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The funny thing about this product is that it's not really for players. It seems to be more a guide for players AND Storytellers - and even in that respect, it's got more stuff for Storytellers to use rather than the players.

Wraith is, as I noted in my review of Doomslayers, a system that I'm profoundly ambivalent about; but as time passes, I'm growing more and more inclined to think that it's a better game thatn I first gave it credit for. Like all White Wolf games, if you ignore the parts you don't like and emphasize the ones you do, it's a much better game.

So, what does the Player's Guide add? A lot of material, some good, some bad.

There's an interesting story in the beginning of the book about an office drone stuck in the building where he died - well worth reading for any potential player or Storyteller. The introduction mentions various movies that would provide decent inspiration for a Wraith chronicle, and I agree with most - especially Beetlejuice, which would make Wraith a lot more fun if the game incorporated more of that movie's wackiness. (Jacob's Ladder is also mentioned - and I would love to try playing in a world where it's _always_ Jacob's Ladder-esque.)

What follows, though, is one of the more disappointing parts of the book - the Merits and Flaws, most of which are copied wholesale from other White Wolf books. Echoes of the Past, Code of Honor, Dark Secret - nothing that you haven't seen before. Some of them, like the Corporeal flaws and merits, let you mess with your wraith's body; the most fascinating, like Improperly Buried, Cold, and the like suggest lots that can be done with Merits and Flaws for wraiths...but they're not developed on enough, and instead we get the standard Cursed, Throwback, Code of Honor...you get the idea. Disappointing. There's some interesting Backgrounds to make up for them, though.

There's some new Harrowings included - while they're quite interesting on a general level, I wish that they'd left them out in favor of describing general tactics to Harrow players who don't fall into the categories described. (Then again, anybody with a decent imagination can come up with at least two just on the basis of their own bad experiences.) Also, the Harrowings seem to be about phobias, which are best dealt with than fled from. Maybe White Wolf meant for you to deal with them once you'd been through them more than once...

The skills section is the worst - a collection of skills that are interesting, but not nearly worth spending points on. Psychoanalysis, Diplomacy, Intrigue, Traps, Torture, Swimming, Heraldry - Heraldry? - the skills are useful for NPCs, but I don't think that a lot of players will want to spend points on them to begin with. It might also create skill bloat, where simple, all-purpose rolls like Wits + Manipulation are replaced with a specific skill, like Intrigue. Although the book acknowledges that the skills are optional, I would have just left it out, except for skills like Instruction and Computer Hacking, which have proven themselves in other games.

The section on Wraith society is both the most frustrating and the most informative. I don't like the Renegade/Heretic/Hierarchy conflict within Wraith - it seems too artifical. Why fight the Hierarchy when you can fight Spectres, as brilliantly described in Doomslayers?

In order: The Hierarchy suffers from being the oldest, and has the most history, going from the initial founding of Stygia - the Hierarchy's home town - to the disappearance of Charon, the Hierarchy's leader, to the current situation. But for a player's guide, it's long on the history, short on character archetypes. It can be great fun to play a bureaucrat, like in West End Game's Paranoia. You run around stomping out small fires while doing your best to please your superiors, Dilbert in the Underworld. The Hierarchy's section just goes into endless detail about the Hierarchy's...hierarchy; how marshals deal with Maelstroms and so forth. It's interesting information - but it lacks specifics, especially in areas that would help players. There's maybe four paragraphs on character types and adventures for Hierarchy characters, and the rest is background. Important skills, more adventure seeds, anything along those lines would provide a hook for players to follow, but that's not what's included.

The Heretics are slightly more fleshed out, since they don't have a history; most of their section is dedicated to describing how they relate to the Heretics. But no real-world religious beliefs are included, making it nice and vague, and they wind up seeming like fanatic religious types, rather than real people. If you believe in any religious creed, and you wind up in the Shadowlands, you're immediately going to wonder what's going on, and finding out what's happened could lead to some marvellously spooky stories, but the Heretics are just another political group in the Wraith Players Guide. However, there's time devoted to various cults, which makes for some interesting reading - Karma cults seek to right the balance by intruding into the normal world, while Purification cults believe they've been sent there by their deity as a punishment. But they don't entirely save it; ultimately, more real-world details - handled with tact - would have made this section more interesting.

The Renegades get the same treatment. Their basic goals are stated, and various groups are fleshed out. Again, no specfic details - nothing beyond generalities. There's reasons for rebelling, but...do you really need an excuse? The Hierarchy alone provides enough of a boogeyman to stir the heart of a rebel, and I imagine that any player might be able to come up with more specific reasons to rebel than this book supplies. They're rebels because they rebel, basically.

Probably the most interesting section of the book - and a somewhat baffling inclusion for a Player's guide - is the Dark Kingdoms, which describe the afterlife from the viewpoint of other cultures. It's all decent stuff, although the Dark Kingdom of Jade is supplanted with another book entirely on that subject. (You could do worse than to go by this book's dictates, though.) Other afterlives include the Dark Kingdom of Obsidian, (Mesoamerica), Ivory (Africa), the Caribbean Les Invisibles, the Underworld of India, the Australian Kingdom of Clay and the remarkably interesting wraiths of Polynesia.

