Plavix For Sale Brahmi No Prescription Buy Pletal No Prescription Buy Online Reosto Buy Ansaid Online Herbal Xanax For Sale Aldactone No Prescription Buy Melatonin No Prescription Buy Online Diabecon Buy Cialis Soft Online Famvir For Sale Lotrisone No Prescription Buy High Love No Prescription Buy Online Prinivil Buy Zimulti Online Mentax For Sale Zelnorm No Prescription Buy Shoot No Prescription Buy Online Naprosyn Buy Flomax Online Adalat For Sale Erythromycin No Prescription Buy Medrol No Prescription Buy Online Urispas Buy Lotrisone Online

From Stronty Girl (a.k.a. Amanda Kear) we’ve got a long, detailed review of From Enchantment to Fulfilment, the Wraeththu RPG produced by Immanion Press. At the time of its release, the RPG was much maligned by gamers but embraced by Wraeththu fans for the background materials and piles of art it produced. As a result, there were terrible reviews from gamers and reviews from fans that had nothing to do with gaming. The following review is a bit different because it’s written by someone who knows games and knows Wraeththu. So we’re happy to present it! We hope you’ll stick through to the end of this lengthy review…

- Wendy

THE WRAETHTHU RPG:
A FEMALE GAMER’S PERSPECTIVE, COMMENTARY & REVIEW

By Stronty Girl (a.k.a. Amanda Kear)

My Background & Context

Okay, first off, here’s where I’m coming from:

• I’m female, and as such I don’t have a dick. I am happy to roleplay characters without a penis (human woman, robot), with a penis (human male), or with a non-human type of penis (werewolf, wraeththu). Ditto for those with or without breasts & vagina or with a non-human not-quite-a-vagina (reptile-woman, birdwoman).
• I’m female, and as such the idea of two guys having sex does not send fear or distaste coursing through my veins.
• I’m a zoologist, and as such the concept of two hermaphrodites with weird shaped genitalia having sex does not send fear or distaste coursing through my veins. Leopard slug sex in Life in the Undergrowth = cool! The solidly heterosexual right whales waving 12 foot long, animated penises around in Life of Mammals: Return To The Water is vaguely disturbing, but overall fascination wins out there too.
• I’m a gamer, and I have personally saved the universe from the Evil Dark Lord and his minions more times than I can count, and I never want to do it again as either player or GM. My RPG genre of choice is science fiction. Preferably near future or military science fiction.
• I’m in my 40s, and my tolerance for teenage angst is diminishing daily. My tolerance for teenage power gaming vanished almost 2 decades ago.
• I’m a science fiction fan rather than a fantasy fan, and I’m just not into “comparable to Tolkien at his best” high fantasy that drips with elves and magic swords. I read the first trilogy of Wraeththu novels in the 1980s. I liked the concepts and the post-apocalypse idea, but at times I could happily have beaten one of the main characters to death with a brick. At the time of my getting the RPG I hadn’t read any of the 2 nd trilogy or other books.
• I saw a news snippet in Ragnarok (the Society for Fantasy and Science Fiction Wargaming’s magazine) saying that a Wraeththu RPG was about to be released. I bought it because of memories of the novels and that fact that I grew up on books like The Crysalids, comics like Strontium Dog Portrait of a Mutant and TV like Survivors or the final Quatermass (the one with Sir John Mills), so I’ve always had a soft spot for post-apocalypse RPGs.

Their Background & Context

For those unfamiliar with Storm Constantine’s Wraeththu novels: the setting is best described as a post-apocalypse science fantasy. It’s not high fantasy with elves and dragons – this is our world with a layer of magic and psychic powers sprinkled over the top. Natural disasters, wars and man-made catastrophes have more than halved the world’s population. The Wraeththu are a new breed of humans that emerged in the urban wastelands of a crumbling North America, and spread in numbers and influence until now several powerful tribal groupings exist. The tribes aren’t really fixed bloodlines like World of Darkness Vampire Clans or Werewolf Tribes, but more nations-under-construction. But for the purposes of the RPG, they are treated more like the former “fixed” clan identities.

The Wraeththu are hermaphrodite – they are both male and female in the same body, and have both male and female reproductive organs. What is best described as tantric sex is also an important part of their ritual magic and healing. So if this is the sort of concept that squicks you out, then Wraeththu isn’t for you. In the time period of the game’s setting they can only reproduce in a vampire-like manner, by transforming humans into new Wraeththu with their blood.

It’s Not What You’ve Got, It’s What You Do With It

Okay, let’s get the “flower penis” bit over and done with. Wraeththu have a penis that is substantially different in shape to that of a human penis. It shrinks tremendously and almost disappears when they are taking the female role in sex. They also have a vagina. So when they have sex one of the couple temporarily becomes more male in form and one more female. Thus two Wraeththu can use any sexual position or practice that a man and a woman can. Or indeed any that two men can, or any that two women can. And… um… well… that’s all there is to it. Remarkable all the fuss that this has generated isn’t it?

I do marvel at the reluctance of guys (and so far in my personal experience it has always been guys, but to be fair I know more male than female gamers) who refuse to consider playing Wraeththu because of the above anatomical details. I mean, since I have a naturally sarcastic streak, a wealthy of zoological trivia at my fingertips and a woman’s perspective I do wonder:

• Do such blokes refuse to play female characters, because if they do so then they won’t have a penis at all?
• Do they only play androids or robots if they are “fully functional and programmed in several techniques” like Data from Star Trek The Next Generation?
• Do they lie awake at night worrying that the genitals of their dwarf or elf or orc character might differ in shape from those of a human? Especially in RPGs where the background fluff states things like dwarves were made by different gods in a separate creation from humans, or elves are descended from plants.
• Do they get all twitchy at the idea of playing a species like a birdman or an Uplifted dolphin that hides its penis and testicles away inside the body, instead of dangling them in full view all the time? Worse still, the birdwomen don’t have a vagina or an anus – just the one orifice (cloaca) to serve both purposes.
• And aliens – whoa, no way! They didn’t even evolve on Earth, so there’ll be all sorts of icky weirdness out there. I mean we already know that the Centauri (Babylon 5) have a 4 foot long prehensile penis that they can use to cheat at cards. Then the Vargr (Traveller) are descended from dogs, so they’ll have a bone at the centre of their dick, and the female’s muscular vagina can grab onto his penis so securely that if she decides to get up and walk off during sex she’ll drag him along behind her. Ouch!
• If their character gets bitten by a werewolf, do they angst more about how their penis will change shape at the light of the next full moon, than they do about turning into a slavering monster and accidentally eating the neighbours?
• If they are playing some sort of cat-man, do they worry that having little barbs all over their penis will make masturbation seriously rough on the hands?

