Orpheus is the newest game in the World of Darkness from White Wolf.

I remember a time when a statement like that could be taken at face value without further elaboration. However, Gentle Reader, we are in much more complicated times, so even my opening sentence requires a boatload of explanation.

Orpheus is a game somewhat set in what we here in the year 2003 would refer to as ‘pre-Time of Judgement World of Darkness’, only not really. More accurately. Orpheus is set in a World of Darkness, brushing up against, but not quite melding with, the much more popular and populous World of Darkness in which are set the stable of White Wolf’s flagship titles (Vampire, et al.) For instance, while mention is made of the existence of the supernatural, the players and Storytellers of Orpheus are to look askance at such things, and concentrate on the Orpheusness of the setting at hand.

If this hasn’t made your head swim so far, then consider this: Orpheus is, as the very first sentence of the book proclaims, "The book you now hold represents a new direction for White Wolf Game Studio.", which would seem to put Orpheus smack-dab in the middle of the entire World of Darkness shake-up and White Wolf’s decision to end the World of Darkness as we know it. Given that the release of Orpheus pre-dates the announcement of the Time of Judgement, and the rest of the rather nebulous information regarding this whole juxtaposition from the book itself, I am willing to put forward the following theory regarding Orpheus and what the deal really is with this book.

Orpheus is not your father’s game of Wraith, the ill-fated title from White Wolf that covered much of the same ground as this one. And where Wraith heralded the beginning of the end of the World of Darkness, it is Orpheus, as the titular Greek myth would have it, which leads the World of Darkness, and indeed White Wolf, out of the darkness and back into the light. Only not quite. (We’ll return to this later on in the review.)

It’s my theory that Orpheus, and I can only assume the game titles that will follow it, will explore the same ground as the six World of Darkness titles that came before, only exchanging the literal (you play a ghost) for the metaphorical (you play in a setting which explores the concept of ‘death’). Much like the transformation of old DC titles with the establishment of Vertigo, Orpheus represents a Vertigo-ization of the World of Darkness. In DC comics, Animal Man was a guy who could duplicate the abilities of animals he was near. In the Vertigo title, Animal Man became a manifestation of the Lifeweb, a nebulous life-force that permeated all animal life. This re-conceptualization made for a much more compelling comic book, exploring the themes of life, animal rights and a raft of other topics simply by the character of Animal Man doing what he did.

However, in performing this transformation, Orpheus falls short of a few of the marks it sets for itself, making for an overall middle-of-the-road RPG experience. Orpheus may want to be a lot of things, but in the end, it actually realizes only a few.

Now, with that out of the way, let’s talk nuts and bolts.

Orpheus is a hardbound book of 311 pages (including an absolutely abysmal index), printed in grayscale on semi-gloss paper of good quality. The frontispiece and backpiece are both in color, consisting of heavily Photoshopped x-ray films (ooo – spooky!). The margins of the pages are filled, in the popular style, with mood-enhancing decoration. My copy was in great shape, with good cover materials and quality binding.

Art-wise, Orpheus doesn’t stray one iota from the White Wolf stable of art in recent times. On the whole, I’d grade the art a B+, with many evocative pieces but a lack of serious punch, and a lack of overall coherence. The layout is clean and functional, and even I, an admitted detractor of putting game setting information into narrative, have to appreciate the use of various ‘clippings’ from e-mails, magazines, pamphlets and whatnot that are used heavily in the beginning of the book to establish setting. Orpheus catches that razor’s edge between giving information evocatively and giving information densely.

The book is divided into five chapters, an appendix and a copy of the character sheet. This structure will inform the structure of the rest of this review.

INTRODUCTION

This section, the shortest of the book, actually has the most to talk about in it, insofar as it lays out not only the concept behind Orpheus, but also the future lines of White Wolf and the future of the World of Darkness.

And the concept can be summed up in the following way, with apologies to Spinal Tap:

"Yeah, but this metaplot goes to 11."

White Wolf has never seen a metaplot that it hasn’t liked, (metaplot here being defined as a ‘canonical setting story arc’, often spread across several of a game’s titles), and in recent years has gleefully engaged in metaplot like a naked hippy in the muddy fields of Woodstock. Titles have died for metaplot (Wraith), been born of metaplot (Demon) and will soon all metaplot together into oblivion (Time of Judgement).

