Revisiting Wraith: The Oblivion—Part 6: Alternate Character Concept Supplements

This entry is part 6 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 could be called the “alternate character concept” supplement books: that is, books that offered a different set of options when it came to player characters, beyond the regular circle of Wraiths of some sort or another. Though you might expect that to be something that would have come up a lot more later on in the life cycle of the game, a lot of these books are actually from earlier on in the game’s run, which is interesting. 

(And, since there’s nowhere else to really fit it in, I’m throwing in the Wraith LARP guide by Mind’s Eye Theater, titled simply Oblivion, in this post as well.)

The full list of books discussed in this post includes: 

  • The Risen by Elizabeth Ditchburn and Heather Grove
  • Dark Reflections: Spectres by Richard Watts and Ben Chessell
  • The Quick & the Dead by Beth Fischi
  • Mediums: Speakers With the Dead by Justin Achilli, Andrew Bates, Lisa Daigle, John Daigle, Roger Gaudreau, Ed Hall, Robert Martin, James A. Moore, Ronni Radner, Tracey Rysavy, Fred Yelk
  • Oblivion (Mind’s Eye Theatre) by Richard Dansky, Jennifer Hartshorn, and J. Michael Rollins

With that said, I’m diving straight in. 

The Risen

One early-ish supplement for Wraith that I picked up for a great price during a visit to Kansas City was The Risen, a book that, like The Quick & the Dead, provides a great alternate “splat” for Wraith: the “risen” subtype. A lot of people have suggested that this concept was really an attempt to create an analogue of the hugely successful film The Crow in the World of Darkness, but I take Rich Dansky at his word regarding his claim (in a few interviews I’ve seen around) that The Risen was in development and playtesting long before The Crow hit screens, and was more inspired by Ray Bradbury’s “Pillar of Fire.” That said, even today, the easiest way to pitch Risen characters is to say, “Like in The Crow,” though I think the French TV series Les Revenants is probably just as good as a recent pitch resource, if your prospective players have seen it. 

Really, that’s what the Risen actually are: they’re revenants… which is to say, wraithly ghost characters who return to and reanimate their own bodies, and thus enter the world of the living as preternatural, undead creatures. It’s a flexible alternate take on Wraith, one that sets aside the underworld and its politics and concerns, and allows your ghostly characters to focus on things back in the world of the living. It’s pretty nicely in line with the tone and assumptions of the first edition of the Wraith core rules, which are similarly focused on the Skinlands and on Wraiths resolving the unsolved issues from their lives, and less-focused on the business of the sociopolitics and conflicts of Stygia and the rest of the Underworld. 

This focus, of course, led the designers to include a lot of material hinting at crossover play, and maybe that’s something others experimented with. Personally, the one Risen character I had in a game was in fact working to protect a group of mortals who were being messed with by Spectres and the Shadows of recently-departed loved ones, and it worked well. One should note that the Risen character doesn’t need to follow in the footsteps of Brandon Lee’s most famous film character: they can pursue revenge, but can also be hung up on protecting a loved one (or their legacy), on investigating a mystery, preventing a disaster, or anything else that might drive the dead to charge through the pain and horror necessary to return to their bodies.   

Not everyone will find this approach to the game appealing, but I think it’s a very worthwhile addition to your Wraith collection if you’re interested in running games that involve mortals (or other supernaturals) with a focus on the world of the living. And as the LARP guide Oblivion (reviewed below) included Risen characters as a possible type, without much fuss or caveat—and the 20th Anniversary rules are expected to do the same—I guess this was one of the more successful alternate character concepts. 

Dark Reflections: Spectres

Dark Reflections: Spectres is a Black Dog Game Factory entry, which is to say it’s one of the rare books that was deemed so “adult” that even White Wolf preferred to mark it as such. It’s an early effort to deal with one of the major sets of bad-guys for the Wraith setting: the world of the Spectres. 

The reason that I’ve included it in this category of supplements—and, I think, the reason it ended up under the Black Dog label—is because it’s aimed at providing groups with the information and mechanics to run Spectre chronicles. You can see the lingering influence of RPGs from the 70s and 80s here, specifically D&D, since essentially a Spectre chronicle is the equivalent of an “evil characters” campaign in AD&D. 

That said, while I’ve seen some people argue that it’s a book you can do without if you have Doomslayers on hand, I think it’s a worthwhile book in itself, even for those who don’t want to run a Spectres campaign.  Which would be understandable, because if you thought plain-vanilla Wraith: the Oblivion was dark… well, Spectres might just drive you into personal despair. Basically, Spectres are evil, and hell-bent on the destruction of everything in service of Oblivion. Not your cup of tea? Yeah, I don’t know that it’s mine, exactly, either: maybe as a temporary state of derangement for some characters, along the way, but it doesn’t feel like a fun starting point for a game, frankly.  

