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This has got to be one of the weirder games that I've played - not just in the setting, but in the characters. Only in this game, and possibly Paranoia, do characters literally start off dead.

Wraith is the fourth game in the World of Darkness series, and probably the least well received.

Comparing the second edition to the first, it's easy to say why - the original was very introspective, with vague descriptions of almost everything and a hyper-inflated sense of the self. Most of the book was about the struggle between the self and the Shadow, which was represented by another character in the group. Somebody complained, back when it first came out, that there was nothing to do. You could tend to what you left behind, you could engage in a half-hearted fight with your Shadow, and you could engage in the politics of the underworld - the three-way fight between the Hierarchy, the Renegades and the Heretics - but it was a fairly dull game. Almost all 1st edition White Wolf stuff is.

I didn't realize that Wraith had such potential until I got Doomslayers, which is the best book for Wraith ever put out. And I didn't realize how poor Wraith 1st edition was until I saw the 2nd. You'll notice that I mention that my comments apply only to Wraith 1st ed in my review of Doomslayers, and I can say with confidence that one completely outstrips another.

How so?

Specifically, everything that was vague and unexplained is laid out in careful detail. Instead of the psuedo-Gothic claptrap introduction that we saw in the first book, we get two different viewpoints on the afterlife, describing everything in clear terms. One of them tends to put things in flowery terms; the other speaks English. That's a step in the right direction right off the bat.

What is the game about? Essentially, there's two parts to it. The first part is that you're dead and you've got to tend the things that were important to you in life - objects, people and causes that you loved. The second part has you down beneath the surface of the world, past the Tempest, in the Dark Kingdoms of the dead. The game focuses on Stygia, the underworld of Europe and North America, but there are others. In Stygia, the Hierarchy, a monolithic bureaucracy of the dead, runs things, opposed by the ragtag Renegades and the religious Heretics. Thanks to the "death" of Charon, the central ruler of Stygia, the empire has been taken over by the Deathlords, whose squabbling has weakened the Empire.

Meanwhile, the Hierarchy has also clamped down on the real world with the draconian Dictuum Mortum, which forbids interference in the real world. Conflict is everywhere. Stygia is being torn apart from within. (This is one of the things that the Book of Legions gets across, incidentally, which makes it more useful than I originally thought it would be.) In addition - and this is the most serious threat - all wraiths are being threatened by the forces of Oblivion, which essentially wants every wraith everywhere to plunge into the grasp of nothingness. Wraiths who have fallen to the temptations of Oblivion become Spectres, who try to pull other wraiths down into hell with them. For a game where everybody's already dead, there's a lot of fighting going on.

Characters are one of the more interesting things about this game. Essentially, anybody can be a wraith; all that it takes is dying, and having something strong left in life to attach yourself to. One of the more interesting things about wraith characters is that they actually need to rank their wants and desires. When you create your character, your Passions indicate exactly what's keeping you around - whether it's a need to destroy the person who killed you or a desire to see your work recognized. There's also items that keep you anchored to the real world, things that were important to you, like an old car, or a computer that you used all of the time. The Passison provide innumerable adventure oppurtunities in the real world. Same thing with protecting Fetters. (The problem is if you have every adventure turn into a series of Fetter rescuings, but that can be avoided with a good GM.)

One problem that I've found with this approach, though, is that it forces players to think of every detail of what their characters are like from the very beginning, as opposed to slowly discovering them as the adventure proceeds. I know that most of my characters have started out as the generic Virtual Adept and slowly turned into, say, a geeky scientist who loves to disguise himself and infiltrate Technocracy headquarters; in Wraith, you have to know what your character's goals are from the very beginning. It's not a hard concept to understand, especially after you look through the character archetypes in the Guildbooks, or look at the sample character created. Wraith is definitely for the experienced role-player, especially if you're used to a lot of detail for your character.

