Revisiting Wraith: The Oblivion—Part 5: Faction and “Meta-Splat” Books

This entry is part 5 of 12 in the series Revisiting Wraith the Oblivion

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

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

In this installment, I’m discussing what I think of as the “meta-splat” or “faction” books for the game line: that is, the umbrella organizations that characters have to deal with in the afterlives. If guild affiliations are the rough equivalent in Wraith: The Oblivion to the Clans in Vampire or the “Tribes” in Werewolf: The Apocalypse, then The Legions, The Hierarchy, and the Renegades are like 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: 

  • The Book of Legions, by Tim Akers, Ken Cliffe, Richard E. Dansky, Geoff Grabowski, Juliann Krute, James A. Moore, Clayton Oliver, Derek Pearcy, Jeff Quick, Jonathan Woodward
  • The Hierarchy, by Jackie Cassada and Allen Tower
  • Renegades by Jackie Cassada and Nicky Rea, with fiction by P.D. Cacek and Tom Deitz 

The Book of Legions

The Book of Legions is another one of the books I picked up in Kansas City during my visit years ago. This one also has a long list of authors, and if I’m remembering right, Richard Dansky includes a farewell note in the publication credits for this book, though I think he ultimately stuck around for the last book in the series, Ends of Empire (which I’ll discuss in a later installment of this series).

The book details the individual legions within the Hierarchy, which are the groupings into which the society of Stygia—the empire that rules the Western portion of the underworld—is split up based on cause of death. It’s a messy way of organizing ghosts, given the overlap between the legions’ portfolios, and that’s almost certainly part of the point of why this method of organization was chosen by the game designers.

It’s pretty apparent that each of the eight legion descriptions was written up by a separate contributor, and then the results were harmonized slightly in the editing process. That makes each writeup slightly different in structure, and occasionally I wished that something covered in one legion’s writeup also had been covered in others, but I think the variety made the book more interesting and rich overall. That said, it also necessitated the kind of organization that makes the book Storyteller-facing and not player-facing, which leaves one wondering how to convey the content to players, or, in other words, use the information in-game.

Having started to dig into various editions of Paranoia, I’ve found it fascinating to look at RPG supplement books in terms of whether they’re GM-exclusive or player-facing. In Paranoia books, the stuff players aren’t supposed to read is clearly marked “Ultraviolet Clearance,” with all kinds of warnings, and many books are Ultraviolet Clearance all the way through. (There are also supplements for the XP edition of Paranoia that are 100% player-facing though they aren’t (on the cover) obviously labeled as such, which is interesting.) For the bigger and more popular classic World of Darkness lines, you got a core rulebook, a player’s guide, and a GM-exclusive supplementary rulebook. Wraith ultimately got the first two (and a Shadow Player’s Guide), but not the latter; instead of a GM guide, there were supplements like The Book of Legions.

As a result, this is an odd book, fascinating to read, but rather harder to apply in-game. Don’t get me wrong: if you’re playing a game where the legions are important, or where maybe characters are being tugged back and forth because allegiance to their legions and to their Guilds (or their fellow PCs, or other allegiances) the material could be very useful, for color and setting and tone. But as someone whose games mainly were concentrated in the Skinlands and Shadowlands, I found myself finishing each section and wondering how I would have put it to use in a campaign, and not really being sure.

Even so, I enjoyed reading it, and I think this book would does help illustrate the nature and flavor of Stygia. The fact that the structure of the book necessitates that this evocation occurs only (or mainly) in the mind of the person running the game, but this introduces another interesting question: is this a book to be read, or a book to be used in-game? I feel like it was more for reading and enjoying, and the fact that the fiction segments that run through it tie in directly to huge events in the setting’s metaplot. That said, I found the volume of information overwhelming to the point where if I had to put it into play, I would have to carefully study, take notes, and make decisions about what to include.

In fact, at times, it felt as if the book could (and should) have been reworked into a player-facing text, less something like The Book of Nod (the in-game lore book from the Vampire: The Masquerade line) and more like a tongue-in-cheek in-game guidebook, in the style of a Lonely Planet: The Afterlife or Death on a Shoestring travel guide, something you could just hand players, but also use yourself as the GM, to quickly and flavorfully get a sense of the culture of the legions and of Stygia generally. Among the new supplements for Wraith 20th Anniversary was a PDF book that kinda fits that general description, titled “The Handbook for the Recently Deceased.” (This is something one would want to have in print, I think.)

It having been ages since I’ve read the other books in the line, reading The Book of Legions left me curious about how many other supplements will turn out to be mostly background setting information.


The Hierarchy: In the Ranks of Death

The sourcebook for Stygia, stronghold of the political behemoth that rules the Underworld of the Western dead, is The Hierarchy: In the Ranks of Death. It was reading this book that I finally really got just how much of Wraith (and the old World of Darkness in general) was about producing books for reading, as much as it was about producing product to be used at the game table. It’s a funny thing: the OSR prides itself on a DIY spirit, but people running these old White Wolf games surely had to do just as much DIY pre-game prep as the DM running Tomb of Horrors or The Temple of Elemental Evil... probably more, in fact.

