World of Darkness: The Book of Spirits
Nov. 12th, 2012 09:26 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chuckroA supplemental book for the “core” World of Darkness line by White Wolf, it details the Shadow, the spirits that live there, and their interactions with the mortal world. It includes rules for how supernatural creatures (vampires, werewolves, mages, fae) can interact with the Shadow, but the primary focus is on mortals and plot hooks for horror games. There’s also a very large appendix of sample spirits, and spirit-urged or spirit-ridden humans.
It occurred to me one of the reasons that Mage: The Ascension has always been my favorite of White Wolf’s lines: Mage is a game about wonder. The core message is that anything is possible if you try hard enough, and there are amazing and wondrous things just outside of humanity’s narrow line of sight. Yes, it was a very dangerous world and it was clear a lot of bad shit was going to go down before the world could be saved, but it was both magical and hopeful. It was a game where your character being happy and successful but not insane was reasonably plausible. None of the other game lines really achieved that.
The core New World of Darkness line certainly doesn’t: It’s a horror game, more like Call of Cthulhu than any of the earlier WoD games. The theme of NWoD seems to have been to dial back the power levels of all the supernatural creatures, remove a lot of the metaplot political power structures that existed in the OWoD, and generally make everything darker. This book opens with a description of how the Shadow (basically the Near Umbra of the new setting) could be mistaken for (and used as, for plot purposes) the hell or afterlife of every major religion. It is presented as a terrifying and dangerous place that no one in their right mind would ever want to go. Compare that to the descriptions in Umbra: The Velvet Shadow or The Book of Worlds, where the Umbra was a grand adventure just waiting for characters to brave it.
Similarly, the spirits that live there are not going to be your friends. They range from indifferent to malicious to bizarrely alien, but the NWoD doesn’t have any spirits of cuddles or spirits of happy days in the sunshine—they were all eaten by monstrous war-spirits that incorporated their abilities and now want to cuddle you to death.
Credit to them, however, that they try to stuff the books full of story ideas and that even the rules “crunch” tends to be ideas that can be used to create drama just as much as they might make the PCs more powerful. This book includes a big section of cursed items, which each come with a power and a drawback. Every NPC spirit or spirit-ridden person is really a plot hook that could become a full-blown gaming session or even a full story.
Overall: I’m not sure if I’ll ever run core NWoD, but I have some great ideas for Call of Cthulhu or Cthulhu Dark adventures using details from this book. Some of them would even work cross-genre in Mage or superhero games, but that requires tinkering.
It occurred to me one of the reasons that Mage: The Ascension has always been my favorite of White Wolf’s lines: Mage is a game about wonder. The core message is that anything is possible if you try hard enough, and there are amazing and wondrous things just outside of humanity’s narrow line of sight. Yes, it was a very dangerous world and it was clear a lot of bad shit was going to go down before the world could be saved, but it was both magical and hopeful. It was a game where your character being happy and successful but not insane was reasonably plausible. None of the other game lines really achieved that.
The core New World of Darkness line certainly doesn’t: It’s a horror game, more like Call of Cthulhu than any of the earlier WoD games. The theme of NWoD seems to have been to dial back the power levels of all the supernatural creatures, remove a lot of the metaplot political power structures that existed in the OWoD, and generally make everything darker. This book opens with a description of how the Shadow (basically the Near Umbra of the new setting) could be mistaken for (and used as, for plot purposes) the hell or afterlife of every major religion. It is presented as a terrifying and dangerous place that no one in their right mind would ever want to go. Compare that to the descriptions in Umbra: The Velvet Shadow or The Book of Worlds, where the Umbra was a grand adventure just waiting for characters to brave it.
Similarly, the spirits that live there are not going to be your friends. They range from indifferent to malicious to bizarrely alien, but the NWoD doesn’t have any spirits of cuddles or spirits of happy days in the sunshine—they were all eaten by monstrous war-spirits that incorporated their abilities and now want to cuddle you to death.
Credit to them, however, that they try to stuff the books full of story ideas and that even the rules “crunch” tends to be ideas that can be used to create drama just as much as they might make the PCs more powerful. This book includes a big section of cursed items, which each come with a power and a drawback. Every NPC spirit or spirit-ridden person is really a plot hook that could become a full-blown gaming session or even a full story.
Overall: I’m not sure if I’ll ever run core NWoD, but I have some great ideas for Call of Cthulhu or Cthulhu Dark adventures using details from this book. Some of them would even work cross-genre in Mage or superhero games, but that requires tinkering.
