- Revisiting Wraith: The Oblivion—Part 1: Overview
- Revisiting Wraith: The Oblivion—Part 2: Core Rules & Expansions
- Revisiting Wraith: The Oblivion—Part 3: “Setting” and “Adventure” Supplements
- Revisiting Wraith: The Oblivion—Part 4: The Guildbooks
- Revisiting Wraith: The Oblivion—Part 5: Faction and “Meta-Splat” Books
- Revisiting Wraith: The Oblivion—Part 6: Alternate Character Concept Supplements
- Revisiting Wraith: The Oblivion—Part 7: “Concept” and Other Books
- Revisiting Wraith: The Oblivion—Part 8: Tie-In Fiction and Comics
- Revisiting Wraith: The Oblivion—Part 9: Other “General” Supplements
- Revisiting Wraith: The Oblivion—Part 10: Orpheus
- Revisiting Wraith: The Oblivion—Part 11: Play Resources
- Revisiting Wraith: The Oblivion—Part 12: Conclusion… for Now
Welcome to my revisitation of the Wraith: The Oblivion RPG book line. I’m reviewing the whole run of gamebooks in this series of posts. If you’re new to the series, I recommend starting with the first post.
If you’re not interested in reviews of older RPGs, I suggest you skip it.
In this installment, I’m discussing what a loose grouping of “general supplements” that mostly provide adventure locales and crossover concepts for Wraith: The Oblivion and other old World of Darkness games.
The full list of books discussed in this post includes:
- Ghost Towns, by Nancy Amboy, Andrew Bates, Richard E. Dansky, Steve Miller, Derek Pearcy, Ethan Skemp, John Wick, and Fred Yelk
- World of Darkness: Tokyo by Bruce Baugh and Mark Cenczyk
- World of Darkness: Hong Kong by Jackie Cassada and Nicky Rea
- World of Darkness: Blood-Dimmed Tides by Sean Jaffe, Clayton Oliver, Ethan Skemp, and Adam Tinworth
With all of that out of a the way, I’m going to dive into the reviews:
Ghost Towns
Technically, Ghost Towns is a supplement for Werewolf: The Wild West, revisiting the concept of the Western “ghost town” first explored in the “Six-Guns and Soulfire” adventure (in the Midnight Express book, reviewed above), and expanding it to facilitate crossover games that include characters from Werewolf and Wraith: The Oblivion.
I can hear you out there now: Crossover? Yeah, I’m dubious too. The book goes some distance to explaining how it could be done, but didn’t really convince me that I’d want to do it, at least not just for the sheer thrill of buying a bunch of Werewolf: The Apocalypse books having Werewolves in my Wraith game. Still, I was curious enough to give it a look since it’s so rare in the Wraith line (aside from material in Necropolis Atlanta and a few of the other books on this page, there’s nothing but what’s in the core rulebooks) and because as notoriously hard as crossover was on old World of Darkness, everyone seemed to agree it was even harder in Wraith, for obvious reasons. Werewolf is actually a good choice for sidestepping those obvious reasons: Garou can slip into “spirit realms” (and so why not the Underworld). Similarly, Wraith has a few loopholes: Risen characters, for example, or having spots with a very thin Shroud rating… which could not so coincidentally be a sacred place for the Garou. I suppose it’s doable, and the (nicely creepy) opening fiction definitely tries to show how… though of course, the interactions are antagonistic, so not a model of PC-PC interaction unless you’re running rival groups of PCs at war.
I found the more summative, viewed-from-afar sections of the book to be the most interesting and useful for me, like Chapter 1 (“Building a Better Ghost Town”) and Chapter 3, the “Storytelling” chapter (which covers stff like mood and themes and so on for a game set in a “ghost town”). Chapter 2, on the other hand, follows the pattern in a lot of White Wolf books: tons and tons and settings with NPCs for each on, heavily detailed. I found them of varying interest, though my favorites were “Malvado Canyon” and “Paradise, Montana.”The chapter was a bit overwhelming, to be honest, and I think a little more work creating schematics of the constellating relationships of each town—the alliances and enmities and so on—would have been helpful. That said, there’s plenty of fleshed-out material for someone wanting to run Westerns in Wraith, even if you did away with the Werewolf stuff or made it something more in the background. I think the Storyteller would have to put in a lot of work making the towns sustainable settings for a longer-running campaign, but then maybe people don’t run those as much now anyway. There’s plenty to recycle if you want it, in any case. The book ends with some stuff focused on the Werewolf side of things, with just a page devoted to the Wraith side… but then it does bear the trade dress of a Werewolf: The Wild West book, so maybe that’s to be expected. A little more about the Wraith setting—what the Hierarchy’s up to, how relations between European and Native American wraiths work, and a little more about the Dark Kingdom of Flint—would have been nice, but you can’t have it all.
Reading this, though, it hits me that what was really missing was a good book walking a Storyteller thorugh the process of designing a Wraith game setting in some period and locale other than the standard one: that is, more scaffolding for homebrew setting with tweaked background. I guess that’s counter to what White Wolf was doing—putting out dedicated game lines for other time periods and settings, and having a solid, consistent metaplot running through its books—and in some ways, I don’t think most RPG publishers were doing that anymore, since supplements was essentially how one monetized a game company after one of its games hit it big. Still… that’s perhaps the thing I wish Wraith had more than anything else: a sort of guidebook helping Storytellers adapt Wraith to any historical period or setting: how to shape the background factions to sit the setting; how to tweak and warp Arcanoi to fit it; how to connect the Skinlands, Shadowlands, and Underworld in a vital way in, say, an 18th century game set in the Caribbean, or an ancient Roman or Mycenaean game, maybe even predating the death of Charon; Wraith set in Vinland, where the Vikings who settled there died out and have to deal with the local Wraiths and Underworld authorities, as well as maybe the other local supernaturals; Wraith set in central Asia a century after the death of Alexander the Great, or in rural Korea right in the wake of the Korean war… with ghosts, there’s so many compelling possibilities.