That’s not to decry a book like this as “useless”: it’s just to say I don’t imagine one would be carrying a book like The Hierarchy to a game night the way one would the core rulebook. After all, a twenty-five-page history of The Hierarchy just doesn’t have much utility mid-game… but it wasn’t intended for that, after all. This is clearly a GM book, meant to evoke a sense of what the Hierarchy is and how it operates, to facilitate a certain kind of Wraith chronicle, and to facilitate a sense of how the Hierarchy works and can be used in a game.

Well, sort of.

Here, I think, is the interesting difference between the D&D aesthetic and the White Wolf one: the former will overload a product with unusable cartographic information—say, a map of Waterdeep where most buildings aren’t labeled, and which is not in practical terms particularly useful—where in place of cartographic overload, White Wolf overloaded with setting and backplot detail. I thought of this because, among other things, a map of Stygia was never really produced during the original run of the game. (Though there is one for Wraith 20th Anniversary edition.)

This makes sense: White Wolf characters tend to be politicking, dealing with the conflicting pull of various splats and how they complexify the problems faced by individual characters taking care of their own business: a Wraith character will generally have to balance the demands of their guild (if any), their Legion within the Hierarchy, and their relationship to the Hierarchy (submitting to it, evading it as Heretics, fighting back against it as Renegades, or being embroiled in intra-Hierarchy quarrels and factional disputes), along with personal things like their Fetters and Shadow, and social ties to the Necropolis they’re bound to by necessity or circumstance. The clash of these conflicting demands is built into the characters—and it’s a feature in all White Wolf Games—which means the characters in this game are designed for primarily a social game, where (say) D&D characters are built around their functional roles in combat and exploration/survival scenarios.


Renegades

Finally, Renegades is a book about all of those who stand opposed to established power structure of the Wraithly underworld, and thus the primary opposition to the Hierarchy… sort of like the Anarchs in Vampire: The Masquerade, if the Anarchs outshone the Sabbat. 

Of course, being that they’re the opposition, they’re also pretty hard to nail down: it’s not an organized resistance, so much as a kind of grab-bag of all the wraiths who hate the Hierarchy enough to openly fight it, while not being so burnt out as to be ready to throw in with the Spectres. That difficulty in nailing them down makes it even more difficult to write a 124-page book about them, outlining their goals, beliefs, culture, and secrets.

Unfortunately, the result ends up being a certain degree of what feels like bloat here. For one thing, the book starts with not one but two fiction pieces, both of which I skimmed and both of which are fine as far as intro fiction goes, and shorter than the usual, but don’t really establish much in the way of establishing contrast or counterpoint. (That’s what I imagined might be the intention, given some of the rest of the book, but it seems not.) 

Also bloated-feeling were Chapter 1: A History of Revolution, and Chapter 3: Bridges and Barricades. Both chapters are content typical of metasplat books and of World of Darkness games in general: the first outlines the underworld’s history as seen by the Renegades, while the third essentially explores attitudes among Renegades towards various other factions, supernatural creatures, and mortals. I like the idea behind how each is written: since Renegades aren’t a unified, homogenous institution, one cannot ascribe a single attitude or ideology to them, so the authors basically crafted the text of each chapter as a kind of kaleidoscope of attitudes.

That’s fine, but it does provide a lot to wade through: the attitudes-toward-others is written with the typical “quote from a faction member” style, except each group discussed gets three to five (sometimes lengthy) quotes from different, seemingly random Renegades. It took ten pages to get through a very limited number of “others.” While I admired the idea, and even the execution, I felt this was pretty much the lengthiest way to cover that ground and get that message across. (Though I did enjoy, and find interesting, the counterpoint in the quotes about the various Guilds.)

My issue isn’t the content itself, so much as the economy of presentation, though I’m realizing that’s an issue I have with a lot of games from the era. I feel like maybe an easier way to present this information would have been to dramatize the disagreements, say, in some kind of panel discussion-type scenario, or as a kind of annotations-in-the-margins concept on some document. If I were tasked with getting this kind of idea across in an equivalent sort of book today, that’s probably what I’d do, I guess. 

Chapter 2 is sort of a Renegade-focused world-building chapter—it discusses types of Renegade groups and the adhocratic organizations that do exist within the broad group of movements—while Chapter 4 (starting on page 77) finally starts to answer  the question of how you might use Renegades in a game, at the game table. (Chapter 4: Making the Revolution is about Renegade-related mechanics, while Chapter 5: The Soul of a Renegade is more about Renegade character concepts and ideas for adventures and campaigns. 