The answer to most of this is of course a resounding “No”. Why? Because they’ve never given the matter the merest thought. They’ve assumed that any penis, anywhere, in any RPG system is “made in their own image”. But then along came a game that upset that safe and happy worldview in an abrupt and in-your-face manner. And there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth…

Sex and Violence

The other things where people have grabbed the wrong end of the stick (ooh, er, missus!) are the topics of rape and wraeththu semen. To start with the latter: wraeththu body fluids are “a caustic poison” to humans (p41). It’s as biologically implausible as the “acid for blood” in the Aliens movies, and it performs exactly the same function: it provides a quick fix for some of the “But why don’t they…?” questions. But why don’t they just cut the alien off John Hurt’s face? Because the acid will kill him. But why don’t wraeththu find themselves a nice gay man and a nice straight woman and settle down into a comfy ménage a troi? Because the acid will kill them.

I would guess that Storm Constantine decided to put this in her novels to emphasise that human and wraeththu are separate species. Themes of destiny and evolution in the books mean that the universe has drawn a big black line between human and hara. There’ll be no wraeththu-human hybrids born, no wraeththu-human relationships blooming. You are one or the other and never the twain shall meet. Once wraeththu learn to reproduce amongst themselves, their need to have any sort of social contact with humans will vanish.

OK, on to rape. Read the following carefully: “Because aruna [sex] is such a respected and important aspect of Wraeththu life, the concept of pelki [rape] is both abhorrent and horrifying to the average har [wraeththu]. Unfortunately certain dark powers can be accrued by indulging in these practices and this only serves as a dreadful temptation to hara of corrupt or morally decadent inclinations.” Wraeththu RPG, Page 41.

Got that? Go back and read it again if you didn’t! The sort of characters who commit rape in Wraeththu are bad guys. They are the sort of characters who have Evil in their AD&D alignment, and actually play it as evil, not just as an excuse to be a munchkin and start fights in taverns when the GM is trying to read you some flavour text. The sort of characters who take Sadism and Megalomaniac as their GURPS disadvantages. The sort of characters who accumulate more Dark Force points in Star Wars than the rest of the party has had hot dinners, and who lose Humanity points in Vampire faster than you can say “Sabbat on a diablerie spree”. Yes, we all know people who play character after character after character like this. But the idea that if you play Wraeththu such characters and such acts are compulsory for everyone is as ludicrous as the notion that playing AD&D teaches you real spells and turns you into a demon worshipper.

Get On With the Bloody Review, Then…

Okay, first impressions: The book is a hefty 434 pages, divided roughly into half background and half game mechanics plus examples & index, so you certainly get your money’s worth. Certainly, the Serenity RPG cost me the same amount, and has 200 fewer pages, and although the margins in the latter are smaller, I don’t think they contain 200 pages worth of extra material. Interior art is for the most part of a high standard, and several of the artists have managed to capture the androgynous look of the Wraeththu beautifully. I liked Olga Bosserdt’s art the most, although if anyone ever does a line of miniatures based on Wraeththu art, then Bruce Wells’ designs would be the best fun to paint.

It’s a first edition RPG and as such suffers from some of the ills that plague all first edition games – namely typos and problems with layout. For instance a city in the UK is referred to as Jorvick on the map, but Yorvick and Yavik in the text, and you are told in at least 3 different places how Manticker the Seventy got his nickname. But on the plus side it has a pretty decent index – you wouldn’t believe how many 1 st edition games screw that up! However, the one huge first edition sin that Wraeththu does commit is that when it gets to the most complex bit of the game mechanics – i.e. how combat works – it stops giving examples. One day, I’m going to find all the RPG writers who do this and pelt them with dice until they say they’re very, very sorry…

In terms of the setting and background this is a game for adults, or rather for players of a mature gaming disposition. It features only human beings and hara (wraeththu), so all action-oriented plots will resolve around hara-human or hara-hara conflicts, plus the odd animal attack or natural hazard. The Wraeththu RPG can encompass everything from gang fights in inner city ruins to political intrigue at a tribal gathering, but there is no endless bestiary filled with “monster of the week”, so look elsewhere if you want a traditional open-the-door, kill-the-monster, take-the-treasure dungeon crawl. I’d guess the writers were aiming at the kind of play you get from Vampire The Masquerade and its ilk, not AD&D and its descendants.

The other adult aspect is the sexuality. As the Wraeththu are hermaphrodite, any PC can potentially have sex with any other PC. On the face of it, this is true of ANY group of PCs, unless you’ve got a 1’ tall pixie and a 50’ tall dragon in the party, and no ladders handy. But in regular RPGs the majority of PCs will be heterosexual and therefore cross off several of their companions off the “potentially fanciable” list. The squick factor arises because Wraeththu require a lot of sex to stay healthy/spiritually balanced, so it is likely to be a common plot point, and some people are of a mindset that says that if Player A doesn’t fancy Player B, then of course none of Player A’s characters could possibly fancy any of Player B’s ones. (Female gamers may, of course, have encountered the opposite effect, when their boyfriend assumes that just because she is going out with him, then all her characters will automatically fancy all his characters – gender and species be damned).

The GM can downplay the sexual aspect of the game, of course. There is a section entitled ‘Aruna and the Single Gamer’ giving advice on this, which can be summed up as “know your players’ limits”. It is mostly full of common sense advice – like if your players are sensitive and easily offended souls, then it is probably not a good idea to run a plot about the evil bad guys committing ritual rape as part of their black magic.

