The Ghosts of RPGs Past

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Back in 2020, The Ghost Hack was the first of my ventures into indie RPG publishing inspired by The Black Hack's irresistible mechanic of old school D&D stats married to a shrinking usage die. It was a bit primitive but it sold nicely - a Silver Best Seller in drivethrurpg. I was obsessing over ghost stories at that time and followed The Ghost Hack up with a slightly more polished expansion and a couple of short scenarios.

Now I've released a revised edition that incorporates both books in one volume, adds a bunch more content, and brings the rules into harmony with the more polished version I ended up using for The Magus Hack​.

Before I talk about the new Ghost Hack, I need to say something about its source material.

Wraith and Why It Never Rocked Me

Back in the '90s, waiting for the next chapter of White Wolf's World of Darkness game line to see print occupied the space in my life that was later occupied by waiting for Game of Thrones to release a new season. 1991 brought out Vampire: The Masquerade and then Werewolf: The Apocalypse in 1992 and Mage: The Ascension in 1993.

By 1994, I was a frothing fan and the arrival of Wraith: The Oblivion was a bombshell, with its fantastic cover of interlinked chains, moody spectral art and surreal, grotesque setting of the rotting Shadowlands and hyper-real Tempest, with slave-harvesting wraiths and Oblivion-worshipping Spectres.

Mind. Blown

And yet. And yet. Wraith remains the one World of Darkness game that has never worked for me. I've run long campaigns with the other main games but every attempt to launch Wraith has met with, well, dissatisfaction. The closest I came to making Wraith fly was a version set in the 18th century Caribbean. Pirate Wraiths are cool.

Part of the problem is Wraith's setting which always struck me as incompletely realised. The other World of Darkness games are set in a bleak dystopian version of our world. Although werewolves and mages can step away into fantastical spirit worlds, they are still products of this world. Wraith is weird. Where are you? A sort of parallel reality called the Shadowlands that both is, and yet is not, the same as the world the living inhabit.

The moment you start playing Wraith, you butt up against confusions about what everything looks like. Wraiths perceive the world through a filter of decay. But how does that work? Do buildings in the Shadowlands have doors and windows, or are they shattered and broken? Can wraiths read newspapers and watch TV - or is the paper rotten and the screen cracked for them?

Wraiths get discorporated by rough contact with 'real' things. This makes crossing a street or moving through a house rather difficult. Wraiths are perpetually being bashed into insubstantiality every time someone opens a door into them, drives through them, kicks a ball at them. Your immortal vampire can walk down a crowded street at midnight, but your lordly wraith, weirdly, cannot. So where do Wraiths live? What do they do?

Wraiths are supposed to be driven by obsessive Passions and tied to Tethers, which are objects or people that mattered to them. Yet they are also supposed to be servile minions in the Hierarchy, a Kafka-esque slave state of the dead. The rules invite us to imagine NPC wraiths who are clerks or legionaries in this vast bureaucracy of the afterlife. I get it: I've seen Beetlejuice. ​

Yet these wraiths are also passionately tied to weird causes, like growing perfect tulips or avenging their wife's murder or finishing their unpublished novel. Where do they find the time? How can they be a committed servant of the Hierarchy and yet also dedicated to tracking down their cousin who disappeared in the Appalachians?  There doesn't seem to be a way to combine both ideas of what a wraith is. 

Then there's the Shadow, which is your dark-side given voice, whispering in your mind and offering power in exchange for the gratification of its own Dark Passions. If every Wraith NPC has this sort of Jekyll-and-Hyde persona, the social world of wraiths becomes unimaginably weird. How does the Hierarchy even function if all wraiths are self-sabotaging all the time?

The game recommends players roleplay each other's Shadows, acting as tempters and tormentors to one another. Great on paper, but I've never been able to get it to work. Some players are too amiable to play the Shadow with gusto; others throw themselves into it with such cackling enthusiasm that it derails the plot.

