Guildmember NPCs: good material, here, though I found this stuff of limited use personally. 

Overall, the Puppeteers come off a little bit like a gang of dangerous, unbridled gutterpunks who’re, as-is, essentially Renegades themselves. I’m not sure why, but it feels like something is missing from the earlier guildbooks, I suppose because the inter-splat relations section is folded into the chapter on the Risen, and because the infiltrator’s report goes to such great lengths to portray them as dangerous and cruel even to those who’re just aspiring to join their guild. Oh, but if you’re interested in the ever-elusive idea of a crossover game, and planning to use Risen in it—which is the easiest way to do crossover with Wraith any any other line—then this part of the book will likely be of use to you. 

As for the Pardoners, this Guildbook does, I must admit, make them more attractive as player characters. After all, they keep the Underworld—Stygia and the Necropoli alike—running by purging Angst from the Shadows of all Wraiths who come to them… for a price, of course. Probably the book makes them look good in part because, though this guildbook uses multiple perspectives to present the guild just like the other guildbooks, most of the narrators here are sympathetic and the unsympathetic ones are, well… less charming. (Somehow a Shadow that uses vocabulary like “Shaddap” and “Nyah!” and “Bla bla bla” to counter the claims of a respected Pardoner isn’t all that convincing.)

This guildbook’s installment of the “Road of Steel and Souls” snaps things back to the main thrust of the over-arching narrative: the buzz surrounding what looks to be an attempt by a group of powerful Wraiths to go hunt for Charon down in the Labyrinth. It advances the metaplot, tossing out speculations as to whether Charon might be hiding elsewhere (such as in the Skinlands) and as to the true nature of the Malfean Gorool, which famously clashed with Charon in the last moments before he disappeared during the Fifth Great Maelstrom. 

Overall, this book is quite readable, if not without its issues. The first chapter, a sort of introduction to the Guild, takes the form of a lecture to applicants to the guild by guildmember Brother Tenacious, accompanied by a brochure of meditation exercises (the whole of which is annotated by a snarky outsider, whose snark comes off a little cheesy but at least cuts through some of the the half-truths in the lecture). In the next chapter comes the official guild history, told as a confession by its longtime leader, Sister Rapture. This is fine, with more hints and details and meta-plotty content, except for the front choice, which simulates handwriting but turns the chapter into a bit of a slog. Chapter Three is the inter-splat relationship chapter, which is fine though it’s unnecessarily broken down into “pamphlets”; I liked, though, how it explored the specific alliances and enmities of the guild, as well as how it focuses on Spectres as a special group.

Chapter Four explores four “secrets” of the guild, and for my money is the most awkward of the chapters: I like the idea of it being written and printed by the Shadow of Brother Tenacious, but there’s an attempt to inject some back-and-forth pseudo-dialog in the form of annotations by Brother Tenacious, and counter-annotations by his Shadow. This doesn’t work particularly well, both because it seems to try to evoke spoken dialog, but also because the Shadow’s snarky tone cheapens its authority with the claims it’s trying to make. Still, the secrets revealed are pretty compelling, even if we split the difference and assume everything the Shadow is claiming is only haf-true. Chapter Five provides the usual new set of Arcanoi, Archetypes, and Artifacts, and is followed by the usual set of character templates in Chapter 6, and NPCs in Chapter 7.  

Despite a few minor disappointments, I liked this guildbook. I almost wish that White Wolf had started out doing double-sized guildbooks from the beginning… or even metasplat books grouping sets of guilds together, since after finishing those, they might have gotten them all covered (and had room for other factions, like the Heretics, as well as neglected locales such as the Far Shores). Of course, hindsight’s always 20/20, and I’m off topic. It’s a good guildbook. 

