Roll to Save
Three middle-aged nerds dive deep into the golden age of tabletop RPGs, covering the classics from the 80s and 90s that shaped the hobby we love today. Iain and Jason banter their way through gaming history while Steve desperately tries to keep them on topic—and occasionally succeeds.
Whether you're a grognard who lived through THAC0 or a newcomer curious about what to do with all those lovely polyhederal dice you've aquired, we've got you covered with historical deep-dives, roundtable discussions fueled by questionable nostalgia, and actual play episodes where our players' competence is... variable.
All of this released on a schedule that can charitably be called "flexible" at best.
Grab some dice and join us for a trip down memory lane—just don't ask us to commit to when the next episode will drop.
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Wraith: The Oblvion - What if That Voice in Your Head Answered Back?
What happens when an RPG asks you to play the dead, feed on emotion, and also hand over your own inner critic to another player? We go deep on Wraith: The Oblivion, the most haunting corner of the World of Darkness, unpacking why its ideas still feel daring: fetters that tether you to the living, pathos that turns feelings into fuel, and Shadows that weaponise doubt. From first edition’s glow-in-the-dark cover to the 20th Anniversary’s colossal compendium, we map the rise, fall, and quiet return of a cult classic.
If you'd like to purchase Wraith, it's currently available at 40% off (at time of release) on DriveThru RPG
Contact us at:
EMAIL: roll.to.save.pod@gmail.com
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HOSTS: Iain Wilson, Steve McGarrity, Jason Downey
BACKGROUND MUSIC: David Renada (Find him at: davidrendamusic@gmail.com or on his web page).
TITLE, BREAK & CLOSEOUT MUSIC: Xylo-Ziko (Find them on their web page).
Welcome to Roll to Save, the RPG History Podcast. Wraith the Oblivion. Hello and welcome to another episode of Roll to Save, the RPG History Podcast. Today we're going to be talking about one of my favourite games. It's a game that was very much misunderstood during its heyday. It was often seen as overcomplicated and difficult. No, I'm not talking about Middle Earth roleplaying, I am talking about Wraith the Oblivion. Wraith was the fourth game in White Wolf's World of Darkness line, following the standard Monster the Noun format. It came on the heels of Vampire the Masquerade, Werewolf the Apocalypse, and Mage the Ascension. And it promised a much darker game than the previous ones. It included some groundbreaking mechanics that had never been seen before in games, and some things that I don't think have ever been seen since. And it generally took gaming in a completely different direction. It prompted a much more introspective and melancholy style of play, but it wasn't for everyone, and this was reflected in the sad end that it saw to its line. So grab yourself a beverage of your choice, sit back, relax, and follow us as we take you through a history of one of the darker games in the already dark world of darkness. It pretty much dominated my gaming life for well over a decade, with Vampire sucking up, punfully intended, an inordinate amount of that time. Therefore, it's logical to most people, when they ask me how I got into the World of Darkness, to assume it was through Vampire the Masquerade. And I mean why wouldn't they? Vampire was the big one, the flagship title, the game that put White Wolf on the map. It was a game that fundamentally challenged people to consider what the role-playing hobby was about. However, at the risk of being a contrary mary, it wasn't Vampire that dragged me into the world of darkness. No, my first World of Darkness game was something first ranger, far more melancholy, and honestly far more interesting. That game was Wraith the Oblivion. Fun fact, it was also the first tabletop RPG that myself and my co-host Steve played together. We were at university and Wraith wasn't exactly an easy game to pitch or to explain to others in the RPG club. Usually the mention of you get to play a ghost led to lots of sniggering and speculating about all the hilarious and comic antics characters could get up to if they were ghosts. Seemed like a lot of people were way more interested in taking advantage of being invisible or capering around like a demented cross between Casper and Slimer from Ghostbusters than they were of playing an introspective brooding game that explored the meanings of mortality and loss. So Steve and I more or less played Wraith as a one-on-one with another player occasionally joining. And it was awesome, even if Steve did have to put up with me being his shadow. What's a shadow? Well, more on that later. However, before I get into the meat of this, let's talk about an odd little wrinkle in Wraith's publication history. The first thing released for the game wasn't actually the game. No, White Wolf kicked things off in June 1994 with something called The Face of Death, which was this oversized art book. I suppose he wanted to set the mood right from the start and in effect show people the aesthetic before hitting them with the mechanics and rules. Honestly, that's very Wraith. This game has always been about atmosphere and theme first, mechanics second. So, what is Wraith the Oblivion? Well, put simply, it's a game about being dead. Not undead, mind you, while vampires get to cling to a sort of twisted parody of life, in Wraith you're properly, definitely, thoroughly dead. Dead dead, you're a ghost, stuck in the afterlife, and you're dealing with all the baggage that comes with that. This setting is utterly unique amongst RPGs, at least in my experience. You exist primarily in something called the Shadowlands, which is this dark, twisted reflection of the living world. You can see everything that you left behind, watched your loved ones go through the lives without you, but you can't interact with them. Not easily anyway, you need special ghostly powers called Arcanae to do that. And even then it's difficult and draining. Think of Patrick Swayze in the movie Ghost. These powers are fuelled by something called pathos, an energy that wraiths straw from their emotions. You regain it by indulging those feelings, by connecting with the things that get you tethered to existence, or by hanging around others who are experiencing these strong emotions that are important to you. Again, think of the Sways and Ghost. It's a brilliant bit of design because it mechanically reinforces the theme. You literally need your emotional connections to function and survive. You're also bound to the world of the living through something called fetters. These are physical objects, places or people that tie you to the world. Maybe it's your childhood home, maybe it's your wedding ring, maybe it's a person you left behind, or maybe it was that girl you were just too shy to ask out on a date. These aren't just background noise, they're mechanical elements that are vital to your survival and, more importantly, they drive your story forward. Another interesting facet of Wraith's ruleset that really helped create that ghostly vibe was how a character's health was measured. Instead of health levels, like other White Wolf games, Wraiths have something called corpus, which represents your ability to maintain physical integrity in the afterlife. When your corpus is damaged, you're not bleeding or suffering from broken bones, but rather you're leaking plasm and losing cohesion as your spiritual form is literally coming apart. And here's something interesting, you can spend corpus to make yourself insubstantial, to slip through solid objects. It's a trade-off, weakening yourself to gain that classic ghostly ability to walk through walls. In addition, in other White Wolf games, as a character suffers health levels of damage, they incur penalties to their actions. Not so for Wraiths. You might be a bit more insubstantial, but it doesn't matter if you've 10 corpus levels or one corpus level, you're just as effective. Wraiths also seem to be studier than their counterparts in other games. They have 10 corpus levels instead of the usual 7 health levels, and they can regenerate a level of lost corpus every turn by spending pathos. So far, so ghostly. You've got a character who's bound to the land of the living by things that were important to them in life, who subsists on the powerful emotions that drive them, and whose