Why I Like Orpheus, or: I should just rename the damn blog "Why I Like"

The logo was bullshit, though.

Orpheus is neat in a couple of ways. First off, the setting was one of those simple concepts that breeds a whole host of possible adventures and ideas: A cryogenics company¹ discovers that their resuscitated clients have been having out-of-body experiences and, crazier yet, have been interacting with ghosts. Developing the technology to enhance this effect, they make it more or less reliable (it works best with people who've had multiple near-death experiences and thus have "loose souls") and set about resolving the issues of the recently-deceased for cold hard cash². Or, as the game's elevator pitch sums up, "the kid from The Sixth Sense opens a Ghostbusting business".

There's more to it, of course, the usual mysteries and oddities of the world - there are rival ghost-resolution firms, a street drug called pigment³ lets users see and even interact with ghosts, nobody has met a ghost more than about five years old, ghostly activity is definitely on the rise, and you often run into spectres who've turned Full Monster and seem to have a hivemind going - which segues into the other cool thing about Orpheus. Most games try to play down whatever metaplot they might have- there's all this stuff, and maybe something is gonna change, or maybe not, no pressure There are two very good reasons for this, one financial and one creative. The financial is that having an end in mind sets a limit on the number of sourcebooks you can produce, which in turn limits the amount of money you can make on a particular line. The creative is that most gamers are going to create their own game using bits and pieces of the given setting, so you want sourcebooks that present them with options rather than a didactic now-this-happens arrangement, because those sell better. Okay, so they're both financial reasons.

Orpheus says phooey to all that. There are six books in the line⁴ and that's all you get. Each book pushes the plot forward with some Big Fucking Thing that happens, increases the power level, introduces new threats and stuff, and reveals some more secrets. And after the sixth book, you're done, finito, that's it, go do something else. The authors love using a movie metaphor for this - Starts with a premise, twist, rising action, twist, climax, - all that screenwriting stuff. And on the page, it works pretty well overall, although I'm still reading through the metaplot as a whole. This may well be the first RPG line that was planned from the beginning with a specific end in mind - not just the end of the GM's particular plot , but an actual end to the line as a whole.

This is ballsy⁵ and I like it. It was, I think, Robin Laws who pointed out that your average gamer is going to have a relatively tiny amount of time to play in - Even assuming a perfect every-weekend-for-a-year game, you're still looking at maybe 150-odd hours of actual play time, to say nothing of chargen, rules disputes, freak-outs, holidays, nerd drama, booze runs, etc etc et fucking c. In most RPGs, you can easily own entire books that will never even see partial use. A game that you only have to have six books to run, ever - One hardcover corebook, five softcover supplements - seems a welcome alternative, and players only need⁶ the first half of the first one.What's more, the lack of formal material meshes well with the setting - it's our world, but with ghosts. You can come up with plots just by grabbing a newspaper and plugging in restless dead.

Of course, for all its coolness, it's still an OWoD game. It has splats which divide up the ghosties into a set of predetermined types (which is good for the 'scientific paranormal' element of the setting, but come on, seriously?). It has mechanics for fucking everything, including the always-irritating "one power per level, always the same power" thing which makes the ghosts even less individual. There's even an attempt to tie the game back into the Wraith: the Oblivion metaplot⁷ which I admit I find endearing in a let's-not-lose-touch-after-graduation way (Also, WtO's drab, oppressive, bureaucratic netherworld that everyone hated? They blew it up. With nuclear fucking bombs. Talk about blurring the line between "cool" and "paint-eater retarded"). If I were to run it - and as enthralled as I am by the setting, I don't think I can run a game with this kind of time commitment in my current uncertain-future situation - I'd probably adapt it to FATE or some similarly freewheeling system. But the very fact that I am tempted to run it at all says a lot. Come on, who doesn't want to be ghostly Ghostbusters?

---

1. Technically, I guess they'd be a suspended-animation company, seeing as their process doesn't involve freezing people alive or bilking the terminally ill out of their savings. Well, okay, they do have the right to invest your finances until you come back, but the point is that the process works - you actually will come back, probably.
2. The game never outright states that they hassle James Randi first, but come on, wouldn't you?
3. That name rings hollow to my ear for slang, and the alternative - Black Heroin - is way too easy to confuse with actual black tar heroin. If/when I ever run the damn game, I'd probably just call it dye - short, cute pun, keeps the whole coloration thing (which continues with a ghost subtype called hues - pigment users come back as hues, who are a lot more vulnerable to monsterization).
4. Well, there are six official books. Some mad bastard made a 135-page fan sourcebook for the game, even going so far as to copy the design of the official books. There's a half-formed thought here about the limited run of the game encouraging people to create material rather than wait for the Man to provide the final word. Of course, the flipside of this is that once the run is concluded, that interest and the accompanying material vanish into thin ether - the Project Flatline site that created the fanbook is gone, and a google search for "Orpheus RPG fan site" returns bupkis.
5. And they know it, and they never shut up about it. The air of self-congratulation around this admittedly really good idea is part of what makes Orpheus, the last of the Old World of Darkness games, a microcosm of the whole OWoD, along with the metaplot which ends in a gigantic fucking apocalypse, the gothick trappings (occasionally juxtaposed hilariously with heavy-duty military hardware), the insistence on both "roleplaying" and minutely defining said roleplaying in both text and mechanics, and the writing that gets tiresome after a chapter or so. Oh, and of course there are fucking LARP rules.
6. Or should that be "only get to use"? The great D&D3 sin of arming every player with a million mechanical options for their character still irks me, but that's a post for another day.
7. Wraith is gonna get its own W.I.L. one of these days, but it deserves its rep as a game that's interesting but a pain in the ass to play. Another thing Orpheus gets right is that ghosts should be haunting our world, not off in their own not-quite-an-afterlife doing baffling and alien things for a hierarchy nobody living knows anything about. And hey, I mentioned Wraith without bringing up my all-time favourite "terrible idea" supplement, Charnel Houses of Eur- dammit!