Horvath’s Hoard

Monsters, Aliens, and Holes In the Ground was penned by enthusiastic RPG collector Stu Horvath as an outgrowth of his other work documenting vintage RPGs, which began with a humble Instagram account and now takes in a weekly podcast. It’s a handsomely-presented coffee table book, offering a sort of tabletop RPG equivalent of A History of the World In 100 Objects in which Horvath goes over his extensive personal collection and picks out RPG books to discuss – core rules primarily, but supplements, adventures, campaign settings, and less easily categorised items also feature.

Rather than simply offering a run-down of Horvath’s favourites, Horvath attempts to select items which help illustrate something about the tabletop gaming zeitgeist. If a game is historically significant or extremely influential, that counts for a lot, but Horvath also allows himself to include a few items which represent noteworthy oddities, intriguing creative dead ends, or outright screwups, because as in other creative fields infamous failures can be just as illustrative as celebrated successes. In addition, Horvath sticks to items from his own collection – he won’t include something he hasn’t heard of, or has not at least at some point owned and been able to make his own assessment of.

In this respect the biggest gap, as he acknowledges in the introduction, are RPGs in languages other than English; I don’t know whether or not Stu is multilingual, but presumably if he was multilingual enough to read and appreciate RPGs written in other languages, he’d have included some here, so this is really a tour through the Anglophone segment of the hobby; we get only second-hand glimpses, via translations, into areas like the Swedish scene, and nothing on Germany or Japan, all territories where games other than D&D rule the roost.

On Ending a LARP II: When It’s Out of Your Control

A while back I wrote an article mulling over the various ways one can conclude a LARP – both in terms of bringing an individual event to a close, and rounding off a campaign. Specifically, though, I was talking about planned endings – endings intended to be exactly that – because as a game runner that’s the type of game you want to design.

Just recently, though, a LARP game I had been playing has experienced a different type of ending – an unplanned one. Crucible was a Vampire: the Requiem LARP run by the Badgers and Jam referee team. It was designed to be a low-budget, low-cost, long-running monthly campaign. The format was structured around sessions taking place once a month in a hired pub function room, and lasting for a few hours of a Saturday afternoon – allowing for a much lesser time commitment than many of the weekend-long LARPs I’ve written about on here previously.

The “ageless creatures in the modern day” concept meant that anyone could come kitted in normal clothes or push the boat out on costuming to the extent that they saw fit, and also meant that it wasn’t incongruous for characters to use smartphones; the latter point meant that the referees could deploy a handy little web portal to manage the use of vampiric Disciplines mid-session, freeing them up from having to referee such things. All of this was supported by a much more simple system than Mind’s Eye Theatre – partially to enable the phone-based resolution in the first place, but also to scale back the barrier to entry and to declutter gameplay (since Mind’s Eye Theatre tends to import a lot of tabletop game mechanics and complications without really thinking about how social LARP games actually play out in practice).

The campaign had started shortly before the COVID pandemic – the first session I attended was the last one before the game went on hiatus as a result of the virus making it dangerous to run sessions and lockdown making it illegal. Whilst many outdoor LARPs opened up again somewhat in 2021-2022, due to outdoor events being more COVID-secure and thanks to the vaccine rollout, Crucible was specifically meant to be a game played in pub function rooms, because that was key to making it widely accessible. As such, the referees decided to wait a bit longer to restart the game – not just to the point where suitable venues were starting to reopen again, but also to the point where they had at least some confidence that we wouldn’t be going back into lockdown after a brief easing, forcing the game to go into hiatus again.

It was therefore mid-2022 when the organisers started to seriously talk about reviving Crucible, canvassing the player base to see how many people were still interested, whether people wanted to keep using their old characters or start fresh with new ones, and so on and so forth. They appeared to have sufficient numbers to make a go of it, and scheduled a return session for the 1st October – but then decided to postpone the return because despite a good number of people saying they wanted to return, an insufficient number of those signed up to actually attend the first planned revival session. (Apparently just enough people signed up to cover the venue hire, but not enough to functionally run the game as envisioned.)

