Damn. These wraiths land.

For months I squat down to the lowest shelf of my FLGS and swipe through Wraithlands, written by Leckie with art by Paul Jon Milne. The art is heavy, bold, and consuming. The system light, a mixture of hex crawling and storytelling. Eventually, I can’t resist. I pull the trigger.

Good move.

What a Hook

Wraithlands takes place on the celtic island of Nullona. Here, a thick fog called The Haar twists anything it touches, for good or ill. Devils called the Underkirk Lairds enslave the land, forcing the deceased into an eternity of hard labor instead of the restful slumber they are owed.

But there are heroes: wraiths. Those once dead, chosen by The Haar to live again and resist the horrors besetting the land. To die and be reborn and die again in service to the prayers of Nullona’s people. How much you remember of your past life is up to you, but what matters is the present.

What a System

The mechanics are simple. Roll a pool of d6s depending on your circumstances. The classic 6 is success, 4-5 is a setback or partial success, and 1-3 is disaster.

You get dice for:
– Being unharmed.
– Using an appropriate relic (a fancy item).
– An ally’s aide.
– Having the upper hand/targeting a weakness.

The system is so simple that this is the character sheet:

Your background is a mix of class and starting items, but there are no mechanical differences between the backgrounds. Everything is fictional differences, from your history to what your items can do.

Maybe you’re a bogwitch with a relic that gathers the last thoughts of corpses? Or perhaps a three-armed otter with an enchanted hand that follows your bidding, cut off from a greedy robber?

The enemies? Just descriptions. No stats.

Everything is fictional positioning, consequences, and communication. It works beautifully.

What a Mess

The majority of the book is a hexcrawl with submaps and locations. The amount of game and roleplaying you can get out of these descriptions are excellent. But there are two problems, and one of them might not actually be a problem.

Organization

The book is organized by each sub-area in the island’s hex map, with a bestiary and items at the end. Enemies are in italics, while items are underlined. It should work, but having the referenced materials so far from where you are in the book is a logistical frustration.

Even worse, the pdf is not bookmarked or hyperlinked. You’ll need to remember where you are if you want to return back after checking out an enemy or item. I ran the game online and eventually resorted to having the book open to one page and the pdf opened to another for less flipping. Not ideal.

Nullon-wha?

Nullona has history, it has factions, it has deep knowledge that you can, possibly, glean from reading every sentence of the book and compositing fragments together. At first, I though this was another organizational issue. But in hindsight, I think it’s on purpose. I don’t think you’re supposed to have details. I think your group is supposed to find them in play.

What an Imagination

You only know the brief snippets of information the book gives you. It can be frustrating if you’re searching for something definitive to give to your players, for the knowledge a GM is supposed to wield, but Wraithlands asks you to treat it as it does everything else: it’s fictional positioning you create at the table with your players.

Take a look at this merchant my players encountered early on:

There is not a detailed item list with costs and descriptions. I just … went with it. We played and found out.

With too much direction, the Icon Peddler encounter would have gone in a very narrow direction–not bad, but more prescribed. Instead, my players asked if the Peddler might have carved the topography of the area. I asked them to roll to see if they could spy such a topography.

They rolled a disaster.

I described in great detail, the curves, crests, and valleys carved into a block of wood. How they matched up with the surroundings. How the connection finally came together in their minds as they realized … the Peddler was a lonely pervert who had designed a woman’s body, one that could be easily mistaken for topography. The carving had no limbs or head. Just an awful, crude, cursed torso.

It was supposed to be a joke. A rug pull.

The players went wild for it, purchasing it immediately. They later encountered wolves and threw the carving at the wolves as a weapon, hoping its cursed nature would cause tremendous harm … but they rolled more disasters. And without any hand leading me, I was free to do the unthinkable.

A wolf ate the cursed object and painfully transfigured into the carving. Now floated a half-formed god, a flesh, feminine torso with no head or limbs. Even worse, decapitated heads and amputated limbs are scattered across Nullona. As the PCs traveled, they witnessed the godling stealing these lost appendages for its own. That one line of text, without guard rails, led to me creating the big bad that narratively tied together our campaign.

What a Memory

Wraithlands is a game about memory. The PCs have only part of their memories, reflecting on aspects of their past as it relates to the present. Wraiths earn new items telling tales of the great deeds and heartaches of your campaigns at funeral cairns. Dead wraiths are reborn, pulled out of the mist after ceremonies in which they are remembered and celebrated.

And I guarantee, you will remember the stories you created at the table with Wraithlands.

Thanks

Thanks to my players for going on this wild adventure with me and providing such creativity and strong choices. Thanks to Leckie and Paul Jon Milne for creating this. Thanks to my dogs for not standing on their hind limbs and bearing a sword and shield at me.