But Orpheus actually takes metaplot to an entirely new level by declaring, up front, that the whole run of the title’s products are tied to the flaming wheel of metaplot, and indeed every title will exist primarily to advance the metaplot, with other information being incidental to that purpose. There are five more titles coming in the Orpheus line, and not one of them includes the word "handbook" in the title. This is all quite clearly laid out in the Introduction (p. 14-16), and is likened to the narrative structure of movies.

What this means is that if you’re like me, and metaplot for you is a four-letter word, you may want to double-check your impulse to invest in Orpheus. While the book makes it crystal clear in traditional Rule Zero Style (p. 249 – sidebar) that your Chronicle need not follow White Wolf’s story, it seems fairly obvious that players and Storytellers who choose not to follow the metaplot will be eating gravy and cranberry sauce at Thanksgiving dinner while everyone else eats the turkey, potatoes and stuffing.

With that in mind – does Orpheus present a good enough game in the first book to be worth the price of admission? Yes, it does. The first book is compared to the open 20 minutes of a film, which "establishes the situation" (p. 16). While this makes the book a bit flat on campaign ideas and leads (which, after all, are ostensibly to be tied to the metaplot in the next five books), Orpheus does present a solid setting and a handful of good, neutral hooks to get the Storyteller started.

Now, having said all that, the question is: "So what’s the metaplot?" The Introduction gives tantalizing hints of some large-scale screw up on the behalf of humanity (or less promisingly, an Alien Menace of some sort) which causes serious problems and possibly the End of Civilization As We Know It. But the few snippets provided in the book are inconclusive.

CHAPTER ONE: WORLD OF THE DEAD

The first chapter is the setting material for Orpheus, which is presented for the most part in the meta-first-person style of magazine clippings, e-mails and bits from confidential memos (and a corporate profile of the Orpheus Group, the central organization of Orpheus). Again, White Wolf actually strikes a good balance in this section between narrative to pull you into the heads of the characters and infodumping the setting.

The setting of Orpheus can be summed up thusly:

((Ghostbusters – Humor) + Sixth Sense) * (Shadowrun – Elves) = Orpheus

The basic idea is that ghosts are real, and the mysterious (and of course menacing, untrustworthy and shadowy … this is White Wolf) Orpheus Group investigates, removes or solves the angsty problems of said ghosts for those who can cough up the fee. Add to this the other natural uses that a shadowy organization could have for agents that can walk through walls and literally frighten people to death, and you have an added wetwork/espionage angle to spice things up.

Arrayed against the Orpheus Group are two rival organizations (Terrell & Squib and NextWorld), evil Spectres (a feature straight from Wraith) from the World Beyond, and the need to keep the Teeming Masses from finding out that ghosts really do exist.

It’s this last point that makes the world of Orpheus a bit of a head-scratcher. The game material is a bit schizophrenic when it comes to the exact level of knowledge that the general public has regarding ghosts and the activities of the Orpheus Group. On the one hand, the book takes the usual angle of ‘if people knew the true extent of what is going on and the existence of ghosts, there’d be dogs and cats living together and mass hysteria. On the other hand, the Orpheus Group advertises on prime time TV. No, really. It says, ‘prime time’. So you’d think that a corporation that advertises on TV would have some profiles done on it in, say, the New York Times, and then from there it would become apparent that something funky and ghost-related was going on, since that would be what they advertise.

But apparently that doesn’t happen because in a World of Darkness, investigative journalists suck big wang.

That minor tilt aside, Orpheus basically covers the same ground as Wraith, but from the opposite side of the mirror – the humans dealing with the existence of ghosts, instead of ghosts dealing with their existence and worldly shackles.

CHAPTER TWO: SHADES, LAMENTS and HORRIBLE THINGS (CHARACTERS)

There’s something to be said for the use of evocative names is creating terminology for RPGs. The right terminology lifts the game away from the banal and helps set the mood. Or, as is the case in Orpheus, the terminology is just confusing and drips of over-thinking the issue. Orpheus characters are categorized in two ways: their Shade and their Lament.

A character’s Shade is a character template that determines the typical suite of abilities (known as Horrors, more on that later) and the typical character outlook and role. The five Shades are Banshee (manipulate emotional states with spectral voices), Haunters (can enter objects, a la Christine), Poltergeist (chuck things around), Skinrider (possession) and Wisps (sort of a mix of vampiric Presence and hypnosis).