Oh, and finally, and a little depressingly, the book closes with advertising for a lot of books for a vast number of game lines… excluding Wraith, which I suppose means that the writing was already on the wall? There were more Wraith: The Oblivion books coming out, of course—a number of them, in fact—but White Wolf wasn’t advertising them here. Which is funny: either they decided the line had its faithful core who’d follow the line without needing ads, or they hoped to interest Wraith‘s fans in other games. Either way, we see ads for Changeling: The Dreaming 2E, the Vampire: The Masquerade CD-Rom, a fiction anthology (The Essential World of Darkness), two Vampire tie-in novels launching new series, and finally the core book for the already Aeon: Trinity RPG. Of all of these, I feel like Changeling: The Dreaming was the likeliest to be a good fit for your average Wraith fan. (I have to admit to not having read all the way through my copy of the Aeon: Trinity core book despite having owned it, and had it on hand, since at least sometime in 2001.)

Guildbook: Spooks and Oracles

This is the second double-guildbook, and the last that was published as a proper guildbook. Guildbook: Spooks and Oracles deals with a rather strange pairing: the Spooks, masters of the Arcanos Outrage, which allows them to act directly upon (mostly) objects in the world, and the Oracles, whose Arcanos Fatalism allows precognition of various sorts. Even a description as cursory as that should bring to mind likelier pairings: Spooks with Haunters, Puppeteers, or Proctors, and Oracles with Monitors or Mnemoi. Even if we think of guilds in terms of other natural groupings—one common one is to split them into “Great,” “Working,” “Criminal,” and “Minor” guilds—the pair don’t fall together naturally.

Though this is just a guess and I could be wrong, I imagine they just happened to be the next two guildbooks in the pipeline, and were paired to fit the scheduled end of the game line. That said, if Onyx Path does do revised guild books, I think more natural groupings would make sense, and perhaps help boil things down to the most economical presentation of the material. 

The Spooks section of the book was alright, but didn’t charm me as much as some of the guildbooks, perhaps because the concept for the spooks seemed to boil down to a mobster concept, cut slightly with tinges of what’s more like a crooked labour union. I wasn’t really wowed by the guild history, and I found most of its factions (and, I’ll add, the NPCs in the final chapter) felt very American and mostly pretty obviously mafia-flavored, with the exception of the last NPC. (The author has great fun explaining why the Red Sox never won the World Series—one of the most obvious example of how these books have dated, second only to a brief mention of Donald Trump in The Book of Legions.

Still, I have to admit the new Arcanoi, Merits and Flaws, and Artifacts and Relics in this book are simply great and would be a lot of fun to use in play, and that probably even the mob concept works well for Wraith, if you’re interested in it. So why wasn’t I wowed? The writing, apparently by Mark Cenczyk, suited this conception of the Spooks, and the art was particularly well tuned to the mafia/underworld/noir concept, so my guess is that maybe I just wasn’t that into it because it was the seventh guildbook in a row that I read, or maybe just because I feel like I’ve had enough of mafia narratives for the moment. Or maybe because, with the exception of a couple of minor things, the guildbook felt very, very focused on the United States, more than most of the other Guildbooks. I find that a bit disappointing, since Stygia is supposed to govern the whole Western Underworld.

The Oracles section of the book is a little different: it deals with the guild whose Arcanoi are tied up in fortune-telling and future-seeing. Unfortunately, I found this guildbook was also something of a slog. For one thing, it’s the only guildbook to come with its own “Lexicon” page (something that most White Wolf core rulebooks have, as do splatbooks in some of the other lines, so it’s not without precedent, but it does speak to how much new argot is introduced in the guildbook). 

The introductory fiction—the eighth installment in the “A Road of Steel and Souls” narrative—again feels like a bit of a departure from the building narrative: stuff here is stated outright that was handled more enigmatically in earlier sections, especially with respect to the mystery of where Charon currently is. Chapter One is sort of an introduction to the guild by an emissary from within the guild, and it’s a bit of a mess: there’s an effort to be old-fashioned and Continental, but the tone of the narrator is what one friend called “elevensies,” as in cranked up to eleven. (The overabundance of Exclamation! Marks!, for example, is pretty in-your-face.)

