I never really got into the whole idea behind Orpheus, truth be told. I loved a lot of Wraith, especially the fantastic horror of Doomslayers and the nature of Oblivion and so forth, but there were a lot of concepts that you had to wrap your head around to play the game – and many of them were more bizarre than useful, like soulforging, or the entire slogging mess of the Hierarchy. Orpheus was a great game, mechanically speaking, but the suspension of disbelief was a bitch. The central concept was that the Orpheus Corporation was selling the services of ghosts, and those who could step out of their bodies, to the general public. Not only was there no Masquerade, in other words, but the supernaturals in question could hire their own publicity agent. It’s a bit of a switchup, you can imagine.

                  Now, to my mind, I figure that this is the kind of thing that’s going to cause major-league upheaval in any world, much less the World of Darkness. If you’re playing in the canonical World of Darkness, then you’re going to have vampires coming down on you like the Stark Fist of Removal, along with every human crazy and/or religious nut with a grudge. As a matter of fact, Unknown Armies summarized it best with what I like to call the Black Ant/White Rice syndrome: If you display supernatural powers to the public, then the crazies will be on you like black on an ant, and the press will be on you like white on rice. Orpheus sort of hand-waves it off in the core book, but it’s still something that made me say “Huh?” when I read the game for the first time.

                  Anyways. Endgame is the last of a six-book supplement series. Essentially, the six books were like a short-term metaplot, originating with the raiding and destruction of the Orpheus corporation, continuing with a spiritual comet strike, the distribution of a drug made out of Spectre plasm, and the rise of a subgroup of ghosts who were able to redeem themselves from the grip of the spiritual malaise known as Oblivion. With the sixth book, the metaplot comes to an end.

                  And it’s a doozy, basically resolving to a civil war between the Neverborn Malfeans and the thing that spawned them in the first place, dubbed “Grandmother” by parties unknown. You know all of those evil, Great Old One-esque threats that have lingered in the background of White Wolf’s cosmology all that time? Those things send Grandmother Mother’s Day cards. As the characters investigate, they’ll find themselves drawn into the Underworld, Wraith’s primary setting, and find a way to prevent Grandmother from kicking the wall between the living and the dead down.

                  The book does open up on a fairly blasé note, involving a description of the office building where a major Spectral hive is being built in the building’s spiritual reflection. While the crucible may be brought in to deal with the problems caused by having Spectres living “next door” to the building, the hive is torn open when Grandmother attempts to tear her way into the real world. The resulting spiritual storm causes those within the area to get sick with a weird disease, which in turn results in the government bringing in the CDC and USAMRIID – in other words, treating the results of the spiritual plague as if they’re a physical disease.

                  There’s some flaws in this setup – not huge ones, but they’re there. For one thing, the people who work for TermsCo are described, along with their personalites and so forth – and while a good scenario could be gleaned from spiritually “cleaning up” such a place, and helping the various people within with their problems by using various ghostly powers, it kind of strikes me as playing something along the lines of Werewolf: The Stress Counsellor and Ergonomic Analyst. If you’re going to have an event as major as the barrier between Earth’s afterlife and the Maelstrom broken, then the people who work at the site should be, I’m thinking, relatively anonymous – important, but not the center of attention. The character do get the chance to close up the rift between the Maelstrom and their world, which is cool.

                  In addition, the chapter also has the government stepping in with the whole Outbreak-style management – blood tests, camps for the sick, and so forth. The problem is that the government doesn’t have the faintest idea of what it’s doing, since the illness is purely spiritual, and the characters may wind up detained or even imprisoned if the government happens to get in their way. (As a matter of fact, if they’re still wanted, then the characters could encounter a lengthy roadblock before they can continue.) On top of that, there’s nothing to do in a situation where there’s a plague and the government has stepped in – you can either lounge around shooting blood out of every orifice in your body, or you can frown in a concerned fashion at a test tube. Neither scenario really strikes me as an entertaining option. Furthermore, keeping the government out of your business is one of the primary rules of horror games, because they’ll seize conrol of the situation from the player characters. It’s hardly a crippling flaw, but it’s the kind of sticky-trap that can foul up the game if you don’t realize the implications of having the characters caught. 

                   The next chapter deals with the place where the Maelstrom lives, which Wraith veterans will immediately recognize as their old stomping ground, the Underworld. Since Ends of Empire, though, the place has basically been levelled, with huge chunks of the Labyrinth being pushed into the Underworld and the Maelstrom scraping everything into dust. It’s a bit of a switch from Ends of Empire, where the PCs became the new Deathlords and the Underworld was still – relatively – intact, but since the characters were presumed to be going “somewhere else”, perhaps they got relocated to yet another layer between the Labyrinth and the real world.