Unbowed and unbroken, Badgers and Jam soldiered on. Deciding that in November-January people were likely busy, they decided to run a poll and see who was still interested despite this latest setback, and which of several possible days for a return session people could say with confidence that they would be able to make. The first Saturday in March seemed to have the numbers, and so a first session was planned for then, with a “first Saturday of the month” schedule going forwards from there.

In fact, I can jot down the actual numbers here – because the referees levelled with us about them afterwards. I was at the March event and enjoyed myself, but I did notice that attendance seemed a little light, and some players I’d had the impression were among the most keen participants in the campaign weren’t there. In fact, although 22 players said they were interested in the game and could make the March date, only 13 actually showed up. The referees had accounted for something like a 25% drop-out rate, which would have left things within the range they considered viable, but 13 players wasn’t quite hacking it.

This put the organisers in a tough spot. They seriously didn’t want to put a guilt trip on people or try and make people feel that they were compelled to attend – players who aren’t specifically enthusiastic to be at your game aren’t going to get anything from it and won’t give their best contribution – and they specifically designed it as a game where it was possible to simply miss a session if you weren’t feeling it in a particular month. At the same time, a certain attendance level was needed to make the game viable in its current design. This was why they disclosed those numbers to us post-event – rather than trying to brush the issue under the mat, the refs took what I thought was a sensible move by being honest with the player base about the precarious situation the campaign was in, and explained that they wouldn’t be able to keep running if we weren’t able to get regular attendance up.

They were also clear about the criteria which they would now start to use to decide whether the campaign was still viable: at the start of each session going forwards they’d take a headcount of everyone who’d made it to the event (and anyone who’d messaged in to say they were running late) and see if they’d hit 14. If they had those numbers, fine, the campaign would keep going. If they had 13 or less, and there wasn’t some form of significant mitigating circumstance intervening, they’d put the campaign on hiatus, taking a vote of those attending on whether to play through one last session or just end it there.

As it happened, at the April event there were only 10 players. The refs had told themselves that if we came in just a little but under expectations, they’d overlook it, but they couldn’t ignore that much of a shortfall – especially when the number of people who said they planned to come, even accounting for possible train strikes on the day (which if I remember right were called off anyway), was substantially higher than that. We near-unanimously voted to play through a session (which you’d expect, because the people present were generally those who were most enthusiastic about the campaign anyway), and then we were left to console the referees and ponder what had transpired.

It is a real shame that this has happened; Crucible was a good game, and may indeed still be a good game if the refs decide to retool, reconfigure, and continue in another form, and if they get the support from the player base necessary to make a go of it. It’s certainly the case that dropouts from LARP events seems to have become a little endemic in the UK scene, and whilst it had increased post-COVID it did happen pre-COVID as well. Sally Poppenbeck did a good guest post over on the LARP Experience blog thinking more about general reasons why COVID may have led to a shift in habits in this respect, but I do want to put some consideration into factors which might or might not have affected Crucible specifically.

Firstly, I suspect games like Crucible need to plan for a higher dropout rate than is average for, say, a weekend-long LARP event (for which the 25% drop-out rate feels like a reasonable tolerance to plan for). Weekend-long events tend to involve more commitment both in terms of time and money (even if the organisers undercharge, travel costs are a thing) and in terms of sheer personal effort than events which unfold over a weekend afternoon.

On the one hand, you would expect people to find it easier to come to an afternoon event than to a weekend event – but I suspect there’s a motivational paradox here. Precisely because it takes way more effort to go to a weekend LARP, I think people tend to be more invested in them. You aren’t going to book for such an event if that weekend is not clear, and once you have booked you are going to keep that weekend clear if you can; once you’ve decided to commit a fair amount of time and money to it, you’re probably going to show unless some dire turn of events prevents you, or if you have some sort of catastrophic loss of confidence in the event, or a mental health wobble makes you not want to leave the house, or whatever.