phantom form is durable yet substantial. It's clear that you're playing something different. However, Wraith did something that made it really special, something that even people who have never played Wraith know about and talk about, and that really is what sets it apart from every other RPG I've encountered. This is something called the Shadow. You see, every Wraith has two sides. The Psyche, which is you, your personality, your goals, your drives. Every action you take, every passion you explore, that's your psyche. Then there's the shadow. The shadow is your dark side, the part of you that hates yourself, that is overly critical, and which ultimately undermines your every action. In the living world, we might suffer from imposter syndrome before we do something important. We've all felt it, that little voice in your head telling you that you're no good, that you're going to fail, and that nobody's going to appreciate your efforts, it's just part of being human. Now, imagine that voice was sentient, had goals of its own, and could hold two-way conversations. Imagine it could sometimes take control of your body. That's a shadow. It seems that in the metaphysics of the world of darkness, when you die, something about not being tethered to messy biology frees that little voice and gives it free reign inside your mind. Now here's the really clever bit. In the game, another player controls your shadow. They play the voice in your head that is constantly trying to undermine you, sabotage you, drag you down, and you, in turn, play someone else's shadow. So every player is juggling two characters at once, their own Wraith trying to accomplish their goals, and another player's shadow, trying to destroy them from within. The shadow is powered by something called angst. Yes, really angst. White Wolf were really leading into their image of making games for tortured goths, weren't they? But it works thematically. Angst is generated when Wraith fails, when they suffer, when things go wrong, when people important to them are hurt. And the shadow spends that angst to make things even worse. They have powers of their own called thorns that they can use to affect the outside world. And what's more, when the angst total gets high enough, they can momentarily take over a Wraith's corpus, relegating the Psyche to the role of backseat passenger. If it gets too high, well, the character succumbs to the dark side and becomes a terrifying NPC. Let me tell you, it's bloody brilliant when it works. It can also be absolutely terrifying if your group doesn't have a solid foundation of trust because you're essentially giving another player permission to attack your character psychologically, to push buttons and to whisper terrible things to you. If someone's being a dick about it, the whole game falls apart. But when you've got a good group, when everyone understands that they're trying to create compelling drama rather than just win, it's one of the most powerful gaming experiences you'll ever have. Now I mentioned earlier that wraiths are pretty hardy, but there are lots of things in the underworld that can harm them. And when a wraith takes enough damage that their corpus is depleted, they don't die, obviously, they're already dead, but instead they undergo something called a harrowing. Harrowings can also be triggered by losing a passion or a fetter as you feel a little bit of what binds you to existence fade away. Now in the game's cosmology, a harrowing was supposed to be this cathartic moment for the soul to come to terms with a loss, a way of processing trauma and moving forward, but what it became in practice was a psychodrama run by the character's shadow, a nightmarish journey through the wraith's fears and regrets where the shadow tries to break them completely. Fail to find a way out of a harrowing, and your soul risks being consumed by oblivion, a primal destructive force of nothingness that sits at the heart of the underworld and slowly drags everything towards it like a bleak, nihilistic black hole. How do harrowings work? Well, the storyteller will get the other players to take on the roles in the harrowing, playing out aspects of the Wraith's mind, embodying their fears and acting out twisted versions of their memories as the psyche struggled to try and solve the harrowing and find a way out of this nightmare. It was powerful stuff when it worked, but oh god, it was a lot of work. The storyteller basically had to prepare harrowings in advance because coming up with a morality play with parts for all the players on the fly was not an easy thing to do. You needed to know the character intimately, understand the psychological landscape, and craft something that was both dramatically satisfying and thematically appropriate. No small ask. Deeper into the underworld is the Tempest, this churning sea of chaos and darkness, and within the Tempest are islands of stability, the largest being Stagia, the Dark Kingdom of Iron, this massive city-state founded by the legendary Charon. Yes, that Charon, the ferryman guy that the ancient Greeks believed ferried the dead to their final destination. In Wraith's cosmology, he's real, and he built an empire of the dead. Specifically an empire of the western dead, and yeah, we'll get to that shortly. Here's the thing though, the first edition could have done with way more detail about Stageir. We're given a lot of background and history, and a big deal is made of how important it is, but it's hardly described as a setting. You get the broad strokes, sure, but if you're expecting the kind of detail that Vampire gave you about the Camarilla in its main rulebook, you're in for a disappointment. For example, how do you get to Stagea? Don't know. It's in the Tempest, but no mention is made of how to travel there other than in the loosest possible terms. What would characters encounter en route? How long does it take? What happens when they get there? What does it even look like? Don't know, it's not described. The hierarchy as a whole isn't much better. The hierarchy is the organization that governs Stage and Ton governs the West Undead. The legions, which are groupings of wraiths divided based on how they died, are a very cool concept and are presumably the closest thing wraiths have to a social structure, but they get a similar short shrift. We're talking about maybe a sentence each. There's definitely not enough meat there to really build a character identity around. And the opposition factions, because this is a White Wolf game, and of course there are opposition factions, the heretics and the renegades, they get such a hand wavy treatment that it's really left to the storyteller to decide what they actually mean. It's obvious White Wolf figured they needed a structure similar to Camarola Anarch Sabat from Vampire, so they came up with Hierarchy Renegade Heretic, but they didn't put in the same legwork to make them feel real and lived in. Renegades are basically anyone who opposes a hierarchy, whilst heretics are super religious cults that oppose a hierarchy. A storyteller wanting to use them will have a lot of work to flesh out a renegade gang or heretic cult for their chronicle, and whilst this can be fun, it does necessitate early legwork for something new players might never interact with. All of this adds up to Wraith games feeling much more homebrew than the likes of Vampire or Werewolf, which have clearly defined settings in the core books. Whereas it was very easy to pick up one of Wraith's sister games and dive into a fully realized world, this game's core book gave a skeleton, pun again very much intended, for the storyteller to hang their chronicle on, which is fine if you're willing to put in the work, but it did limit the game's appeal. One potential drawback for anyone who's experienced of White Wolf's games will know is that they are very fond of their meta plot, so this airy fairy make the underworld what you want approach meant that you were putting your chronicle at risk of falling out of sync with what White Wolf might release further down the line. Spoiler, but as we'll see, this would have very real repercussions. Oh, and I've also mentioned this before, but the default setting of the underworld also comes across as very western focused, which is fine if you're playing in Europe or North America, but otherwise it was a problem that wouldn't be addressed until later supplements. Speaking of problematic, although I mentioned that