Pyramid Review
World of Darkness: Ghost Stories
Published by White Wolf Gaming Studios
Written by Rick Chillot, Matt Forbeck, Geoff Grabowski, Matthew McFarland, Adam Tinworth, & Chuck Wendig
Art by Sam Araya, Jim DiBartolo, Anthony Granato, August Hall, Michael William Kaluta, Joshua Gabriel Timbrook, Jamie Tolagsun, & Becky Jollensten
127-page b&w hardcover; $24.99
As a major -- but not uncritical -- fan of White Wolf's Wraith: the Oblivion and Orpheus, I was filled with some trepidation when I heard that there would be a book of Ghost Stories for the new World of Darkness.
Put bluntly, I was worried that it might be terrible. In the past, White Wolf's stabs at scenarios and adventures often fell flat, due to their being too wonky, unwieldy, and complicated to run as written. This was a shame, since White Wolf always excelled at creating evocative settings, giving them a sense of history and populating them with interesting NPCs; their writers just never seemed able to make the leap from brooding menace to actual action without losing their readers along the way.
However, it's a whole new World of Darkness, now: new format, (mostly) new systems and new ideas, hopefully taking the mistakes of the past into account. So would World of Darkness: Ghost Stories repeat the mistakes of the past, only this time in hardcover? Or had they learned from such "gems" as Chaos Factor and the Diablerie series?
Fortunately for us, the answer is yes, they did learn something. zGhost Stories is a well-done . . .
This article originally appeared in the second volume of Pyramid. See the current Pyramid website for more information.
Article publication date: May 20, 2005
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