                  The Dead Cosmologies chapter describes the Wasteland, and in many respects, it’s a dilly. Some of the eerie originality that made Doomslayers such a must buy is here as well. For example:

                  A stream of blood. It’s about three to five feet wide and one foot deep. If followed upstream, it narrows until it comes to a point, where a scythe is buried, point-down, in the ground. If the scythe is removed, the blood flow stops. Downstream, one can find three to five Spectres building a crude dam.

                  As elegant a tribute to the Ferrymen as you’re likely to find. Or:

                  A building, split in half. Though it’s tilted precariously towards one side, entry is possible. It’s a library. But every letter on every page has been scratched out, by hand, with an angry X.

                  Or:

                  An area, about fifty feet on a side, enclosed with string…Inside the enclosure are over a thousand jars and bottles. In each is a lumpy wad, appropriately suited for its container…Anyone with appropriate medical experience recognizes them as tumors.

                  Nice. That’s the kind of awesome imagery that makes Wraith sing, the idea that the afterlife is a gigantic clearinghouse for all of the psychic detritus that mankind accumulates – like Jacob’s Ladder, except on a huge scale.

                  At the same time, there’s a maddening theme throughout of refusing to just haul off and call things by the names that they were called in Wraith. For example, the nameless leader of the Underworld is described, and it’s mentioned that he’s called by many names – but there’s only one name that he has in Wraith, and that’s Charon. Admittedly, the Nameless City may have had its name eaten away by Oblivion, but to call it Stygia is to establish a link to a game that acts as Orpheus’s grandparent, and it would be nice to see some kind of firm link made between the two games. The scythe is a nice touch; it would be even nicer to meet a Ferryman with one hand studded with office pushpins. It’s like playing a game of Jinx, with any mention of Wraith being rewarded with a punch in the arm.

                  The rest of the chapter deals with the nitty-gritty of the Wasteland, including rules for sinkholes, aggravated damage – a new addition to Orpheus – travel, which includes rules for jury-rigging relic vehicles, and a section on the Labyrinth.

                  But the Labyrinth, in my opinion, has a lot of its primary horror removed by the way that it’s described within the book. Basically, the Labyrinth – the parts under Grandmother’s control – becomes subjective. If three different wraiths step into one room in the Labyrinth, they’ll see it as three different things – one sees an operating theater, one sees a Middle Eastern marketplace, another sees a ‘Nam jungle. Even though all three see different things, it’s basically the same thing.

                  That removes a lot of the horror, in my opinion. Nobody sits through the hospital section of Jacob’s Ladder and thinks “Hm, that’s scary, but I would have been more scared by a depiction of a room whose walls are lined with marzipan cookies, which I personally loathe.” Horror revolves around reinforcing commonality, not in emphasizing the difference between people. In other words, you are not a goddman unique snowflake. You are walking through the worst place on earth, and the GM shouldn’t have to come up with something custom-tailored to each player just to scare them.

                  And the genuis of the Laybrinth was particular. The Labyrinth didn’t have meaning; it ate meaning. You would never find a Middle Eastern marketplace in the Labryinth because the Labyrinth would have broken things up into their component parts. Maybe you’d find a shard of pottery, or an age-crumbled, water-blurred, illegible page from the Koran on the floor, but you would never find anything that would remind you of Earth. The Labyrinth isn’t supposed to be designed to scare you; it’s not designed to play upon your worst nightmares; it does not care about you; you are not important You are playing around in the crumbs between its teeth. Instead of being all about you – I.E playing to your worst fears – the Labyrinth just wants to erode you away and then eat you. And the only viewpoint that matters is Oblivion’s.

                  The third complaint is that creating subjective horror means that the GM has to come up with as many new scenes as there are PCs, which in turn means that he’s going to have to do a ton of work every time they round a corner. It’s also a recipe for confusion. If one PC demands to pick up the broken radio that was just thrown, and the GM tossed off a reference to it being a shattered pot to that PC’s character, that’s going to cause confusion – I’ve seen it happen in my own games many a time.

                  Finally, the Labyrinth already had a fantastic visual scheme of its own, at least in my head: Gray wood, broken glass, sprays of dirt, cold winds or stagnant air, dust, windows caked with dirt, faceless mannequins, body parts thrown into corners, broken toys, exposed steel beams. Broken records. A plain of broken schooldesks, a numbered porcelain mannequin sprawled across each. Blubbery, eroded Spectres sliding through the sky like melted fat. Doomslayers made all of this stuff perfectly clear, and while I understand the impulse not to rewrite that book, it’s a darn shame that they didn’t take more from that book.

                  I will say that the description of how Grandmother is presented makes up for that. Rather than being described as some massive thing, Grandmother makes her influence known – as the book describes – as a condition; stagnant air, a patch of shadow, a particular color. As they get closer to Grandmother, that condition intensifies until it’s all that they can see. That’s beautiful work, an excellent way of describing something that would otherwise just come off as another yucko blob of tentacles.  After a brief description of how the various powers of ghosts/wraiths work in the Wasteland, we hit the next chapter.