we have very little detail in Stagia, what detail we do have is fairly harrowing, and there's another pun for you, you're welcome. The Empire is run by the hierarchy, and while they give Warhammer 40k's Imperium a good run for their money in the grimdark stakes, Stagia practices slavery extensively and often. Why? Well, here's some truly chilling world building for you. Slavery wasn't considered taboo in Western culture until relatively recently, and the generations of dead from eras where slavery was acceptable vastly outnumber the modern dead. Weirdly, it's unsettling logic like this that makes the setting feel genuinely thought through rather than just trying to be dark and edgy for the sake of it, which, as fans of White Wolf will know, they were certainly guilty of from time to time. Now, if that wasn't enough in terms of horror, and this is a horror game, remember, some of these enslaved wraiths can be subjected to something called soul forging. That's when you're literally dragged to an anvil and your plasma is hammered and beaten into the shape of an object. Every coin used for currency and stagia? That used to be someone's soul, someone who was once a person now minted into cash. Imagine spending the entirety of the rest of your existence in pain as a coin in someone else's pocket. Imagine paying for something and your currency seems to shift slightly in the palm of your hand and moan. It's horrifying when you start to think about it. Now, the hierarchy claim that they only use soul forging on threats to orderly society or weak-willed wraiths that are easy prey for the shadows and oblivion, but really, this reinforces the fact that things are much worse when you're dead. It's not all despair and eternal servitude though. Wraith offers players a way out of the unrelenting misery that is the afterlife. Transcendence. It's similar to Golconda in Vampire or Ascension in Maids, those mystic states White Wolf were very fond of that represent some kind of apotheosis for your character. But unlike those, transcendence has actual mechanics behind it. If you can resolve your passions and fetters, in effect, if you come to terms with your death and let go of what's holding you back, you can achieve transcendence and move on to, well, whatever lies beyond. Your character leaves again, presumably in a bright shaft of light. It's a brilliantly bittersweet concept that reinforces the game's themes about loss, pain, letting go, healing, and moving forward. And no, nobody in any of my games I've run of Wraith has ever achieved transcendence. I can hear my co-host Jason chuckling from here. Anyway, let's move on to one of Wraith's big differences. This time it's not thematic, but instead it's part of the game's design. In short, Wraith didn't have splats in the traditional sense, and this was very different not just from other White Wolf games, but from most RPGs. For those of you who haven't heard the term before, a splat is in effect a character class. In Vampire, your character is part of a clan. In Werewolf, they're in a tribe. In Mage, you're a member of a tradition. Not only do these splats define mechanical aspects of your character, they also play a vital role in determining your character's sense of self, where they stand in society, and who their friends and enemies are. They're also not a new thing. Splats have been part of RPGs since DD first said, What class do you want to be? It's a lot easier to play a fighter, a cleric, or a thief than some nebulous adventurer. You have a framework, an identity, a role, a job in the party. The Star Wars RPG gave you character templates that basically allowed you to play a serial numbers filed off version of one of the characters from the movies. You were a smuggler, yeah you're playing hand solo. A young Jedi, hello Luke Skywalker. These templates let characters jump into the world and start playing straight away, and they gave you a framework for how to interact with it. Wraith had none of this, which created both opportunities and challenges. On one hand, it allowed players to devote much more effort to who their character was as a person, digging deep into their specific history and relationships and emotional baggage. Whenever I run vampire, I always make a point of having the players create their human characters first, precisely for this reason. I don't want them creating a character who is a stereotypical member of a clan and nothing more than a walking set of powers with no personality beyond how hard they hit. I want them to think about the person. However, splats are also incredibly important, not least because they give characters a place in the world, a social framework, and an immediate gateway to interacting with those around them. It helps build camaraderie and reasons for characters to work together, or, in some cases, oppose each other. Wraith did none of this. The hierarchy, the renegades and the heretics, they were more like factions and sparts, and the legions were so vaguely described as to be functionally useless. There was another group mentioned in the book, the guilds, who were masters of various Wraithly Arcanae, but they were basically described as having been disbanded by the hierarchy in ages past, so they were a non-starter too. It made Wraith a game that was almost impossible to just pick up and play. You needed session 0, actually, you needed session 0, 1, 2, and 3 before you even rolled any dice. The storyteller and players had to work together to create not just individual characters, but the web of relationships and shared goals that would make them a functioning group. And that's a big ask, especially compared to other World of Darkness games, where you could just show up, pick a clan, tribe or tradition, and immediately understand your place in the world. Okay, that's enough about the background, let's talk about the actual publication history of Wraith because it's quite the journey. As I mentioned, the face of death hit in June 1994, then in August 1994, the core rulebook followed alongside two other products. The first of these was the storyteller's kit, and that included a three-panel screen with all the essential charts and tables, along with some additional material for running games, mainly around crossovers. Nothing groundbreaking but useful enough if you wanted to hide your dice rolls from your players during harrowings. The second of these products was the character kit, and I actually really enjoyed this one. It included a little player screen which described character creation as well as summarising combat and other key roles. However, what I really liked was the fact that a death certificate came as part of the character sheet. There was something quite affecting about filling out your character's death certificate, writing down when and how they died, what they left behind, it made death feel real and final in a way that most games never manage, and it reinforced the fact that you were playing a person who'd been taken from this life far too early. The artwork from that first edition book was absolutely fantastic, all black and white, very moody, full colour honestly would have ruined Wraith. The stark, almost dreamlike, or should that be nightmarish-ish imagery perfectly captured the bleak, melancholy atmosphere of the setting. Best of all, the first edition book had an actual glow in the dark cover. When the lights were off, the Wraith symbol would glow. Gimmicky, sure, but fun, yeah, it made the book feel special, like you were holding something otherworldly. October 1994 saw the release of Necropolis Atlanta. This was meant to be Wraith's equivalent to something like Vampire's Chicago by Night or Werewolf's Rage Across New York, a detailed setting book for a specific city, and it did a good job of showing what a necropolis could look like, with details on the local factions, important locations in the Shadowlands, and various fetters and haunts throughout the city. It gave you a solid example of how to build your own necropolis, which was valuable given how little detail the core book provided. We finally got a look at what Wraithly Society could actually look like, what the various titles were that the hierarchy used, as well as ideas for Renegade gangs and heretic cults. However, it suffered from something that White Wolf was so fond of in their early years, something I call crossover madness. You see, Necropolis Atlanta also served as a source book for vampire, as a whole