(note: this review assumes a basic familiarity with the Wraith setting and terminology)
Guildbook: Masquers
Masquers is the third of the guildbooks released for Wraith. As with the other guildbooks, it contains information on the history and politics of the guild as well as providing nifties for Masquer players. For reference, the Masquers are the guild that reshape the “bodies” of wraiths in various manners.
First, a description of the book chapter-by-chapter.
Ghost Story: A Road of Steel and Souls, Part III – 6 pages
The book begins with a piece of game fiction, the third installment of the Road of Steel and Souls series. This story involves a Masquer assassin sending the head of the Artificers into a Harrowing. It’s not bad as game fiction goes, but it’s not notably good either.
Chapter One: Life at the Masque – 14 pages
This chapter is a description of the structure of the guild. It has some rather interesting stuff on the sort of wraith that joins the guild, the internal organization of the guild, and so forth. About half of the information in this chapter is in character, in the voice of a guild journeyman. There are also sidebars on various topics such as the initiation ritual (and let me say, ick.) and the guild’s relationship with the Mnemoi, and two in-character pieces of correspondence. This chapter also contains descriptions of some of the types of specialist in the guild. All in all a fairly useful chapter.
Chapter Two: Truth Told by Liars – 10 pages
This chapter describes the history of the guild, told in the in-character voice of a historian with notes from another party. As is to be expected, the bulk of this chapter is written in odd typefaces with a grey pattern for a background. We have one block of text describing the events involved from a rather biased viewpoint, and then one of the notes giving an opinion with a rather different in-character bias. In this history the Masquer guild is made out to be one of the bigger driving forces behind Stygia. If you can tolerate the annoying background and fonts, there’s some interesting stuff in here on how the guild views itself.
Chapter Three: Taking the Stage – 6 pages
Here we have an in-character description of the ways the guild relates to various other groups, ranging from renegades to werewolves. Interestingly, the character-voice information contradicts some of the OOC information earlier with respect to a few details, apparently dealing with a divide between the truth about the guild and the information known to the rank-and-file guildwraiths. Other than that, it’s not a very noteworthy chapter.
Chapter Four: Chisel and Clay – 12 pages
This chapter discusses the Masquer arcanos, Moliate. It has information on the principles involved and various tricks used by Masquers, as well as more information on how the wraithly corpus functions. This is also where we get the crunchy system bits in the book. There’s a new skill dealing with the artistic qualities of plasm modification, new arts for guildmembers, merits and flaws, and a pair of artifacts. Quite a few of the new arts are interesting, and several such as “Chorus of Throats” are truly strange. The merits and flaws range from a forgettable face to a plasmic homunculus made out of the wraith's own corpus attached with a slender cord. One of these merits, Headless, appears to contradict what the chapter says earlier about disembodied limbs, and just seems to lend itself to all sorts of absurd situations as well (a fact which, to the writer’s credit, is mentioned in the description of the flaw). The artifacts are somewhat interesting, but since they are supposed to be extremely rare and guild secrets beside, they won’t be showing up much in games.
Chapter Five: Faces – 12 pages
This chapter contains character templates: a spy, an emotionally needy person with almost no self-image, a depressive combat monster, an anthropologist studying Spectres, and a shapeshifting prankster. Some of these characters are genuinely interesting concepts, and they may be useful for players or Storytellers partial to the use of templates.
Appendix: Dramatis Personae – 7 pages
The appendix contains information on a few prominent or interesting guildmembers, several of which have interesting possibilities for use in play. Also included here is a Masquer-specific character sheet, although it doesn’t even seem to have a place for listing currently-used moliations, a noteworthy flaw given how almost any Masquer will have several of them. It’s practically just a standard guild character sheet with the word “Masquers” printed at the top, and as such isn’t really all that useful.
Thoughts on the book:
Again, the guild is made out to be one of the most important forces in the European deathlands, with spies everywhere and manipulators controlling all sorts of things. As I stated in my review of the Artificers guildbook, it seems to be moving Wraith from a game of personal horror to a sort of afterlife version of Paranoia where you can’t throw a relic brick without hitting two or three members of secret societies.
The art in the book is fairly well drawn and almost all topical, although it does take up a bit more of the book than I personally prefer.
All in all, this book has a decent amount of useful and interesting information in it, and would be useful for both players interesting in running a Masquer and Storytellers who want a more guild-focussed game of Wraith. At $12.00 with 72 pages, with a bit over 40 pages of text once you take out the title pages, art, and white space. Perhaps it’s a bit steep at full price unless you're really interested in the guild, but if you see a copy for nine or ten bucks, it would probably be worth picking up.
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