Passions also help you gain spiritual energy - the oddly-named Pathos - which then lets you heal damage and power your Arcanoi, the Wraithly equivalent of vampiric Disciplines or Garou Gifts. The Arcanoi pretty much run the gamut of ghostly abilities, including smashing things in the real world, making the walls bleed, navigating through the Tempest between the real world and the Underworld, making yourself appear in the real world, predicting the future, and keeping track of your fetters. One of them, Castigate, is my favorite, allowing you to directly attack your Shadow and reduce its power. They're very cheap compared to most White Wolf game powers, since wraiths don't really have a whole lot else that they can use to affect the real world.

There's a lengthy, overlong history of the Underworld, from its inception by Charon through the various catastrophes and triumphs that Stygia has gone through. I was surprised how incredibly lucid this history was in comparison with the old one. It concentrates on specific elements of the plot, including the inception of the Ferrymen, the creation of soulforging, the Maelstroms, the battle with the Spectres, the fall of Charon - all of it reads like it was probably meant to in the 1st ed. Ambiguity is gone, which is a good thing. Players and storytellers alike have a grip on the setting now, which is a bloody good thing. (There's also a description of the Midnight Express, which baffled me until I read this book. It's not described in great detail, but there's enough to use it without having to buy another book.)

There's also an entire chapter on one of the more interesting parts of Wraith - the Shadow, the "Mr. Hyde portion of your personality", as the book suggests. You're always fighting with the part of your personality that would love to see you dead; Wraith; The Great War suggests that the Shadow is the selfish part of your personality, but this book suggests it as a flat-out malevolent force - tearing down everything that's good about your life, carving away at your more sensitive parts, acting as the antithesis of everything that you are.

To boot, the Shadow is represented by another member of your gaming group, who's responsible for tempting you to give into your Shadow's appeal. Do so, and you get more power; you might even learn new Arcanoi in the bargain. But that strengthens your Shadow. Strengthen him enough, he'll take you over, at first for brief periods, then for good, at which point you become a Spectre. In other words, you die. It's an impressive mechanic, definitely for advanced players and those who can differentiate between the actions of a player and the actions of his Shadow. (And if you're not happy with the player-acts-as-Shadow, there's other options.)

The only problems that I can see is the name of Spectral energy - Angst, which gave me the impression of Wraith as a sooper-dooper dark game when I first saw it - and the fact that it's very difficult to reduce your permanent angst. That means that your character is very likely to start a slow spiral once he starts using his Shadow, one that can't be cured even with Castigation.

I would have definitely appreciated some mechanic for dropping your permanent Angst score, especially because it reminds me of the death-spiral that Changelings can get into with Banality. I don't want to play a character who's slowly decaying. The book does suggest dropping permanent Angst for good role-playing, which offers a way out, but at the GM's discretion.

There's also Harrowings, which were one of the more detailed parts of the original Wraith. There, it was a series of somewhat overwrought text pieces which were meant to be dramatized by the Storyteller; here, they're a whole lot of guidelines, including what abilities a wraith can use, what exactly is going on, and some rough guidlines as to how to run it. The original was useful for the specific details that they gave for exactly what a Harrowing could be like - I.E a raw nightmare - while the second breaks away from scripted encounters and allows you to do it the way that you think that it can be run. It'll be mighty useful if you have a good idea of what freaks your players out; otherwise, you might flounder a bit. (Anything by Pagan Publishing, or out of Jacob's Ladder is pretty good for a nightmarish image or two.) There's also rewards for surviving Harrowings, which is a good way to decrease the sting that Harrowings had before.

Whast else? The rest of the book is almost standard boilerplate, but it includes a very useful description of the four different states that Wraiths can achieve. That information was present in the original edition only sketchily - I don't recall it being clearly explained, truth be told. There's an interestingly-drawn comic to explain combat, a useful comic that a lot of people don't like; me, I like it a lot. Couldn't be happier. The Spectre is awfully goofy-looking, nothing like the bloated monstrosities of Doomslayers, but it's not bad. Plasmic entities - the "animals" of the Underworld - are included, and feature some pretty interesting descriptions. The Hierarchy, formerly the star of the show, has been reduced to a background presence. There's specific rules on how to achieve Transcendence, instead of the vague attributes of the 1st ed. It is, in short, a really damned fine book.