Conversely, if a game is happening every month on a Saturday afternoon, showing up is easier, but brushing it off is also easier. If you bail on a weekend-long LARP event that’s an entire weekend where you are suddenly at a loose end. However, if your weekend is looking busy with lots of smaller-scale activities, it can be tempting to drop something to leave more space for the rest of the stuff you’re planning to do. And if a game is not a one-off, and happens reasonably regularly, you can expect to blow off a session and be able to come back. That’s what the refs kind of wanted Crucible to be – but it becomes unviable to run the game if the proportion of people who blow it off is so high so frequently.

In addition to all that, I do wonder if the “we’re going on hiatus if we don’t make quorum” announcement accelerated the hiatus a little. I’m not saying that making the announcement was a mistake; quite the reverse. In general, I think it is good and healthy for referees to level with your player base about this sort of thing, both because it’s the honest and transparent thing to do and because trying to put a brave face on things and pretend there’s no problem is rarely the right call when it comes to mental health and morale.

In this specific instance, I think providing clearly-understood criteria for what a viable Crucible looked like was not just honest and transparent, but also a great aid in expectation-setting, as well as a challenge to the player base – it let us all get a picture of how much of a knife-edge the game was on, and helped stimulate us to try and recruit new participants.

Equally, though, if you tell a player base your game is in a fragile state it can be a risky move. In some cases you may find the players rally behind you, re-commit to the game, and pull out the stops to help get things back on course. In other cases, you could find that the player base become more disengaged, not less – if they start expecting that the game might go away, they may become less committed, because they feel less inclined to invest time and creativity in something which might evaporate suddenly.

What’s more likely than either of those extremes is a mixture of reactions – some players become more committed, some begin emotionally disengaging, and some have a more complicated reaction. In my case, for instance, I found I was more determined to make the monthly events because I didn’t want the event to disintegrate because I happened to fancy a lie-in one month, but I also found myself wanting to adapt my approach to the game, because my initial character concept was designed with an eye to undertaking long-term projects, and since I didn’t 100% trust the rest of the player base not to flake I didn’t want to get overly invested in those projects when they might never yield any payoff.

As a result, levelling with your players like this can be a gamble – it might be the prod your player base needs to stop taking the game for granted and do their bit to keep it alive, or it could further sap their morale. Nonetheless, I think it’s a gamble which is worth it because it not only explains the problem, but opens up a basis for conversation and constructive engagement. Several times during Crucible‘s restart, from the initial seeking of expressions of interest to literally the minutes before the final session, I checked in with the referees to calibrate my expectations, explain where I was coming from, and generally make sure they had a clear idea of what level of commitment I was intending to give the game.

Some of those conversations involved saying slightly awkward things. When you’re talking to someone running a game the people-pleasing thing to say is “of course I love your game, of course it’s going great, and of course I’ll definitely make sure to make the next session”. The awkwardness comes when one or more of those things isn’t true – for my part, I thought Crucible was a solid game, and I wouldn’t deliberately want to arrange something which clashed with it, but there’s LARPs out there and other things which I am or might be more enthusiastic for, and whose scheduling isn’t under my control, and which I would probably prioritise over Crucible.

That’s not an easy thing to say, but it is an honest thing to say, and just as player bases deserve honesty from referee teams, so too do referees deserve players who are honest in turn. The whole reason the refs undertook all the labour involved in trying to revive this campaign not once but twice is because people kept telling them that they wanted to participate, but when it came time for people to make good on that… too many of us didn’t show up.

It stings badly enough when you throw an idea out there and, for whatever reason, you don’t get a critical mass of people behind it. In some ways it can sting worse if you do have an apparent critical mass, but then a chunk of the player base didn’t actually mean it when they said “yes, we’ll go out of our way to help you make this game work”.