The thing to remember is the despite the names of the Shades, these templates are for living agents as well as ghosts who are part of the campaign, which I found confusing at first. Your Shade is your Clan, to a lesser extent than is usual for a World of Darkness game.

Next comes the player’s Lament, which is a word that just drips melodrama – needlessly, I might add. Your character’s Lament refers to the fact that they are either alive or dead. In the case of the living, it determines your character’s means of projecting their soul into the afterlife. For the dead, it really doesn’t matter at all, because the choices sum up to a non-choice, really.

The two choices for the living are Skimmer and Sleeper. Skimmers are people who have mastered the art of astral projection, and are the primary footsoldiers of the Orpheus Group, since they are primarily beings of the mundane world. This contrasts with Sleepers, who have been placed into cryogenic sleep in the Orpheus Group complex and have been plied with drugs to remove their soul from their bodies. The tradeoff between the two choices is that Skimmers are able to do things like date and go to fine restaurants, but can only project their souls for a limited time. Sleepers, meanwhile, can indulge in their voyeuristic side 24/7 in exchange for having their bodies locked in a freezer owned by a shadowy, untrustworthy, ethically ambiguous corporation.

The two Laments for dead characters are Spirits and Hues, which translates roughly to ‘ghost’ and ‘weaker ghost’. Spirits are free-floating ghosts that bear an uncanny resemblance to their progenitors, Wraiths. Spirits get an extra five Freebie points to spend during character creation, and in exchange, they have to deal with their Shadow (er … Spectre), which is essentially a doppelganger out do in the Spirit or their loved ones left behind. Where this departs from the Jungian brilliance of Wraith is that the Spectre is a separate entity under the control of the Storyteller.

While this may not sound like a boatload of fun, it’s a party compared with the Hue, whose main constraint is that they may only have a maximum Vitality of 7, which as I will explain later is basically like shotgunning this character choice in the knees. Hues are Spirits that have been around for a while and would be ready to pass on if there weren’t some compelling force keeping them in the world of the living. Their one up-side is that they can use the major flaws that the characters accumulate to their advantage … but at a cost that is way too high given their central disadvantage. Again, I’ll explain more in the next chapter.

Lastly, this chapter sums up the Horrors that the character’s Shade determines. So you’ll notice now that Orpheus characters have a Shade and a Lament, and that their suite of powers is referred to as Horrors. Like I said, sometimes new nomenclature is a good thing. Sometimes it’s like licking sandpaper. The book gives no hint as to why the vernacular for a character’s distinguishing ability is a Horror, and it simply comes across as odd.

There are ten Horrors listed in the book, all of them associated with one or another of the Shades that a character can assume. I’ll not run through all of them, but I will note that they range in power from being able to see the future and possessing the living to being ‘attractive’, and most (though not all) have a decent range of functionality.

Horrors don’t work in the same way that some White Wolf gamers may be used to. Horrors are binary – either you have them or you don’t, and there is no gradation of dots for Horrors. The effects of Horrors are determined by the amount of Horror-fuel (the character’s Vitality score) that the player chooses to invest in the effect and the number of successes (normally determined by rolling against the character’s permanent Vitality score).

The one thing that really struck me about the Horrors is that there are so few of them, particularly considering that that Horrors don’t have different dot-levels to buy into. Really, in the framework of a World of Darkness game, Orpheus has a puny number of available powers and effects. The one bone tossed at the careful reader is that the book mentions that some Horrors are ‘not yet known’, and so presumably will be revealed in later books.

Taken together (and assuming that anyone actually wanted to play a Hue), these combos give Orpheus characters 20 different base character combinations to work with, which is quite respectable.

Last, I’d like to mention one thing that has stuck in my craw about a note on the physics of the afterlife, given on Page 64. In what I can only describe as a cop-out to ease Storytelling, the authors have hand-waved some physics that involve ‘body memory’ and the like. The upshot is that ghosts and spirits in Orpheus cannot fly, because their bodies remember that they are supposed to fall. Mind you, you can’t necessarily fall to your death, but you do ‘sink’. This, of course, at the same time that characters can walk through walls or drop through floors or other items – things that the their physics-remembering bodies shouldn’t allow either. I realize that it’s a way to limit the mobility of the characters – but I think that it’s a bit goofy.

CHAPTER THREE: CHARACTER CREATION

It’s in this chapter that I’ll talk about the two fundamental problems with Orpheus that cause the game a great deal of trouble: Vitality, the Stat You’d Be Stupid to Leave Home Without, and Stains, or How to Take the Teeth Out of a Disadvantage.