The art is also uniformly good, catching the atmosphere at the same time that it suggest potential stories. A flaming skeleton dressed in a janitor's uniform walks through a graveyard, gasoline can in hand. How precisely did he die? How'd he get there? What's going on? Good stuff all around. Other pieces are more mood pieces, including one of what must be Spectres masquerading as super heroes, but they're all well in tune with the entire idea of Wraith.

Does it catch the atmosphere of a ghost story? In a sense, yeah. But despite my glowing review, Wraith does have some problems, at least as I see them.

For one thing, the authors of the book correctly surmised that hanging around haunting your Fetters all day was going to get boring in a hurry; that's why the Underworld was introduced, with its decaying empires and bureaucrats of every stripe. Most games in the Underworld are likely going to be political in nature - the Guilds vs. the Hierarchy, the Renegades vs. the Hierarchy, the Hierarchy vs. Spectres, that kind of thing - more politics than Vampire, in other words. It doesn't have to be, but it's something that's strongly focused on in the various supplements published. You can replicate just about every ghost story you've ever seen, including Ghost Story and Ghost, but the game is split between the real world and the Underworld; there's not a whole lot of overlap. Even crossing the boundary between death and life is illegal, at least to the Hierarchy - that's a game balance thing, to prevent wraiths from hopping in and out as they please, but it limits the game a bit. There's too much focus on the Underworld and not enough on the real one.

The game also lacks humor. One of the things that I love about Mage is that it has an entire Tradition - the Sons of Ether - who can be naturally tuned to humorous purposes, the weird scientists who seem to make things explode more often than they actually invent something. The Virtual Adepts are equally fun to stereotype as hacker d00dz who don't really have as much of a clue as they think they do; the point is that the game can be as funny or as serious as you want it to be. With Wraith, the darkness is almost omnipotent, and flashes of humor are as rare as hen's teeth. Yeah, you're dead; but think about Beetlejuice and you'll immediately see my point. ("Nice f---in' model!" <honk honk>) In an attempt to outdo Vampire for horror, the game loses its sense of self. Maybe that's just me, but it would have been nice to see just a flash or two of life in a world of the dead. Wraith 1st ed was a game that you slit your wrists to; Wraith 2nd ed is a lot better, and has the occasional stab at a lighter setting, but it's still dark.

The true killer of this game, at least for me - and mind you that it's one of my favorite games - is that slavery is a huge part of Underworld affairs. Since there's nothing to really smelt bricks out of, and since most people die without strong goals in mind, the Stygian economy is based on the use of Thralls, which are the people who didn't entirely show up in the Underworld intact. They get to provide the manual labor for Stygia - and, in the game's most horrifying aspect, can be melted down and "forged" into something new, like a sword, or a building brick. As the Artificier's book says, it's taking a person and turning him into an object, which is MIGHTY strong stuff.

The book does limit forging to Spectres, thralls and criminals, but it's still something that threatens to offend players...hell, that'll offend a lot of players. Spectres are pure evil; criminals crossed Stygia, even if their aims were noble; but Thralls are just unlucky. Me, I'd just extend soulforging to Spectres and ghosts who have been lobotomized by their passage through; otherwise, the horror of the situation becomes a bit too much to take. Nasty, nasty stuff. (Why in the world would White Wolf leave that aspect in? Anybody want to speculate why in the message board?) It's not a vital part of the game - it can be ignored - but it's still pretty ugly.

It's worth buying if you have any interest in ghosts - or, for that matter, death in general. Being able to set your affairs in order after you're dead is a fun idea, and dealing with a bureaucracy that's been around for some two thousand years could be even more entertaining. Think about any ghost story and wonder why it was that the ghost got there in the first place, and you'll have the core for a good Wraith adventure. (I'd also recommend the Eels' "Electroshock Blues" as a good album for playing in the background, since it deals with death and the grieving process.) Pick up Doomslayers, find some good role-players, ignore soulforging if you're not comfortable with it and have a good time; it may not be the best White Wolf game, but it's up there with them.

