What happens when you die? Does your soul
ascend to heaven and eternal peace as a reward for your piety and lifetime’s
worth of good deeds? Are you cast down into hell as punishment for your sins and
impropriety, suffering an eternity of torment and agony? Or are you washed
ashore of somewhere in between, a liminal space that might be a purgatory, a
place from which you move on, your soul washed of your sins, or simply trapped
in the lands that border on nothing? Awakening under a blood red moon in lands
of perpetual night, not living, not dead, but undead, the memories of who you
once were stripped away from you and what cords of faith you had in life with
the gods cut in twain. In lands where vampires proudly walk the streets and
quest for more lands to conquer and blood to take, where the Fae quail from
their vengeful god in their Lonely Isles, where mechanical monsters hunt the
Mystland to taunt and torment the people hidden within their fortresses, and
where in the perpetual lunar night, silver falls as rain the Ever Dusk to burn
and scourge the skin and souls of the undead. Renounced, rejected, and reviled
by those gods, the majority undead take on lives and roles that they might have
had in life, though they cannot recall what they were. Others rise above that, perhaps becoming the monsters that their
new forms embody, revelling in their new nature and imposing it on others, but
others seek to rise above that, seeking honour and enlightenment even though
there is no way to pass through the Veil that the gods have placed around the lands
that make up their new home. These lands are the Tortured Isles in the world of
yh , where the undead know that if they die, it is not permanent and they
cannot pass on. Instead, they can only be reborn as undead again, memories lost
of what they were, ready to start again.
This is the setting for Wraithborn: Role Play in the Realm of the Undead, a roleplaying
game published by Theatre Macabre following a successful Kickstarter campaign. Mechanically Wraithborn is based upon Mörk Borg, the Swedish pre-apocalypse Old School Renaissance style roleplaying game designed by Ockult Örtmästare Games and Stockholm Kartell and also published by Free League Publishing. A player rolls a twenty-sided die, modifies the result by one of his character’s abilities, and attempts to beat a Difficulty Rating of twelve, though the Difficulty Rating can be higher or lower. The Difficulty Rating may go up or down depending on the situation, but whatever the situation, the player always rolls, even in combat or as Mörk Borg terms it, violence.
In terms of what you play, creating Player Characters in Wraithborn adds tables for determining personality, physique, wealth, and monstrous feature. There are optional rules for each Player Character’s cursed existence—inspired by his monstrous feature, what his destined purpose might be, and Omens. The latter are tied to the Player Character’s destined purpose and work as gifts, and as he gains Levels, gives him options in terms of altering reality, reading the passage of time, hearing the unsaid, and manipulating the aether. All of these are optional, but they add depth and detail to a Player Character. One notable addition to a Player Character in Wraithborn is a fifth stat, ‘Clarity’, which is measure of a Player Character’s magic casting ability, memory, and intelligence, pushing Wraithborn away slightly from its Mörk Borg roots and towards a more traditional roleplaying game.
The ten Classes in Wraithborn consist of Blood Seeker, Damphyr, FaeBound Daemon, Ironclad, Lunari Mage, Stormbringer, Wraithborn, Wyld Kin, Wyvern Rider, and Zarowka. The IronClad are faithful warriors who serve the IronLairds and who sought out and destroyed Heaven’s Gate, one of the events which triggered the Veiling of the Tortured Isles by the gods, and now protect the MystLand. Vampires come in several types, but hunger for blood and all practise Haematology or Bloodcraft and cast Blood Curses. Vampires in the Tortured Isles thirst for domination and sail from the north across the Severed Seas in their red-sailed ships and in the cities they conquer, they store the blood they tithe in banks. All vampires need to drink blood, and they suffer penalties if they do not . However, unlike a true Vampire, the Damphyr must drink daily, but can transform into vampiric beasts, create tonics, grow vampiric wings, gain greater presence, call forth the legions of the dead, and so on. Damphyr also suffers from ageing. The Blood Seeker is a hybrid Damphyr-arachnid whose spider-like protrusions can pierce victims and directly draw blood from them to store in the blood abdomens on his back and collect them for his master’s blood banks or sell them as part of the Blood trade. The Wyld-Kin connects to the natural world—both flora and fauna—through lyrical telepathy, can transform into both, taking on bestial forms such as arachnids, bears, and more.
