Most of the blogging I’m going to be doing over the next few months about the Wraith: The Oblivion 20th Anniversary Edition Kickstarter and Project is going to be either A)over on the KS page as updates or B)on the Onyx Path blog as, well, updates. That’s perfectly cool with me, as it’s an OP project and they therefore have dibs.

But before the Kickstarter launches on Tuesday, I did want to ruminate on the project for a little bit. Wraith was the First Big Thing that I ever did in gaming. I was hired by Jennifer Hartshorn to do two chapters in the Haunts sourcebook back in the day, and that was my first paying, professional work. Most of it was actually written in the basement of a church in suburban Boston, where I was proctoring fake SAT tests for the Princeton Review and cramming myself and high school juniors into chairs designed for third graders, but that story’s been told a million times. After that, I did some work on the Wraith Players’ Guide, and an article for Inphobia on keeping your party together in Wraith games, and then I got contracted for Artificers and did a bunch of stuff on Changeling and got pulled in last minute to write the back end of Toybox and…

Whew. It was a long time ago, and if you draw a straight line from then to now it runs right through the middle of a big patch marked “Insomnia”. But I will say this: I have always been incredibly proud of the work that went into Wraith, both my own and those of the many people I collaborated with. I was very sad to see it get shut down back in the day, though I appreciate White Wolf’s choosing to let me wrap the line up neatly with Ends of Empire instead of just putting on the brakes. I’m pleased and excited to be climbing back onto that (bony, skeletal, undead) horse again, and I confess to having let “so what would you do differently?” rattle around in my brain for the last fifteen years or so.

And I am of course really excited to be working with many of the classic Wraith writers from the old days. And I know, that sounds pollyanna as hell, but it really is fun bouncing ideas off them again, seeing their prose (and how much it’s improved in the last fifteen years - don’t tell them I said that), and just generally swimming in the same pond with kindred spirits. There is something to be said for getting the band back together. Hell, just having an excuse to pick up the phone and call Clayton Oliver makes me happy. The fact that the conversation largely consists of “You’re doing great stuff, now add these additional bits” is icing on the cake.

I will be talking a lot more about the project over the next few weeks. I will be singing the praises of the new folks on the project, writers who haven’t worked on Wraith before and who are hitting the ground running. I will be talking about what we’re changing from the old edition and what we’re keeping and why I am cheerfully spitting in the legendary Wraith Curse’s eye on this one.

And right now I’m already neck-deep in manuscript redlines, turning around various chapters to various writers with various suggestions. Though to be fair, I appear to have gotten kinder and gentler over the years. Bruce Baugh wanted to know who I was and what I’d done with the real Rich Dansky; apparently the memory of the time I told a freelancer that he’d written me a lovely Wings Hauser movie but now I needed some game material still lingers. The rust, though, is coming off. The old muscles are being flexed. The red pen is my non-crosspieced lightsaber, and I wield it with Jedi-like precision.
But I’ll talk about all that later. Right now all I have to say is that it’s good to be back.