Hm. I guess we’ve come a long way, since a lot of games kind of assume that homebrewing and setting-building is something the Referee (or even the players) will want to do, and provide scaffolding (if not an explicit guide) for it.
World of Darkness: Hong Kong
World of Darkness: Hong Kong is one of the World of Darkness series of books, which aimed at a sort of combined approach: they discussed the World of Darkness itself as a setting, covering aspects of the setting that related to each of the major game lines. I’m not a fan of this approach, personally, since I was only really interested in Wraith and found a lot of the other game lines’ lexicons impenetrable. On top of that, this sourcebook is specifically aimed at Vampire: The Masquerade primarily, though it also covers Wraith a bit.
All that said, I wasn’t particularly enthused by this city sourcebook. In general, it’s more of a guide to Hong Kong (with smears of World of Darkness added), and in its attempt to cover all of the major game lines, it spreads itself somewhat thin. I get why someone would think that a multi-game-line city sourcebook sounds like a cool idea, but in practice there wasn’t much to do with Wraith in these pages—and even less if you’re not playing a Dark Kingdoms of Jade game. I think the setting book would be most useful if you were playing a Kindred of the East game, in fact—a lot of the NPCs are “kuei-jin,” and only a very few were wraiths of any kind whatsoever. It does include an adventure, but one far better suited to vampires or practically any other supernaturals than wraiths. (It specifies that if you do run it for wraiths, to make sure they have high levels in Puppetry, because it’s really a Skinlands adventure.)
World of Darkness: Tokyo
World of Darkness: Tokyo is much more focused on Wraith: The Oblivion than its Hong Kong counterpart. Even so, the first half is basically a potted history of Japan and Tokyo, and a Lonely Planet-styled guide to Tokyo, with the World of Darkness information mostly confined to a few chunks of boxed text. The third chapter is a rundown of NPCs in Tokyo, and includes a lot of Wraiths; the fourth concerns the setting as a locale for a game. (There are some bits that are a bit cringe in this section. 1). There’s some supernatural politics, mostly driven by differing opinions on the fact that Japan’s Shadowlands are ruled by the (Sinocentric) Dark Kingdom of Jade.
The book is fine, and less excessively problematic than a fair number of World of Darkness books—at least at a skim—but it’s very, very specific to running a game in Tokyo, or maybe Japan more generally. The one thing I think it actually lacks is a sample adventure built upon the setting’s features, and that’s a regrettable omission, because I think Baugh would have written a good one.
World of Darkness: Blood-Dimmed Tides
World of Darkness: Blood-Dimmed Tides is an oddball book, basically a one-stop reference to the World of Darkness’s oceans and seas and their assorted residents and hazards. It’s far from necessary for a Storyteller to have, but it does contain quite a lot of stuff for Wraith: The Oblivion—certainly more than I expected, at least.
Highlights include a discussion of how the Shadowlands ocean works for wraiths, some new mechanics including variant sea-focused Arcanoi, writeups of a few ghost ships and adventure ideas, and a good bit of advice on how to build the right mood for a waterborne adventure. There’s also tips for running a Wraith pirates campaign, if that idea appeals to you.
That… kind of covers it. I am pretty sure there’s more I could include: everything involving the Giovanni clan from Vampire: The Masquerade (the first and revised edition of the clanbook , as well as the Giovanni Chronicles series of adventures focused on them), for example, seems to tie in with Wraiths, since the Giovanni are basically a necromantic mafia; or, if you’re of the (apparently heretical?) opinion that Exalted is the mythic prehistory of the World of Darkness, then maybe some of the material from that game line dealing with the Underworld. I’m sure there’s some stuff about Wraiths in the Mage game line as well, and possibly even in Changeling.
However, I don’t have most of those books, nor do I feel quite invested enough at this point to go out and get them just to review them. I assume that what most of the contain is of pretty limited use to a Wraith-centric game, just as in the one book I did at one point have—Revised Clanbook Giovanni. I mean, I guess it’s interesting to see the wraiths through the Giovanni’s eyes for a bit—especially since it’s set after the Sixth Great Maelstrom has trashed the Underworld—but all you get is a glimpse, and there’s not much I’d actually use in a Wraith chronicle. Experience suggests it’d be like that in most of the other game lines’ books I’ve alluded to, since the book would be focused on being useful to groups playing a game focused on that other game line.
(That’s fine and natural, it just leaves me uninterested in tracking down every single bit of Wraith-related trivia from the other game lines: I think I’ll leave that to someone else to do, if indeed there is anyone out there who feels the impulse. Anyway, I don’t.)
I think that’s everything I’ve got. That’s the whole line, and all the books that were significantly tied to the Wraith: The Oblivion game line. Next, I’m going to turn to the spinoff game Orpheus. That’s coming soon.
For example, where it’s noted that Tokyo is so much “[t]een suicide, wife-beating, and the less-severe realities of patriarchal and misogynistic life generate abundant Pathos” (the game’s term for the dark energies wraiths can use to fuel their powers). I leave it as an exercise for the reader to figure out whether domestic violence really is more prevalent in Japan than, say, in Atlanta where this book was published. There’s a passage not too much later that refers to Japan’s high suicide rate as “self-snuffitry” which… huh?↩