-Darren MacLennan

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

Wraith: The Oblivion
Author: *Richard Dansky, Mark Rein Hagen, Jennifer Hartshorn and Sam Chupp Category: Company/Publisher: White Wolf Line: Wraith Cost: $28.00 Page count: 300 ISBN: 1-56504-600-5 Capsule Review by Darren MacLennan** on 05/28/99. Genre tags: Modern_day Historical Horror Espionage Gothic	This has got to be one of the weirder games that I've played - not just in the setting, but in the characters. Only in this game, and possibly Paranoia, do characters literally start off dead. Wraith is the fourth game in the World of Darkness series, and probably the least well received. Comparing the second edition to the first, it's easy to say why - the original was very introspective, with vague descriptions of almost everything and a hyper-inflated sense of the self. Most of the book was about the struggle between the self and the Shadow, which was represented by another character in the group. Somebody complained, back when it first came out, that there was nothing to do. You could tend to what you left behind, you could engage in a half-hearted fight with your Shadow, and you could engage in the politics of the underworld - the three-way fight between the Hierarchy, the Renegades and the Heretics - but it was a fairly dull game. Almost all 1st edition White Wolf stuff is. I didn't realize that Wraith had such potential until I got Doomslayers, which is the best book for Wraith ever put out. And I didn't realize how poor Wraith 1st edition was until I saw the 2nd. You'll notice that I mention that my comments apply only to Wraith 1st ed in my review of Doomslayers, and I can say with confidence that one completely outstrips another. How so? Specifically, everything that was vague and unexplained is laid out in careful detail. Instead of the psuedo-Gothic claptrap introduction that we saw in the first book, we get two different viewpoints on the afterlife, describing everything in clear terms. One of them tends to put things in flowery terms; the other speaks English. That's a step in the right direction right off the bat. What is the game about? Essentially, there's two parts to it. The first part is that you're dead and you've got to tend the things that were important to you in life - objects, people and causes that you loved. The second part has you down beneath the surface of the world, past the Tempest, in the Dark Kingdoms of the dead. The game focuses on Stygia, the underworld of Europe and North America, but there are others. In Stygia, the Hierarchy, a monolithic bureaucracy of the dead, runs things, opposed by the ragtag Renegades and the religious Heretics. Thanks to the "death" of Charon, the central ruler of Stygia, the empire has been taken over by the Deathlords, whose squabbling has weakened the Empire. Meanwhile, the Hierarchy has also clamped down on the real world with the draconian Dictuum Mortum, which forbids interference in the real world. Conflict is everywhere. Stygia is being torn apart from within. (This is one of the things that the Book of Legions gets across, incidentally, which makes it more useful than I originally thought it would be.) In addition - and this is the most serious threat - all wraiths are being threatened by the forces of Oblivion, which essentially wants every wraith everywhere to plunge into the grasp of nothingness. Wraiths who have fallen to the temptations of Oblivion become Spectres, who try to pull other wraiths down into hell with them. For a game where everybody's already dead, there's a lot of fighting going on. Characters are one of the more interesting things about this game. Essentially, anybody can be a wraith; all that it takes is dying, and having something strong left in life to attach yourself to. One of the more interesting things about wraith characters is that they actually need to rank their wants and desires. When you create your character, your Passions indicate exactly what's keeping you around - whether it's a need to destroy the person who killed you or a desire to see your work recognized. There's also items that keep you anchored to the real world, things that were important to you, like an old car, or a computer that you used all of the time. The Passison provide innumerable adventure oppurtunities in the real world. Same thing with protecting Fetters. (The problem is if you have every adventure turn into a series of Fetter rescuings, but that can be avoided with a good GM.) One problem that I've found with this approach, though, is that it forces players to think of every detail of what their characters are like from the very beginning, as opposed to slowly discovering them as the adventure proceeds. I know that most of my characters have started out as the generic Virtual Adept and slowly turned into, say, a geeky scientist who loves to disguise himself and infiltrate Technocracy headquarters; in Wraith, you have to know what your character's goals are from the very beginning. It's not a hard concept to understand, especially after you look through the character archetypes in the Guildbooks, or look at the sample character created. Wraith is