That’s fine, though: even if you don’t have a use for the material on creating player character Spectres, the added Dark Arcanoi and the Storyteller advice about using Spectres as antagonists would be useful for any game, and the sample characters in the back make handy NPCs one could throw into a chronicle, or use as the basis for making one’s own interesting NPC Spectres. There’s some campaign/adventure ideas in the book, too, and if they’re admittedly a little bit bare-bones, you can supplement this book with Doomslayers, I think you won’t have too much trouble finding a use for—and a place for—Spectres in your game. To me, it seems like (as with some of the other earlier supplements) the authors erred on the side of economy, and I must prefer that to erring on the side of padding out books. If I’m going to have to work to integrate stuff into my game, I’d rather have stuff that’s directly useable, and less to wade through, while I’m doing so. 

So I guess I’d say this book is recommended… that is, if you can find a copy on offer from someone who’s asking less than an arm and a leg, because this is one of the most sought-after supplements for the game. (So much so that some jerks online even try to sell copies of the the POD version available from Drivethru RPG at jacked-up prices.) Still, if you’re just looking for a copy to use at the table, I imagine a new print-on-demand copy from DTRPG would be fine.

The Quick & the Dead

Beth Fischi’s The Quick and the Dead was part of the Year of the Hunter range of supplements. It was also the book I used most (other than the core rulebook) back in the days when I was originally running Wraith. It’s a great book, loaded with ideas for running a mortals-centric game, as well as developing mortal opponents for Wraith player characters to have to deal with.

Unusually for a Wraith supplement, almost everything in the book is directly useable in-game. There’s material on sample ghost-hunting organizations, how to create mortal ghost-hunter characters and organizations, advice on possible types of chronicles centered on mortals, and a useful appendix with all kinds of stuff about equipment and magical objects that ghost-hunters might or ought to have and use while doing their work. There’s stuff that gets expanded on further elsewhere, in other (non-Wraith specific) classic World of Darkness supplements—like Hedge Magic and psychic powers—but for those who want something simple and basic, this material is very usable.

I don’t know how well the book meshes with the other Year of the Hunted supplements (I’ve never even see the main core rules for that game line, but I can say that it doesn’t really matter for my purposes. Using this and the main Wraith books, I was very happy with the results we got running mortals-focused games for several years straight. Some of this book anticipates the later Orpheus game that Lucian Soulban spun off Wraith, in good ways, and I feel like people who enjoy Orpheus and feel up for a bit of DIY could run any of a whole host of similar games focused on groups detailed in this book—or built using the materials and suggested included in its pages.

Mediums: Speakers With the Dead

The Wraith: The Oblivion offering for the “Year of the Ally” line from 1997 was Mediums: Speakers With the Dead. To some degree, it revisited the previous “Year of the Hunter” book The Quick and the Dead—which was the only book available for Mortals games when I ran my mortals-centric campaigns in 1996-1998. However, instead of sketching out ways for groups to play potential antagonists to wraiths, Mediums touches on some world-building and mechanics for integrating potential allies (individuals and and organizations alike) to Wraith characters and troupes.

It’s no surprise, then, that Mediums to some degree revisits the ground covered in the previous supplement The Quick and the Dead, indeed even to the point of asking readers to refer back to the earlier book for some of the mechanics pertinent to mortals interfacing with wraiths. That’s… well, on the one hand, I’m sure one could argue it’s a way of maximizing new content (and avoiding a rehash of material from an earlier book) but there’s so much overlap between the two that I can imagine some people being frustrated by that: like, do we really need two mortals books?

One some level, I think this might be cutting close to the whole publication model for the World of Darkness games: manby cool ideas got turned into supplement books, but aside from core rulebooks (which did get revised, sometimes more than once) most never got seriously revised; the splat and setting books, especially, ended up just sort of never being retired, so that later releases covering similar ground ended up sort of being supplements not only to the core rules, but also to the earlier supplements. (In a similar way, a lot of people have commented that the Doomslayers book ended up almost  (but not quite) rendering both Dark Reflections: Spectres and the Sea of Shadows book obsolete. 

In any case, I felt less excited about Mediums: Speakers With the Dead than I did about The Quick and the Dead, though it contains more material. The chapters, broadly speaking, cover a very wide range of “mediums”:

  • “boardwalk mediums” (think Whoopie Goldberg in Ghost)
  • those who’re messing about with what they shouldn’t (scientific and corporate researchers—a bit of a foreshadowing of the later Orpheus game line, which I’ll review in a future installment of this series)
  • an update on the groups covered in The Quick and the Dead, especially the Benandanti
  • various occult and magical cults who mess around with the dead, including the Giovanni clan from Vampire: The Masquerade
  • Native American shamans (from indigenous groups of the United States, specifically)

The book concludes with a bunch character templates for playing various mortal characters from these groups. Funny thing, though: you definitely don’t need the book to run mortals games. I’m pretty sure I had it back in Canada, when most of my Wraith chronicles at least started out as mortals-centric games, but reading it now, I don’t think I used it much, or even did more than skim it…. and I honestly don’t feel like my game missed out on much by that omission.