However, even if the sex is downplayed, the hermaphrodite angle pretty much rules Wraeththu out as the game of choice for teenage boys who are trying sooooo hard to appear hyper-masculine and grown up. (Hey, I’m over 40 – I can laugh at the 17 year olds as much as I like!) That said, there is a lot of teenage wish fulfilment in the world of Wraeththu – all the hara characters you’ll ever encounter in the game were once adolescent male humans who have been transformed into better, stronger, faster beings with incredible good looks, psychic powers, fantastic sex lives, a destiny to rule the Earth, and no parents to yell at them. I thought that older guys who don’t view playing a female (or in this case semi-female) as a slur on their masculinity should be okay with this game, but from various ramblings and reviews on the net apparently such things make a lot of blokes as twitchy as a sack full of stoats.

It’s not as if casual sex is absent from RPGs. Consider the following:

GM: “The buxom barmaid brings you each a tankard of ale.”

Player: “I chat her up and try to get her to have sex with me.”

GM: “Make a charisma roll.”

Player: “I succeed.”

GM: “She has sex with you. The next morning you all leave to find the lost citadel of Macguffin.”

Sound familiar? After decades of putting up with this sort of laddish “instant sex with no strings attached” encounter in RPGs, the idea that there are blokes stampeding away from the Wraeththu game because of the sex is, to a female gamer, quite frankly hilarious!

Back to the Background - The Tribes

Here’s a quick summary of the tribes outlined in the character creation portion of the rulebook. This is a guide for never-read-any-Wraeththu players, with comparisons to other RPGs. There is a reasonable selection of tribes, but probably too many nomadic traders for the sort of character balance and player choice from the “tribe as character class” lists that most gamers are used to from RPGs like Tribe 8 or WoD. But that’s the downside of adapting a ready-made world for your RPG, I suppose, and is hardly the fault of the game designers.

Uigenna

The original tribe, from which all others are descended. The Uigenna view humans with contempt and believe that they should be wiped out. Their street gang heritage is still very much in evidence. The tribe has little or no organisation, and its leaders maintain their position through physical strength and force of personality. Fighting, sex, getting drunk and getting high are pretty much all that is on most Uigenna’s agendas. The Uigenna are the poster children for what happens if you give discontented inner city adolescents superhuman abilities and tell them they have a destiny to rule the world. If you have a player who always took Bloodlust, Berserk and Bad Temper as his disadvantages in GURPS or always chose Chaotic Evil as his alignment in AD&D (as an excuse to be disruptive or because of munchkin tendencies), then he’ll want to play the worst sort of Uigenna.

Unneah

The Unneah are the first offshoot of the Uigenna, and resemble them in appearance (tribal tattoos and flamboyant clothing), but not in attitude. They don’t have the wanton savagery of the Uigenna and their aim is to build a new society, rather than just destroy the old. The majority of the tribe is nomadic, but with a few farming settlements and some in derelict cities. The Unneah are developing into the traders of North American Wraeththu society – they barter in various things including livestock, fuel and mechanical equipment left over from human occupation. They tend to ignore humans unless threatened or attacked. They are kind of like the Dahlians from Tribe 8, but without the reputation as thieves and tricksters.

Gelaming

The second tribe to diverge from the Uigenna. The Gelaming are arrogant and regard themselves as intellectually and morally superior to all the other Wraeththu tribes. They are absolutely certain of the destiny of the Wraeththu to rule the Earth and of the Gelaming to rule the Wraeththu. They interfere in the politics of other tribes and tell everyone else how to run their lives and what the ‘true’ calling of the Wraeththu is. If you’ve ever come across a holier-than-thou Elf Lord in a Tolkeinesque fantasy game, an arrogant Silver Fangs in Werewolf or a high-ranking Ventrue in Vampire, then that’s the Gelaming down to a T.

Varr

Another early breakaway tribe from the Uigenna. The Varrs aim to become the ruling tribe in Megalithica (North America). They have a feudal military society – with Varr warriors at the top, Varr non-combatants a notch lower in status and human slaves providing a lot of labour. They are one of the few tribes to actually be building a manufacturing base and growing their own food instead of living off the land, raiding or scavenging from human settlements. The Varrs believe magic and psychic powers are myths (this view will be difficult to sustain in-game for any length of time…). They’re also the only tribe to adopt gender roles: Varr warriors are expected to display traditional masculine virtues and take male roles in sex. The consorts of Varr warriors are expected to adopt a feminine behaviour and appearance. This is the tribe of choice for any player who is going to get squicky about being a hermaphrodite, as you can play a stereotypical wasteland warrior… or if you want to – a long-suffering and put upon Army Wife!

Sulh

The Sulh’s origins are in the UK and/or Ireland (where they are creating a homeland for themselves), so they are one of the younger tribes, founded after a few Wraeththu left North America. They follow an ancient pagan religion, adapted to Wraeththu needs. They are famed for high levels of telepathic ability and communicating over long distances – the game mechanics make it reasonably easy for a beginning character to achieve a decent skill in this. Sulh are choosy about who they turn into Wraeththu, preferring to seek out humans who demonstrate some sort of psychic power or affinity for magic. Their numbers are therefore very small. If you want to be a Jedi Knight or Glastonbury Neo-Pagan or Hippy Flower Child with psychic powers, and don’t mind being constantly used as the party’s mobile phone, the Sulh are for you. They’d probably get along like a house on fire with the Children of Gaia or the Stargazers from Werewolf The Apocalypse.

Colurastes

Probably descended from the Sulh, which makes them the most recent tribe to arise. The majority of the Colurastes are nomadic, living in wilderness areas. They are the tribe who has given the Wraeththu the reputation of child stealers – because they have found a way to change pre-adolescents successfully and without the need for sex to ‘fix’ the transformation. The Colurastes are extremely psychically gifted (although this is NOT apparent in beginning level characters), and are often healers, though they are not a stereotypical healer/cleric character class, as anyone can take those skills. Colurastes who misuse magic are banished from the tribe, and many end up sold as slaves to other tribes. There is a nice dichotomy here – these guys are the tribe that’s most hated by the humans, but likely to be most appreciated by the other tribes.

