Wraith: The Oblivion 
An Introduction

 Welcome to the other side.

Wraith: The Oblivion is a game, a fictional journey if you will, into a world of passion and horror.  It is game is about ghosts, the restless dead, and it takes place in a world that is very reminiscent of modern-day America. Yet the world of the dead is not exactly that of the living, it is ‘displaced’ in a way, a few notches away from life and growth towards death and entropy. The relationship between the living world  (the skinlands) and the dead (the shadowlands) is balanced in a unique way. The dead are able to see the skinlands and everything in it, like through a veil of decay, but are unable to affect it physically. The living cannot see the shadowlands or their denizens, but they can unknowingly manipulate or disrupt the soul-stuff of which the shadowlands are made.

The living world is much like our own, yet the shadows are longer and the darkness more penetrating. Violence and crime are more expressed, and physical and spiritual corruption is increasingly the norm. It is a World of Darkness. The shadowlands, however, are much worse. Clearly discernible from that of the skinlands, the landscape of the shadowlands is composed only of things that no longer function in the living world – demolished buildings, wrecked cars, and wraiths. These elements of the afterlife stand out clearly to the eyes of a wraith, as they are solid to her. The objects in the living world can be passed through if so desired, by drifting temporarily into a state of discorporeality, but the walls of the afterlife are solid.  Everything there is made up of emotions, which is what existence after death boils down to. Wraiths are passions embodied, and the relic objects around them are made up of the feelings the living have attributed them in life. A wraith’s energy to act, and cling to life, comes from the play of emotions, whether in the wraith herself or released by the living. To exist, the dead must feel. This dual existence, of physical and emotional matter, is central to unlife in the shadowlands. 

The restless spirits known as wraiths are indeed the souls of the dead, those unable to accept their deaths, that keep fighting for life even though they have gone beyond it. After death, they find themselves enveloped in a cocoon of sort, from which they have to be released by either themselves or someone else. Emerging from this caul, most of their human sense of good and evil is gone, what remains after death is only the emotions and desires that keep them anchored to existence. These desires mean everything to a wraith, without them she would fade into nothingness. Most wraiths also have an emotional connection to certain things in the living world, which gives them the strength to remain close to the skinlands, and not fall from grace into the eternal soul-storm known as the ‘tempest’. But what makes existence as a wraith even more difficult is that all her insecurities in life, all the things she despised and hated about herself, seem to have taken on a life of their own. Sometimes this ‘shadow’ represents itself through painful images and memories, and sometimes it whispers seductively in her ear, trying to convince her that she is less than nothing. It can even grant the wraith great power, temporarily, if she lets some of her soul corrupt and wither. But it is always there, in the back of her mind, reminding her that she is only a short step away from true nothingness, Oblivion. All of these things combine to form the personality and outlook of the restless.  

Playing in this game means taking the role of one of these souls, and bringing them to unlife by writing stories, with or without other players, about how they maintain their existence in this gloomy underworld. These stories can be about anything, as long as it is possible for the wraithly character, and you do not include other player’s characters and/or significant non-player characters without checking with the player in question or the storyteller. The role of the storyteller is to make sure the character’s stories have an effect on the game world, as well as controlling non-player characters and making sure everyone is happy with the game.  

It is hoped that any players will see this site for what it is – an interactive setting, a place where you can let your imagination loose and help create a story that is bigger than all of us. Each new soul becomes another part of the underworld that the players share in their mind, one that will hopefully grow larger and deeper with each passing story.