section called Atlanta by Night, detailing local vampires and their schemes. And look, I get it, White Wolf wanted to show how their world of darkness games could interact. It was also probably a cheeky way of getting vampire players to check out a Wraith product and then presumably to move on to investing in the game as a whole. But was all that page count really needed in a Wraith supplement? Kutner's pages have been better spent and more Wraith-specific content. November 1994 brought us two releases. First was Haunts, a supplement about haunted locations in the Shadowlands. This was actually quite useful, it explored different types of haunts, from simple residences to castles. It was great inspiration for storytellers who wanted to build out their own necropolis further, and it was a useful peek into what the underworld could actually look like. Also in November was Midnight Express, which was a collection of five adventures from Wraith. These scenarios covered a whole range of tones and themes, and as to be expected, the quality was variable as anthology adventures tend to be, but there were some solid ideas in there. Incidentally, the titular Midnight Express was a spectral train that passed through various necropoli en route to Stagia. December 1994 gave us two more releases. Death and Damnation was a fiction anthology of ghost stories. Now, I know fiction anthologies are a bit hit and miss, and yes, Death and Damnation was certainly no exception. Some stories were brilliant, really capturing the melancholy, bleak horror of the Wraith setting. Others were less successful, but here's the thing, even the weaker stories gave you ideas for how a Wraith Chronicle could look. They showed different types of Wraiths, different passions and fetters, different ways that death in the afterlife could be portrayed. For a storyteller struggling to get their head around running Wraith, that was valuable. The book did a great job of saying, look, there's multiple ways to play this game. It doesn't have to be that bleak nihilism that Ian seems to be so in love with. Also in December was Love Beyond Death, and this was probably my favourite supplement for Wraith. Not because it was particularly well written or busting with cool metaplot revelations, but because it was one of the first supplements I'd ever seen dealing with love as a main story element within RPGs. Now, some people in the RPG press maligned this as sappy, much as White Wolf were changing the gaming landscape, it was very clear that there were still people out there who still believed that unless you were playing a roidied-up barbarian who was kicking ass and taking names, you were somehow doing the hobby wrong. Regardless of them, I think that this was a really important supplement for Wraith. In every game I've ever run, there's always been at least one character who's taking love in some form as one of their passions, and this is where the book shines. It explores building stories that deal with love, but tells us that we don't need to think of it as a traditional love story. Sure, it talks about romantic love, but there's also familiar love, platonic love, even obsessive destructive love. It gave guidance in writing stories that had a powerful emotional tone, but also on how love could be twisted by the shadow, because who doesn't like a tale of doomed, tragic love? It also included four scenarios built around these themes. The Price of Love dealt with the ghost of a young woman whose plan she believes will let her be with the man she loves obsessively. Objective Affection was about two female wraiths struggling over the forged remains of a man they both had once loved, forever years centred around a psychiatrist who has built a machine in the hope that it will let him contact his loved one that is part. On and a final farewell featured a heretic hunting for the woman he loves, and who unknowingly allows his feelings to let him be manipulated into doing another's dirty work. These scenarios matched Wraith's themes perfectly. They were moody, introspective, focused on emotional conflicts, and they didn't feature much physical combat. 1994 was White Wolf's year of the Hunter across their game lines, and Wraith wasn't left out. But before we got to the Hunter supplement, March brought us the Sea of Shadows, the Tempest Source Book. This had a lot of interesting material about the churning sea of chaos between the Shadowlands and the Dark Kingdoms. You got details on the strange phenomena that occurred in the Tempest, the creatures that dwelled there, how to navigate it, and what treasures and dangers could be found in its depths. The sample adventure was interesting, but it suffered from what a lot of early White Wolf adventures suffered from. The main rule book had spent pages and pages and a ton of ink explaining that Wraith was a game of moody introspection, about personal tragedy and unresolved emotional conflicts, but this adventure was a high adrenaline action romp that saw the characters chased all across the Tempest after MacGuffin in probably the most railroady way imaginable. There was some nice advice about running this adventure in parallel with a story set in the Lands of the Living, showcasing how events in the Lands of the Dead can impact the skin lands and vice versa, but overall it felt like the authors wanted to cram in as much of the source book as possible, showcasing all the weird phenomena, settings, and creatures, but in doing so they created something that didn't really fit the game's themes. May saw the release of the Wraiths Players Guide. This was a hefty supplement that expanded in character creation options, provided newer can eye, merits and flaws, details in Wraithly Society, some rules updates, and a bunch of essays designed to assist storytellers and players. The latter I really enjoy. These types of articles really help get the creative juices flowing. In addition, this book finally gives us information on the other Dark Kingdoms, which are other cultures equivalents of Stagia. This was great world building and finally allowed for storytellers to get a complete view of the underworld that allowed for something approaching diversity. It also explored the conflicts amongst the Wraiths. Despite being supernatural creatures, Wraiths were obstensibly still human, so all the prejudices and nastiness that normal humans possessed carried over into the afterlife. All in all, the player's guide was genuinely useful, giving players more options for customising their characters as well as more guidance on how to roleplay them effectively. It also gave Storytellers some great tools to make the settings richer. June brought us the Quick in the Dead, and that was Wraith's contribution to the Year of the Hunter. I was always a bit disappointed by White Wolves' Year of the Gimmick, as it usually meant that each line got a single book relating to that theme. It was more like Month of the Hunter. Anyway, regardless of nomenclature gripes, this book was an interesting change from vampires hunters, who were usually just fanatical hyper-religious inquisitors with crosses and torches. The Quick in the Dead presented various types of hunter groups, who varied from the scientific, to the pseudoscientific, to the academic, to the occult. You had some groups that wanted to gain power and influence over wraiths, some who wanted to understand them, and some who just explored the afterlife for kicks. It gave much more nuance to the relationship between the living and the dead, showing that not everyone who could perceive Wraiths wanted to destroy them. It also made regular humans viable antagonists for a Wraith Chronicle. July brought the Hierarchy, a source book detailing the government of Stagia. It had another chapter of the history of the hierarchy, which honestly felt superfluous given that the history of Stagia was explained in the core book, but this is White Wolf, and they always like to have a the history of chapter in each of their books. More interestingly, it had a chapter on the culture of the hierarchy, allowing storytellers to not only get an idea of what day-to-day existence was like for your average hierarchy Wraith, but also to finally get a description of Stagia itself. It was much needed detail that the core book solely lacked. August 1995 gave us Dark Kingdom of Jade, which explored the Eastern Underworld, showing that the cosmology was completely different there. Instead of Stagia and the