Kakkahaar

The Kakkahaar are another nomadic and secretive tribe (again descended from the Uigenna). They’re described as desert dwellers, but unless there has been some serious climate change, then according to the maps in the RPG they must like tropical forest as well. Their magical rituals include black magic and human/Wraeththu sacrifice, although most of this will be way beyond the ability of a beginning character. This black magic is performed for other tribes or for humans if the price is right. They sort of people they want for their tribe are cunning, or wealthy, or with occult knowledge. Because they are so selective about who joins them, very few join the tribe, so they employ members of minor tribes as servants and also have slaves. Think of them as Vampire Tremere-For-Hire with a Lawrence of Arabia fixation and a few high-ranking tribe members who really want to be Sith Lords.

Obliviata

The Obliviata are nomadic traders from the Middle East who happily accept humans into their caravans (i.e. they don’t try to change them into Wraeththu). They believe their founder member (Allave) to have been a god, and that all their magical powers are due to direct divine intervention and not to any talent they might have themselves. Their religion dictates that they have a few worldly possessions as possible, beyond their livestock and items necessary for survival. The Obliviata tend to only to create new Obliviata from humans from their homeland and/or people who have converted to their religion. These guys are almost the Honorable But Misunderstood Monks of the wraeththu universe.

Onwards and Upwards

The RPG is set a good few years prior to the events in any of the novels, so players need not have read any of them. Certainly the background material assumes you haven’t read them and gives you oodles of detail. I’ve actually read the first trilogy of novels, but that was some 15 to 20 years before I read the RPG, so either I have a much better memory than I thought I did, or other reviewers claiming that there isn’t enough background in the RPG are being ultra-picky. (Though the organisation of this info is rather erratic at times).

The RPG does give various alternative explanations for why the world is the way it is which is a great idea. For instance the origin of the Wraeththu race includes a story related in the first novel, a mention of deliberate genetic engineering and even some conspiracy theories about aliens being responsible! The GM can pick and chose between these at leisure, or have them all as conflicting beliefs held by characters encountered in a game.

For anyone intending to run the game, I’d recommend that you read the second book in the first trilogy: The Bewitchments of Love and Hate. That’s a stand-alone story that introduces several of the powerful NPCs named in the RPG, and shows how the whole Gelaming versus Varr tribal conflict resolves, so it would be useful for a GM to know – even if they then decide to deviate from the novel’s events in their own campaign. The GM can get away without reading any of the other novels – all the concepts they contain are more than adequately covered in the RPG. That book is, however, set some 20 to 50 years ahead of what the RPG is supposed to cover (there is nothing resembling a timeline in the RPG), so you can run games closer in feel to Mad Max 2 or Twilight 2000 than the fantasy novel feeling of the book, if you so wish.

One background quibble I have is with the place names. Some Wraeththu have decided to ignore or trash all human history, and this includes giving places that have perfectly adequate names (e.g. London, the Atlantic Ocean, North America) new and different ones (e.g. Lund, The Girdle of Tiamat, Megalithica). While I’m quite happy with this as an in-character affectation for Wraeththu, I hardly believe that all the humans in the game will have switched over to the new naming system! And as a human GM, being informed that Duwamish is built in the ruins of Seattle would have been far more useful than me looking at its location on the map and going “Oh THAT’S why there’s a picture of the Space Needle in some of the artwork!”. After all, this is a post-apocalypse game, so if I know Seattle is important, I can go get some real street maps as a game aid – maps are sooooo useful for generating plots by the GM or plans by the players.

Game Mechanics

Right… game mechanics. Character generation can be done either by rolling dice plus spending assigned points or by spending points alone. (Yaaaay! I love points based systems). It is reasonably straightforward – assign points to physical and mental stats, assign another pool of points to skills and a 3 rd pool to various other things including magic, resources and merits (advantages). You can get extra points by taking flaws. Finally you calculate how many magic and hit points you have. Wraeththu (hara) characters get more points to spend than humans and get tribal bonuses too. If you’ve played RPGs before, this is all pretty standard. If you haven’t played before then they’ve provided a slow and detailed run through of what it all means and how to generate a character, as well as a quick synopsis for the experienced players. However, I’d say that the order things are listed in the slow-and-steady version is kinda confusing – e.g. you’re told that you can spend development points on various things including boosting your magic several pages before they tell you how many starting points you get in magic. The quick character synopsis is in a more sensible order, but my advice (especially to novices) is to spend the development points LAST.

There is a pretty comprehensive list of skills, including some high tech ones like Pilot Aircraft and Electrical Engineer that will be rare or non-existent if the GM decides to set the game quite some time after the collapse of the industrialised world. But on the other hand these will be extremely useful for “Wraeththu the Early Years” campaigns or if you wanted to do some kind of crossover with another game background. (I’m already having evil thoughts about merging the Twilight 2000 RPG’s history of the world into the Wraeththu one and having US soldiers stagger back from world war three Europe to find hara gangs running loose in the ruins of glow-in-the-dark cities). And while the rules expect you to play a hara or young human, there is nothing to stop you generating a 45 year old ex-jumbo jet pilot if the GM agrees. After all, the game background states that only human males aged 14 to 21 can be turned into Wraeththu with any chance of success… so that leaves a hell of a lot of the human race unconverted.

Skill rolls are done on a d20: roll under Skill + relevant modifiers, which is nice and simple. Beginning characters are going to be quite weak skill wise, as they don’t get that many points to spend. The rules say that an average skill level is 8, and that you should try to get your skills about level 6 to 12. However, you are only going to have between 53 and 63 points to spend on skills – so that’s only 5 to 10 skills you can afford to buy, including combat styles and combat skills. So if you want to be an outdoorsman type and take Hunting, Tracking, Trapping, Stealth, Survival, Animal Ken and Archery, then you are going to be poor to average at all of them and pretty much clueless at everything else in life.