Sure, some of the drop-outs from the March and April sessions may have been due to illness, emergency, or some other factor outside of the control of the people who dropped out – but I know for a fact that this doesn’t account for 100% of them. Some people simply opted not to show up, prioritised some other game over Crucible, or double-booked themselves with activities whose timing they absolutely did have some level of control over. No one individual is wholly at fault here; this isn’t a situation where I can point the finger and say “That asshole ruined Crucible for the rest of us!” Collectively, however, we as a player base turned out to be shockingly unreliable, and that speaks to a problem with the culture around the game.

It’s entirely legitimate to want to run a game which is easily accessible and doesn’t demand the investment of time and money a weekend LARP does – it’s a good thing to have, and London surely has enough LARPers and gamers to support many such things. At the same time, it’s hard to do that if people are going to treat your game as being utterly disposable. There is surely a middle ground between “blow my entire weekend on this game” levels of commitment and “I simply cannot be bothered to keep the day clear for this LARP” levels of detachment, and it’s frustrating to me that many of my fellow Crucible players don’t seem to have been able to find it.

Sorties Into the Dark Ages

So, despite having been involved in LARP in some capacity for twenty years or so, for a good long while I’d never been to what you might call a “traditional” Vampire: the Masquerade LARP, despite the prominent role those have played in the field over the years. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve been to Vampire LARPs – of both Masquerade and Requiem flavours – but never one which used the venerable Mind’s Eye Theatre system as maintained by By Night Studios.

There’s various factors why that has been the case. I started LARPing in university; at the time, there was a local branch of Camarilla UK (the major Mind’s Eye Theatre-based World of Darkness LARP network), but there was also other options. If you were into a more physically active LARP, with combat actually implemented using pulled blows with latex weapons, Mind’s Eye Theatre wouldn’t be your thing anyway – that system has never used “hard skill” combat but instead uses game mechanics to resolve violence in an abstract fashion. There was a local system which ran frequent afternoon sessions of a Saturday, so if you preferred that, that was what you did.

Mind’s Eye Theatre-esque games are somewhat suited to games which put a strong emphasis on political networking and social skills – but for that there was also alternatives, with at least one (and often several) freeform games which delivered a similar style of play. These would run campaigns in short runs (since they were associated with the local university’s RPG society and so needed to complete their arcs within the academic year due to student turnover), and as the “freeform” title implies tended to be extremely system-light.

This meant there were not much in the way of rules you needed to keep in mind to play, and not much in the way of the sort of long-term baggage that any RPG campaign accumulates over the passage of time. By contrast, the local Camarilla UK game seemed rather unapproachable. The Mind’s Eye Theatre system provided a significant barrier to entry and seemed daunting to handle in play – whilst in a tabletop context it’s much easier to pause and look up a rule when playing a crunchy system, LARPs really thrive on pausing the action as little as possible, so a rules logjam in a LARP can be significantly more disruptive to the play experience than a difficult rules problem in a tabletop context, and needing to keep a large amount of rules information straight in your head to ensure smooth play is a perennial LARP system design issue.

I Ain’t Afraid of No Wraiths

World of Darkness: Ghost Hunters – yet another Kickstarter project from Onyx Path – is another entry in the extensive 20th Anniversary World of Darkness line. It’s a supplement, rather than a standalone core book, and the front cover bills it as being for Wraith: the Oblivion, which is sort of true but not quite the whole story. It’s a Wraith supplement in the sense that ghost hunters are, specifically, ordinary human beings who go looking for spooks, and in the World of Darkness setting that means that if they find what they are actually looking for, they’ll have turned up a Wraith, or at least something Wraith-related; it’s also thematically something of a reimagining of The Quick and the Dead, the old “here’s the mortals that hunt your particular splat” supplement from the original Wraith line.

On the other hand, it doesn’t absolutely require Wraith. It needs one of the 20th Anniversary core rules to explain the basic system stuff, of course – but you don’t need to use the Wraith one for it, and indeed there’s a little appendix at the end giving a simplified system for statting up spooks to use in conjunction with Ghost Hunters if you don’t have Wraith to hand. This is a little reminiscent of the 1st edition New World of Darkness core rules (before that line got renamed Chronicles of Darkness and had the God-Machine Chronicle folded into its new core rulebook), since that book included some brief rules on ghosts to provide something to investigate or be antagonised by if you were running a mortals-only campaign using only that book.

