Wraith World

Wraith World is a homebrew setting originally designed by an anonymous /tg/ poster and his childhood friends. The game, as well as setting has an emphasis on fast and loose rules, ridiculous character tropes and designs, and vague sexual content bordering on magical realm material. Essentially the game was written to entertain a bunch of grade school kids, but when shared or discussed with 4chan it was immediately requested to be rewritten into a playable game to be enjoyed by all.

The Game's Mechanics and Composition

Because of the game's obscure conception, it borrows heavily from other tabletop role playing games, yet was forced to develop several conventions of it's own. Wraith World has two essential books necessary to play, one titled THE WRAITH WORLD BOOK, and the other THE BOOK OF LEGENDS. Each of these books provide different necessary aspects to the game, and in the case of The Book Of Legends, a hard copy, or printed version is recommended for play. The content and use of each of these books were as follows:

WRAITH WORLD has most of the games content and history, as well as a relatively large Gazetteer explaining the layout of the world itself. It, more importantly, contained the entirety of the game's system and rulings on combat and special moves. This book was much larger, and the players were able to look through this for rules and regulations whenever they liked.

THE BOOK OF LEGENDS was a thinner binder that contained all of the games Monsters, Traps, Spells, and Secrets in it. Players were never allowed to look in the book when they were not running the game as a game master, and if your were caught peaking, the penalty for such an offense was INSTANT DEATH OF YOUR CHARACTER. Also, one of the most interesting aspects of Wraith World, was that if your character was strong enough, or interesting enough, when they died or reached level 100, their character sheet was saved in THE BOOK OF LEGENDS, and they may return one day as a boss in later adventures or campaigns.

At it's core, the game is very simple. You have five attributes called Stats; Strength, Resistances, Mindpower, Agility, and Luck. You would have a seperate die associated with each of these attributes which governed your level of competency. At level 1, all of your attributes had 1d4 associated with them, and after growing 5 levels, you could increase one of these die to the next degree. So, at level 5 one of your d4 would become a d6, and at level 10 you could increase it to d8. Stats were also given a bonus based on what kind of equipment you carried. A normal sword, for instance, may give you +1 while using it. So a level 1 character, swinging a normal sword got 1d4+1 to their attacks.

Other mechanics were present, such as critical hits, Magic Spells, and lots of tables for different situations that you would find yourself in. But one of the more prevalent and concerning game mechanics was in creating a new character after death. When your character died, everyone in the game, including the Game Master, could vote whether your character was worthy of being added to THE BOOK OF LEGENDS. Most characters were not, and would be ripped up, and thrown away immediately. In either case you had to make a new character, starting over. Player characters could only be human, unless one of your previous characters had slept with "a maiden of a different species" and had a child worthy to take up your heroic banner.

From A Technical Perspective

• There are hard caps on player progression, emphasizing rolling a new character while still encouraging greater character development.
• It boasts a simplified stat system that doesn't eliminate fail-rolls but still provides ample rewards.
• It is brutal as fuck and unapologetically "rapey", yet somehow still less "rapey" and stupid than FATAL.
• It appears to be imbalanced in favor of, of all things, strong melee. And magic is rare, costly, and extremely gratifying.
• Plot and role-driven character development that is meaningful to mechanics and abilities that require reaching a story goalpost instead of just *leveling up.
• I has a seemingly successfully executed classless system. Batshit insane clusterfuck of a world to play in. Preserves a sense of things forbidden or arcane.