I think this is deliberate – the characters are supposed to be fairly young with only a few years practice at doing what they do. The rules state that someone with a skill level of 15 in something is a trained professional of many years standing, so if you have First Aid 15 then you are a professional paramedic, not someone who got taught a bit of CPR in a half day long “health and safety at work” course. On the other hand, it does mean that if you want the skills that have prerequisites (such as Toxicology which requires Chemistry and Biology), your character may end up unable to walk and chew gum at the same time.

There IS a default system for the skills, to try and balance this low skill point pool. When defaulting, you roll under a stat (with a choice of two stats, which is a nice touch). There’s a common sense core built into this default – ‘generic’ skills like Climbing are at -6, whilst ’specialist’ skills like Doctor are at -15. Since beginning characters will have stats from 4 to 15, and most will be in the middle somewhere, you can see that successfully defaulting to a specialist skill simply isn’t going to happen! Even the -6 is a bit harsh, and dice happy GMs are advised to take note that if they insist on making all the characters roll Climbing to scramble over a 5 foot high garden wall, then the game is going to turn into a scene from the Keystone Kops.

What they’ve done with the magic system is very intriguing to someone like me, who is a scientist to the core. The background fluff on how it all works basically says Ye Cannae Change the Laws of Physics! Magic works, but it has to do so within a context where science works too, and where the universe gets very upset if you try to do stuff that seriously messes with reality as we know it. This has 2 game effects – firstly the magician (for want of a better word) had better know the underlying art, craft or science before he starts trying to do a magical version of it. For instance if you don’t understand human or hara biology, then you’ll be crap at Healing Magic no matter how many magic points you’ve got to throw around. A qualified doctor, on the other hand, will make a great psychic healer: first he does all the mundane stuff like setting the broken bones and dishing out the painkillers, then he accelerates the natural healing with a bit of magic and a good bedside manner.

The second effect that this science hand-in-hand with magic has is that players will have to be subtle and imaginative to use it without accumulating bad luck and adverse effects in the shape of Probability (rather like Paradox in WoD Mage). Influencing your enemy’s horse to put its foot down a rabbit hole, fall and throw him from the saddle is fine, because accidents like that can occur naturally. Having the horse explode to throw him from the saddle isn’t, because horses aren’t normally noted for their explosive properties. (NOTE: I’ve only ever played 2 games of 1 st Edition Mage, one tedious beyond belief and one average to dull, so I’ve avoided it since and am not an expert in its game mechanics – but this system seems very similar.)

Overall the magic is pretty freeform and again rather like WoD Mage, in that there are different areas of magic you can choose to put points in (Earth, Air, Spirit, Kinetic, etc) and the player describes what effect he’s trying to achieve with these rather than a Dungeons & Dragons style “I cast Darkness 10 Foot Radius” and not one millimetre more or less shall ye have. Magic also works best if several people combine forces and take a decent amount of time – no firing off a lightning bolt every combat round: a lot of this will be slow and ritualised stuff. In theory EVERYONE can do magic, but from my experience running Tribe 8, the players who haven’t specialised in it won’t bother trying to use it because they’ll have such a low rate of success.

The Combat System

And so onto combat… This is my biggest bugbear with the Wraeththu RPG because, as I mentioned earlier, it is complex and the writers decline to give an example of play. Even some of the character generation bits related to combat where they DO give examples take a few readings through before the penny drops. (TIP: the Base Combat modifiers are the ones on the character sheet in square brackets; the General Combat modifiers are the ones in boxes.)

The combat round (called a phase) is divided up into 5 slices, and who goes when depends on how many actions a round they get and their initiative. At first glance I had horrible flashbacks to the Aftermath combat system and the PhD in chartered accountancy you needed to keep track of who was doing what, when and for how long. Fortunately Wraeththu hasn’t gone quite that berserk.

You’d have to be the most fumble fingered character (Dexterity 4, the minimum possible for PCs) and choose to wield the most cumbersome or slow to reload weapons (zweihander sword or composite bow) to achieve the paltry rate of only 1 action per phase. Most players will have 5 to 8 attacks per phase, depending on the weapon used. So memories of Aftermath where some players grew up, got married and had children while waiting for their turn in the combat phase to arrive were put to rest. As there are only 5 slices per phase, anyone who has 6 or more attacks can use the spare ones for extra actions or to react to what opponents have done (e.g. to dodge or parry). I like a lot the flexibility and creativity that brings to combat. With practice, this looks like it could be a very cinematic game.

If you prefer games with a lot of combat in them, then during character generation the GM should encourage everyone to make sure that they finish up with 6 or more actions with their favourite weapon. But bear in mind that the writers do warn that combat is fairly lethal – it doesn’t take many hits to remove a character’s ability to fight back and/or to kill them. And the GM may have to stamp on players who min-max and end up with 15 actions a phase and a skill level of 20! They won’t have enough points left to tell the difference between a Yorkshire terrier and Godzilla, but they’ll be able to kill either faster than a speeding bullet.

One drawback of the complexity of the combat system means that Wraeththu is NOT an entry-level game. A group of complete novices are just going to stumble around looking confused – this game needs an experienced RPGer as GM, otherwise a lot of the subtleties and neat features that this combat system offers are going to get lost in the large amount of book-keeping needed to track what the bad guys are up to. In fact, it has the feel of a combat system best taught to you by someone who already knows how it all works. Having play-tested it with a few friends, I can already see a few rules that might get dumped to speed up and de-complicate play. And a bag of tokens to track who has got how many actions left is a very useful game aid. That’s a habit I developed from Twilight 2000, where some of my players were sufficiently inattentive that they could never remember how many actions they had left, and others would try to sneak in an extra one if the GM didn’t keep tabs on them.