hierarchy, you had the Jade Emperor ruling from the Yellow Springs. It was a completely different take on the Wraith concept, and it showed that White Wolf were trying to make the game's setting more diverse. The book detailed the Dark Kingdom's history, its structure, how Wraiths in the East operated differently from those in the West. It included new character options, new powers, and information on how death is understood and approached in different cultures. October 1995 saw the release of Dark Reflection Spectres, and this was one of the most truly dark publications White Wolf ever produced. It was marketed as a Black Dog publication for a very good reason. Black Dog was White Wolf's mature reader's imprint for books that went beyond the usual darkness found in the World of Darkness games and taking them into genuinely disturbing territory. In Wraith Parlance, Spectres are Wraiths that have fallen to the shadow and that are therefore consumed by their most destructive, darkest urgies. That opening piece of fiction in this book set the tone immediately. This wasn't a book about cartoon villains, this was about genuine evil, about souls so twisted and broken that they'd become true monsters. The main text it follows does a great job of explaining Spectres as more than just mindless cannon fodder that the storyteller could chuck in when they wanted some combat to break up all the melancholy and angst. It showed them as tragic figures, wraiths who'd fallen into oblivion and been corrupted by it, and who were now trying to drag others down with them because that was all that they knew. It detailed the society, their goals, and their relationship with Oblivion. There were also rules for Spectre PCs, but I'm honestly not sure that that's the sort of game that would be kind of fun to run or play in. Also in October, White Wolf decided to try and address the lack of splat issues that I talked about previously. When I mentioned all the reasons to include Splats, providing a societal niche, defining character identity in broader groups, helping with world building, I forgot one very important one. Splats let White Wolf sell more books. I can see the vast swathe of vampire clan books in my bookshelf looking at me smugly as I say this. Because of this, October brought us Guild Book Mascals, which was about the Guild of Wraiths who could manipulate their appearance. I'll be honest, I wasn't a massive fan of the guild books, they felt bolted on. If I were to do splats for Wraiths, I'd have done Legions instead, especially as guilds were given such little space in the main rule book and were also meant to be defunct. However, clearly White Wolf disagreed with me because in December the Artificers got their book, and in February 1996, the Sand Men got theirs too. In April 1996, we got Dark Kingdom of Jade Adventures, a collection of scenarios set in the Eastern Underworld. The quality was okay, and there's one absolutely bonkers adventure that sees the characters going into a Malfian's lair to find the ghost of a nuclear bomb that fell in Hiroshima. Yeah, really, the ghost of an atomic bomb, it's as wild as it sounds, but it also attempts to explore the trauma of nuclear war and the scars it left on the Eastern world. In June, White Wolf gave us something fun. You know how everyone wanted to play the Crow after that film came out? Well, the release of The Risen let you do exactly that. These were Wraiths who managed to possess their own corpses and return to the land of the living. But here's the catch, to become Risen, a Wraith had to make a pact with a shadow. That meant the shadow became more powerful more quickly, and when the shadow took control, the thought of the damage it could do with a nion indestructible body in the land of the living was terrifying. Risen were a candle that burned twice as bright and burned out just as quickly. However, fun as this book was, it was much more suitable as a resource for making interesting and unique antagonists for other game lines, primarily because Risen were lone, obsessive figures. Because of this, they didn't fit easily into an existing chronicle. Do you just put things on pause for the other players whilst the risen player jaunts around the skin lands in their body? The book makes it very clear that the risen are super rare, so a party of risen are almost a no-no. Especially given that the risen are a literal walking breach of the dictum mortem. That's Wraith's equivalent to Vampire's Masquerade or Werewolf's Veil. Yes, this is a White Wolf game, so there has to be the standard, and the main faction rigorously enforces a Mortal Shall Remain unaware of us, Supernatural's Law. Actually, as I talk about this, I've just had a brilliant idea: a Risen Chronicle for two players, one playing the Psyche, one being the Shadow. That could be a lot of fun. Anyway, moving on, and August heralded the arrival of Wraith's 2nd edition. This was a significant upgrade, the rules were streamlined and clarified, and a lot of the clunky mechanics from 1st edition were smoothed out. The book also reorganised the material more logically. The first edition sometimes could feel a little bit scattershot, jumping as it did from topic to topic. Second edition had a clearer structure, making it easier to find what you need. One thing though, 2nd edition did lack the funky glow in the dark cover. Boo. All in all though, it was a solid book, and in White Wolf Tradition, it was released as a hardback compared to the soft cover of 1st edition. September saw Buried Secrets. This came packaged with a storyteller's screen and was a companion to 2nd edition. It covered a wide range of topics including new artifacts and relics, information on angelics and demonics, details on human antagonist groups, a section on the far shows, and the setting of Little Five Points Atlanta. It also included Errata for 2nd edition, mainly around how to regain Pathos. Yeah, for some reason that was missed in the early printings of 2nd Edition. 1997 brought several significant releases. The Shadows Player's Guide gave lots of dirty tricks and tactics for Shadows, making them true Dark Sides, rather than moustache twirling evil twins. It included information on the Dark Kingdoms, about 60 pages covering the Yellow Springs, the Flayed Lands, the Bush of Ghosts, the Millerlands, Swar, the Kingdom of Clay, and the Sea That Knows No Sun. It also had information on how Spectres and Risen interacted with shadows, and information on the Eidolon, that lighter side of the Wraith's personality. The section on the Australian Shadowlands though is particularly interesting and it's somewhat problematic by today's standards. The authors suggest that Australian Wraiths of Western descent carry such profound guilt over colonial atrocities that there's a physical manifestation of this collective shame somewhere in the Australian Shadowlands, and that the shadows visit this. Now, this was fairly typical of White Wolf's approach in the mid-90s, they were very keen to address historical wrongs, which was admirable, but they often did so in ways that raised some rather awkward questions. In this case, why single out Australian colonists? North American wraiths didn't seem to have a similar button despite comparable histories. Spanish and Portuguese wraiths in South America aren't mentioned as having this affliction either, and if we're holding people accountable for ancestral sins, why only apply this to Western colonisation? History is sadly replete with atrocities committed by people of all backgrounds from across the globe. The inconsistency suggests White Wolf were more interested in making a statement than thinking through the implications of the world building. That said, it's an interesting mechanical concept, tying a character's shadow to collective historical trauma, even if the execution was rather selective in its application. However, one of the fundamentally brilliant parts of the shadow as a concept was that it was personal. A shadow was interesting because it was a uniquely dark mirror of one person's personality. The instant we start trying to tie shadows to cultural groups, we lose what makes them individual and unique. Concurrent with this release came Medium Speakers with the Dead, and this focused on mortals who could perceive and communicate with Wraiths, building on concepts first exploded in The Quick and the Dead. It provided rules for building classic boardwalk mediums, as well as people