It’s also tempting to compare this book to The Hunters Hunted, in either its original version or its 20th Anniversary edition update. After all, Hunters Hunted was the original “play mortals hunting the supernatural” supplement for the World of Darkness, and a critically revered one at that, and it kicked off the trend for each of the original World of Darkness games to have an associated supplement on a similar theme, The Quick and the Dead being the one they did for Wraith; this process culminated (as far as the original World of Darkness is concerned) with Hunter: the Reckoning, a game which took the “you are playing mortals hunting the supernatural” concept and botched it by making all the PCs “Imbued” – in other words, a new flavour of supernatural individual with their own special powers.

A High Standard of Deviation

Though Paradox’s management of the World of Darkness line has been somewhat haphazard – I’ve long since lost track of who is responsible for writing books, distributing books, and so on but there’s been at least three companies involved entirely distinct from White Wolf and Paradox themselves – things have gone somewhat more smoothly for the Chronicles of Darkness line, largely because (subject to the name change to avoid confusion with the old World of Darkness) Paradox just don’t seem to care about that side of things all that much, so they are happy to let Onyx Path just keep on trucking rather than trying anything fancy with them. That’s ultimately helpful, because Onyx Path have already hit a point which raises difficulties in further expanding the franchise and a particularly interventionist approach from Paradox is unlikely to help.

Chronicles has long since passed the point where it’s produced equivalents to the old World of Darkness game lines. Admittedly, some of the Chronicles equivalents are fairly distant from their World of Darkness forebears, particularly since the resurrection of the original World of Darkness has meant that the Chronicles no longer need to be a safe haven for players of the old games starved for new material. Geist isn’t all that much like Wraith and Demon: the Descent has only hazy thematic connections to Demon: the Fallen. But this varies: even in its second edition, Vampire: the Requiem hits a lot of the same notes as Vampire: the Masquerade, and arguably more artfully.

With the second edition of Chronicles creating some system space between it and the standard World of Darkness iterations of the Storyteller system, and the second editions of the earlier Chronicles games doing a good job of dialling up what worked well and scaling back on what fell flat, to the point where I can confidently say (for example) that Mage: the Awakening is a just plain better game and setting than Mage: the Ascension, which labours under a fatal burden of lingering 1990s nonsense which no amount of well-intentioned labour can quite fix.

However, now Onyx Path has hit this point, it must turn its attention to considering the possibilities of new lines. Some might question the creative necessity of such – I often do – but there is a compelling commercial argument, in the sense that as is often the case with RPG lines core books tend to sell way, way better than supplements do. Still, the tricky thing here is to come up with a splat which feels distinct enough from the existing ones that you can offer a compelling answer to the question “why is this not just a supplement for Earlier Game?”, and which has a cool, vivid elevator pitch which quickly and succinctly sums up the appeal of the line to get people hooked.

The most recent-but-one attempt at this, Beast: the Primordial, was something of a botch, for many and varied reasons, not all of which were to do with the actual design of the game (but which certainly left a bad taste in people’s mouths and made them disinclined to be generous to it). To my mind, one of those reasons is that any elevator pitch you offered for the game would either be a) way too long and complicated to be meaningfully described as an “elevator pitch” or b) extremely misleading due to all the detail it left out. I hear word that the original elevator pitch for the game was something like “greedy dragons”, and whilst you can sort of squint and see how you got to the end product from there, that’s a pitch which misses out almost everything which is actually important or distinctive about the game.

Beast, for all its other faults, is actually based around creatures which are a very, very specific type of entity, interpreted in a fairly specific way; in many ways, even the title of the game is a problem, because Beast suggests something way broader than the tight focus the game actually goes with. Sure, sure, there’s these connections to ancient mythology, but you wouldn’t start with any of those creatures and work from there to figure out that they must be something like Beasts, it’s very much a case of starting with the Beast concept and then finding tenuous reasons to connect them to old folklore enttiies.