It’s not so much that the content of the book is lacking, so much as that the content’s usefulness feels a bit contingent on how invested you are in using other Wraith book materials (and other game lines) as well as how much work you’re willing to put in filling out the ideas presented here in seed format. Sure, if you’re interested in doing crossover play with the Giovanni from Vampire: The Masquerade, or if you really dug the Benandanti as presented in The Quick and the Dead and want to know more about their internal politics, or if you’re following the metaplot (there’s some stuff here involving Xerxes Jones that foreshadows things to come in future supplements, especially Ends of Empire) you’ll be interested in the book. But the book covers so much ground that the depth isn’t really there for you to pick up and run with things: you’d have to do a significant amount of DIY prep work to make these groups work in your own game, I think.

Or, well, maybe that’s unfair: rather, I think that what this book really did was provide some seeds for whole game concepts, but left it up to the GM to work out how to make use of them. Arguably, the Orpheus game core book (which was Wraith’s second lease on (un)life after the game line ended) is something of a model for the implementation of each of these campaign seeds. Instead of suggesting how you might run a game centered on a group of Benandanti mortals, or a group of kids on the “rez” working with their shaman uncle or aunt or grandparent as they unveil a mystery involving wraiths who need help, or how you might run a game where Wraith player-characters interact with a boardwalk medium player character, the book sketches out the seeds that might inspire such games.

That’s interesting because, I guess, Mediums therefore offers sufficient seeds for a decade of chronicles where mortals and wraiths interact… but if you’ve read Orpheus, then you know that to make the game concept work, some heavy lifting was necessary. On reflection, I think that’s something Wraith never got, that some of the other game lines did get: chronicle scenario books that did the heavy lifting in terms of illustrating how a campaign in the game ought to look, and that did some of the heavy lifting in terms of prep and conception—as well as rules modifications that would be necessary to make this sort of mortals-wraiths crossover play easier to pull off in a regular, extended game. Also, I’ll just note that while it’s technically from the “Year of the Ally” line, a lot of the groups in this book can be just as usefuly worked into a game as antagonists for a group of Wraiths (or, for that matter, mortals connected somehow to wraiths). 

I guess that amounts to me saying that it’s a pretty good book, but is also yet another book that wasn’t what I’d be looking for in running this game. It’s jam-packed with ideas and seeds, though, and perhaps, given how exotic and bewildering the Wraith setting proved to be for many, that cuts to the heart of the game line’s problems? Maybe it needed campaign books more than, say, Vampire: The Masquerade or Werewolf: The Apocalypse, where I think the question “What are the stories that emerge from this game supposed to look like?” is less difficult for a newcomer to answer. 

(And, I’ll say, while I love reading adventure modules—and think that for games where they’re applicable, the core rules should always include one example adventure—I rarely end up actually running anything I haven’t devised myself… but I read them because I find them invaluable in getting a better idea about what the game is designed to produce a the table, if that makes any sense.) 

Anyway, I’d say for practical use, the book is non-essential; for seeds, and if you’re looking to run a mortals-centric game, it might provide you with some useful ideas, and as one of just two books designed for mortals play in Wraith, it’s probably not a bad idea to at least give it a look, if you can get a copy without spending too much money anyway. 

Oh, one more thing: this book drives home for me that, at least for the Wraith line, the installments that were assembled out of chunks written by a lot of different people—the books with really long author lists—tend to be the ones that impressed me less. They somehow end up covering more terrain, filling out the “World of Darkness” but they tend to have gelled together a little less well, and offered less in the way of answering that perennial question, “Yes, but how do I implement this in play?”

At least, that’s my impression. 

Oblivion

Oblivion is a guide for those who wish to play Wraith: The Oblivion as a live-action roleplaying (LARP) game. If you don’t LARP, you don’t need it. Still, I found a copy cheap and picked it up, so I can talk about the book… sort of. 

The thing is, I have zero experience with LARPing, and can’t speak to its usefulness, though I can say I was surprised by the idea of playing Wraith as a LARP, when I first heard of it. (For the record, the first time I ever heard about anyone actually doing so was on the Midnight Express podcast, where the longtime host Adrian BK occasionally discusses his own long-ago Wraith LARP on occasion. It sounds like it was a lot of fun, even if I’ve never been much of a LARPer.) 