But first, an overview. This is a chapter that anyone who has played a White Wolf game will know by heart. It details the character creation process and then proceeds to run through the various Attributes, Abilities, Backgrounds, an explanation of the uses of Willpower, and the game-centric stats, which in this case are the aforementioned Vitality and Stains, and the flip-side of Vitality, Spite. I’ll move directly to the latter, since the former is presented solidly and is down to a science with the writers for White Wolf.

Vitality, as the book plainly states in two different places, Vitality is "… (arguably) [sic] the most important Trait in Orpheus," (p.191) and "One of the most important mechanics in any Orpheus game … " (p. 188). This is a bit of an understatement. Vitality is both the power-fuel of the game and the character’s de-facto health in the spiritual realm. This dual nature means that Vitality is pretty much singular to a character’s effectiveness in the game.

Characters begin with either 4 or 5 Vitality from their choice of Shade, which is then modified by your choice of Nature and Demeanor. This will land your character with between 7 and 10 (the maximum) in Vitality, and even if you were being masochistic, you couldn’t do worse than 6. Even players who weren’t out to maximize this very important stat would be foolish not to, considering all of the things that it is used for.

Every level of damage that a ghost takes (and oh, by the way, ghosts are harmed, or at least disrupted by physical objects passing through them, which means you can effectively beat the hell out of a ghost with a baseball bat) removes one point of Vitality, along with transferring the damage to the physical body if the character is living. Once your temporary Vitality reaches zero, your projected soul is disrupted and you return to your physical body. I’d also assume that if your character were to take sufficient damage and go to Incapacitated health, you’d lose consciousness and return as well.

Of course, there are ways to keep your Vitality from reaching zero, which include spending temporary Willpower (to get Vitality at a 1:3 ratio), borrowing it from other characters, and calling on your character’s Spite points. In fact, you automatically start burning Willpower in order to stay Vitalized until that is gone as well. Use of Spite is voluntary.

This all creates an interesting conundrum, in that the character would likely need to use Vitality in order to get their bacon out of the fire … but by doing so, they lower the very stat that they are trying to protect in the first place. If a character is doing poorly in combat and losing Vitality, they will need to dip into their Willpower or their Spite in order to win the day – and in the process give in to the Dark Side, as it were.

This makes for an interesting system of mechanics, but a basic flaw in this is that any player worth their salt is going to maximize their Vitality out the yin-yang, making it a character design no-brainer. The more no-brainers you have in a game, the more alike the characters start to look and feel.

Aside from this admittedly aesthetic flaw, Hues are restricted to a maximum Vitality of 7. Remember that there is no physical body for a character to fall back on if they’re already ghosts, and this most certainly ranks the life expectancy of the various Laments:

Skimmer -> Sleepers -> Spirits -> Hues

If you want a character that’s going to live a while, you want a Skimmer, who can recover from their physical wounds (which are non-lethal damage when transferred), and in another 10 hours (maximum) return to the spirit world fully recharged. Sleepers are in the same boat as Spirits in that they can’t leave the spirit world at the flip of a switch, making loss of Vitality more dangerous. Sleepers can, however, transfer Spite to their physical bodies in order to maintain their Vitality in a pinch, then get unplugged and go ‘through intensive psychotherapy’ to remove the Spite. Spirits are more vulnerable to Vitality loss, but they at least can have a maximum of 10 points versus the trade-off of having a nemesis that may or may not come into play at the Storyteller’s discretion. Hues are not only limited to 7 Vitality, but the main tradeoff for this is that they can use their Stains at will – but at the price of 2 Vitality points per use – which on a good day is only three uses before they’ve put themselves in mortal peril.

This tilt in game balance makes playing a ghost character in Orpheus an unbalanced choice, and I see this as a flaw in the game.

Which brings us to Spite and Stains.

Spite is to Orpheus as Angst is to Wraith. It is the power of the Dark Side, which the character can tap in times of need, but said tapping puts you in jeopardy of having said Dark Side overwhelm your character.

Well, in theory, anyway.

Given what I’ve said above about Vitality, characters in Orpheus can carry around a hell of a lot of Spite to tap into, and resist the more terrible effects of having a high Spite rating (in the case of a starting Vitality of 10, they can do it almost indefinitely). Add to that there is no mechanic that I was able to find in the book for lowering your starting Vitality score … and you have a mechanic that allows the characters to pretty much do as they will with Spite without worry too much about the cumulative effect. And given that releasing tortured spirits into the ether (one of the fundamental missions of Orpheus) can permanently reduce Spite, you’ve got a downside that isn’t much of a downside.