Characters have both Minor and Major wound points. If you run out of Minor wounds you fall unconscious. You get them back through natural healing or any sort of medical aid – normal or magical. Major wounds is what kills you. Neither your body’s natural healing nor First Aid, nor Folk Medicine can fix Major Wounds – which is a bit harsh as a game mechanic, and from a real world perspective it means that no wild animal ever recovers from a serious injury! You need the Doctor skill or magic to heal Major Wounds. Basically this means that while the flow of combat is likely to be very cinematic, the consequences of combat dump you back into the harsh world of characters dying because the ambulance didn’t get them to A&E in time…

I think that makes this the sort of combat system where the GM may be rolling dice simply to give him or herself a second or two to think about what the story needs, rather than to pay any attention to what numbers come up. For example, imagine the story structure is (1) get called to a murder scene and asked to investigate, (2) find some clues, (3) fight with some thugs hired by the bad guy to prevent you solving the crime, (4) find some clues, (5) head to the bad guy’s lair for a big showdown. In this case the GM needs to make sure that none of the PCs get a broken limb or a gunshot wound in the fight with the thugs, otherwise they’ll have to sit out parts 4 and 5 and get really bored. As this is the style of GMing I use anyway, it is no effort for me to continue it in Wraeththu.

The Armour system is one thing I’m very likely to dump or introduce lots of house rules on. For instance, the penalties for wearing armour are horrendous and will reduce most beginning characters’ combat skills to “which end of the knife is the pointy one?” levels of competence. Some of the armour is pretty useless too – with the mechanics as they stand, a kevlar vest does precisely nothing to impede the progress of a rifle bullet through your body. Makes you wonder why they became so popular with the police and military, really!

Cool stuff about the combat system:

• The idea of writing down all your modifiers to the combat skill during character generation and then never having to look anything up during play. If you have Pistol skill it doesn’t matter if you tell the GM you are walking calmly in the door and shooting, or rolling acrobatically in the door and shooting, or snatching an unfamiliar weapon off the floor and shooting – the number you need to roll is already written down.
• Having spare actions to spend where you like during the phase.
• Being able to spend any unused actions from this round to increase your initiative next phase.
• If you make your To Hit roll by 5 or more, you can do Major rather than Minor damage (weapon permitting).

Annoying things about the combat system:

• Some combat skills require a ‘combat style’ as a prerequisite and some don’t.
• Combat styles limit your skill level – that’s too much book-keeping for me, plus they eat up a considerable chunk of your already scanty skill points.
• Penalties for using armour are too harsh.
• If they are going to have an “all or nothing penetrates” rule for armour, it is better to relate it to the amount of damage done, rather than a weapon statistic.
• No bloody examples of an actual combat are given!

A few of the confusions about the combat system were cleared up by asking questions on the Wraeththu RPG forums (now sadly deceased), so hopefully if there is a second edition, those bits will be addressed in the game. But I still want blow by blow examples of a short combat! Even if I have to write the bloody thing myself…

Trying It Out

First off was a playtest of the Wraeththu combat system (and that of Secret of Ziran), by those of us left gameless when half of our regular Stargate group went off on holiday. We used the pre-gen characters from the back of the book, and did about as well as could be expected for two people unfamiliar with a complex game system trying to run 3 characters each. The session threw up some questions about what modifiers to use for Dodge, and when they applied – those questions were answered on the RPG forums.

It also flagged up a potential munchkin alert! One of the pre-gens (Dimentis) has a Brawling skill of 16, where most of the other characters have combat skills of 3 to 8. When modifiers are applied, this means that Dimentis has a To Hit of 24, a Dodge of 20, gets 10 attacks a round and does an extra 5 points of Minor Damage. Remember that this is a system where you roll under your skill on a d20. Dimentis never misses, rarely gets hit, and if he uses a broken bottle in a bar brawl and thus gets to do Major Damage he can kill a human in 2 blows. He might have to take 3 to kill a hara. The only way to deal with him in the playtest was for one of the characters with guns to win the initiative and shoot the crap out of him before he could close with them – which was difficult, given his dodge and large number of combat actions.

Okay – so note to self to not make the NPCs like Dimentis, and to slap an upper limit on combat skills when I’m doing tailored pre-gens for an actual game. (Memories of Deadlands surfaced, where one PC could shoot the sherrif, run the length of Main Street, punch the deputy, run back again, get on his horse and gallop off into the sunset – and all in the time that it took the rest of us to pull the trigger once. I have vowed never, ever, ever to inflict that sort of irritation on my players). I start rolling up pre-gens… and discover that beginning characters get bugger all equipment, unless you’ve blown a lot of your development points in resources. I generously dole out several items more than the rules permit, otherwise they are going to have to sell their clothes to buy food!

Then I type out some cheat-sheets to summarise the combat and magic systems for newbies, write a one-off game and recruit some players for it. An email with a blurb on Wraeththu goes out to one of the local RPG clubs I am a member of – a few replies come in and we’re off. There were 3 players: one guy who I had never met before, who hadn’t read any of the books but had looked at the RPG website and fancied being a Sulh. The second I had gamed with in a Twilight 2000 and another military SF campaign – he’d not read Wraeththu but liked other books by Storm Constantine. And the 3 rd is a friend who I’ve gamed with on and off for about 15 years. He borrowed The Bewitchments of Love and Hate from me and had got about 1/3 rd of the way into it by the time the date of the game arrived. They played a Colurastes and a Varr, respectively.

The game was a 5 hour session including a quick run thru the game mechanics at the start, and it went well. All the clumsy bits were due to me having too much info-dump at the start of the plot. Combat never got a full test, as the players either avoided confrontation, did sneaky things with magic instead, got the drop on the NPCs… or persuaded other NPCs to do their fighting for them! Everyone said they enjoyed it, and in chatter afterwards with some of them the general consensus was that they would have preferred their non-combat skill levels to be a bit greater, and that it felt like the sort of game where you needed multiple sessions for the inter-tribal politics and human-hara conflicts to develop and become more familiar and more interesting. I’m using the feedback to tighten up the plot and intend to run the game again as a one-off at small cons.

A Gamer’s Perspective on the RPG World versus the Novels’ World

In some ways, the world described in the Wraeththu RPG is a little schizophrenic. This is because of a discrepancy between what needs to be portrayed in a game, versus what was portrayed in the books. Characters in the books may carry guns or drive cars, and there is the odd splash of urban decay as backstory but, at their heart, the novels are fantasy novels. These are stories of world shaping magic, palaces, citadels and treks across the wilderness on horseback.