I preferred the next chapter, which is sort of a loose guide to the history of the guild, in part told as a description of the temple of the Oracles in Stygia; I’m not crazy about the font choice here—handwriting-like fonts have their place, but after pages and pages, one starts to wish one could reconfigure the font as one can on an ebook reader. Still, the factions here are interesting, even if to me it seems a bit of a stretch that the factional lines among the Oracles would necessarily so closely follow the scrying methods used by its members.  I did find it puzzling that Kahan includes a group of Oracles from the Dark Kingdom of Jade, though: this was the first such inclusion, and it’s odd it would happen so very late in the line, which left me wondering about the status of ambassadors and envoys from other Dark Kingdoms to Stygia, and their involvement (or lack thereof) in the Stygian Guilds. 

The third chapter is the weirdest in this whole double-book—and possibly the weirdest in all the guildbooks. It seems, at first glance, to be a look at a number of prophecies that have been recorded by the Oracles over millennia… but in fact, that’s just the disguise used to present the de rigeur factional-relations chapter. I actually realized what it was about halfway through the chapter, went back to the beginning, and read it again…. and found it much less bewildering the second time. I admire Dawn Kahan’s creativity here, though, well… maybe it’s not good that I had to go back and reread a bunch of it after I figure out the point of the chapter. That said, I think it was a very clever and creative way to present the information, and for that reason feel like it was a worthwhile, if slightly experimental, departure from the typical format used in most of the other guildbooks.

The fourth chapter has the typical new Arcanoi, Merits and Flaws, Artifacts and Relics. It was alright—stuff that I would be slightly less inclined to include in a typical Wraith game, but might consider if someone was running an Oracle character and it felt like it might fit. The character templates in Chapter 5, though, were mostly really interesting and funny: a former televangelist, a deceased telephone hotline psychic (with her phone headset burnt into her head), a Ren Faire kid, a bookish history prof, and a Dungeon Master (complete with dice bag). The NPC roster in Chapter six was less compelling to me, though: I found it hard to take one of the characters seriously, and the other two were fine, but not particularly exciting.

Like the previous double-header guildbook, this one closes with ads for other game lines: Mage: The Sorcerer’s Crusade, Kindred of the East, and Trinity (which title, by this point, had lost its “Aeon” prefix). 

Prologue to Remembrance: Guildbook Mnemoi (from Ends of Empire)

The Wraith game line was canceled years before its forecast end, and the last book in the series, Ends of Empire, attempted to tie up as many loose ends as possible. To that end, it included a chapter (the fourth) that in fact was the official Guildbook for the Mnemoi, which I’m going to discuss here. (I’ll leave the rest of the book to discuss elsewhere.)

In practically every previous case in which they’re mentioned, the Mnemoi are presented as horrible, awful wraiths, blamed for treason against Charon. This is a thread that runs, to some degree, throughout all the Guildbooks as well as many other books in the line… and so, of course, the obvious thing happens in Ends of Empire: they turn out to be the one guild most faithful to Charon, the secret keepers of his memories who’ve had not only to endure the blowback from a ton of misinformation fingering them as traitors to Stygia, but also had to effect that misinformation by the manipulation of other Wraiths’ memories.  

I have to say, though it follows the structure of the other Guildbooks, and also shows signs here and there of being slightly rushed, I appreciated the economy with which it presented a lot of its information. The opening fiction is effective, if a bit predictable (at least, I felt like I knew where it was going pretty quickly), and the guild history, told as a series of memory flashbacks transferred into the mind of an initiate to the guild, worked well, though of course it did somewhat fixate on the Big Secret.

The Guild-as-it-stands-now writeup, in “Those Who Remember: Mnemos Society,” is better, in that it gives a lot of quick snapshots of different factions, groups, and major individuals within the guild, as well as a look into their recruitment process, initiation rites, training methods, and more. The inter-splat relations section was, surprisingly, the one part I felt was a bit overlong, but that’s partly because of the style used: each relationship discussed is first played out in a memory flashback of some interaction between a Mnemoi and a member of that group, and some of the memories end up being surprisingly long, followed by a very short snippet summing up the typical Mnemos takeaway regarding that group. Of these, the biggest surprise was the Mnemos antipathy towards the Chanteurs, something I didn’t really expect. 