Never mind that, you can't kill wraiths - at least, not reliably. A dead wraith tumbles into a hyperspace realm called the Labyrinth where it is tormented by its dark side. This psychodrama element tells you a lot about the highfalutin' play style going on at White Wolf head office, but for a lot of ordinary roleplayers it feels incredibly self-indulgent. Then the wraith reforms and it's business as usual. Yes, there's a limit to how many times you can do this, but the bottom line is that you can't kill a NPC wraith because they just come back again, chastened and more sorrowful.

All of these conundrums weigh down a game that was already way too fiddly. Wraiths have Passions and Tethers, but also Dark Passions and Shadow Thorns, and Memoriam, and Angst; they are loyal to a Faction and a Legion as well as a Guild plus their own mortal attachments, as well as ... look, there's a lot to keep track of, a lot of dice to roll, a lot of points to tot up.

So Let's Hack It

David Black's Black Hack is a short and sweet creative step away from Old School D&D. There are the familiar 6 Stats (STR, DEX, CON, INT, WIS, CHA, the old gang), plus character classes and levels. You roll a d20 to do stuff and you're trying to roll under your Stat. Penalties add to your die roll, making that more difficult. For example, attacking or dodging someone with more HIt Dice than you is hard: you add the difference to your d20 roll.

Black's system lends itself very well to cheap and cheerful dungeon crawls - and in this regard I'm particularly fond of Michael Thomas's Bluehack, which condenses the already-concise Holmes Basic D&D rules into Black's ultra-simplified template.

All on drivethrurpg for pennies - click on the image to hit the link

The secret ingredient Black introduces is the concept of a Usage Die. This is a die you roll that gets smaller every time it rolls a 1 or a 2. It might start off as a d8, so if you roll it there are six chances nothing happens, and two that it shrinks to a d6. Once the d4 shrinks then PFFFT! the Usage Die has gone.

In his original rules, Black only uses this mechanic as a way of tracking how many arrows you've got left or how much oil is in your lantern: don't bother keeping track, just roll the Usage Die every now and then to see if it's running out.

Then I came across Matthew Skaill's The Blood Hack. Skaill's little book has two fantastic innovations. One is to treat a vampire character's blood reservoir as a usage die. Every time you use your blood to heal or activate a magical power, roll the die. Once the die has gone, you're a hungry vampire.

The other is to make your vampire's Morality a usage die, so every time you do something evil you have to roll. But - and this is the clever bit - every time that usage die rolls a 1 or a 2, it doesn't get smaller: it gets bigger! A vampire with d6 Morality is pretty normal, a d8 Morality is a bit of a sonofabitch, a d10 is a sociopath, a d12 is a monster. If you reach d20 you are demonically horrible and if a d20 Morality Die gets any bigger then BOOM - you've turned into a NPC villain.

This is a great push-your-luck mechanic. Sure, with a d6 Morality, the first time you murder someone there's a 33% chance your die is going to expand to a d8. As it gets bigger, the chance of further escalation shrinks, but the consequences get worse. There's only a 1 in 5 chance your d10 Morality Die will get bigger, but if it does, then watch out!

What About the Setting?

The Ghost Hack uses character classes over up to 10 levels of experience. These classes (or Trades) do the job of the Guilds in Wraith, giving you powers you can do for free and perks towards advancing in certain ways. As a Poltergeist, you can interact with objects in the Living World, and you'll probably get a high STR stat really fast. Levels and Hit Points don't feel weird or implausible in a ghost setting anyway, because of course your Hit Points don't represent your body: you don't have a body.

