A Halloween Ghost Story

It was a night like this one, a long time ago. 

Back before the plague, before the tech bros, before the red caps and the boss babes, back when we were all wandering the face of the earth wondering what to do, a whole world full of lost little children. 

I was driving that night way out past those hills on the horizon there. Those hills are a funny place I tell you what. Some folk say there's something in them, something old and strange that calls to men, draws them off their path. The stats sure back it up, the crash rate along those roads is crazy. I've seen more than a few cars off the road in my travels round there and the way they looked, the way they had crossed past the barrier and over the side, the way they had come to their final rest, like a faithful horse carrying its rider to the very end, something just so damn uncanny specific about those wrecks when I seen 'em, well... 

... well I just can't help but think about those stories. 

And after that night, well... 

It was late, coming up to midnight. I had gone out for a cruise, to clear my head I suppose. I needed to get away, to run away, to fly away, to run to the edge of the world and never look back. I wanted to put my past as far away behind me as I could, and I had kept it in the rear view mirror at 80ks an hour since the sun had started painting the world one colour at a time. I had gone to the edge of the road, right to the sea, and since I had a car not a boat, that meant the end of the line. Only trouble was, I had done such a good job of outrunning my demons, I couldn't remember the way back. 

And it's the damndest thing, no matter how sure I was that I was turning back towards home, I kept ending up further and further into the hills. I tell you, those hills out there are funny things, they like to play tricks on you at night. 

The car's clock was coming up on 3AM by the time I got out of the hills, and I was a long way off the main roads. I decided to pull over and check the map to see if I could get a bearing. 

That was when I saw the school. 

I had come to a stop across the road from it, that desolate archipelago of buildings rising from the endless open countryside, still and empty and gaping like a dollhouse for giants. I had just turned the engine off when the moon caught the sign outside, a blazon of bright flowers and shiny blue ocean as vivid and colourful as the day it was first painted. It's funny how signs can outlast their buildings like that. The school itself, well I have to say I don't think that place had been teaching kids for years. 

Maybe it never did. 

The buildings seemed to huddle and grow close as I glanced across them. Their windows were still and black, their timbers blue in the forsaken night, but I swear in that moment my appreciation over the place weren't a two-way street. I looked into that deserted lost place, and it looked straight back at me with those gaping black holes of windows. 

And then I noticed the library. 

It was the biggest building, in the centre of the huddle. When I looked hard enough I could just make out the rows of bookshelves through its windows, a tiny other world at the end of a long dark tunnel. 

Why did I think there would be anything valuable in there? I don't know. Maybe I just couldn't leave a stone unturned if there was a chance a treasure of forgotten lore was under it. Maybe I wanted to believe I could escape back to that island of time when I could lose myself in the picture books in my old school library, paint whole worlds from just the pages, and live a whole afternoon in them without a care in the world. 

All I know is I locked the car behind me, dashed the road and jumped the chain at what used to be the gate. 

It was a wild night that night. The wind roared across the fields, clouds swam before the wheeling stars. But as I got closer to that place, everything got dead quiet. Even the wind seemed to leave it well enough alone. 

Maybe once that school had been a kind place, with its rows of white buildings. But the flowers painted on the walls had faded to a bone-like pallor, and one or two of the classrooms sat with their white painted walls clawed and mangled with deep dark scorching, the charred blackness behind their windows almost still smoldering to the eye. Through one window rows of desks stood with chairs neatly folded up, another they sat open before the desks as if in anticipation. A handprint sat in the corner of one window, a tiny footnote of darkness upon the darkness behind it. 

The only thing that moved besides me were a pair of swings on the far side of the concrete lake these islands of wood and darkness were set upon, twisting and rocking without a sound. There wasn't a damn noise in all the world as I walked through that place. 

Just the sense that something bad had happened here a long long time ago. 

The door to the library threw itself open with a crash that split the night like a meteor. Rust crept around its lock and hinges like mould. I made for the vast towering maw of darkness that lay beyond, daring it to swallow me before the future did. If the noise of the world was timid around the school, the light was just as meek inside it. It was only after a minute of careful, purposeful snaking through black upon black that I was finally able to make the open inner doorway, and that cold barren maze of shelves beyond. I pressed through, past shelves of  glossy hardcovers and tattered shambles of desecrated pages. 

And then right at the heart of that damn room I'll never forget what I saw. 

As soon as I laid eyes upon it the door smashed shut with another cleaving thunderclap. All at once the back of my head burned with anticipation, like a thousand eyes were staring down on me, judging me for ever daring to trespass that god-forsaken ruin that claimed them as their home forever. My own heart was silent. My own head was silent. My own soul was silent. The darkness smothered like water overhead. 

That was when I heard the yowl. 

A howling preening cry that cut through the suffocating silence like a sword. I wrenched my head to where it came from, a cat on the open window, its shapely tail curling up and back and beckoning me to where I was before. I needed no further invitation. I bolted for the window, not squandering a second to look back. The beast turned and leapt as I reached it, lunging behind me in an arrow of fuzzy darkness and brilliant iridescent eyes that shone like gold. I threw myself out the opening and ran, ran until my chest screamed and my hands hit familiar metal and glass. 

