redirected from Main.WraithTheOblivion
alt title(s): Wraith The Oblivion
A Storytelling Game of Death and Damnation.
A tabletop role-playing game in the Old
World Of Darkness, considered by many to be one of the most depressing of the lot. First of all,
you start off dead. And we don't mean
undead, we mean
dead. You've failed to pass on to the true afterlife, and your soul has ended up in the Shadowlands, a decaying spiritual reflection of the real world. You're bound to this side of reality by your Fetters and Passions,
emotional and physical ties to your old life. You have to negotiate the viper's nest of politics that's been set up in the Shadowlands — a three-way clusterfuck between the oppressive Hierarchy, the revolutionary Renegades, and the devout Heretics — while trying to protect and, eventually, resolve that which ties you to this life and move on to the true afterlife.
Wait.
It gets worse. Also parking its tuchus in the Shadowlands is a grand malevolent force known as Oblivion. Seeking to drag all existence down its sinkhole, Oblivion sends its soldiers, the Spectres, out to make the world a much worse place. One of those soldiers is parked in your head. It's called your Shadow, and it's constantly going to wheedle you, cajole you, taunt you, set you up, and make your life a living hell until you give it what it wants — that is, all control over you.
Wraith was considered a tough concept to handle, even for the World of Darkness. The characters were constantly at war with themselves (and sometimes each other) while trying to find their place in both life and death. The first edition focused more on the personal struggles than the actual setting; it took the second edition to truly flesh out the Shadowlands.
Wraith was the first (and pretty much only) gameline in the Old World of Darkness to be cancelled before
The End Of The World As We Know It. It later received a spiritual sequel in the form of
Orpheus (which dealt with humans and ghosts who dealt with troublesome spirits and investigated the wreckage of the Shadowlands).
The upcoming New WoD gameline
Geist looks to be another spiritual sequel; while the
P Cs have been explicitly stated not to be ghosts, it will explore the NWoD's Underworld. The tone of Changeling: The Dreaming and Wraith: The Oblivion were basically swapped in the new World of Darkness for Geist: The Sin Eaters and Changeling: The Lost. In Geist, the
PCs are happy half-human spirit mediums possessed by mostly beneficial ghost partners.
This game contains examples of:
- And I Must Scream — Soulforging. That soulsteel sword you're holding, the kind of thing that makes mincemeat out of Spectres? Guess how fondly you'll look on it when you realize it's weeping.
- Back From The Dead — In a way. It's possible to permanently yield some power to your Shadow in order to reenter your body and become one of the Risen until you take care of some unfinished business. Yup; you become The Crow.
- Cosmic Horror Story — You're stuck in a godless afterlife facing down the soldiers of Oblivion, one of which has a key position in the back of your mind. Have fun.
- Creepy Child — The Striplings, Spectres of those who died before they went past 10 years old. Form a society unto themselves, with their own Malfean. Even other Spectres (including the Malfeans) find them creepy.
- Deader Than Dead — Soulforging is often considered a form of this.
- Deal With The Devil — The Shadow is capable of offering temporary rewards to its host if they give it a little bit of power.
- The supplement, Risen, is basically a how to to turn your wraith into the Crow, but the most important step, after still having a corpse, is begging your shadow to let you get back into your corpse.
- The Empire — Stygia, as embodied by the Hierarchy.
- Enemy Within — The Shadow, which keeps trying to get you to make deals with it and give into its will. Ironically, Spectres also have an Enemy Within, the Psyche, that drives them to remember who they were in life and do good things.
- Epiphanic Prison
- Fate Worse Than Death — Oh, and are there. First of all, there's becoming a Spectre, which means your self is lost to eternity as you become a foot soldier for Oblivion. And then there's soulforging, wherein you are sentenced by the Hierarchy for crimes you have committed (or even ones you haven't) to have your corpus boiled into molten ore and forged into an object. Those who carry soulsteel swear they can hear it weeping at times.
- Functional Magic — The Arcanoi, Inherent Gifts based on manipulation of life energy.
- The Heartless — Shadows and Spectres.
- Humans Are Bastards and/or Tearjerker — Charnel Houses of Europe: The Shoah deals with Wraiths spawned from the Holocaust. There's no "Beethoven Was An Alien Spy" here; humans are perfectly capable of atrocities on their own. It is the single darkest sourcebook White Wolf has ever released, and is considered by many to be their best work. While many titles in the Black Dog line were simply Rated M For Money, this one truly is not for the faint of heart.
- Mana — Pathos, emotional energy that wraiths gather by feasting on examples of their guiding Passions.
- The Necrocracy — The Hierarchy, rulers and supporters of Stygia, the Dark Kingdom of Iron. There are several other Kingdoms in the Shadowlands, such as the Dark Kingdom of Jade (the Far East); some (such as the Dark Kingdom of Obsidian, the Mayincatec Shadowlands) were even wiped out by an expansionist Stygia.
- Our Ghosts Are Different — They're either perfectly reasonable folks tied to this world by old bonds... or evil spirits bent on destruction.
- Recycled IN SPACE! — Wraith: THE GREAT WAR! (one of the very few games of any medium based on World War One) and Dark Kingdom of Jade (Wraiths OF THE EAST!) There were actually several Dark Kingdoms based on different cultures, but Jade is the only one that got its own book (Wraiths of North America and Europe are the Dark Kingdom of Iron, by the way).
- Soul Train — The Midnight Express, which shepherds souls across the Shadowlands and serves as peaceful ground for all sorts of factions... including Oblivion.
- Unfinished Business — Represented mechanically by Passions and Fetters.
- Video Game Cruelty Potential — In some editions, it was recommended that the players, not the Storyteller, provide the voices of another character's Shadow. That went over real well, I bet.
- As a matter of fact, it did. It's not like they have any more motivation than the GM to screw you over with this - on the contrary, a shadow that is too active can actually doom the entire group, including the shadow's player's character.
- There's one more version of the game, with the Shadows having their own players - every character is then played by two people, one of which has completely no reasons not to be active.