Now, that order makes sense, but I think the fact we’re more than halfway through the book before the issue of, “So how would this all be usable in my Chronicle?” kind of points to the issues I have with some later Wraith books. Then again, by this point there was a metaplot to advance, and the Underworld needed to be populated with factions and groups. The loosey-goosey approach of the earlier books—which I see as a strength—had, at least in commercial terms—to be set aside.

That said, I think Chapters 4 and 5 do an admirable job of suggesting some fun ways that Renegade-centric games (and Renegade PCs) could be brought to the table. I think the structuring of the information is a bit muddled, and I always prefer player-facing information to be clearly separate from GM-facing information, but it’s not really a big deal (and far less egregious than in the otherwise mostly-good Orpheus books I’ll be discussing later in this series). The options are good, and while I have a feeling some of the ideas here could’ve been more easily communicated with things like a sample Renegade HQ or some kind of adventure text, these chapters are done up the usual way for Wraith, and offer a fair amount of material that is interesting and useful, Likewise, the final chapter (with the requisite Renegade character templates) and the Appendix (with its Renegade NPCs) are serviceable and can serve both as a pool of NPCs, or as a kind of guide for making effective player characters and NPCs.  

My misgivings about the book feel a little miserly: I can see what Cassada and Rea were trying to do, and in a way it’s a really cool concept… I just wish there were a bigger payoff given the amount of material they generated for the book. Maybe that’s a curmudgeonly attitude, but I feel like the worldbuilding material in an RPG book, if I’m likely only read it once, probably shouldn’t take longer to read than the mechanics and player options. There’s no need to barrage the reader with twenty different attitudes when one can simply note that attitudes vary widely, but tend to range between X and Y. That said, I think Cassada and Rea were clearly trying to achieve a kind of kaleidoscope effect, and they do… I just think  they could’ve done it just as effectively using fewer words—or fit more into the book, if they’d compressed it more effectively—if they’d put their minds to it. But perhaps it’s ironic it’s taken me so many words to come out and say that clearly.  


Thoughts

On one level, I feel like maybe the distinction between meta-factions or meta-splats and setting is artificial: the power structures of the setting are, in an important way, the setting: like settings, they have moving parts and they have their natural tendencies as far as how their energies are deployed. 

That, perhaps, is why as I was reading these books—especially in the case of the Book of Legions—I got a strong feeling that I was reading a setting supplement, rather than faction book in the manner of the game line’s guildbooks. Sure, these meta-factions have moving parts—just as the setting has them, albeit to a much lesser degree—but they’re really more like the ideological landscape, incarnated in the form of individuals or groups the player characters can meet in-game. 

How to incorporate them into play, though, is something that comes up only a little in these books. Especially Book of Legions ends up mostly being a heavy infodump suitable for a Storyteller, who then is faced—with limited practical support and few models to draw upon—with the task of integrating however much of it seems appropriate into a game. 


What’s Missing? 

This list of books is obviously much shorter than most of the other lists, but that’s in part because my categorization system is a little arbitrary: The Guildbooks, outlined in Part 4 of this series, each describe the guilds, which not only can function as factions but also contain their own sub-factions within each guild. Given that the guilds’ legality is in effect a grey area in Stygia (illegal, but in many cases effectively tolerated or strategically ignored), this allows them to represent a conflicting group of factions opposed to the Hierarchy but also subservient to it. Ends of Empire, the last book in the series, also contains a guildbook, which was folded into it because the cancellation of the Wraith game line necessitated it. 

Still, I can point to one area, at least, where there’s room for a whole book, one that I think Onyx Path should consider producing for the fans of Wraith who turned up to buy the Wraith 20th Anniversary edition, and (yes, once again) that’s a book covering the Heretics. Sure, they’re described a little bit in Sea of Shadows and elsewhere, but they don’t really get an in-depth treatment anywhere, though the way they’re discussed in the core rules and in these other meta-splat books—especially in Renegades—suggests that they are deserving of more in-depth treatment. (Presumably they would have gotten it, if Wraith hadn’t been canceled?)

They never did get that treatment, though, and that’s too bad, because (especially in the 1st edition rules and supplements from that era) the Heretics (and their domains among the Far Shores) are presented as an important alternate meta-faction in the Underworld. The notion of some form of religion surviving among wraiths seems to me too good to pass up, and the hints at how awful and hellish some Far Shores locales are makes me wish there’d been a supplement book covering them, and treating them as an adventure locale, the way Doomslayers opened up the Labyrinth for adventurous wraith groups. Oh, and I’m not the only one to think the Heretics ought to have gotten some more in-depth treatment: they come up a few times in this discussion of what people wanted out of Wraith20, just before the rewrite launched

My next installment in this series will concern supplements exploring what I call “character alternate concepts” for Wraith.  

Series Navigation<< Revisiting <i>Wraith: The Oblivion</i>—Part 4: The GuildbooksRevisiting <i>Wraith: The Oblivion</i>—Part 6: Alternate Character Concept Supplements >>

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