like false mediums who made a living off death without understanding what they were truly mucking around with. We also got an update on what our friends from The Quick and the Dead were up to and rules on creating Spectre cults, groups of deranged mortals that worship and serve Oblivion servants. April 1997 brought Channel Houses of Europe, The Shoah, which was a black dog publication dealing with probably the most delicate of delicate issues, the Holocaust. Thankfully, for the company that dropped the ball horribly with Berlin by Night by including a bunch of real-life Nazis amongst the characters, this book and the material is handled in a very sensitive manner. We can say remarkably sensitive for White Wolf. Rather than being rules for playing victims of Nazi atrocities, the book is presented as a memorial of sorts. It opens with an introduction explaining that nobody should forget what happened during that dark period of human history, and that stories are a valuable tool in ensuring that something is remembered. There's also a grimly beautiful two-page art spread showing the interminable numbers of the dead being pulled across the sticks one by one with Charon and the words never again. The book provides an overview of the Holocaust, as well as chapters exploring individual atrocity sites. These are part history and part fiction, the history providing an overview of what happened at these places, and the fiction exploring the effects on the underworld of the Holocaust, how the sheer scale of death affected the Shadowlands, and how the trauma created lasting scars in the very fabric of existence. It doesn't shy away from the horror, but it treats the subject with respect and gravity. It's not an easy book to read, the real history is genuinely horrifying and unsettling, and it's certainly not one to use lightly in a game. In fact, I think I'd be content to let the book stand as a memorial to the Holocaust. I doubt I could do the subject matter justice in any game I run. So after this book proved that White Wolf could handle delicate historical matters tastefully, June saw them chunning out guild book haunters. And if that wasn't enough, September saw a guild book that chunted Pardoners and Puppeteers into one book. Clearly there wasn't enough material to give each an individual book, which says a lot about the content of these guild books. 1998 saw several releases. Ghost Towns leaned heavily into crossing over with Werewolf the Wild West. This supplement explored haunts in the wilderness and rural areas of the West, places where Wraiths existed far from the necropoli. It detailed how Wraiths interacted with werewolves and the spirits of the Umbra. This honestly felt a bit more like a werewolf supplement for storytellers who wanted their guru to have dealings with ghosts rather than anything particularly interesting for Wraith. Guild book spooks and oracles combined two more guilds, the aforementioned spooks and oracles, into one. Fun fact, this was the last guild book to be released, meaning not all guilds got one. Can you imagine Vampire not releasing a clan book for every clan? Yeah, it shows kind of how paper thin this whole guild splat concept actually was. Anyway, following this, the Book of Legions finally gave proper detail to the Legions that'd been mentioned but never fully explored in the core book. Each Legion got a whole chapter and it made the Legions feel like actual organizations rather than these throwaway labels that they'd been in the core book. It also though came four years after the main game had been released, and people probably had their own ideas of what legions were. This is what I meant when I said at the beginning that not having a lot of the stuff fully detailed in the core rulebook meant that by the time White Wolf actually released supplemental material, a lot of people's games would be deviating from what was canon. And as we're about to see, this is probably a little bit too little too late. July 1998 brought us Doomslayers into the labyrinth. This detailed a special group of wraiths who travelled into the labyrinth, you know, that nasty place deep in the tempest where all the spectres lived to hunt spectres. The book covered the history, purpose, organizations, and tools most commonly used by Doomslayers, including how to create Doomslayer characters and how they could use Darker Canae. It detailed the Society of Spectres, Amalfians, and what life in the labyrinth was actually like. It also provided rules for travelling through the labyrinth, something that had only previously been touched upon in the adventure that was bolted on to the end of the Sea of Shadows supplement. Now, the section on Spectral Society in this book was interesting, but this honestly felt like a book for people who wanted to have a dungeon bash in the Wraith game. Great, if that's your thing, but it's not really in line with the game's themes. October 1998 saw the release of Renegades, a source book detailing the faction opposed to the hierarchy. And I say the faction, but this book isn't really sure what it's about. It opens with a chapter talking about the history of the Renegades, as if they're a cohesive body, but then goes into different types of Renegades. After this, we've got the Renegades' opinions on the other factions within the underworld, but are we back to this being a cohesive group again? If there are many, many types of renegades, surely there will be an equal number of opinions. We also get character creation rules and the usual sample characters that like White Wolf liked to throw in. Honestly, it reminded me of Vampire's Anarch Supplement, another group that is actually meant to be made up of basically anyone who isn't in the Camarilla, but which the book tries to put an organizational structure around. Regardless, White Wolf didn't give as much of a chance to use Renegades because one year later, in October 1999, they released Ends of Empire. This was Wraith's Apocalypse, the end of the line, the finale to the entire Wraith setting. And despite being critically acclaimed, Wraith was performing poorly, so the Powers at B decided to wrap things up. This book catches a lot of flack. So this is a your mileage me very warning, but I actually kind of enjoyed it, primarily because it had some great fiction that brought the various story threads I'd enjoyed throughout the Wraith line coming to an end. It also finally lifted the curtain on the ferryman's secrets, as well as providing a scenario designed to finish the story of the Dark Kingdom of Iron. Okay, spoiler warnings for the scenario, because I can't talk about it without giving stuff away. So if you want to avoid this, uh skip ahead, I don't know, five minutes. That's probably how long it's going to take me to rant about this. The scenario, interesting as it is, is figuratively and literally a railroad. The characters are bounced from scene to scene where important stuff happens and important people speak. And at one point they're on the Midnight Express, so they're literally on rails. Regardless if this is an intentional metaphor, and if it is, it's rather heavy-handed. The characters scoot from set piece to set piece with barely a pause to catch their breath. Sure, they're given some tasks to do in a vague you are the chosen one's capacity, but on the whole, they're largely bystanders to history taking place around them. And none of their choices mean anything, so that's fun for sure. The plot centres on Charon's return amidst a war between the Dark Kingdoms of Iron and Jade, and Wraith's background, Charon sacrifices himself at the end of World War II to fight off a big monster that is buffed following the bombing of Hiroshima. There's political manoeuvring, betrayals, last stands, sacrifices, the ferryman, Charon's mysterious servants play a major role. It's absolutely an epic in scope, and the writing does a good job of conveying the scale of the catastrophe, but it is so metaplot heavy that it really suffers as a result. Unless your storyteller has done serious work to weave the main villain into your chronicle, for instance, he's just another boss battle. The fact that the characters get to face him has no meaning and no amount of yeah yeah, but he's oblivion's general from the storyteller, will be able to convince him that this is anything other than a big final nasty to face, the same as you get at the end of any RPG. Likewise, the scenario assumes your characters care deeply