The upshot of this, plus a plethora of other issues, means that Beast to all appearances is a critical and commercial flop, and it feels like Onyx Path have quietly cancelled the line. It’s still in theory on sale, but there is sweet fuck all in the way of future products in the pipeline for it that I can find on Onyx Path’s product schedule or in their latest weekly blog post. (I’m a little sad to see nothing planned for Vampire: the Requiem, come to think of it, but I imagine their work on 5th Edition Vampire: the Masquerade supplements takes a lot of the creative oxygen which might otherwise have gone to that.)

Step up Deviant, the Renegades, a game which takes a radically different approach to expanding the Chronicles of Darkness series and ends up being a much more appealing product as a result.

Technocracy Reloaded, Ascension Declined

As the title implies, Technocracy Reloaded is the Technocracy-themed supplement for Mage: the Ascension 20th Anniversary Edition, a sort of fresh take on the much-respected Guide to the Technocracy from previous editions. From this perspective it’s… it’s fine. It’s a competently designed bit of work which makes the best of a challenging task – that task being to update the Technocracy concept for an era when anti-vaxx sentiments and QAnon conspiracism suggest that scientific rationalism is neither a villain nor an unchallenged, dominant worldview these days. On a quick read, I found nothing especially wrong with it as a concept.

At the same time, I think with this book I am kind of done with Mage: the Ascension – not just this edition, but the game in general.

The problem is that to present a nuanced view of the Technocracy that’s worth devoting a 240 page supplement to, and to update it for the 2020s, the writing team have found they needed to grasp the nettle and really address some of the major issues with the standard Mage: the Ascension setting as it has been previously presented. A big reason that so many Mage fans like the idea of being able to play as the Technocracy is that it’s hard to deny that they do have some admirable aspects. As well as frequently being more egalitarian than the Traditions, there’s the simple fact that what the Technocracy mainly want is a world where the general public has some sense of cosmological security and stability, which can provide them with the basis of actually having a halfway decent life. Vaccines and modern medicine may have their issues, but doing without them (or relying on the goodwill of a healing mage who might decide you aren’t worth it if their ideology suggests it) would be much, much worse.

More than that, though, the book acknowledges absurdities like how the idea of Paradox as it exists in Mage and the usual explanations for it simply don’t work. It is 100% predicated on the assumption that the Sleepers, in general, do not believe in supernatural stuff, and magic and the paranormal go against their worldview that it unleashes the force of Paradox in order for consensus reality to reassert itself.

Supplement Supplemental! (Changeling Cliques and Gloranthan Glamours)

Sometimes I read a supplement and I want to say a few things about it on here, but don’t want to give it a full article; for this purpose I’m going to start reviewing such things in this new ongoing feature, Supplement Supplemental. This time around, I’ve got some slim additions to Changeling: the Lost and RuneQuest to look at.

Oak, Ash, & Thorn (Changeling: the Lost)

Oak, Ash, & Thorn is billed as “The Changeling: the Lost Second Edition Companion”, this feels like something of a misnomer. Usually, when RPG supplements are billed as “companions” – and that’s been true for Onyx Path’s Chronicles of Darkness output as any game line – that’s usually a signal that they have a fairly broad scope, offering a diverse range of material which may be a bit of a grab-bag, but precisely because of this can be potentially useful for a wide variety of campaigns within the envisioned scope of the game. Onyx Path have used the “companion” designation for some of their own material – think the V20 Companion or the Dark Ages Companion – which very much fits the status of stuff which, whilst useful, didn’t fit in the core book for their respective lines.

