Product Review

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