about high-level staging politics, about the fate of the hierarchy, about the machinations of ancient wraiths. But if your chronicle has been more focused and personal, and really delved into characters' individual passions and fetters, you know, like the rule book has been suggesting that the game is about since day one, your players might just look at each other during these political set pieces, shrug, and say, I guess. This cannot be overstated. You only have to look at the early supplements, things like Love Beyond Death, they all focus on Wraith's personal interactions with the living world, with the people that they leave behind. There is so little information on Stagia and the Dark Kingdoms that it's not really that interesting to make an adventure around them. And if you had been making an adventure around them, chances are it was your storyteller's homebrew setting. So all of this grand stuff in the finale, a lot of it probably didn't get used. There's also a moment that's meant to be a big reveal when all the remaining Nimoy, who are an outlawed guild of memory workers, are brought in and it's revealed that their banishment and persecution was all part of the plan, and those words are all in capital letters. This is meant as some stunning revelation, but unless your storyteller has really lent into the whole fable of the Nimoy being persecuted and outlawed, and it's unlikely they would have because the Nimoy Guild book is included as part of this book, then this all just falls a bit flat. It's just another group of guys that are wheeled out for the finale. Also, the whole reasoning behind the war is very covert. Storytellers may know about it if they've been keeping up with the Wraith's Meta plot, but your players probably won't. Therefore, having an opening set piece that feels more like the D Day landings might be a bit jarring if your game is previously focused on personal horror. Finally, Charan's proclamation that the PCs are his chosen heirs during the final Charan transcends and goes to somewhere nice scene feels jarring. Why have they been picked? Because of the main characters? In the grand scheme of things, they're only there because they happen to be the ones that reap Charan's soul. Other than that, they've merely acted as glorified couriers, hardly the stuff of kings. In short, it suffers from all the usual problem of published White Wolf scenarios. The core rule books, for the likes of Vampire and Wraith, spend a lot of ink musing on how this is a game of personal horror, tragedy, and introspection, only for the adventures to be these epic sweeping action romps that jarringly and clumsily break the mood. Imagine you've been playing Wraith for years, and your chronicle focuses in your small circle, helping each other cope with the depredations of the underworld, as well as assisting each other in coming to terms with a new existence and healing the wounds of the past. Fantastic stuff, very deep, very Wraith according to the rulebook. Then your storyteller describes a ghostly battleship appearing and bombarding the town whilst ghostly soldiers and what can only be described as anime-inspired armors storm the city. Quite the discord, no? With Ends of Empire, Wraith came to an end. Mark Reinhagen stated early in the development of the game that he wanted players to feel uncomfortable playing it, and in that regard he succeeded perhaps too well. The themes were dark and often touched on topics that were unsettling or triggering for players. I know from experience that Wraith is the only game I've ever run where a player has asked for a timeout because things were getting too intense for them. Concepts like the Shadow required advanced players, and not everyone enjoyed being an antagonist to another player. Also, brilliant as this was conceptually, it often proved difficult in practice. Shadow guiding came out before the idea of collaborative play to lift was commonplace in gaming culture, which meant you had a lot of players shadow guiding aggressively or in ways that were really competitive rather than collaborative. It required a level of trust and maturity between players that wasn't always present at gaming tables, and as a result, Wraith as a whole lost popularity. Not just because of the amount of preparation required, but because it was often a lot of work simply coming up with things for players to do. Sure Wraith had some politics and antagonists built in, but not to the same extent as Vampire or Werewolf, and besides, that's not what people wanted to play Wraith for. This game was about exploring death, loss, and what was next. And while that's a cool concept, it's very hard to weave a game out of it that works for all your players. This was self-evident in the White Wolf line when they started releasing things like Doom Slayers, effectively saying, Look, you can have a cool dungeon bass with ghosts in our game, right? There was also the question of why the characters were even together in the first place. Although White Wolf fancied themselves as having a renaissance in gaming, groups of players who were into the idea of weaving a cooperative story were still pretty rare. A lot of the players of their game still came from traditional ways of playing RPGs. So if you didn't have that cooperative storytelling mindset, the mindset that had players playing in their troupe rather than a party, as White Wolf defined it in their rulebook, your reasons for the players being together often came down to the fact of the other PCs sitting around the table. Because of all these factors, Wraith had a very limited audience throughout most of its history, and limited audiences translate into limited sales. When you're pulling in less cash than Changeling, you know that you're in trouble. White Wolf discontinued production of the Wraith Line in 1999, several years before other World of Darkness games, a victim of poor sales and the inherent difficulty of translating the game's mechanics and themes into something that players. Enjoyed, but it wasn't quite done. Uh, there was a book release called Wraith the Great War, which dealt with the Shadowlands and the period of the Great War between 1914 and 1918. Honestly, it didn't really work. Wraith doesn't need a historical setting. Whereas something like Vampire, the Dark Ages explored this different world in different settings. Wraith always kind of had that. It dealt with other Wraiths who had been dead for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. Therefore, the concept of a historical setting, especially one as recent as World War One, didn't really change anything in terms of how the underworld worked. The hierarchy itself was already incredibly anachronistic. World War One would seem positively modern for the hierarchy. In 2003, White Wolf released Orpheus. Now, Orpheus wasn't technically a sequel to Wraith, and it wasn't officially part of the Wraith line, but it shared enough in common that it's worth discussing here, and it scratched that ghostly itch for people who were missing Wraith. It was set in the modern day, in a world where death and the afterlife were real known phenomena. The players took on the roles of projectors, people who could separate the souls from their bodies and enter the spirit world. They worked for the Orpheus Group, a slightly shady corporation that hired their projectors out to do various PCs of snooping and espionage. The game was structured as a metaplot heavy story, released as a series of six books that told one continuous narrative of each book, advanced the plot from the last one, revealed new information, introduced new threats. It was designed to be played through from beginning to end with a definitive conclusion. The tone was different from Wraith, it was much more action-oriented, more focused on investigation and problem solving. You weren't playing introspective dead people working through their emotional baggage, you were playing cool ghost spies working for a corporation. That said, it shared Wraith's themes of death, loss, and what lies beyond. The story itself centered on the Orpheus group getting caught up in a conspiracy involving a rival corporation, malevolent spirits, and ancient evils from beyond death. The plot built over six books, cumulating in an apocalyptic finale. The final fate of the Shadowlands played strongly into Orpheus' storyline. While it wasn't a direct sequel, it did have many points of interest to those familiar with Wraith and