That is not quite the case with Oak, Ash, & Thorn, which actually is more specific in intention and unified in theme than that. As the introduction notes, it’s pitched to “Tier 2” Changeling games. Tier 1 is street-level, low-status stuff, where the PCs are probably not the movers and shakers in their Courts and events focus tightly on the motley’s immediate needs and foes. (Think the classic mode of play of early Vampire: the Masquerade, when the overriding assumption was that the PCs were all new-ish vampires towards the lower end of an extensive hierarchy as of the start of the campaign.) At the other end of the scale is Tier 3, which are intended to be more global in scope; this is the sort of cosmic-scape campaign which culminates with you bursting into the True Fae’s homes in Arcadia to go full Long Lankin on them.

An Arcane Followup

So, a while back I did an article looking back at Arcane‘s Top 50 RPGs list from back in 1996, as polled among their (primarily UK-based) readership. At the time, I said that no truly comparable list had been produced since, but I’ve recently become aware of Tabletop Gaming magazine’s June 2018 piece on the Top 150 games. This includes board games and card games, but RPGs are healthily represented there – in fact, the top game on the list is an RPG. It’s also a UK magazine which feels in some respect like a present-day update of Arcane with a wider remit and some somewhat deeper insights, and the list was also based on a reader vote.

So, I thought it would be interesting to extract just the RPGs from that list to get a “Top RPGs” sub-list, and compare it to the Arcane list. Perhaps we shouldn’t read too much into it – the readership may well not be that similar – but it’s interesting to think about, right?

Kickstopper: New Life For a Dead Game

Given that it is a game about playing a dead person, in some ways it is appropriate that Wraith: the Oblivion was the first of the World of Darkness games to die – not even making it past 1999. Having received even less support than Changeling, in some respects it’s the member of the initial “big five” World of Darkness RPGs which both needs the most love from a 20th Anniversary edition and, you would think, would be one of the easier game lines to sum up in a big fat 20th Anniversary rulebook – after all, since less was published for it, less needs to be compiled, right?

On the other hand, in some respects Wraith is the most genuinely clever and cutting-edge of the original World of Darkness games. Whilst White Wolf spent most of the 1990s trying their hardest to adopt a pose of being sophisticated artists bringing a new level of sophistication to tabletop RPGs, it was rare that their games actually reflected this in terms of system and the supported gameplay and the overall concepts being played with. Wraith was a major exception in this respect.

With Rich Dansky, respected in the fanbase for the work he’d done on the original game line, in place to write this updated edition, would it provide this unique game with the treatment it’s always deserved but never quite received, or would it be another victim of the reputed Wraith Curse?

The Arcane Top 50 – Where Are They Now?

Arcane, a short-lived British tabletop gaming magazine from Future Publishing which ran from December 1995 to June 1997, is a name to conjure by for many gamers of around my age. I came to the hobby after White Dwarf had become a Games Workshop in-house advertising platform, and just as Dragon was on the verge of dropping its coverage of non-TSR RPGs altogether; that meant I got a brief taster of TSR having a broader scope of coverage, and missed out on the golden age of White Dwarf altogether.

With other RPG-focused gaming magazines available in the UK either consisting of patchy US imports or a few local magazines published on a decidedly variable basis (whatever did happen to ol’ Valkyrie?), the arrival of Arcane was immensely welcome. Sure, even by this early stage the Internet was already becoming an incomparable source of both homebrewed material and cutting-edge RPG news, but much of that was in the form of Usenet and forum discussions of variable quality or ASCII text files. To get something which was informative, read well, and looked nice, print media was still just about where it was at.

Truth be told, taking a look back at Arcane in more recent years I’m less impressed than I was at the time. It took largely the same approach to its own subject matter (primarily RPGs, with some secondary consideration to CCGs – because they were so hot at the time they really couldn’t be ignored – and perhaps a light sniff of board game content) that Future’s videogame magazines took to theirs, particularly the lighter-hearted PC Gamer/Amiga Power side of things rather than the likes of, say, Edge. That meant it focused more on brief news snippets, reviews, and fairly entry-level articles on subjects than it did on offering much in the way of in-depth treatment of matters.