(note: this review assumes a basic familiarity with the Wraith setting and terminology)
Guildbook: Artificers
Artificers is the first of the guildbooks released by White Wolf for Wraith. This book deals with the Artificers guild, and contains information about the history and politics of the guild as well as game fiction and some crunchy bits for Artificer characters. For those who don’t remember, the Artificers are the guild that melts down wraiths and turns them into soulsteel.
First, a chapter-by-chapter description of the book.
Game fiction – 6 pages
The first section is a brief piece of game fiction depicting a meeting between guildmasters. I’m not very fond of game fiction, but this seems to be a fairly decent piece of writing. It does appear to be giving out a piece of the metaplot with respect to Charon and Gorool, and if you don’t like it when the metaplot is given in little drips in splatbooks, this may get on your nerves.
Chapter One: The Guild– 6 pages
The first real chapter is a description of the guild in the voice of a Stygian private investigator. It describes what the guild seems to be doing, the basic structure of the guild, and the initiation ritual. It’s got some information that might be useful, but not a whole lot. This section ends with a brief note in white-on-black text, in a typeface that makes your head hurt just trying to read it.
Chapter Two: The Hammer of the Damned – 10 pages
This chapter deals with a history of the guild. Half (on the left side) is purportedly from a book on the history of the guild, and half (on the right side) comes from the Book of Nhudri, the Artificer history/bible.
The left pages contain a reasonably concise and useful history of the guild and are fairly readable, while the pages on the right read like a bad rip-off of the King James translation of the bible on a patterned grey background with an unusual typeface. This combination of factors makes it quite difficult to read, and it contains mostly the same information as the other side.
Chapter Three: The Guild Inside and Out – 10 pages
Now we’ve got some information on the Artificers that isn’t just in character. This chapter is mainly made up of descriptions of what the Artificers think about all the other groups and information about the various groups within the guild.
Chapter Four: Putting the Hammer Down – 6 pages
This chapter focuses on soulforging. We’ve got some information on how soulforging works (including the game mechanics involved), information on how various artificers feel about soulforging, descriptions of the different qualities of soulsteel, and some specific details on forging Oboli and chains. This chapter is concluded with a (weak, in my mind) attempt to connect soulforging to the newer, computer-based arts of Inhabit.
Chapter Five: Ways and Means – 8 pages
This chapter contains almost all of the “crunchy bits” in the book. There are a lot of Ancient Arts for people who want non-computer-based stuff for Inhabit, as well as a few new computer-based arts.
Included in one of these is what I see to be a blatant piece of stupidity inserted in an attempt to balance one of these abilities. I’m talking about the Command Line art, which allows wraiths to operate a computer directly, in a way similar to what a physical operator could do. It is stated, however, that the Inhabiting wraith cannot delete files or reformat the disk because “The system Commanded will actively resist this sort of activity.” Now, I’m reasonably familiar with computers, and I know for a fact that the closest to active resistance to that sort of thing is an “are you sure” prompt or the equivalent, and there’s no reason the wraith shouldn’t be able to select “yes” on this the same way he can input information in any other prompt or input box. So either computers in the WoD have a sort of fitful sentience and can attempt to protect their data, or the ability has a limitation that makes no sense for any reason but game balance, which I think would be better served by just making the art one level higher.
Also included in this chapter are a number of new merits and flaws, some of which look interesting and some of which have me thinking “we're supposed to need rules for that?” Finally, we have a new skill (Soulforging) and a new background (guild status).
Chapter Six: Hammerboys and Netsurfers – 12 pages
Here we have the character templates. There’s an old-style smith, a new-style hacker, a stereotypical guildmember, an ex-guild renegade, and a Nhudri worshipper. None seem to show any real imagination or originality.
Appendix: Who Was Who – 9 pages
Descriptions of a few high-ranking or otherwise notable Artificers are given, as well as an artificer-specific character sheet. Some Storytellers may be able to get some plot ideas out of the descriptions or use the people as NPCs, while the character sheet is only barely useful.
Thoughts on the book:
The Inhabit arcanos has always, to me, seemed almost like two ideas stuck together with no real sense of a core idea behind both of them, and this book does little to reconcile the two in my eyes. On the one hand, you have soulforging, turning wraiths into building materials. On the other, you have all the computer-related stuff. Both ideas work, and the soulforging one in particular I find interesting, but they aren’t the same thing. The book mentions this split between the two groups of Artificers, but it doesn’t really explain why it’s still considered one body of knowledge at all.
Also, the guild is made out to be much more powerful and influential here than it is in the main rulebook, and I don’t think that’s a good change. Wraith always struck me as a splatless game with the guilds artificially grafted on so it would match the other WW games, and giving the guilds more influence and having them have spies and saboteurs everywhere seems to be making Wraith into an afterlife version of Paranoia (Die, Renegade Guildwraith Doppleganger!).
The book has a list price of $12.00, and has 72 pages. If you remove the title pages, the art (some of which is well-done and topical, some of which isn't) and all the white space, you have more like 40 pages of actual text, much of that of limited usefulness. Wraith has had some really good books, (like Doomslayers or Great War) but this to my eye isn't one of them.
Should you buy it at full price? Not unless you’re an Artificer fanatic or you feel you must own every Wraith book. Should you pick it up if you see it for about 6 or 7 bucks? Sure.
Eric "Random Nerd" Eves
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