Hi! I had a burst of design energy that I wanted to share with y’all. As usual, it is nowhere near finished, but I wanted to put it out there for all of you to have a look at.
Deathspeakers is my love letter to Wraith: the Oblivion, a wonderful setting and concept for a game trapped in less than ideal mechanics for playing in it. It establishes a new Crew type, the titular Deathspeakers, and expands upon what lies beyond the ghost-field.
I’ll have more for you as I keep writing, of course, but I hope that this doc is at least enough to see where I want to go with it. Let me know what you think!
I’ve put a bunch of more things in the doc since last night. Started working on more concrete mechanics for the crew upgrades, and building out the fiction a bit more.
Thank you! Very glad that it’s evocative in all the right ways.
I decided to add a short but sweet section on the graceful final death of the Deathspeaker; venturing into the Oblivion Citadel at the end of the world to see what awaits inside.
It’s quite timely, too, as my Whisper and I (GM) have really started to explore the worlds on the other side. So I’ve been plotting them out a bit. Very cool stuff.
Finally took some time to start laying out the new factions of the game. The goal is to have one or more of each existing type, then a whole bunch of them in the Near Shadow, and maybe one or two in the Far.
Each of the Near Shadow factions also has an associated Heartwind of the same Tier and Hold, their innermost desires and thoughts laid bare. The Heartwind is in the Far Shadow, “physically”, but since they are so intimately linked to the Near Shadow factions, they’ll be placed there.
I love how one of the low-hanging fruits in the shadow is Roric himself - being a relatively weak Heartwind, murdering him is the easiest way to own a Heart and crossing the Veil freely.
Also - I think it might be better to limit No Room Among the Damned to once per session per crew, and adding a stress\trauma cost, or at least adressing what happens to the harm (gone? go down to level 3?)
Reworked No Room Among The Damned slightly, to function as special armor against fatal harm and costing a downtime action in exchange for nullifying the harm entirely.
If I were to write up a starting situation for Deathspeakers, which I very well might, it would definitely involve dealing with Roric. It’s a good little microcosm of everything that Deathspeakers is about. Going after the Heartwind directly (and the Far Shadow in general) is meant to be a more desperate approach for dealing with the problem, but a particularly bold and daring crew could certainly go down that route.
Updated with what I would consider to be the last mechanical step necessary to be a full-fledged crew; the Claims map! Did some minor reworkings of the factions, and added another.
The Factions are so evocative! I want to play a campaign as The Skovlan Queen crew. Keep going!
I never got the opportunity to play Wraith: the Oblivion, but it along with Changeling: the Lost have always been fascinating to me.
I have had the chance to facilitate Kaare Berg’s Shadows and Ash, which is based on Harper’s Gothic/Echo and was inspired by Wraith: the Oblivion and Seigmen’s Döderlein.
Sadly, the link to Shadows and Ash seems to be dead. Let me know if you’re not familiar and would like a copy (it’s two pages). The ancestral game DNA from Otherkind dice to Gothic/Echo & Apocalypse World to Blades in the Dark and now your Deathspeakers forms quite a cool lineage.