definitely for the experienced role-player, especially if you're used to a lot of detail for your character. Passions also help you gain spiritual energy - the oddly-named Pathos - which then lets you heal damage and power your Arcanoi, the Wraithly equivalent of vampiric Disciplines or Garou Gifts. The Arcanoi pretty much run the gamut of ghostly abilities, including smashing things in the real world, making the walls bleed, navigating through the Tempest between the real world and the Underworld, making yourself appear in the real world, predicting the future, and keeping track of your fetters. One of them, Castigate, is my favorite, allowing you to directly attack your Shadow and reduce its power. They're very cheap compared to most White Wolf game powers, since wraiths don't really have a whole lot else that they can use to affect the real world. There's a lengthy, overlong history of the Underworld, from its inception by Charon through the various catastrophes and triumphs that Stygia has gone through. I was surprised how incredibly lucid this history was in comparison with the old one. It concentrates on specific elements of the plot, including the inception of the Ferrymen, the creation of soulforging, the Maelstroms, the battle with the Spectres, the fall of Charon - all of it reads like it was probably meant to in the 1st ed. Ambiguity is gone, which is a good thing. Players and storytellers alike have a grip on the setting now, which is a bloody good thing. (There's also a description of the Midnight Express, which baffled me until I read this book. It's not described in great detail, but there's enough to use it without having to buy another book.) There's also an entire chapter on one of the more interesting parts of Wraith - the Shadow, the "Mr. Hyde portion of your personality", as the book suggests. You're always fighting with the part of your personality that would love to see you dead; Wraith; The Great War suggests that the Shadow is the selfish part of your personality, but this book suggests it as a flat-out malevolent force - tearing down everything that's good about your life, carving away at your more sensitive parts, acting as the antithesis of everything that you are. To boot, the Shadow is represented by another member of your gaming group, who's responsible for tempting you to give into your Shadow's appeal. Do so, and you get more power; you might even learn new Arcanoi in the bargain. But that strengthens your Shadow. Strengthen him enough, he'll take you over, at first for brief periods, then for good, at which point you become a Spectre. In other words, you die. It's an impressive mechanic, definitely for advanced players and those who can differentiate between the actions of a player and the actions of his Shadow. (And if you're not happy with the player-acts-as-Shadow, there's other options.) The only problems that I can see is the name of Spectral energy - Angst, which gave me the impression of Wraith as a sooper-dooper dark game when I first saw it - and the fact that it's very difficult to reduce your permanent angst. That means that your character is very likely to start a slow spiral once he starts using his Shadow, one that can't be cured even with Castigation. I would have definitely appreciated some mechanic for dropping your permanent Angst score, especially because it reminds me of the death-spiral that Changelings can get into with Banality. I don't want to play a character who's slowly decaying. The book does suggest dropping permanent Angst for good role-playing, which offers a way out, but at the GM's discretion. There's also Harrowings, which were one of the more detailed parts of the original Wraith. There, it was a series of somewhat overwrought text pieces which were meant to be dramatized by the Storyteller; here, they're a whole lot of guidelines, including what abilities a wraith can use, what exactly is going on, and some rough guidlines as to how to run it. The original was useful for the specific details that they gave for exactly what a Harrowing could be like - I.E a raw nightmare - while the second breaks away from scripted encounters and allows you to do it the way that you think that it can be run. It'll be mighty useful if you have a good idea of what freaks your players out; otherwise, you might flounder a bit. (Anything by Pagan Publishing, or out of Jacob's Ladder is pretty good for a nightmarish image or two.) There's also rewards for surviving Harrowings, which is a good way to decrease the sting that Harrowings had before. Whast else? The rest of the book is almost standard boilerplate, but it includes a very useful description of the four different states that Wraiths can achieve. That information was present in the original edition only sketchily - I don't recall it being clearly explained, truth be told. There's an interestingly-drawn comic to explain combat, a useful comic that a lot of people don't like; me, I like it a lot. Couldn't be happier. The Spectre is awfully goofy-looking, nothing like the bloated monstrosities of Doomslayers, but it's not bad. Plasmic entities - the "animals" of the Underworld - are included, and feature