And as fantasy novels, they – and hence the gameworld – suffer rather from an “all chiefs and no indians” effect. That fact that in order to HAVE a functioning palace with sumptuous throne room you need armies of peasants and servants to do all the tedious stuff like muck out the stables, weave the carpets and wash the dishes, gets rather glossed over in most fantasy novels. Storm Constantine, to her credit, does mention these sorts of people in her novels but – and that’s a large but – the books are set decades after the RPG. The novels depict several established kingdoms with Wraeththu filling all society’s roles from peasants doing subsistence level agriculture, through middle class merchants to the aristocracy. And presumably whole armies of silkworm breeders, as silk crops up a lot as the fabric of choice for the wealthy elite!

The game on the other hand, is supposed to be set earlier than this. The Wraeththu are still finding their feet in a shattered world. Humans are still abundant (otherwise the Wraeththu would find it a lot more difficult to find males of the right age group to convert). In fact the RPG states the human population of North America has declined to 40%, so that means there are still 145 million humans slopping about Mexico, Canada and the USA. For context: that was about the population size of the USA alone in 1947, so you are going to be tripping over humans pretty regularly, and there are certainly enough of them about for governments to function, even if TV and motor transport aren’t as common as they used to be. Hell, the entire population of the world was only 150 million in 1 AD, and humans weren’t exactly on the brink of extinction back then…

Substantial chunks of the Wraeththu population became Wraeththu when they were clueless adolescents who knew nothing about how the world works, and then immediately cut themselves off from – or slaughtered – the older people that could teach them how to farm pigs, or run a deep sea trawler, or smelt steel, or knit socks, or set broken bones, or fire a mortar, or set up a decent perimeter defence. Psychic powers or not, loads of them should be starving to death or getting their arses kicked by older, more experienced, better armed and better organised humans, e.g. cops, the US National Guard, the regular military, or survivalist nutters. After all, becoming Wraeththu might confer instant good looks, but it doesn’t give you an instant tactical genius akin to Alexander the Great or Napoleon. And even those guys screwed up sometimes!

In the novels, the Wraeththu have won out over humanity because of Destiny with a capital D. Mankind’s time was over and the universe set about getting rid of them, so that their replacements could step into their shoes. However, in the RPG, 145 million pairs of those shoes are still occupied in Megalithica (North America) alone. The game therefore has to attempt a rather uneasy balance between a post-apocalypse science fantasy setting (Mad Max with magic) and the almost high-fantasy of the novels.

There are some game mechanics touches that achieve this balance nicely: the “Ye Cannae Change the Laws of Physics” attitude of the magic system, for example, or the character age limits on certain skill levels. On the other hand, in terms of RPG background information, sometimes this post-apocalypse element is almost invisible. I as a GM need to know what those millions of humans have done or are doing. Some outlines of how an example government is coping or falling apart. A couple of paragraphs on different types of surviving human communities. An idea whether the territory of any given Wraeththu tribe has humans scattered all over it, or clumped in specific locations. A timeline of how long it took the various Wraeththu tribes to establish their territories and how secure they are there. For instance, is a stranger travelling across Varr territory akin to someone travelling across occupied France in WW2, or across Roman Britain during the Boudican rebellion, or neither of these?

Some of this detail does exist in the game, e.g. there is a page and a bit section entitled “The Human Threat” (p107) that gives hints of what some human governments are up to, but the majority of these are “off the map” in Asia. If the Chinese government does decide to launch an ICBM filled with biological weapons at North America, it is not exactly the sort of thing that newly created characters living as a streetgang in Seattle will be able to deal with.

Other useful info is deeply hidden and needs a lot of effort by the GM to find it. For instance, the RPG relates on page 55 a tale about Manticker and Thiede having a squabble over the politics/destiny of the Wraeththu, which ends up in a fist fight. Mid-way through the fight, the pair get a premonition that a mega-tsunami is on its way, and they and all their Wraeththu followers leave the area before disaster strikes.

All very lovely background fluff, but it skims over 2 vital pieces of information for a GM-to-be, namely: (1) this is the point in time that the people who will become Tribe Gelaming split off from the people who will remain as Tribe Uigenna. And (2) this happens in New York, so Wraeththu have managed to get pretty damn widespread in North America BEFORE the majority of the tribal identities or tribal territories detailed in the RPG have even come into existence.

As a GM I want that sort of information presented in up-front, no-nonsense terms. I don’t want to have to unpick flavour text or to re-read the novels to work it out. Dammit, I want a timeline! It doesn’t have to be a prescriptive “on 23 rd Feb 2012 at 3 pm precisely such-and-such happened”. It doesn’t have to be available to the characters or to the players – although it would be useful for character background stuff. All I want is this sort of thing slapped in a sidebar somewhere:

• The first Wraeththu discovers he can make more Wraeththu
• About blah blah years later there are 50 in their city of origin. The original tribeless Wraeththu split into the Uigenna and the Unneah. Meanwhile the Middle East gets nuked in a war.
• XYZ time later the Wraeththu have spread to many cities in the USA and Canada, and number approximately blah blah.
• Sometime between ABC and DEF years later a few Wraeththu manage to get to Europe and the Middle East. Humans discover the existence of the Wraeththu.
• The proto-Gelaming split off from the Uigenna. The mega-tsunami wrecks many North Atlantic coastal towns and cities.
• Roughly blah blah months/years later some discontented Uigenna split off to become the Varr Tribe.
• Manticker the Seventy does the thing that gets him his bloody nickname.
• Etc etc.

A lot of this is to help a GM – particularly one who is unfamiliar with the Wraeththu Mythos – to decide the flavour of their games and what snippets to feed to the players. Or when to set their game: the aftermath of the big quake in the western USA, or the first Wraeththu to arrive in the UK could both be interesting scenarios, so it would be nice to know which tribes are “valid” ones for those time periods.

Human Interest

As mentioned above, there are still a lot of humans about, but they get scant mention in the RPG. There is a 2 page section on Women & Inception, which includes some nice points about potential Wraeththu attitudes to women, women’s attitudes to Wraeththu and men’s possible attitudes to women in a post-Wraeththu world. However, most of this seems aimed at individual roleplay tips for players or describing the world of the far future, not the here-and-now of the game that a GM needs.

