RPG WTF 3: Wraith: the Oblivion

[james_davis_nicoll]

Next on my hit list of ​“what were they thinking” RPGs; White Wolf1​’s Wraith: the Oblivion, in which players played dead people in the afterlife. Not inherently a bad idea, although the first edition was plagued with proof-reading and play-testing issues (1st ed WW games tended to be beta versions). But that isn’t why I want to discuss Wraith. Take a close look at the cover.



Do you see a title?

For reasons that I am sure seemed compelling at 3 AM, White Wolf decided to lean into the whole spectre angle of their game. The title (which you can see if you look very closely) is in glow-in-the-dark ink. If the ink has had time to get charged up, it’s somewhat visible in the dark. A cool effect and just too bad most game stores strongly discourage customers from coming in in the middle of the night when all the lights are out. When the lights are on, the title is essentially invisible.

It happened that the cover matched the colour of the slat wall in my store. Customers who came in looking for Wraith could only find it if I helped them, and I cannot image there were many impulse buys.

1: You might expect a follow-up piece on the White Wolf Magazine/Inphobia transition. I am trying to do only one of these per company and anyway, I can understand why a general interest gaming magazine might want to find a better defined niche, even if the one WW found was ​“failed experiment.” There have been a lot of good, general interest gaming magazines and very few of them are still around.

Comments

[kedamono]

It's one of them "Let's be Edgy and Cool" covers that you saw a lot of publications use during the 90s. Add in unreadable decorative font choices and this would fit in nicely with the 90's avant garde art books.

[theresawright]

The price of self-publishing dropped significantly in the '90s. The positive side of this was a boom in a lot of interesting new material. The downside was a boom in ugly design.

[chrysostom]

Whooooooaaaaahhh! Extreeeeeeme!

[(Anonymous)]

Surrrrrrrrge!

[refreshninja]

There are entire game lines that interested me but I never was able to get into because of unreadable fonts. Vamp Requiem and Mage the Awakening might as well have been written in code.

[roseembolism]

Oddly, Wraith though in a very grim setting, was one of the most hopeful WW books. It's all about resolving the ties that kept the characters from passing on.

Still, the only thing more annoying than that cover was the interior text of Mage the Awakening.

[kedamono]

To be honest, a lot of these folks graduated from blue boards and Letraset dry transfer fonts of the '70s and '80s to the early page layout programs like Aldus Pagemaker or QuarkXpress and Corel Ventura. (None of which were cheap.) The really cheap desktop publishing programs were just that, cheap and not full featured. Output was either dot-matrix or very expensive laser printers. And none of the professional printers dealt with digital files. So back to the blue boards and layouts...

[andrewwheeler]

Oh, White Wolf did that with everything -- it was just as bad, if not worse, for their fiction line.

I can't remember which book had the blank vellum cover with the title under it, embossed in white on white boards -- but that's the kind of design WW leaned into every single time.

It was only mildly annoying to me professionally, since any WW books I sold were in the SFBC catalog under nice clear type for title and author. I think the production people who had to transform their designs into something logical for the club editions were less happy.

[james_davis_nicoll]

I think it was their edition of Resume, With Monsters that had a little braggy piece about how WW saved trees by making their books non-returnable. Unfortunately RwM was kind of short for a novel and to disguise this, they double-spaced the book, using twice as much paper as necessary.

[arethinn]

My impression was always that Wraith was far and away the least popular of the big five. Did it seem that way to you? I played in a fairly sizable nominally-VtM-but-actually-WoD-mishmash LARP in the mid-90s, and while there were in-house rules about which werewolf tribes, mage traditions, and changeling kiths were allowed alongside all the vampire clans, wraiths were written off as "you wouldn't be able to interact anyway" and nobody bothered. In fact I think there would have been ways if anyone cared (Spirit sphere, werewolf abilities...) but I guess we thought of Wraith as kind of a boring silo without all the other natural points of contact (thus dramatic tension or potential cooperation) between the beings of the other four games.

[james_davis_nicoll]

It certainly wasn't a big seller for me.