Game: Wraith: The Oblivion (first edition – White Wolf, 1994)
My Experience: For all the time I’ve spent with it, Wraith is one of my less-played World of Darkness games, but no less beloved. The Louisville Gaming Mafia tried a few campaigns that never got legs. Shortly thereafter, I met the newly-reaped line developer, Rich Dansky, at Origins ’96. That encounter led directly to my internship with White Wolf during the autumn of that year, during which Rich gave me my first chance at freelancing with a tiny 1,000-word assignment for The Shadow Player’s Guide. I subsequently bookended my World of Darkness freelancing career with the Silent Legion in Book of Legions and, two decades later, revisiting them in Wraith‘s 20th Anniversary Edition along with most of the wraithly powers known as Arcanoi. Immediately thereafter, I got what was likely my last-ever WoD freelancing gig in Book of Oblivion – also, likely the last-ever official Wraith product. I’ve posted an authorized excerpt and a few cut pieces here under the Wraith: The Oblivion tag.
Margo Vaughn, Stormchaser at the End of the World
There wasn’t much to do in Oakley, Kansas in the nineties. Margo Vaughn grew up re-reading her grandparents’ National Geographic collection and dreaming of traveling to the most remote reaches of the planet. She craved adventure and experience in an isolated corner of the Great Plains that, most days, was the farthest possible thing from either of those. Her only escape from the Groundhog Day of flipping burgers at Don’s Rainbow Drive-In was the rare confluence of a day off, a storm out on the prairie, and her truck running well enough to get her out and back home.
It was on one of those nights, watching lightning crack the sky open, that she met a crew of meteorology students from Oklahoma State. Until then, she didn’t know there was a word for what she did, let alone that there were other people who shared her fascination. She fell in with them immediately. Whenever a weather system was brewing in her corner of the country, she’d offer them a base and crash space, and in return, they began teaching her all the things she couldn’t afford to study.
In an irony that’s all too familiar in the Underworld, what Margo loved finally killed her. Outside Dodge City, she and her friends lost a race with an EF-3. A sheriff’s deputy found their bodies two days later – but Margo was already far away on the other side of the Shroud, struggling to get her footing as her Reaper introduced her to decaying bustle of Necropolis Wichita.
In death, Margo finally found her place. These nights, after a few years of formal training, she’s the Maelstrom Bureau’s sole representative wherever the chronicle is centered. Although she’s responsible for everything from maelstrom forecasting to teaching wraiths how to better fortify their Haunts to gathering and reporting samples from Underworld anemological events, she still has a fair amount of free time. Covertly, she’s also an initiate of the Harbingers’ Guild, which gives her both far-reaching information sources and the occasional urgent need to launch an unlifesaving mission outside the necropolis…
Traits
Nature: Visionary
Demeanor: Martyr
Attributes
Physical: Strength •••, Dexterity •••, Stamina •••
Social: Charisma •••, Manipulation •, Appearance ••
Mental: Perception (attuned to environmental changes) ••••, Intelligence •••, Wits •••
Abilities
Talents: Alertness •••, Athletics ••, Awareness ••, Dodge ••, Empathy ••, Expression ••
Skills: Crafts (farming) ••, Drive ••, Firearms •, Leadership ••, Repair ••
Knowledges: Bureaucracy •, Enigmas •, Investigation •, Occult ••, Science (meteorology) ••
Advantages
Arcanoi: Argos •••, Fatalism ••
Backgrounds: Contacts ••, Haunt (local agricultural supply store) •••, Status (Harbingers’ Guild) •, Status (Hierarchy) ••, Wealth (Maelstrom Bureau salary) •••
Passions: Travel to new places (discovery) ••••, Learn to understand the Underworld’s storms (wonder) ••••, Save those in danger (hope) ••
Fetters: Secondhand meteorology textbook, now gathering dust in a used bookstore •••, Grandparents’ house in Oakley •••, Memorial marker at death site ••, Lightning-struck tree outside the chronicle’s focal community ••
Willpower: ••••• •
Pathos: 5 points
Shadow
One of the uniquely unnerving things about Wraith is that every character has a Shadow: the nihilistic side of their psyche, given autonomy by the forces of Oblivion and given voice by another player at the table. Margo’s shadow is the embodiment of every “you’ll never amount to nothin'” she heard or imagined during her breathing days.
Archetype: The Parent
Angst: •••, 0 points (for now)
Dark Passions: Watch other people suffer the consequences of their bad decisions (righteous judgement) •••, Retreat to familiar, predictable surroundings (fear of the unknown) •••, Allow the Maelstrom to consume (reveling in power and destruction) •••
Thorns: Dark Allies •, Shadow Trait (Occult) ••, Trick of the Light
Notes and Afterthoughts
Since 1996, I’ve had two White Wolf promotional posters on my wall wherever I’ve lived. One is for Wraith. It’s so obscure I can’t even turn up a copy on Google Image Search. It’s a humanoid figure, wings spread behind it, arms crossed across its chest to hold what’s probably a book. The caption reads:
There’s a storm that’s always screaming under the skin of the world. Sometimes it comes looking for you…
That, perhaps more than anything else, has always symbolized the entirety of the World of Darkness for me. It was a strong influence on my aforementioned final work for Book of Oblivion, part of which was 9,300 words on wraiths and disasters. The Underworld has no disaster more universal and iconic than Maelstroms, so a good chunk of that writing was on the wraithly equivalent of meteorology. Tying Margo to that felt right.
Because I can, I also tied Margo’s history to one of the necropoli I wrote for Book of Oblivion. Oakley was extra material that wound up being withheld for lack of space. I figured I might as well get some use out of it, too.
Mechanically, her primary Arcanos of Argos gives her some navigation and travel capabilities in what passes for the wilderness of the Underworld. She’s not particularly fighty, but with that and Fatalism, she can definitely help a balanced party find or avoid the fights as they need.