I got in the car and drove like the wind, until I glanced that darting serpentine shape of paws and ears and arrow-straight tail bolt right across the edge of my lights. I turned after it at the next intersection and as the moon broke through again I finally found myself coming towards the marching army of lights that cordoned the motorway. 

But I'll never forget what I saw that night in the heart of that damn room. 

It looked like this. 

Oh. OHHHHHHH! Oh I finally get it now! It's supposed to be a chained up tome of evil! All these years I thought the cover was just some kind of chain-gimp fetish shoutout

Ever since first learning of its existence I've tried very hard to understand and appreciate Wraith: The Oblivion. Its reputation as being the ultimate apotheosis of edgy grimdark, the shining jeweled cherry of pure distilled edgy grimdark misery on top of the already mountainous sundae of edgy grimdark drenched with hot edgy grimdark misery sauce that is the Old World of Darkness, has intrigued me because being already familiar with both Warhammer 40,000 and the golden child of the OWOD Vampire: The Masquerade, the idea of there being a tabletop game even more grimdark than those two is something I just have to see for myself - I'm fascinated by Kult for very similar reasons. 

Of course, the other big drive behind my fascination with Wraith is its other reputation as the neglected spat-upon Zoidberg of the OWOD, and as something of a Zoidberg myself I cannot help but naturally relate to such a product. One does not spend 15 years as a Tau player in online 40k fan spaces without developing at least a little empathy for a good outcast no-one likes (it's either that or internalise the hatred and become one of those Tau players that's not like Those Other Girls Tau fans)

Unfortunately, for a long time no matter how hard I tried I just fundamentally did not get Wraith. The trouble was that its dense world of Shadowlands and Stygia and Acranoi and a million billion assorted eternal realms of afterlife was all just noise to me, a sea of bizarre concepts that I just fundamentally could not get my head around enough to fully care about. 

And I suspect that's one of Wraith's biggest problems. At least when it comes to cultivating an audience and being successful. 

It's telling that until very recently the game's biggest moment in the spotlight, the time where it came closest to reaching a mass audience, was in one of the best sequences of the video game Bloodlines... that did not even bother to so much as mention a single thing about Wraith's background worldbuilding and instead focused down on classic ghost story staples with laser precision to masterful effect. 

What's also telling is the breakthrough that finally managed to pierce the cloud and start bridging the gap between me and Wraith. It was many years after I had first learned of Wraith, and I was revisiting the TVtropes page for the game in some idle web-browsing when I came across this buried gem: 

It's possible to permanently yield some power to your Shadow in order to reenter your body and become one of the Risen until you take care of some unfinished business. Yup; you become The Crow. 

Now THAT, that right there. THAT, is a concept. That is something I could comprehend having fun with. The stuff about a million billion afterlife realms and cliques politicking in them and also apparently all the stuff is made out of other ghosts now for some reason? That was all still largely illegible alien nerd gibberish to rival the Voynich Manuscript, but "You get to play as The Crow in the OWOD" was a concept with serious potential. 

And it was an angle that stuck with me just long enough to remember it right when I needed it most. 

It was 2020, and the climactic final act of the Vampire adventure that remains my magnum opus as a GM was coming up to high gear. In the sexy glitzy nights of central San Francisco, my PCs had just rescued an important personal friend of the local Tremere coven and an expert in ritual enchantments. In doing so they had finally learnt of the presence of a hard-as-nails veteran vampire hunter, hot on the trail of the defecting Sabbat VIP the PCs had been tasked with guarding and now packing an arsenal of custom tailor-enchanted anti-vampire stakes that she had forced the aforementioned Tremere hostage to make for her. 

(and as it turned out, also the daughter of the Final Girl that helped the Gangrel PC take down a Tzimisce operation back in the day) 

One brief car-motorcycle chase later, and two of the PCs had managed to narrowly apprehend said vampire hunter and get her unconscious ass back to their hideout. Between the difficulty in actually apprehending her and a cursory examination of the absolute arsenals found in the two duffel-bags on her person, the PCs quickly came to the (correct) conclusion that Ghouling her would make a formidable ally. 

Unfortunately the attempt to make a Ghoul out of her fell through when two sets of character prime directives violently collided with each other. See, the PC who had taken on the Ghouling plan as a pet project had this whole thing about only ever turning people into Ghouls and Vampires with consent ("I'm going to give you the choice I never had"), but what the players did not know was that Ms Vampire Hunter had her own whole thing about not becoming the very monsters she hunts at all costs. The resulting impasse might have been resolved with a sufficiently impressive feat of persuasion (which I was actually low-key rooting for the PCs to pull off), but the PC was the party's muscle and very much a fighter not a lover, and for whatever reason the player behind her never thought to break out and switch over to the much more socially inclined Ghoul they already had at their disposal (which I was actually low-key rooting for them to do), so the impasse was ultimately only resolved with terminal neck trauma. 

