[Wraith] Thoughts on hacking, ideas, stuff

A couple more quick thoughts on Shadows before I leave this alone for the night:

I'm still not convinced the game I'm envisioning needs them.  As someone invariably says any time I bring up using a different system to play a Wraith-like game on rpg.net "It's not Wraith without Shadows."  And I agree wholeheartedly.  But I don't necessarily feel the need to rebuild Wraith here.  I just want something that explores the same literary and emotional territory: the importance of life when seen from the other side.  Or at least thats the big thing for me.

BUT!  Shadows ARE way cool.  So if the game does use them (or possibly includes them as a big optional plug in) I am thinking that a big part of how they work will, by necessity, tie in to how the equivalent to Pardoner's work.  I might need to start poking at that playbook.  It's hard to talk about dealing with Shadows mechanically until you know how they can be dealt with in game.

Also, unrelated thought... It looks like there are at least a couple people interested in talking about this.  Should I ask Vincent to set up a subforum for it?

Hmmm, well, thinking about it, I'm gonna break down Shadows to their basics as I understand them. I think it's probably more helpful to think along the lines of "how do I get the game to do what I want?" rather than "how do I do stuff like Wraith?" (which it sounds like you're doing anyway).

So, from what I gather, what makes Shadows cool in Wraith is a) it is a way to represent the dark side of a character other than relying on 'good roleplaying' or resources totally under his control, b) it increases the link between the players, giving a different dynamic than just "PCs and Storyteller relationship".

So, it would probably be pretty easy to come up with a fairly easy way for other players (or one specific other player) to offer your character a mechanical incentive to do 'badness' or give up on your life, or whatever 'the shadow' is representing here.

Maybe something like highlighted stats? Only instead of marking experience when you use it, you gain a +1 forward and the guy who marked it gets experience? I dunno, hard to justify 'in fiction' why X ghost gets experience for the behaviors of Y ghost influenced by Z shadow. But the dynamic might be cool.

As for a dedicated subforum, I don't really have anything to add beyond broad conceptual stuff, but maybe some others have some more concrete and helpful stuff.

I would request a dedicated forum, but... I just realized, I need a name for this thing. "Apocalypse Wraith" is what I'm currently calling it in my google docs files where I'm writing stuff up, but... that's a dumb name, plus I want to shed the "wraith" bit, if nothing else.

Though I don't necessarily plan on attempting to polish this thing to perfection and publish it, I'd like it to at least be theoretically publishable and, hence, not violating anyone's copyrights and whatnot.

Okay, since at the moment I'm using this thread for public brainstorming...
Let's get away from Shadows for a little bit.  Let's talk about playbooks.
To say it one more time: I don't want to just rebuild Wraith with AW rules.  So, while my original thought was "Okay, playbooks can be Guilds from Wraith" and I still want to keep that in the back of my mind, let's really just focus on what kind of ghosts are indispensable.  What HAS to be in the game?
Ironically, I may end up using Wraith terms for some of these at the moment.  :) Though I'm good with adopting new names, too...

• Haunters - Ghosts that are good at the whole Making-the-Walls-Bleed thing
• Poltergeits - Ghosts that are good at violence and breaking things
• Aparitions - Ghosts that are good at communicating with the living and apearing in the living world
• Pardoners - Ghosts focused on the world of the dead and good at helping other ghosts deal with their dark sides
• Gremlins - Ghosts good at haunting and fucking with machinery
• Sandmen - Ghosts good at infiltrating and manipulating dreams
• Possessors - Ghosts good at... well... this one should be obvious
• Creeps - Ghosts good at altering the forms of themselves or others

What else needs to be on this list?  What DOESN'T need to be on this list?  Any suggestions for better names for some of them?

The other thing I really could use brainstorming help on is moves, especially basic moves.  what is missing from my current list?  what shouldn't be on the list i already have? (incidentally, i've pretty much decided that hold your form is a peripheral move, replacing the harm move)

Well, let's kick this off.  I'm not going to bother just trying to brain storm basic moves.  I'm just going to brainstorm stuff that sound like they might be moves at all and then later I can figure out whether some of them should be combined, split up, or dropped and what should be basic and what should be a playbook move.  I am gonna split it up into two broad categories though.