Which brings us, finally, to the outward sign of Spite, Stains. Stains are mutations to a character’s incorporeal form that are caused by Spite. Every character starts with three (!) Stains, and gains another one for every point of Spite that they have above and beyond their Vitality + 2.

I don’t like Stains. First of all, I don’t like the name particularly, but that’s neither here nor there. Stains raise a bunch of bugaboos for me, both of which may not cause other people any particular angst.

First of all, I don’t like the fact that every single character has three Stains to start with, and that there is no mechanic in the game for removing those stains, even if you manage to drop your Spite to 1 or zero. When you consider that these Stains can be things like your incorporeal self looking like a jellyfish with a hawk’s beak and compound eyes when your character loses to Spite. If you’re feeling particularly adventurous in character creation, you can take another two Stains for 10 more Freebie points and have a hawk-beaked, withered jellyfish with claws and compound eyes.

Secondly, Stains offer benefits, and can be called up by the character. These are supposed to be the marks of the crappy parts of your soul – and yet you can whistle them up at will and use them to your advantage, possibly scott-free (if you roll 7 or better on a d10). What this boils down to is another set of powers that the character has at their disposal.

CHAPTER FOUR: WORKING THE SYSTEM

Again, this is standard White Wolf fare, explaining the die mechanics for things like resisted rolls, combat maneuvers and the like. One odd feature is an entire page of example die pools and circumstances where said pool could potentially be used. It’s not particularly a reference, because the die pools appear to be randomly arranged, and it just seems to take up a lot of space.

Other than that, the chapter is more White Wolf rote. Solid, but also information that any White Wolf gamer has seen before (and likely seen more than once). On a side note, I think that White Wolf would do well to take all of this generic system stuff out of all their books, consolidate it into one Storyteller System Manual, and leave the page count for better things.

CHAPTER FIVE: STORYTELLING THE DEAD

The Storyteller chapter is the last in the book, and the shortest. It begins, of course, with a denouement about the Metaplot and how said Metaplot needn’t have anything to do with your Chronicle. This, of course, is a wonderful piece of advice if you hadn’t already heard it in a million other places, and if it weren’t at least partially disingenuous, particularly in the case of Orpheus.

The chapter begins by laying out how characters enter Orpheus (or the employ of their competitors), goes through a list of possible missions, and ends with a table for randomly generating ghosts for the center of your adventures. There’s also a short section filled with ‘Future Sights", which are a collection of ‘visions’ that hint in some oblique way to the Upcoming Metaplot.

The rest of the chapter concerns NPCs for the Storyteller, starting with the various classifications of Spectres, the central adversaries for the characters in Orpheus. One funny aside in the Spectres section is the inclusion of the ‘Jason’ classification, named after the Friday 13^th character of the same name. Jasons are empty living bodies that are possessed and animated into killing machines by Spectres. I thought it was a nice pop-culture nod.

After the Spectres come employees of Terrell & Squib and NextWorld, the two corporate rivals of the Orpheus Group, and then various minor factions. In typical White Wolf style, the characters are a nice selection and well fleshed out.

APPENDIX: GHOST STORIES

The last section (and the thinnest) consist of 12 adventure ideas for your Chronicle. Each one is about a page long and run the gamut of the story-structures suggested by the previous chapter. While none of them stand out as being very interesting, they are all quite solid ideas for a new Storyteller to hang his hat on. By this point in the book, you either have your own ideas about Orpheus Chronicles. If you don’t, then there’s not much here that will inspire you to work any harder at it.

CHARACTER SHEET

Last (I’m not going to count the Index, because it really, really shouldn’t count), but not least is the character sheet. Anyone with two eyes and a pulse will be able to identify it as a Storyteller character sheet. The only issue that I have with it is that both Horrors and Stains are presented with dots next to them, despite the fact that neither category is purchased in such a fashion. It smacks of laziness on the part of the graphic designer not to make this simple change to the sheet in order to accommodate the way the game actually works.