who enjoyed that game. And then, for over a decade, Wraith was silent. I'd say as the grave, but I'm kinda bored of writing puns at this point. The game was out of print, the setting officially over, and while fans kept playing and discussing it online, there was no official new material. But in December 2014, the Onyx Path team launched a Kickstarter for Wraith the Oblivion 20th Anniversary Edition. This is part of their ongoing series of 20th anniversary editions for classic World of Darkness games following successful releases for Vampire, Werewolf and Mage. The campaign was very successful, funding in December 2014. However, the book's delivery was massively delayed. It didn't actually ship until August 2018, nearly four years after the Kickstarter campaign. This was an extraordinarily long delay and it frustrated many backers who'd been waiting patiently for the book. Honestly though, whenever we cover a Kickstarter for this podcast, I am no longer surprised by this stuff. Thankfully, when the 20th anniversary edition finally arrived, it was a beautiful book. Hardcover with art that managed to maintain the moody atmosphere of the original and over 500 pages of content. It compiled material from both first and second edition, including updated rules, new fiction, and all sorts of great stuff from all the supplements. The opening section was the original art book from 1994 that preceded first edition's release, which I thought was a really nice touch as it bought everything full circle. It's also complete. This book's details are more or less everything ever released from Wraith, and it shows it too. It's massive, bigger even than Vampire 20th Edition. Yep, it's that big. Having Wraith readily available in such a complete form was great. For years, if you wanted to play it, you had to track down used copies of the original books and supplements of Rely on PDFs. Now there was a definitive edition that collected everything in one place that was professionally produced and readily available. So where does that leave Wraith? Well, it's a cult classic. It never had the mainstream appeal of a vampire or werewolf, it was always too dark, too introspective, too demanding of its players, but for those of us who connected with it, it was something special. I love Wraith for a lot of reasons. I love that it addresses the thorny issue of the afterlife and belief. What if you died and found that everything you believed in was wrong all along? What if your conception of the afterlife was completely different from reality? Wraith doesn't shy away from these questions. I love that it's not just dark for the sake of being dark and edgy. The idea that you could be forged into an item, that you could spend eternity as an object in someone's desk, that's not just shocking, it's genuinely horrifying when you stop and think about it. And it makes the stakes feel real and the afterlife really seem like an unliving hell. I love that it's one of the most original RPG settings I've ever encountered. The afterlife is a place where the ghosts and detritus of society accumulates, where nobody has any more answers than they did in life, where ancient empires practice slavery and hold souls like currency, it's disturbing yet brilliant world building. Nothing else quite captures that same feeling. I love the shadow mechanic. When it works, when you've got a group that trusts each other and understands what they're trying to create, it produces some of the most powerful dramatic moments I've ever experienced in gaming. Having another player whisper terrible truths in your ear, tempting you towards self-destruction, making you question your every decision. It's uncomfortable, yes, but it's also compelling in a way few game mechanics ever achieve. And I love the personal nature of it all. Your fetters, your passions, your unfinished business, these make every character story feel meaningful. You're not just another vampire in the internal jihad or another werewolf fighting the worm, you're a specific person who died with specific regrets, specific loves, specific failures, and you're trying to resolve them all before you're consumed by your shadow and fall into oblivion. But I'm also realistic about Wraith's limitations. It absolutely is not for everybody. It can be pretty depressing at times. The themes of loss and decay aren't everyone's cup of tea. Some people play RPGs to escape, to be heroic, to have adventures. Wraith is about confronting uncomfortable truths, about life, mortality, and regret. That's heavy and not everyone wants heavy. Some people just want to kill orcs and take their treasure, and that's fine, that's what the hobby's about. Wraith is also difficult to run. The shadow mechanic requires mature players who won't abuse it. The lack of clear splats means you need to do serious prep work to create a cohesive group. The setting requires buy-in from everyone at the table. If one player isn't fully committed, the whole thing can fall apart. You can't just show up with a character concept and expect it to work. You need to figure out why these wraiths are together, what they have in common, what their shared goals are. You need to weave the stories together so that helping each other makes sense and it's something the players want to do. You're going to have to spend hours as a storyteller just finding reasons for characters to play together without it all degenerating into, and we all go into the labyrinth to fight specters. Wraith works best with smaller groups. Think about it, each player controls two characters, the Wraith and someone else's shadow. With five or six players, that's 10 or 12 characters to keep track of. It gets unwieldy really fast. 3 or 4, that is the sweet spot where everybody can focus on their Wraith and the shadow that they have without getting lost in the crowd. The real secret with Wraith is that it's much more of a collaborative storytelling experience than a traditional RPG, and yes, I know that sounds pretentious as hell. The storyteller isn't just running a game, they're facilitating a shared narrative where every player contributes to everyone's character arcs like no other game. It's beautiful when it works, but man, it is a lot of effort. Now this is the spot in the show where I usually say, if you've never tried this game, you should give it a go. Well with Wraith I'd say give it a go but with some caveats. Make sure you've got a group that trusts each other. Make sure everyone's on board with the themes of loss and death. Seriously, some people can find the subject matter extremely triggering. Maybe start with a one-shot to see if it clicks. Use pre-generated characters for your first session so everyone can get a feel for how the mechanics work without investing too much time in character creation, and you as a storyteller have a group that has a reason to be together and doing stuff together. So, if you're curious, the 20th anniversary edition is available on Drive Thru RPG, and there's physical copies out there too. You can also find all the old stuff on eBay. Give it a read, see if it speaks to you, but be prepared for something quite different from your typical RPG. Wraith isn't about going on adventures and killing monsters and getting treasure. It's about exploring what it means to die, what you leave behind, what you hold on to, and how you heal from all your emotional baggage. It's about regret, hope, hate, revenge, sorrow, joy, and love. In short, despite being a game about the dead, it's very much about exploring what it means to live, about what makes us vibrant and alive. We are a semi-regular podcast on the history of RPGs. We have over 70 episodes now available in our back catalogue. You can find other history episodes like this one, as well as interviews, roundtables, product reviews, and even some actual plays. So if you're a new listener, go and check those out. If you'd like to support the show, we would be delighted if you left us five stars on your podcast platform of choice. A review would be great too. This really helps with visibility and it massages our fragile little egos and makes us want to produce more episodes. If you want to get in touch with us, you can do so by emailing us at roll.two.save.pod at gmail.com. You can also find us on Facebook and Instagram by searching for role to save, but also on threads to at save podcast. Thanks again for listening. And remember, in the world of darkness, death is only the beginning.