A Wyvern Rider is tethered or soul-bound to the wyvern he rides, whilst the Zarowka is an incorporeal practitioner of umbral magic, his player spending Reaction Points to cloak others in Umbral Armour or with Drown in Darkness, suffocating and blinding them, or set them alight with Radiance or set a Light Trap of crystalline shards. The Stormbringer is so attuned to the Aetheric Elements that he can adapt and strange his physical form to embody Elemental properties of S’Gàth—flesh, gold, oil, salt, and stone. The Lunari Mageis a Fae who draws upon the light of the lost sun reflected off the Moon to cast magic, the power varying according to the Lunar cycle, whilst the FaeBound Daemon is drawn from the Realm of Infernal Fire and bound in the body of a dead Fae and so suffer persistent Red Rot, but command powers of flame outside of magics of S’Gàth. Unfortunately, the creation process is not easy with a lot of paging back and forth through the book to look at the basic steps and then looking at individual Classes and then the various elements of each Class.
Wraithborn uses a unique magic system built around Aetheric Elements—flesh, gold, oil, salt, and stone. Instead of simply casting spells and forgetting them or using a simple points system, spellcasters invest dice of three types in spells to cast them. Ritual or six-sided dice are a caster’s inherent magical ability; Moon or four-sided dice represent the fleeting magical influence of the Aether; and Phase or eight-sided dice represent the phases of the Moon, but are only available to Fae. Ritual dice are gained as part of the Player Character’s Class and refreshed daily, whereas Moon dice are gained from in-game activities, such as killing foes, absorbing power, making offerings, and so on. When a player wants his character to cast a spell, he invests dice in an attempt to equal or exceed the casting threshold of the spell. Moon dice can also be used to boost the subsequent die roll. This is a standard roll of a twenty-sided die and its result will not only determine if the spell is successfully cast or not, but also if the dice are expended as result of the casting attempt. Further, elements can be combined to create new elements, so that a combination of flesh and oil make blood, gold and stone make steel, and so on. This is not without its complexity in comparison to spellcasting systems in other roleplaying games—especially those in the Old School Renaissance—but it also means greater player involvement and flexibility. The roleplaying game’s spellcasting Classes grant extra bonuses with the system. For example, the Stormbringer attunes to two elements daily to grant extra dice, whilst the Lunari Mage gains extra dice that are better depending upon the phase of the Moon.
Wraithborn oozes flavour and atmosphere, but it is a roleplaying game with problems. It provides some great Player Character options and a nicely done new magic system, but it does not help the Game Master with advice on how to run it—beyond addressing the horror of the setting before play and not revelling in this aspect of the setting—or really how to set up a campaign or what to do with it. It does not help in this with the lack of a scenario, whilst there are solo play rules, these are brief, and perhaps best work as a series of prompts for the Game Master rather than something to use to generate long term solo play. To be fair though, there is a scenario at the end of The Tortured Isles, the campaign setting for Wraithborn, but that is in another supplement.
Physically, Wraithborn: Role Play in the Realm of the Undead is vibrant swathes of black and red, swirled in with other colours and classic pieces of art. As good as it looks and as much atmosphere as it imparts, it is a problem. It takes the Doompunk art style of Mörk Borg and over-energises it, not only making it a challenging read (especially if you have conditions such as colour blindness or dyslexia), but also making content and details difficult to find. This could and should have been offset by an index, but it lacks one. This is an error of judgement for a volume that really needs one.
Wraithborn: Role Play in the Realm of the Undead is the grim dark of Mörk Borg twisted and made even darker and grimmer under a perpetual night and a waxing, waning blood red moon and storm clouds of silver in which the undead twist and turn, wondering where they came from and wondering what the future holds, knowing that it holds nothing. It is potentially, a great sequel to the apocalyptic drowning of the last land of Tveland, as foretold by the prophecies of the Two-Headed Basilisks in Mörk Borg. Of course, it also stands as a roleplaying game in its own right. Or rather not quite. Amidst the interesting Player Character options and the sharp tang of its magic system, as well as the descriptions of the Tortured Isles, Wraithborn hints at possibilities and ideas, but it never really examines what the objective of the roleplaying game is or what it is that the Wraithborn do in S’Gàth. Wraithborn: Role Play in the Realm of the Undead is ripe with play options and drips atmosphere, but really is awaiting a Game Master with good ideas or a campaign.