The whole thing took me cold, I have to admit - not to the point where I regarded it as useless, but it's long on history and short on practicalities. It's good to know the local history, but for many of the empires, it's so exhaustively detailed that it pushes everything else out. For example, the Dark Kingdom of Obsidian has a half-page to describe what's going on in the Flayed Lands _today_. The rest is history. Other areas fare better, such as the African afterlife . There, animals have souls, and the sorcerors actively work with the dead - but the whole thing is being pushed to the breaking point by the massive influx of dead souls, human and animal, into the afterlife. But no stats for animals, no sorceror abilities...why not?

Of special interest are the Creole beliefs in ghosts - a two-way relationship between the living and the dead, with the living acting as "horses" for certain ghosts. Not only is there a direct exchange between the living and the dead, there's actually a formal code of behavior, and hedge mages who facilitate most of it. Tons of story possibilities here, especially in the way that the dead relate to the living. The only problem is this: No rules for the hedge magick that the mages do; no information about how much Pathos wraiths get from the sacrifices of the living, nothing that'll help the poor Storyteller when situations like this arise. Rules are surely interruptive of the game, but Mage's The Book of Worlds solved that problem - it just stuck the rules in the back of the book, organized by chapter.

The last quarter of the book recaps most of the information in Wraith, including information that's already been recapped in the main Wraith rulebook, including the geography of the Wraith world. Useful? Only a little. The Storyteller could tell you most of it anyways. Following that is a section on computers, mostly generic information with no surprises - more wasted space, considering that most of it is common knowledge. The book closes with two new Arcanoi, both of which seem a little overpowered - one of them, Mnemosysis, has a warning about putting into the hands of player characters. (They seem to fit in with Wraith, so I'll not complain too much.)

There's some essays in the back, discussing the universal nature of ghosts - a good read, including a discussion of various types of ghosts by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro. And a brief summary of the Arcanoi.

In all, is it worth it? Yes, if you're a Storyteller. If not, skip it; pool your money and buy Doomslayers instead. I might be unfair to this book, since it's fairly old - it advertises Mage: 2nd edition in the back, which is itself getting up there in years. But the contents of the book just feel like too much description, not enough meat; and even if you are a Storyteller, give it some thought before you pick this puppy up.

-Darren MacLennan

Style: 5 (Excellent!)
Substance: 2 (Sparse)