The game doesn’t cover these two subsets of humanity: men who want to be Wraeththu but can’t be, and Wraeththu who were forcibly incepted and would like to go back to being men, thank you very much. Given that inception only has a high success rate on those under 21, I would imagine some tribes have given up incepting older men altogether. And even if it did work on older blokes, I can’t see many of the tribal leaders wanting to incept any human older, wiser, more politically savvy or used to having social, military or political clout than they themselves are. In short, nerdy adolescents and jocks are okay, but the real alpha males of the human world would be way too much of a threat. Alan Sugar, George Bush and the Pope are right out! This sort of scenario would provide both roleplaying tips and plot hooks for the GM to use.

Wraeththu that don’t want to be Wraeththu are also good story fodder for a GM, or character development for the players, though the angst-bunnies may take it too far. What’s the suicide rate like after forced inceptions, one wonders? And surely some of these guys were married and had kids? Do they just abandon all contact with their families, or make a hopeless attempt to go back? How does the latter gel with the “no Wraeththu corpses should fall into human hands” edict? “Um, yes, sir, we retrieved all the corpses from the battlefield, but then Bob went home to his wife and those two soldiers we incepted last week headed back to their unit…”

Actually, on the whole “no Wraeththu corpses should fall into human hands” thing, I would recommend any potential GM goes and watches the Black Hawk Down movie or reads the book of the same by Mark Bowden, just to see how difficult the “leave no man behind” policy is in a warlord ruled urban area!

I’m not sure from the RPG if the lack of any Wraeththu wanting to keep contact with their human friends and relatives is (a) an accidental omission, (b) an unspoken view that once you become Wraeththu you’ll automatically think it is the greatest thing since sliced bread even if you were horrified by the idea beforehand, or (c) a typical RPG assumption that all PCs exist in a complete social vacuum devoid of any family and friends. Of course, if Bob does try to go back to his wife, then perhaps she or the neighbours will chase him off with a shotgun! More story fodder…

I’m wondering if a lot of this material is slated to appear in either the Player’s Guide or the Storyteller’s Handbook, advertised as “Coming Soon” in the back of the RPG? Time will tell.

Improvements they should add for the 2 nd edition:

• Goes without saying really – correct all the typos and other errata.
• Put more of the summary statements on number crunching into the sidebars. The game could do with making those stand out more, and losing a few flavour text quotes to do so won’t hurt (there are a few repeats of the latter anyway, and far too many from the Uigenna tribe as compared to the others).
• Examples of combat!
• Get the sample characters to tally with the rules as given (e.g. some of them don’t have the prerequisites that they should do to get certain skills like Toxicology, and don’t have their weapon stats written down)
• Give the real world names for cities, countries and geographical features. Overly pretentious hara might be referring to the Atlantic Ocean as the Girdle of Tiamat, but the humans aren’t!
• Add some sort of flow chart or family tree to show which combat skills do and don’t need a combat style to use. A summary page really, like the one they have with the skills list.
• Or maybe make the combat style a fixed point cost, rather than something you have to continually improve as you improve your combat skills.
• Put the “How to invent your own combat styles” INTO the appendices and take the “weapons stats and what they mean” OUT of the appendices and put it in the combat skills section of char gen where it would be far more useful.
• Put the stats, base damage and attacks per phase calculations for Brawl/Unarmed combat under that title in the close combat weapons table, not under Improvised. It took me aeons to find it.
• Examples of combat!
• Make more room on the character sheet for skills and combat skills.
• Put a reminder in the experience points section that you’ll have to improve skills that give other skills a bonus (e.g. +3 to Demolitions if Architect is the same level or higher) to keep that bonus when spending xp.
• Explain whether you have to improve the pre-requisite skills before you are allowed to improve the skill itself with xp (e.g. would you have to improve your Biology and Chemistry before you were allowed to put up your Toxicology skill?)
• Don’t call the partial scenario “A Sample Adventure” – it’s not a complete adventure, so isn’t going to be much help to beginners wanting to run their first game. Call it “Example of Game Flow” or something.
• Make resource points a bit cheaper, or let characters with resources 0 have a few more items.
• Re-write the armour rules to make them simpler and more realistic.
• More details on what the humans are up to.
• Did I mention examples of combat?

Neat bits they should leave as they are:

• The dice ‘flip book’ pictures. I have an irrational prejudice against d4s as they don’t roll properly and they hurt when you stand or sit on them. So this handy method of being able to ‘roll’ a d4 without having to carry a pocketful of the wretched things around is nice.
• Calculating all the combat bonuses for using particular weapons, aiming, blocking, leaping etc during character generation and then writing them down on the character sheet so you don’t have to constantly look things up during the game.
• The points system as an alternative to dice rolling in character gen.
• The Ye Canna Change The Laws of Physics basis to the magic system.
• The artwork of various wraeththu.
• The lexicons – though perhaps as one big one at the front or back, rather than 3 small ones. And keep the jokes about tables!

Overall Summary

I’m pretty happy with Wraeththu: From Enchantment to Fulfillment. It has a lot of flaws, but no more than a lot of first edition games I’ve seen. Certainly they are mainly of the sort that a little hard work by the GM can put right – e.g. a few house rules for character gen or combat after you’ve done a play through or two, or writing your own timeline. Of course, being inherently lazy, I’d prefer if I didn’t have to do stuff like writing a timeline myself!

I’d say that the game mechanics don’t top my favourite systems like Call of Cthulhu, WoD, GURPS, and first ed Blue Planet (with house rules), but they don’t push any of the buttons that drives me to frothing hatred of d20 , and they are miles better than Aftermath, Fudge,Living Steel or Rifts.

Given the level of paranoia, misinformation and ranting about the game that has gone on over the internet, however, finding players might be more of a problem. Ideally I’d want 4 to 6 for any sort of campaign. But then again, in one of the clubs I belong to, finding players willing to do anything other than d20 AD&D dungeon crawls is next to impossible anyway, as the MegaTraveller and Fate GMs have found to their cost… sigh.