Wraith:
the Oblivion is dead. As dead as a Restless
one, as dead as a ghost.
From its ashes, Hunter:
the Reckoning was born.
It wasn’t a replacement,
as some rabid fans thought. It was a whole
new game, born from a different idea, but
linked to it, to its death. White Wolf wanted
a reckoning, and they created the “Week
of Nightmares,” when the whole world
of Darkness was rocked and changed forever.
Wraith was discontinued after its Sixth Great
Maelstrom, the vampiric Ravnos clan was wasted,
the Hunters were born. Enoch, the old vampire
city in the Tempest was bombed, as was the
Labyrinth. With Enoch, the True Black Hand
went down the john, and the Avatar Storm separated
the Mages from their elders and superiors,
almost driving them to extinction, and turning
the Ascension War against them.
Arcadia’s gate was
shut forever and… But enough of that.
Let’s focus on the basics. Wraith, as
a game, is officially gone, and Hunter was
born. From Hunter’s main book, we learn
that there’s a deep connection between
them and the undead, especially those beings
generically referred to as “the walking
dead”, more commonly known as zombies.
Whoever played Wraith knows that it was pretty
uncommon to rise from one’s grave, as
the sourcebook the Risen emphasized. But everything’s
changed after the Sixth Great Maelstrom.
So, Hunter’s Storytellers
needed an update to all they knew about the
Restless Dead. Who could do a better job than
Richard E. Dansky, the former Wraith developer?
He was one of the authors of this book, and
it presents an excellent conversion of the
Wraith universe to Hunter’s. Some concepts
are purposefully mismatched, in the typical
Hunter fashion, but they’re easy enough
to recognize by veteran Wraith Storytellers.
The point is, it’s as close to an official
continuation of Wraith as it gets, which is
a very cool thing.
Let’s
get this over with. What is this book?
This is a player and Storyteller
resource about ghosts, zombies, and the undead
supernatural. It doesn’t include vampires,
well, it gives us a brief snippet on them
here and there, but on the whole they are
left out, since they are consciously spoken
of as a different species of monster.
The Walking Dead details
the Hunter’s (especially on hunter-net)
view of these nasties and the “in-game-birth”
of the Carpenter, a very cool character that
appears in some Hunter stories and stars in
the Year of the Scarab novel trilogy. This
wacko is a serious character, whose nature
I will not reveal so as not to spoil your
read. We also meet Ichmail, another freakish
creature that has managed to log into the
hunter-net. Maybe a Kuei-jin? We also learn
of a demonic place, in Thessaly, Greece, which
hosted the Orphic Circle, a group unspoken
of in Hunter books, but of the Wraith gameline,
very important to the dead game’s metaplot,
in fact.
So,
what do I get for my dinero?
Plenty of info about the
subject. Cool Storyteller ideas if you’re
the one who’s chosen to tell the stories.
New cool ghostly powers. An interesting read.
Nice (if exuberantly bloated) Mitch Byrd art
(yea, that guy that seems to make all women
double-whopper lovers, and makes the Colombian
artist Botero just a pretender); and other
cool art as well (and some crappy art, just
to compare). More Storytelling ideas concerning
the Hunters’ main antagonists.
Do
I need this book?
Well, no. I could do without
it just fine, till I browsed it on a friend’s
shelf. I considered it a waste of money, but
I’ve come to realise it’s just
the opposite. The Storyteller ideas alone
are worth the money. But no, you don’t
absolutely need it, but pick it over the other
“WoD adaptations”, because this
one is over a dead gameline. You can keep
up with Vampire, Werewolf, and the rest (well,
maybe Changeling is also on the hit list,
but not for now) but you can’t with
Wraith. So this can add to both your collections,
and clarify some things.
Any
final words?
Not much. I think I’ve
said all. Then again, words can’t describe
my feelings for this masterpiece. I repeat
that I dismissed it when it hit the stores,
and now, after a careful read, I see the full
extent of my error. It gets more interesting
when you start drawing the lines between World
of Darkness and the Creation of Exalted. The
connection between the un-dead and the Solars,
and between the same former and the Hunters
becomes… disturbing, don’t you
think?
IT DOES NOT LIVE
Certainly not, my dear Messengers…
Reviewed by Matías
Timm |
