Hello again y'all! Once more I am coming at you live from my place of employment because I like to be a rebel (and also because it's dead at the moment and I have nothing better to do). Anyhoo! Earlier this week I had been working on an assignment for one of my English classes, and in the process discovered and re-discovered a number of really fun Newspaper comics. Why am I spending time discussing a dying medium that is mostly enjoyed by geriatric comfort readers who enjoy the shambling zombies of ancient comic strips? because it's my blog, deal with it! some of the earliest memories I have of reading are of me devouring Calvin and Hobbes or Far Side collections. That, and it will allow me to experiment with fancy HTML features like embedded images!
Now that I have succesfully demonstrated the incredible powers of my basic shakey understanding of HTML, I can actually get more into the subject itself. Despite the rather... rough state of the medium in the modern day, it used to be a vibrant art form with a variety of wonderful and highly influential works. I am quite fond of some of the later works in the medium, particularly the previously mentioned (and shown!) Calvin and Hobbes and the Far Side- but in the course of my studies I have become enamoured with older works. Things like Frank King's Gasoline Alley, that experimented with long-form storytelling with a shifting status quo (something that hasn't often been replicated in that medium) as well as gorgeous full-page artwork, or even older works like Little Nemo by Winsor McCay or the hillariously titled Queer Visitors from the Marvelous Land of Oz by L. Frank Baum and Walt McDougall have an absolutely captivating aura to them.
On the opposite end of the timeline, we have the current state of the medium which on first glance appears to be essentially dead. Most comics are re-prints and new strips are very uncommon. The situation is admittedly quite bleak, with ever-decreasing readership, mostly because newspapers don't take the risk with new creators out of a fear of alienating the few elderly folks who still read the paper. It's a bit of a self-enforcing doom spiral. However, I would argue that the medium itself has evolved rather than died. Sure, the situation for comics that appear in print newspapers is bleak, but many would-be cartoonists have instead pivoted to webcomics which are far more vibrant and exciting. Many of the earliest webcomics were digitized comics from University newspapers (Where the Buffalo Roam by Hans Bjordahl being a prominent example), so the shared DNA is very visible. Especially since lots of popular (particularly older) webcomics have the same "gag-a-day" format.
Moving on, another area of recent interest for me has been TTRPGs, particularly those not made by Wizards of the Coast, and especially those that are very strange or unconventional. I had dabbled in some of these before, playing Powered by the Apocalpyse games such as Monster of the Week, Masks, and Apocalypse World (I have discovered that I am not the biggest fan of these for reasons that I may elaborate on in later posts), as well as Dread (a horror game that uses a jenga tower instead of dice that I am quite fond of), but beyond those my experience was quite limited. This all changed when one of my lovely friends re-introduced me to White Wolf Publishing's World of Darkness series of games through a Werwolf: The Apocalypse campaign.
I had been vaguely familiar with the setting, as I had briefly attempted (and failed) to get into Vampire: the Masquerade as a youngin' after having seen folks talk about the old CRPG adaptation, Bloodlines on YouTube but this campaign revived my interest. Like some protagonist in an H.P. Lovecraft story studying an eldritch text that they likely oughtn't, I found myself obsessively reading every scrap I could find on the subject. I should note that this wasn't just reserved for the good games that everyone likes like Werewolf: the Apocalypse or Vampire: the Masquerade, I was reading the more obscure books like Changeling: the Dreaming, Demon: the Fallen, Mummy: the Resurrection, and most importantly for this writing's purposes: Wraith: the Oblivion.
See, something was different about Wraith- something was special. It wasn't the edginess, as all of the games in the series prominently feature their fair share of edge (it comes with the territory of being 1990s RPGs about playing horror monsters), it was something far more interesting than that. You see, Wraith: the Oblivion is sad. Intentionally so- which is something I have never seen before in an RPG (Changeling has some sad aspects as it is about the death of childhood dreams and creativity, but this is on a different level). Unlike the other games where you play cool spooky characters with fun superpowers, in Wraith you play ghosts meandering around the land of the dead trying to move on and avoid getting forged into a tool, weapon, or piece of machinery (which is as insane as it sounds) by a despotic regime. To make matters worse players are also saddled with something called a "shadow," which is the manifestation of their character's worst impulses and darkest desires. Their shadow is portrayed by a different player at the table and will do everything in its power to encourage the players to give in to those impulses. Admittedly, this system while very cool, has many opportunities to backfire if anyone at the table has even an ounce of "that guy™" in them, but if you have the right table, it sounds incredibly cool.
The shadow system is unfortunately emblematic of a lot of Wraith's problems, as it seems to be a game that is super cool and unique, but unless you have a very specific group of players it is downright unplayable. I myself have not played it, and I have yet to meet anyone who has (part of this may have to do with the fact that it is a game from the nineties and I am a wee baby Gen Z, but my point stands). I can only hope that one day I manage to find a group that wants to play it, as despite how depressing it is, it also seems to have the capacity for incredibly emotionally resonant storytelling (like literally conquering your demons, growing as a person, and refusing to give in to the gloom, not to mention how powerful moving on can be as a narrative device).
While it, and the other World of Darkness games, are what have consumed most of my attention, Wraith is not the only game that has caught my interest as of late, as I have been on a bit of a research hole. I have been particularly fond of the extremely weird, niche games found on the depths of itch.io such as the absolutely hillarious Jonathan Frakes Wants Your Attention, And You Must Not Give It To Him by Jeff Stormer or the bizarre adaptation of internet urban legend Saki Sonabashi. Many of these games are not particularly functional, but they often have a surreal abusrdism and raw (frankly traditionally unpublishible) artistic creativity that makes them fascinating. These kinds of games are almost a form of outsider art, and some of them are incredibly personal such as My Brain is a Stick of Butter by Adam Bell, which is about struggling with ADHD (something I myself am intimately familiar with).
All of these games are quite inspiring, perhaps if I ever have the time I'll make my own...