RPG Spotlight: Wraith

By Titus Villanueva

Time for something unconventional. I wrote an article earlier about the significance of horror games in the world of RPGs so let’s delve deeper into that world. I had the honor of starting a fascinating RPG campaign last Sunday with a very interesting system.

We spent a really good part of the afternoon creating our characters. The system was pretty in-depth, reaching the point that we had to determine people, places or objects that were relevant to our characters, their personal histories, and passions. We spent more time that day creating our characters than actually playing the game… and then it started.

The very first thing that happened in the story was that our characters were killed. Yes, killed. In Wraith, an RPG setting using the famous World of Darkness system, your character is dead.

Our GM didn’t tell us anything about the setting’s rules, factions, world or lore. We were going into this blind. This made it a terrifying new experience where we had to figure out the rules for ourselves. What happens when we try to phase through walls? Can we interact with the living? Being a ghost was lonely and depressing. Later we started to discover that the rules seemed to be different for all of us. Some could enter people’s dreams, some could possess objects and others could even move them.

So started our adventure; Myself, a father who caused the deaths of himself and his whole family (who moved on without him), an activist who died under mysterious circumstances, a professor in denial of his own death and a teen who was killed by her own fad diet.

More to come…