The “crunchy” material in “Working in the Past: Systems” actually grabbed my imagination perhaps more than anything else in any of the guildbooks (though maybe that’s just because of my interest in memory palaces after reading Frances Yates’ book on the subject earlier this year). I can easily imagine a session or two of really interesting gameplay where a group of Wraiths trawl through the memories of a Mnemoi, searching for clues to some mystery they need to solve, and maybe stumbling upon more than they bargained for. The rules for the special Memory Palaces that contain Charon’s memories are especially brutal and appropriate, and the Merits and Flaws, new Arcanoi, and bizarre Artifacts (like Memory Golems, Mirrors of the Past, and the creepy Greater Palace that tracks all of Charon’s memories in terms of who’s carrying what) were all fitting to the guild. The templates were fine, and made sense, but I found it funny that the templates section started with a note that reads as follows:

Note: There are no statistics attached to these templates. This is not an oversight. We’d just rather give you more information than a page full of dots you can whip up yourself quickly anyway. 

It’s funny, to me, because I’ll admit that for the most part, I just skim the templates section of typical splatbooks and almost never actually read through the character sheets that are included facing them. I’ve never found the “pages full of dots” all that useful anyway—I felt like they were an unfortunate, bulky holdover from the original first edition core rulebook for Vampire: The Masquerade, a book in which they were arguably useful because people didn’t really have a handle on the character mechanics and what all the dots meant. By 1998, I think the two-page template writeup and sample template character sheet had outlived its general usefulness, beyond perhaps being useful as a quick, heavily-detailed NPC. Speaking of which, the NPC roster for the Mnemoi is fine, perhaps a little less playful than some—it focuses on bigwigs—but still with a funny sting in the tail, in the form of a Mnemoi “memory pusher” named Sheldon. Yes, I admit, much as I disliked Big Bang Theory, I can’t help but imagine him looking like this:

Gah, what a way to end my review of the last official rulebook. I guess now’s the time to say something I didn’t say above: the artwork is uniformly outstanding in all of the Guildbooks, mostly very well suited to theme of the guild, and very, very much in keeping with the mood and feel of the rest of the Wraith: The Oblivion line. Even in Ends of Empire, a book that feels like it was compressed as much as possible to fit the maximum amount of material—to fit three separate books, really—this holds true.    

Supplementary Fan Efforts:

A number of the Wraith: The Oblivion’s Stygian guilds never got a full, book-length treatment, which prompted fans to create their own Guildbook expansions to address those guilds. Meanwhile, the same and other fans occasionally felt the need to expand the scope of those guilds that did get a guildbook, or to update them (mainly to a post-Sixth Great Maelstrom setting).

While they’re not official products, and I won’t be giving them extensive review, I think they’re at least worth a mention for those who’re interested in filling out the guilds that ended up not being written up officially. Many of the netbooks I discuss below are available via the Wraith Project, though the last two are independently housed elsewhere, on the personal webpage of their creator. 

Oh, and besides fan-written Guildbooks, there’s a fair amount of other material available there, including several prewritten Wraith campaign outlines and adventures, and more. While the archive of The Wraith Project is slightly incomplete (and a bit jumbled), it’s still a great resource to check out.

Oh, and it’s a website that went offline and then came back, so there’s no telling when it’ll go offline again… so you may want to try get yourself a full copy of the site, just in case. (See the tips on this webpage about how to use the wget command for the least painful way to do that.) 

For the compleatist, I’ll try collect links to all the fan-sourced material I can find online—including new Arcanoi posted on the Onyx Path forum, other fan-written supplements (like a Victorian era setting book for Wraith), and more—and add them to a later post in this series. I’ll also keep a backup of the materials, in case these sites go down, to prevent the materials from being lost to the ether. I’m happy to do that, given how much work has gone into making these things. (It’s nice having someone else do creative work for you, even if you only mix and match and use the bits you like, and I think this kind of work should be saved for those who might use it.)

But for now, I’ll just address the alternate guildbooks. 

