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Love Beyond Death
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May 17, 2018
Love Beyond Death is an interesting book, if for no other reason than its capacity to serve as a link between games that came before and games that came after the point in time in which it was published. I'm not sure you could publish the book today, as the first part would likely be in a wildly different medium, and the second really suffers from a genre disconnect.
The first part of the book consists of a lot of advice on how to use romance in a game. While some of it mentions Wraith specifically, most of it is advice that could be used for any TRPG: Listen to your players, tailor your thematic approaches to their interests, and know and respect their boundaries. All great advice, especially in a game that uses characters powered by emotion. The book is, to me, worth a purchase for that advice alone; however, in 2018, I expect I'd read this on a quality gaming blog, rather than in a game book.
The pitched adventures here are, well, they're pretty bog-standard quest-giver adventures, which flies in the face of all the advice given in the first part of the book. The biggest challenge for pre-written adventures is that they have to be written for a broad audience, where players could theoretically bring any PC of any build to the table. This results in exactly the sorts of adventures presented here: Quest-giver X has quest Y for N+1 Player Characters. The problem is that Wraith very specifically runs on the Passions of the PCs, which may or may not be stimulated by the presented problem. To be honest, I'm not certain it's possible to write a Wraith Chronicle without knowing exactly what sorts of characters the players are playing, and that certainly colors my thinking on the matter. A more sandbox-y collection of locations and NPCs would probably have gone better with the advice up front.
Overall, I recommend the book, but also recommend dispensing with the plots of the stories and pillaging the NPCs and locations in the back for your own use.
The first part of the book consists of a lot of advice on how to use romance in a game. While some of it mentions Wraith specifically, most of it is advice that could be used for any TRPG: Listen to your players, tailor your thematic approaches to their interests, and know and respect their boundaries. All great advice, especially in a game that uses characters powered by emotion. The book is, to me, worth a purchase for that advice alone; however, in 2018, I expect I'd read this on a quality gaming blog, rather than in a game book.
The pitched adventures here are, well, they're pretty bog-standard quest-giver adventures, which flies in the face of all the advice given in the first part of the book. The biggest challenge for pre-written adventures is that they have to be written for a broad audience, where players could theoretically bring any PC of any build to the table. This results in exactly the sorts of adventures presented here: Quest-giver X has quest Y for N+1 Player Characters. The problem is that Wraith very specifically runs on the Passions of the PCs, which may or may not be stimulated by the presented problem. To be honest, I'm not certain it's possible to write a Wraith Chronicle without knowing exactly what sorts of characters the players are playing, and that certainly colors my thinking on the matter. A more sandbox-y collection of locations and NPCs would probably have gone better with the advice up front.
Overall, I recommend the book, but also recommend dispensing with the plots of the stories and pillaging the NPCs and locations in the back for your own use.
Displaying 1 of 1 review