While I can’t speak to the quality of the book in terms of its usefulness for LARPers (though it seems sensible in most of the rules, and I can say that—aside from a few things here and there, 1 I feel like sections of this book would make an excellent short introduction for new players looking to better understand the setting of Wraith: The Oblivion.

Also, seeing the Arcanoi and other supernatural powers simplified as they are in this book—there’s just four tiers: Innate, Basic, Intermediate, and Advanced—I feel like this might almost have been a nice feature for the regular tabletop game; it seems, also, to presage the way Horrors (the equivalent of Arcanoi) worked in Orpheus, at least sort of. I have to admit, having five tiers for each of the Arcanoi makes things confusing, and necessitates quick-reference sheets of the sort that ended up being made for Storytellers and players alike.

Two more things: one is that the amount of economy on display in Oblivion makes one once again notice the bloatedness of a lot fo the supplement books. For example, there’s a chapter on the Risen as a character type in LARP Wraith… and the Risen character type is covered in about twelve pages—pages that are smaller than those in the usual splatbooks. I was impressed, and I rather wish that the content of all the splatbooks could have been condensed in this way: that, I think, would be a great reference book for a Storyteller or a Player alike.

(I know publishing a line of gamebooks means finding ways to justify making it a line of books instead of just a revised book with everything you need for cool, advanced options added in the minimum necessary pages… that is an idea that would come, eventually—many of the Apocalypse Engine games seem to tend toward that approach—but in 1997, it looked unlikely… especially when its a big company publishing your game.) 

Aside from Risen, there’s also rules for making Specter characters, but not for mortals. I found that interesting, though presumably there’s a different Mind’s Eye Theater LARP-specific rulebook for human/mortal characters, and I imagine it’d probably mesh well enough with this, so it’s not a shocking omission.  

That pretty much sums up the various options offered in the Wraith game line for alternate characters and other forms of play. Totaling it up, there’s two books for running mortal Player Characters, one book for running Spectres, and one book for running revenants.

Unsurprisingly, the books earlier in the run were more focused on mechanics and on how to get a game with such characters going—plotlines, adventure seeds, new magical powers and mechanical issues, and so on—because the metaplot wasn’t really much of a thing yet, and because the supplements had to have some sort of practical usefulness in order to justify themselves as purchases. Personally, I prefer those earlier, stripped-down or more bare-bones books to the more expansive (one might say “padded-out”) Mediums: Speakers With the Dead.   

And yes, if you’re detecting a pattern here, Mediums: Speakers With the Dead was indeed the last book of this subset to be published and, I’d say, tends more toward worldbuilding and metaplot. I think by this point, Wraith line sales had settled into a groove where purchases were dominated by hardcore fans, and the game line had to service them and feed whatever compleatist impulse a lot of them presumably felt.

This, I think, hurts the book somewhat in terms of its immediate usefulness at the table: you’re not very likely to bust it out and look up some skill or ability, like the Dark Arcanoi in Dark Reflections: Spectres or the Numina in The Quick and the Dead, or to pass it to a player and say, “You want to run a Risen? Cool, read this.” You would need those books at the table, if you were running Mortals or Spectres or Risen in your game, because they’re pretty much rules expansions for different modes of play. 

The usefulness of Mediums: Speakers With the Dead is instead more like Book of Legions or The Hierarchy: as a research and adventure design resource, for Storytellers who have a campaign idea in mind and are working on stocking it with interesting antagonists and allies and factions for player characters to deal with (or, of course, protagonist backgrounds, if they’re planning a Mortals-centric game). As such, it’s hardly the only book in the line that’s aimed more at GMs who will read it and use it for backstory and worldbuilding, and then leave it at home on game night—and these things are useful for those who are interested in more support for that stage of game-running—but it’s not really an essential book, as far as I’m concerned, as much as it is a secondary resource. 

One thing I will say, though, is that I have the sense a lot of Wraith: The Oblivion was actually being worked out in detail through the process of publishing the game line. I’m very curious to see how things were boiled down and summarized in the 20th Anniversary edition rulebook. I do hope advantage has been taken of the fact that this is a chance to rework and update all of this material, and I do hope that some effort to condense things has been made. We’ll see, I guess, but I assume it had to be condensed, for so much to fit into a single volume. 

Series Navigation<< Revisiting <i>Wraith: The Oblivion</i>—Part 5: Faction and “Meta-Splat” BooksRevisiting <i>Wraith: The Oblivion</i>—Part 7: “Concept” and Other Books >>

  1. The most egregious thing is in the Introduction, where the comment is made that LARP puts the story in the hands of the players, whereas tabletop RPGs “still [leave] most of the story under the control of one person. Er, not in my games.

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