 

Guildbook: Chanteurs

The Chanteurs are the guild specializing in Keening (and the guild that seems pretty clearly inspired by the trope of the Banshee, a ghost who sings and screams as an ill potent). The Chanteurs’ never having gotten a Guildbook was a disappointment to me, since, as a musician, I was very interested in that Guild. This treatment is pre-Sixth Maelstrom, set before the cataclysm mapped out in the final book of the game line, Ends of Empire. Guildbook: Chanteurs (attributed to J. & K. Productions) is available only in web format, and is hosted at Knocking on Charon’s Door, which also, along with alternate arcanoi, Tempest monsters, artifacts, locations, and factions, hosts some sample characters and a campaign plan. 

Revised Guildbook: Symphonists

Another treatment of the Chanteurs, this unofficial guildbook is by named J.L. Williams, who decided to write a guildbook of sorts for them… one set after the Sixth Great Maelstrom, which is an interesting twist. Guildbook: Symphonists is the result of that effort. It’s an interesting effort to grapple not only with the Chanteurs as a guild, but also to grapple with the idea of what life after the Sixth Great Maelstrom would be like for the Wraiths who survived it. Despite taking the Sixth Great Maelstrom into account, it may have some useful material even for those who choose not to use that chunk of the metaplot in their games. 

Revised Guildbook: Spooks

Like the Revised Guildbook: Symphonists book above, the Revised Spooks Guildbook (also by J.L. Williams) is a treatment set after the Sixth Great Maelstrom of Ends of Empire and Orpheus. The difference here is that there was an official Guildbook for the Spooks, and this is more of an update or expansion rather than a Guildbook created to answer the need for a missing book from the line. That’s not a bad thing, of course: Storytellers and players may find useful things here, whether they’re playing a post-Sixth Great Maelstrom game or not.  

Revised Guildbook: Sandmen

This is still one more revised guildbook, in this case dealing with the Sandmen and their role in Stygian society after the Sixth Great Maelstrom. Therefore Revised Guildbook: Sandmen (also by J.L. Williams) is something of an update for the Sandmen, though you may find bits and pieces here that are of interest even if you don’t include that part of the metaplot in your own game. Consider it a supplement and expansion for the original Guildbook: Sandmen and glean from it whatever you like, I suppose. Or don’t, if you prefer. 

Guildbook: Solicitors

J. Edward Tremlett’s Guildbook: Solicitors seems never to have gotten the full PDF treatment, but was published in HTML format. It gives a look at another neglected guild, this time the Solicitors, whose Arcanos, Intimation, involves warping and molding the desires of others to suit the purposes or needs of the Solicitor… or whoever has hired him or her. They’re a minor, creepy group, and probably few PC Solicitors were ever played, but there’s some fun stuff here for any game where the PCs have to deal with one.  

Guildbook: Harbingers

Stewart Wilson’s Guildbook: Harbingers also never got a PDF treatment. Like the Solicitors and Symphonists Guildbooks, it’s a look at a guild that never got its own splatbook. Their focal Arcanos, Argos, is a pretty important one in Wraith—it’s the occult skill of navigating the Tempest, which pretty much all Wraiths who do anything like “adventuring” need eventually to do—so it’s a pretty notable omission, but this treatment is fairly brief and would require some filling out by the Storyteller and/or players if one were to attempt a political, guilds-driven chronicle.  

Guildbook: Proctors

The netbook Guildbook: Proctors is an admirable effort by Finnish Wraith fan J. Tuomas Harviainen, and is hosted over at his site. (There’s also a PDF version over on Scribd, which doesn’t seem to be hosted on the original site for some reason.) The Proctors are a “criminal” guild and their focal set of Arcanoi, collectively known as Embody, deal with materializing in the world of the living. The author specifically highlights that it was friends who made clear the possibilities for characters from this guild, which suggests what I think is the case: that the possibilities aren’t all immediately apparent from just reading the core rulebook. 

Guildbook: Solicitors

Another effort by J. Tuomas Harviainen—and another stab at exploring the creepy guild of desire-warping occult powers—Guildbook: Solicitors is available as an early draft in webpage form, or, in its final form, as a PDF file. The guild deals in the Arcanoi of Intimation, which involves warping the will and desires of others by “magical” means, and is therefore one of the outlawed Arcanoi. 