Stuff dealing with the world of the living:
-Communicate with the living
-Enter the living world in physical form
-Terrify the living
-Possess the living
-Possess/animate an inanimate object in the living world
-Possess an animal in the living world
-Move/destroy/alter object in the living world
-Take comfort in your chains

Stuff dealing with the world of the dead:
-Alter your ghostly form
-Repair your ghostly form
-Confront/Negotiate with your other half
-Persuade/manipulate another ghost
-Threaten another ghost
-Damage/alter/repair another ghost's form
-Chastise/punish another ghost's other half.
-Examine another ghost's chains
-Remember who you are
-Enter/examine/reach into the madness beyond death

Oh!  I just realized there's one big thing I've been feeling about this that I've never said here.

I have absolutely no interest in getting into all the ghostly politics/Stygia crap that's in Wraith.  Crap may be a bit too strong.  It was cool enough it's in own way; these ancient, powerful ghosts that have given up their connections to the world of the living but have refused to pass on completely, and their power politics.

But whatever.  It's not what I want here.  The thing that makes a game like Wraith really interesting, in my opinion, is its interactions between the world of the living and world of the dead.  For this hack, in Wraith terms, I'm going to pretend the various "islands" in the tempest like Stygia don't exist.  I like the idea of the tempest, especially as an analog to AW's "psychic maelstrom" but aside from that, I want it to be just the "shadowlands" and the "skinlands."  There can be power poltics and shit like that between ghosts in the shadowlands but I've no interest in going to a place that has no direct connection to the world of the living at all, because at that point, how much does it really matter that you're technically a ghost?

Good lists!

Two quick thoughts: one, maybe it's a move to accurately even *perceive* the living world. Like, say you haunt the house where your family was murdered. You have to really focus and try hard to see what the house looks like now, otherwise it looks like the blood stained Victorian home that was the last thing you saw before you offed yourself.

Second, an ungiven future option: You pass beyond the shadowlands, having resolved your ghostly issues.

Oooh!  That's a great idea for a move, definitely.  And it reminds me: I think in Wraith ghosts had the power to assess things like the physical health of living people, and possibly structural weaknesses in objects.  Maybe ghosts in this hack normally have their perceptions warped by looking between the worlds, but if they successfully make a move to perceive things accurately they gain extra useful information, kind of like you do when you read a sitch/person.

And good idea for the ungiven future option.  One of the things I haven't given much/any thought to yet is advancement... though for the most part I'll probably be able to copy the advancement options from AW.

I'm coming back to this idea again, because I love it.  Yes, ghosts perceptions of the living world is warped.  I'm dead, I'm haunting the house where I used to live.  It's been 50 years, and everyone in my family has either died or moved elsewhere, but whoever lives in the house now, I still see them as my old family, unless I try really focus and/or actually open a hole in the veil between the worlds (which, of course, has its own problems.

Ghosts, by default, are kind of stuff in place and in time.  They have difficulty remembering that time is passing and that things are changing, and an equal amount of difficulty perceiving those changes even when they remember to look for them.

PCs in AW are unique.  I think one of the core things that makes PC ghosts unique in this hack is the simple fact that they are dynamic creatures, able to grow and change by (mechanically) earning experience and advances.

I like what you guys are working on about the Shadow- the Shadow player offers help and gets hold to get the player to do something later etc. I'm working on a very straightforward Wraith to AW hack, and I was glad to find Necrology, I like what you're doing a lot.
I'm not sure if your system will use Pathos and Angst, but mine will because I want to keep a lot of the ideas of the original game. i'm wondering what peoples' thoughts would be on using Angst?
 I'm also sort of using the experience from doing this hack, especially the Shadow stuff, to roll into another game I'm planning, about (for lack of a better term) Faustian favors and temptation.

Random thought: What if the MC is simply referred to as the Shadow?

Alot of MC moves could be reconfigured to deal with how the Shadow interacts with ghosts, and some could even be made up from scratch to mimic the awful things that happen in Wraith.

I think if it's a straight-up Wraith hack, I'd want the players to do the Shadow duties, it was a pretty cool and fun system in the original game. And in my "faustian" style setting, I think the shadow/tempter being another player adds some unpredictability to it. I like the idea that the MC is running the scenario, while the players are keeping tabs on each other's dark sides. It would snowball pretty quick into interesting stuff.
I'll post my work on that soon, when it's a bit more refined.