(Ok, I lied – a few words on the index. An index serves one purpose – finding mention of particular subjects, by keyword, in a text. The Orpheus index was apparently a way to kill two pages to finish out the 16-page signature that couldn’t be filled somewhere else. The example I’ll give is that ‘Personality Archetypes’ (p. 147) lists, in order, all of the Natures and Demeanors in the game. Since these are alphabetical, the list in the index simply ratchets from page to page … 152, 152, 152, 153 … and so on for 11 column-inches. Meanwhile, Radio Free Death, one of the most interesting parts of the entire setting and hidden in 6 column inches in Section Three, gets no mention whatsoever. It took me reading the entire book cover-to-cover to find the damn thing. White Wolf has put out how many books? I thought so. Shame, shame.)

CONCLUSION: WHAT ORPHEUS IS, ISN’T AND COULD BE

Some might think that comparing Orpheus to its spiritual (no pun intended) predecessor Wraith is unfair. Those people would be both right and wrong.

They’d be right in that Orpheus goes out of its way to explain that in this game, humans come first. This isn’t supposed to be a game about playing a ghost. This is about playing someone who communes with ghosts and works to defend humanity and to free the souls of the dead from their torment. The problem with that execution, of course, is that in the process of making a game about humans, White Wolf trod the same ground as the other humans-in-a-world-of-darkness game, Hunter. Instead of making a game where humans are human, they made a game where the humans become ghosts, quite literally. Not only ghosts, but ghosts with a host of abilities to cope with that environment. The afterlife in Orpheus has been turned into the next frontier, and that frontier is about as alien as the Wild West. Dangerous, sure. Full of possibility, definitely. But mysterious? Unfathomable? Not at all. And that is what a game about humans wandering into the depths of the state of death should be. Mysterious. Unfathomable. Instead, we get a clinical dissection of the ‘classes’ of ghosts and a whole host of nomenclature and attitude that says ‘This is Not Mysterious.’

Which is, of course what brings me to the reason why Wraith is (was) a far better game in the same genre (ghost stories). In Wraith, your entire character revolved around what they used to be, what they cared about as a person. Fetters, Passions and Pathos all worked together to create a character that was tied to their backgrounds and their character concept. The Shadow rules drew you even deeper into this morass.

Orpheus does exactly the opposite – abstracting everything about the character into one, flawed, mechanic (Vitality), which doesn’t have anything to do with who or what they are. The entire concept of the Shadow, which admittedly was the role-playing equivalent of ascending Mt. Everest, is dissolved down to Spite, another (less flawed) mechanic. While Orpheus is most obviously a close cousin to Wraith, it’s the poorer cousin in comparison.

The back cover blurb asks a lot of very good questions. "What if death wasn’t the end? What if you could die and return to your body, to live again? What if you could remain among the living long after your body crumbled to dust? What if science had rendered death a mere inconvenience?" Unfortunately, none of them are answered satisfactorily by Orpheus. The societal ramifications of a confirmed afterlife (and what goes on there) is completely untouched, at least in this first volume. While it may be explored by later volumes (I can only prognosticate from the snippets in this rulebook that something does) – the fact is that you’re dealing with the same suspension-of-disbelief in the setting that any Storyteller game requires. Life would quite simply not be the same-only-not if the Orpheus Group actually existed.

What to do to fix Orpheus? Well, for starters make Vitality a dual-tracked stat like Spite, with permanent and temporary Vitality. All Vitality transfers and damage come out of temporary Vitality, and the various ways to boost temporary Vitality stay in place. All rolls take place against permanent Vitality, of course. When the character’s ghost is destroyed, their permanent Vitality is notched down. Increasing permanent Vitality is a function of experience.

Secondly, starting Vitality should be capped for beginning characters, making Spite a much more dangerous proposition.

Thirdly, forget the Horrors and pick up a used copy of Wraith. Use the Arcanoi therein as the character’s abilities. The beginning Arcanoi are feeble … the way a beginning character should begin.

Finally, scrap the voluntary use of Stains as benefits, or even the use of Stains at all as written, substituting instead a system where Spite takes over the form of the character based on their actual … you know … character, and put the form under the control of the Storyteller. That way, tapping Spite (which is supposed to be a wild, violent force) becomes a risky proposition, instead of a known quantity.

Orpheus may evolve into a game worth its salt – but I’m writing a review of the core rulebook here, not buying into some long-term idea. As presented, the core of Orpheus is flawed and bland compared to another White Wolf game, Wraith, and to most modern-horror games in general. While there are ideas to be mined here, they’re not worth the full price of admission.