                  The Unearthed Player’s Guide is the cookie for the players who have been in it from the beginning – a chance to lay hands on Level Four powers, Vitality Emblems, and the addition of a new Shade, the Marrow. The Marrow shade basically draws from the Moliation Arcanos from the original Wraith – they’re constantly shifting shape, ranging from minor shape-changes all the way to bursting into clouds of vermin or birds. If they combine their powers with the rest of their crucible, they can actually create short-lived zombies. It might have been helpful to have this Shade at the beginning of the campaign, back when hiding and disguising oneself would be worth its weight in gold, but hey, I’m not complaining. (Well, I am, but…)

                  The Level Four powers – “Fourth-tier Horrors” are where the real meat of the game lies. There are some nice, nice powers here. Among others, Banshees become able to spontaneously create and manipulate nihils; Marrows incorporate organic matter into their bodies, including living creatures; Orphan Grinders become able to spontaneously redeem Spectres (!); Phantasms yank your worst fear into a hallucination; and Haunters become able to turn themselves into a monster truck WHAAAAAAAAAAAA?

                  Now: just to be clear, I’m the originator of the corpse balloons, something that could very easily come off as silly as hell if you don’t play them just right. (They were in Midnight Siege.) That being said, I’m trying very hard to figure out just how you introduce a spectral monster truck to an otherwise scary campaign without making everybody bust out laughing. (Come at the player with rows of Spectral cars for him to crush?) Personally, I’d replace it with a pair of titanic wings, with hooks on chains that other members of the Crucible can dangle from if they want transport – sort of a play on the original transport-based powers of the Harbingers, from the original Wraith. With the sole exception of the Haunter’s fourth-tier power, all of the powers that you can lay hands on are really cool, and they’re going to be in high demand once the players get

their hands on the book.

                  The Vitality Emblems, to my mind, are a little more problematic. Essentially, they’re spontaneously generated magical items, falling into four general categories – protection, combat, illumination and restraint. If you spend the Vitality, and the experience points then you can manifest the emblem spontaneously out of thin air. However, they are fairly powerful things to grant to a player character; five Vitality gives you a weapon with a +8 initiative bonus, a –3 difficulty to hit, and does your Strength + 9 in damage to whatever it hits. Even at two vitality, you’re doing +4/-1/Strength + 7, which is a lot of damage. The Emblems of Protection grant two dice of soak to all kinds of damage, including aggravated, and can inflict four levels of lethal damage for every additional point of Vitality you channel into it. While I understand that one of the primary complaints of the original Wraith was that the characters were severely underpowered, this might be going in the other direction entirely. I’d advise that Storytellers have a look at these and give it some thought before they allow PCs to buy them.

                  The adventure section deals with what the characters find when they finally enter into the Wasteland. We see the ranks of Oblivion broken down, including – JOY! – my favorite Spectral type, the Hekatonkhire, massively powerful Spectres who almost made it to the top, only to slowly degrade – they’re massively powerful, but only have two or three thoughts left to themselves. Thanks to a really excellent fiction piece in Doomslayers, they’re my personal favorites, and I’m glad to see them here.

                  But, in any case, the characters find themselves exploring the Wasteland as they investigate the war between Grandmother’s forces and the original Malfeans. There’s a lot of good information in here, all of it good, ranging from what it’s like to work with a Spectre (like working arm-in-arm with a child molestor) to the fate of Stygia (it’s ruined, but the Spectral hive-mind can’t exist within it) to the various ruined Necropoli that mirror the real world. Even the World Trade Center appears, as a spiritual maelstrom where spirits can resolve their demons through a Harrowing. There’s adventure snippets for the Grandmother/Malfean war, including the results and how the characters can affect the outcome, as well as descriptions of the Malfeans – including some old favorites, like Rabark the Inhabited.

                  The climax is worthy of the various end books of the line; the characters have a chance to stop Grandmother directly, but they’ll have to pay one hell of a price to do so - and it’s not them paying it, so they don’t get the chance to go out nobly. As a tribute to Vampire, they may meet somebody who’s consistently been associated with the Wraith line, but who never showed up until now – you probably know him, name starts with an A, and his mother is the Lady of Fate. Another scenario has them trying to communicate with Grandmother directly, a being which has absolutely no experience with single intelligences, like ours. It’s not quite the gut punch of the first option, but it could make for some nice role-playing opportunities.

                  Overall, it’s a good book that misses some opportunities. It’s a little too cautious for me – too cautious to raid Wraith for the good bits, overgenerous with bonuses and power-ups for the characters, and not really up to the challenge of portraying the sheer nihilistic horror of the Wasteland. That being said, it’s also chock full of good ideas, and it’s worth it just to see the new Horrors that player characters can lay hands on. If you’re into Orpheus, then it’s worth picking up; if not, you may want to browse through it before you buy.

                  -Darren MacLennan