some pretty interesting descriptions. The Hierarchy, formerly the star of the show, has been reduced to a background presence. There's specific rules on how to achieve Transcendence, instead of the vague attributes of the 1st ed. It is, in short, a really damned fine book. The art is also uniformly good, catching the atmosphere at the same time that it suggest potential stories. A flaming skeleton dressed in a janitor's uniform walks through a graveyard, gasoline can in hand. How precisely did he die? How'd he get there? What's going on? Good stuff all around. Other pieces are more mood pieces, including one of what must be Spectres masquerading as super heroes, but they're all well in tune with the entire idea of Wraith. Does it catch the atmosphere of a ghost story? In a sense, yeah. But despite my glowing review, Wraith does have some problems, at least as I see them. For one thing, the authors of the book correctly surmised that hanging around haunting your Fetters all day was going to get boring in a hurry; that's why the Underworld was introduced, with its decaying empires and bureaucrats of every stripe. Most games in the Underworld are likely going to be political in nature - the Guilds vs. the Hierarchy, the Renegades vs. the Hierarchy, the Hierarchy vs. Spectres, that kind of thing - more politics than Vampire, in other words. It doesn't have to be, but it's something that's strongly focused on in the various supplements published. You can replicate just about every ghost story you've ever seen, including Ghost Story and Ghost, but the game is split between the real world and the Underworld; there's not a whole lot of overlap. Even crossing the boundary between death and life is illegal, at least to the Hierarchy - that's a game balance thing, to prevent wraiths from hopping in and out as they please, but it limits the game a bit. There's too much focus on the Underworld and not enough on the real one. The game also lacks humor. One of the things that I love about Mage is that it has an entire Tradition - the Sons of Ether - who can be naturally tuned to humorous purposes, the weird scientists who seem to make things explode more often than they actually invent something. The Virtual Adepts are equally fun to stereotype as hacker d00dz who don't really have as much of a clue as they think they do; the point is that the game can be as funny or as serious as you want it to be. With Wraith, the darkness is almost omnipotent, and flashes of humor are as rare as hen's teeth. Yeah, you're dead; but think about Beetlejuice and you'll immediately see my point. ("Nice f---in' model!" <honk honk>) In an attempt to outdo Vampire for horror, the game loses its sense of self. Maybe that's just me, but it would have been nice to see just a flash or two of life in a world of the dead. Wraith 1st ed was a game that you slit your wrists to; Wraith 2nd ed is a lot better, and has the occasional stab at a lighter setting, but it's still dark. The true killer of this game, at least for me - and mind you that it's one of my favorite games - is that slavery is a huge part of Underworld affairs. Since there's nothing to really smelt bricks out of, and since most people die without strong goals in mind, the Stygian economy is based on the use of Thralls, which are the people who didn't entirely show up in the Underworld intact. They get to provide the manual labor for Stygia - and, in the game's most horrifying aspect, can be melted down and "forged" into something new, like a sword, or a building brick. As the Artificier's book says, it's taking a person and turning him into an object, which is MIGHTY strong stuff. The book does limit forging to Spectres, thralls and criminals, but it's still something that threatens to offend players...hell, that'll offend a lot of players. Spectres are pure evil; criminals crossed Stygia, even if their aims were noble; but Thralls are just unlucky. Me, I'd just extend soulforging to Spectres and ghosts who have been lobotomized by their passage through; otherwise, the horror of the situation becomes a bit too much to take. Nasty, nasty stuff. (Why in the world would White Wolf leave that aspect in? Anybody want to speculate why in the message board?) It's not a vital part of the game - it can be ignored - but it's still pretty ugly. It's worth buying if you have any interest in ghosts - or, for that matter, death in general. Being able to set your affairs in order after you're dead is a fun idea, and dealing with a bureaucracy that's been around for some two thousand years could be even more entertaining. Think about any ghost story and wonder why it was that the ghost got there in the first place, and you'll have the core for a good Wraith adventure. (I'd also recommend the Eels' "Electroshock Blues" as a good album for playing in the background, since it deals with death and the grieving process.) Pick up Doomslayers, find some good role-players, ignore soulforging if you're not comfortable with it and have a good time; it may not be the best White Wolf game, but it's up there with them. -Darren MacLennan Style: 5 (Excellent!) Substance: 5 (Excellent!)

Wraith: The Oblivion