The five basic character classes draw from common haunting tropes:

• Banshees: ghosts who evoke and trade in emotion
• Doppelgangers: shapechanging ghosts
• Poltergeists: ghosts who can influence the physical world
• Nightmanes: ghosts who excel at traveling through Hades
• Revenants: ghosts who can interact with the Living by possessing them

​And five more that are a bit esoteric:

• Anubians: a sect of ghosts who treat the Rot and banish Wights
• Fleshweavers:: sorcerers who control the Living World
• Grimliches: self-aware Wights who hate their Mortal Coils
• Helgaunts: violent ghosts who wage war on Wights
• Morpheans: mystics who manipulate dreams and illusions

The core rules are agnostic about whether these classes are just abstractions for ghosts with different aptitudes or actual organisations. In the appendices there are rules for treating them more like guilds that instruct ghosts in their signature powers and guard their privileges jealously.

Similarly, the rules offer a distant city of the dead called Dis (but you can call it Stygia), but leave it up to you whether this empire of the dead is just a rumour, a looming threat, or an oppressive reality.

These ghosts can walk through physical objects freely - but they are hurt by iron and repelled by salt, so the physical world has its obstacles. The ghostly Afterlife takes place in our world, but for ghosts the sun is permanently eclipsed and the moon has a lurid tint, so the lighting is eerie.

I offer five ghostly sects that can be allies or antagonists in your campaign. The Misericordium fulfils the role of the ghostly bureaucracy, but it makes more sense because, by recruiting clerks to write up the lives in its ghostly books, it steals away their memory of who they were. The other cults likewise replace your humanity with a Gnosis Die, so by joining them you surrender your soul, but escape from the burdens of conscience and attachment to the living.

• The Temple of the Dragon Soul: a sect that offers enlightenment to those who join its martial order
• The Church of St Thomas Repudiatus: if you accept that you a really in Hell, you can start earning a place in Heaven
• The Ectoplasmic Research Unit: Embrace the monster you are going to turn into, but in a very scientific way
• The Epicurean Dining Society: throw lavish parties where your living puppets indulge your perverse appetites, then move on to literally eating other ghosts

Simplicity is the key feature of Hack RPGs. Half a dozen tables at the back of the book let you roll up NPCs with classes, powers, and spells, and plenty of tables throughout the book generate random possessions and encounters. There's a final appendix that lets you generate random scenarios and five worked examples that show how a feud between ghosts and vampires can take a very strange direction once the Church of St Thomas gets involved.

One thing I've retained from the original is the fantastic pulp-style art from the NUELOW Stock Art Collection. The quirky, anachronistic, yet often deeply unsettling artwork is great for a setting where lots of ghosts still look and act like people from earlier eras. Copyright is @2024 Steve Miller, All Rights Reserved.

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The Ghost Hack is an approach to ghostly RPG - and Wraith, its template - that emphasises light-hearted adventure over personal horror. There's still personal horror there. Ghost PCs are slowly disintegrating and the end state is becoming a demonic Wight. You draw energy from your 'Mortal Coil' which means the people and things you cared about, and this can damage them. If you temporarily turn into a Wight, you are compelled to visit violence on your Mortal Coil. All these elements are horror tropes.

On the other hand, there isn't a tyrannical and oppressive empire ruling the underworld, the slave economy has been marginalised and applies only to mindless 'Echoes' rather than true ghosts, the Shadow has been removed, as well as the psychodrama brought on by being defeated.

These elements are reinstated in the Appendices, if you want morality dramas, player-vs-player psychodrama, underworld politics, it's all there for you. But the core rules focus a bit more on exploration, adventure, and facing peril.

One change from the Wraith template is to do away with the destructive storms raging in the Underworld and replace them with 'the Dread.' This is an acidic fog that rises from Hades and smothers the region. Tocsins blare warnings and ghosts flee to protected Fanes. This phenomenon gets rather more consideration in Ghost Hack than did maelstroms in Wraith, but again: this fits with a game setting where the main danger is external and the light and flexible Hack rules allow quick resolution.

Is this the last product for the Ghost Hack? I'm planning to revisit the two scenarios, which are edgy affairs, and republish them with more detail. It's in my mind to publish a scenario-and-campaign-setting combined: a haunted hospital.

But my main project this summer is Through The Hedgerow: don't miss that!