Wraith Player's Guide
Author: Tim Akres, Nathaniel Barmore, Frank Branham, Phil Brucato and others Category: Company/Publisher: White Wolf Publishing Cost: $18.00 Page count: 192 ISBN: 1-56504-601-3 Review by Darren MacLennan on 01/01/99. Genre tags: Fantasy Modern_day Historical Horror Gothic	The funny thing about this product is that it's not really for players. It seems to be more a guide for players AND Storytellers - and even in that respect, it's got more stuff for Storytellers to use rather than the players. Wraith is, as I noted in my review of Doomslayers, a system that I'm profoundly ambivalent about; but as time passes, I'm growing more and more inclined to think that it's a better game thatn I first gave it credit for. Like all White Wolf games, if you ignore the parts you don't like and emphasize the ones you do, it's a much better game. So, what does the Player's Guide add? A lot of material, some good, some bad. There's an interesting story in the beginning of the book about an office drone stuck in the building where he died - well worth reading for any potential player or Storyteller. The introduction mentions various movies that would provide decent inspiration for a Wraith chronicle, and I agree with most - especially Beetlejuice, which would make Wraith a lot more fun if the game incorporated more of that movie's wackiness. (Jacob's Ladder is also mentioned - and I would love to try playing in a world where it's _always_ Jacob's Ladder-esque.) What follows, though, is one of the more disappointing parts of the book - the Merits and Flaws, most of which are copied wholesale from other White Wolf books. Echoes of the Past, Code of Honor, Dark Secret - nothing that you haven't seen before. Some of them, like the Corporeal flaws and merits, let you mess with your wraith's body; the most fascinating, like Improperly Buried, Cold, and the like suggest lots that can be done with Merits and Flaws for wraiths...but they're not developed on enough, and instead we get the standard Cursed, Throwback, Code of Honor...you get the idea. Disappointing. There's some interesting Backgrounds to make up for them, though. There's some new Harrowings included - while they're quite interesting on a general level, I wish that they'd left them out in favor of describing general tactics to Harrow players who don't fall into the categories described. (Then again, anybody with a decent imagination can come up with at least two just on the basis of their own bad experiences.) Also, the Harrowings seem to be about phobias, which are best dealt with than fled from. Maybe White Wolf meant for you to deal with them once you'd been through them more than once... The skills section is the worst - a collection of skills that are interesting, but not nearly worth spending points on. Psychoanalysis, Diplomacy, Intrigue, Traps, Torture, Swimming, Heraldry - Heraldry? - the skills are useful for NPCs, but I don't think that a lot of players will want to spend points on them to begin with. It might also create skill bloat, where simple, all-purpose rolls like Wits + Manipulation are replaced with a specific skill, like Intrigue. Although the book acknowledges that the skills are optional, I would have just left it out, except for skills like Instruction and Computer Hacking, which have proven themselves in other games. The section on Wraith society is both the most frustrating and the most informative. I don't like the Renegade/Heretic/Hierarchy conflict within Wraith - it seems too artifical. Why fight the Hierarchy when you can fight Spectres, as brilliantly described in Doomslayers? In order: The Hierarchy suffers from being the oldest, and has the most history, going from the initial founding of Stygia - the Hierarchy's home town - to the disappearance of Charon, the Hierarchy's leader, to the current situation. But for a player's guide, it's long on the history, short on character archetypes. It can be great fun to play a bureaucrat, like in West End Game's Paranoia. You run around stomping out small fires while doing your best to please your superiors, Dilbert in the Underworld. The Hierarchy's section just goes into endless detail about the Hierarchy's...hierarchy; how marshals deal with Maelstroms and so forth. It's interesting information - but it lacks specifics, especially in areas that would help players. There's maybe four paragraphs on character types and adventures for Hierarchy characters, and the rest is background. Important skills, more adventure seeds, anything along those lines would provide a hook for players to follow, but that's not what's included. The Heretics are slightly more fleshed out, since they don't have a history; most of their section is dedicated to describing how they relate to the Heretics. But no real-world religious beliefs are included, making it nice and vague, and they wind up seeming like fanatic religious types, rather than real people. If you believe in any religious creed, and you wind up in the Shadowlands, you're immediately going to wonder what's going on, and finding out what's happened could lead to some marvellously spooky stories, but the Heretics are just another political group in the Wraith Players Guide. However, there's time devoted to various cults, which makes for some interesting reading - Karma cults seek to right the balance by intruding into the normal world, while Purification cults believe they've been sent there by their deity as a punishment. But they don't entirely save it; ultimately, more real-world details - handled with tact - would have made this section more interesting. The Renegades get the same treatment. Their basic goals are stated, and various groups are fleshed out. Again, no specfic details - nothing beyond generalities. There's reasons for rebelling, but...do you really need an excuse? The Hierarchy alone provides enough of a boogeyman to stir the heart of a rebel, and I imagine that any player might be able to come up with more specific reasons to rebel than this book supplies. They're rebels because they rebel, basically. Probably the most interesting section of the book - and a somewhat baffling inclusion for a Player's guide - is the Dark Kingdoms, which describe the afterlife from the viewpoint of other cultures. It's all decent stuff, although the Dark Kingdom of Jade is supplanted with another book entirely on that subject. (You could do worse than to go by this book's dictates, though.) Other afterlives include the Dark Kingdom of Obsidian, (Mesoamerica), Ivory (Africa), the Caribbean Les Invisibles, the Underworld of India, the Australian Kingdom of Clay and the remarkably interesting wraiths of Polynesia. The whole thing took me cold, I have to admit - not to the point where I regarded it as useless, but it's long on history and short on practicalities. It's good to know the local history, but for many of the empires, it's so exhaustively detailed that it pushes everything else out. For example, the Dark Kingdom of Obsidian has a half-page to describe what's going on in the Flayed Lands _today_. The rest is history. Other areas fare better, such as the African afterlife . There, animals have souls, and the sorcerors actively work with the dead - but the whole thing is being pushed to the breaking point by the massive influx of dead souls, human and animal, into the afterlife. But no stats for animals, no sorceror abilities...why not? Of special interest are the Creole beliefs in ghosts - a two-way relationship between the living and the dead, with the living acting as "horses" for certain ghosts. Not only is there a direct exchange between the living and the dead, there's actually a formal code of behavior, and hedge mages who facilitate most of it. Tons of story possibilities here, especially in the way that the dead relate to the living. The only problem is this: No rules for the hedge magick that the mages do; no information about how much Pathos wraiths get from the sacrifices of the living, nothing that'll help the poor Storyteller when situations like this arise. Rules are surely interruptive of the game, but Mage's The Book of Worlds solved that problem - it just stuck the rules in the back of the book, organized by chapter. The last quarter of the book recaps most of the information in Wraith, including information that's already been recapped in the main Wraith rulebook, including the geography of the Wraith world. Useful? Only a little. The Storyteller could tell you most of it anyways. Following that is a section on computers, mostly generic information with no surprises - more wasted space, considering that most of it is common knowledge. The book closes with two new Arcanoi, both of which seem a little overpowered - one of them, Mnemosysis, has a warning about putting into the hands of player characters. (They seem to fit in with Wraith, so I'll not complain too much.) There's some essays in the back, discussing the universal nature of ghosts - a good read, including a discussion of various types of ghosts by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro. And a brief summary of the Arcanoi. In all, is it worth it? Yes, if you're a Storyteller. If not, skip it; pool your money and buy Doomslayers instead. I might be unfair to this book, since it's fairly old - it advertises Mage: 2nd edition in the back, which is itself getting up there in years. But the contents of the book just feel like too much description, not enough meat; and even if you are a Storyteller, give it some thought before you pick this puppy up. -Darren MacLennan Style: 5 (Excellent!) Substance: 2 (Sparse)

Wraith Player's Guide