Also worth noting is an unfinished Guildbook: Solicitors that J. Edward Tremlett started working on, but seems not to have finished. That’s hosted as a webpage over on wraith.cattail.nu. 

Guildbook: Usurers

Written by Shawn Endreson, Guildbook: Usurers takes a look at the Wraiths whose business (and Arcanoi) relate to the trading and selling of Pathos. Once hosted on the now-defunct Ex Libris Nocturnis (and apparently still retrievable via the Wayback Machine), you can also grab a copy off Scribd. It treats the Usurers as essentially capitalists trading in the business of emotions, and it’s a short but sweet, creepy look at how the economics of reified Pathos could work in Stygia and the Shadowlands.  

Wrapping Up

I suppose I should make some sort of overall comments on the full line of guildbooks as a set. While my comments above show that they’re not perfect gamebooks, I still like them very much—and I’ll add, I read the full set of them back to back over the space of about a week and a half. 

I will say, though, that I feel the guilds each got a little more detail than I wanted or needed. Obviously, when you’re an RPG publisher and your model depends on specific game lines, you have an incentive to put out a series of books, and the splatbooks approach seems to have worked well enough for earlier game lines. But I think fans of Wraith would have probably been better served with a smaller set of guild-related books, more compressed so that three or four guilds could fit into a single volume. I think that’d probably allow for great economy of prose, and also would have limited the amount of canonical game setting information to an amount that could be handled by your average game group. Asking a player to read a thirty page writeup of a guild, I can see: asking them to read seventy pages? I think that would’ve been a stretch even for my most enthusiastic groups back even before everyone I knew had kids. (Sure, when I was playing in someone else’s game, I read splatbooks, but as a GM I was in the habit, and I don’t get the feeling other players were doing so.)  

That said, I think the usefulness of these books might vary depending on what kind of game you’re running. If you’re running a game focused on Stygia and the Hierarchy, in which the suppression of the Guilds is a significant plot thread, then these books will probably be useful whether your group’s characters are member of the Hierarchy, Renegades, Heretics, or independents. After all, the Guilds are a great concept: a set of illegal secret societies that officially don’t exist and to some degree have to fly under the radar, but which suffuse society and keep it going, and who hold monpoly on the more advanced arts of magical power that keep afloat the very society that banned them. They’re inherently political, and each guild’s specific flavor can, if the player and Storyteller alike are interested in that, complexify both character and plot by contradicting or conflicting with various duties and alliances that constrain player characters’ actions. 

But there’s so much information in these books, is the thing. If you’re running a Doomslayers game, or something very focused on the Skinlands, I feel like you might not need so much detail about the guilds, much less about its upper echelons and Charon. If you’re not interested in the metaplot, there’s other big chunks of information in these books you probably won’t find a use for. And I can see a lot of people not being interested in that metaplot, though a lot of the people who bought Wraith books and consumed them all were reading them as much for the metaplot as anything. Also, the relative absence of both guilds and Stygia as anything more than a vague presence in earlier books (such as Midnight Express, reviewed in the third installment of this series), suggest one could easily run a fun Wraith chronicle without recourse to these supplements, going just from what’s in the core rulebook(s). Well, okay, the first edition core rulebook, that is: the focus shifted more heavily to Stygia in the second edition hardcover core rules.  

On the other hand, I think if I were to run Wraith again, I’d probably approach it with things like the excellent TV series The Americans and John Le Carré’s The Spy Who Came in from the Cold in mind: espionage, conflicting ethics and duties, alliances that break rules, and pressure to work with those one hates… and/or to betray those one likes or even loves. I’d probably want to get the players to pick up a PDF their characters’ guildbook, and give them a copy of the writeup for their characters legion from The Book of Legions. There’d be an expectation for the players to do a bit of preparation, as we’d need to start off the game knowing who is supposed to be infiltrating what group, who trusts or distrusts whom, and so on… even if they were just skimming the guildbook for tidbits they found interesting or useful. Will I ever have a group willing to do that kind of homework? Beats me… but I feel like that’s the kind of Wraith game I’d want to run.  

The other thing to say is that while it was obviously frustrating for Wraith fans that the full set of Guildbooks never got written (only nine of the guilds got this deluxe treatment), I’m not sure we really needed books for all of the guilds. I remember wondering what would be done with the Chanteurs, for example: the guild appealed to me, since I’m a musician, but it didn’t seem likely to be such a goldmine of RPG-applicable material, to be honest. And in any case, dedicated fans stepped up and provided material for some guilds in the intervening years—all the ones I could find are linked above. The guilds that never got any kind of expansion (including by fans) include only the following:

• Alchemists
• Monitors

What they have in common is that they’re all either despised or very minor guilds: the Alchemists were excluded when Charon summoned Guild leaders to sign on supporting the Dictum Mortuum, and the guild from which they were an offshoot (the Artificers) mostly shun them. The Monitors (like the Mnemoi) are hated for a mix of reasons mostly related to a supposedly very nasty use of their Arcanoi and the role they played in Stygian history. 

Honestly, I feel like maybe these guilds deserved to be treated in appendices to the guilds closest to them: The Monitors appendixed with the Pardoners, who were their closest allies until things went sour between them; and the Alchemists as an appendix to the Artificers, since the former were a breakaway guild from the latter. Usurers, I’m not so sure about. Perhaps the appendix idea isn’t so great: perhaps it’d be better to have a book on “shunned” guilds all its own. (And, since I dig mystery in the Underworld of Wraith, I’d like that book to also include, say, a section on independent oddballs and experimenters with new Arcanoi that aren’t part of any of the established Arcanoi, and are beyond the guilds’ established purview.) 

So perhaps it’s unsurprising that these guilds haven’t gotten much attention: playing a character with membership in any three of any one of seems unlikely to be particularly attractive for most players, and indeed unless the whole group is willing to play outright outcasts, it’s hard to imagine these guilds being used for anything but NPCs. Or so I say: maybe some enterprising soul (ahem) out there has devised material for these neglected wraiths, but it seems like it would be a big challenge.  

Or… well, maybe it doesn’t matter: back during the hype over Wraith20, word was that Onyx Path might dive into creating new Guildbooks, updated to go along with updates in Wraith20, but so far that hasn’t happened and it seems less likely with each passing year. I honestly think a group of four guildbooks, with a more limited writeup of three or four builds each, would have been the way to go, but at this point I guess it’s moot. 

Wrapping Up With the Guilds

That’s it for the Guildbooks. I think it’s here, more than anywhere else, that Wraith: The Oblivion was hurt by its early termination: other than the absence of a book on the Heretics and the Far Shores, I feel like the biggest omission in the game line was the remaining splatbooks for the Guilds that never got covered. Obviously that’s what a lot of fans felt, too: besides new and expanded Arcanoi, the majority of fan-generated material seems to be Guildbooks for the missed guilds. 

Personally, I think the idea of combined, compressed guildbooks—floated in the forum post I linked a couple of paragraphs above—is a good one. Such compression would make the material both more useable in play, and help focus the material in a way that would allow Storytellers to see very quickly a lot of ways they could bring it into play in their own games. The in-character narration does make the guildbooks enjoyable to read—at least when it’s done well—but it also threatens to make the books curios that are a little unwieldy at the game table. Of course, I’m sure hard-core old World of Darkness fans would disagree, since this style was present in all the major game lines from the period—and after all, a lot of White Wolf books were designed to be read more than to be used at the table during play—but… well, times have changed, and I think a lot of people prefer something simpler, more direct and to the point, and something that feels more quickly digestible and useable in play.   

Or maybe it’s just me. 

Anyway, in the next installment of this series, I’ll be discussing what I think of as the  “factions/meta-splat” books. 

Series Navigation

<< Revisiting <i>Wraith: The Oblivion</i>—Part 3: “Setting” and “Adventure” SupplementsRevisiting <i>Wraith: The Oblivion</i>—Part 5: Faction and “Meta-Splat” Books >>