Yet it was not the end. The almighty puppeteer god that ruled over their world from behind the shadows was not yet ready to let go of such a promising NPC. Not least because it would make the job of putting together more session content easier if a few more sessions could be squeezed out of her. 

And it was in exploring ways to salvage the character that I remembered that little line from the TVtropes page, and the concept of Risen in the OWOD. It seemed like the perfect solution, so I went over to the White Wolf Wiki to at least get a cliff-notes understanding of what Risen were and how they work. 

And that was how I discovered the next big breakthrough with Wraith. 

See, it turns out that one of the special things Risen get access to is a couple of unique sets of powers. One of those unique lists of powers is called Serendipity, and the Wiki describes it as having power over coincidences that a Risen can use to- 

Wait. 

Hold up. 

Wait. 

Wait wait. 

Wait hold up. 

Wait hold up here a minute. 

Lemme just. 

Lemme just backtrack a little there and.. 

Those who master Serendipity can make coincidences work in their favor.

Make coincidences work in their favour. 

The power of coincidence. 

Coincidence. 

Coincidence, random chance. 

Random chance, coincidence. 

Like in Final Destination. 

The power of coincidence, like in Final Destination. 

Wait. 

Wait wait wait wait wait. 

Hold the fuck up here a minute. 

 Just hold the fuck up here a minute White Wolf. 

You're telling me, White Wolf, that in this Wraith game of yours, this whole time, I could have been going fucking full Final Destination on motherfuckers?  

Holy FUCK White Wolf! Why in god's name did you not open with that? That's the most metal thing I've heard all month! That's rock as hell! Fucking sign me up right there, that's the sale of the century! Bringing back this badass Vampire hunter as pissed off revenant with motherfucking Final Destination powers is exactly the kind of cool fun out of leftside challenge for my PCs I'm looking for! I can have ALL kinds of fun with that concept! 

Right that settles it, we're breaking out this Wraith stuff, we're making this girl a Risen and we're going to be busting out ALL the Final Destination powers, here we go, it's gonna be wild, it's gonna be rad, crank up that Within Temptation and lesh go! 

Alright here we go, I'm all fired up on Within Temptation, I'm feeling this in my bones, I am READY for these Final Destination powers, come on White Wolf hit me with every one of these Serendipity powers you got! Let's do this! Here we go! 

Oh. 

Oh. 

What the HELL White Wolf. How the HELL do you screw up Final Destination powers? I was promised an arsenal of kickass Final Destination powers and instead you give me a bunch of pissy little fee-fee kumbaya kombucha rubbish? What the hell am I supposed to do with any of this! I'm trying to make a paranormal supernatural horror story here not start a bible group! 

Just, just just go. Just get out of here White Wolf, just get the hell out of here. Go sit in the corner with Marmite, you deserve each other. This is why no-one likes you. 

So needless to say I almost immediately threw all the stuff on the wiki page out the window and exercised my awesome omnipotent might as GM to come up with some real Final Destination powers instead. And it was awesome. 

My point here is that this whole story is illustrative of Wraith's big framing problem and what I believe has held Wraith back from finding the same kind of success that Vampire did - Deep inside Wraith: The Oblivion is a mass of potential for a truly brilliant game, but it's hideously mismanaged and buried under 700 tons of clomping nerd bullshit for nerds, and the clomping nerd bullshit is placed front and centre as the star attraction which is the Tabletop Game marketing equivalent of going to a first date with a girl and then immediately asking her for graphic lewd descriptions of her feet and what they can do- it's the sort of thing you have to work up towards. 

That's not to say that this is all Wraith's fault specifically. The exact same problem plagues just about every single OWOD game that's not Vampire: The Masquerade, to varying extents, and again is a not insignificant factor in why none of them have ever really been able to replicate the same level of success and popularity that Vampire did. They all have this bad habit of trying way the hell too hard to make themselves their own distinct unique OC Do Not Steal IP, and in doing so they all end up overthinking everything and becoming dense and out there, and thus off-putting to a lot of people who would otherwise probably quite like their concepts. 

In contrast, Vampire never tried to be its own distinct unique completely original IP. It got there by accident while trying to be the ultimate general purpose vampire RPG. And when it comes to drawing in a big audience, that general purpose nature is a very powerful advantage. Being a general-purpose genre melting pot is a very effective survival strategy for a work of fiction, because leveraging existing familiarity allows preceding works to do half the work for you in priming people to like your content. If you've already grown up with westerns, adventure pulp, knight and samurai fantasy and war movies, then you're already primed to understand and like Star Wars. If you've grown up with 20th century sci fi like Aliens, Star Trek, Star Wars and so on, then you're already primed to understand and like Starcraft. 

And it's fundamentally the same with Vampire: The Masquerade. You're not playing in minutiae of fancy edgy goffik latinicus words, you're playing with sexy vampires. Or classic aristocratic vampires. Or classic hissing Orlock style vampires. You start by picking a classic vampire archetype and working out from there, and all the fancy gothic names are just window dressing that's mostly there as lawsuit repellant. And it works because if you're looking at Vampire: The Masquerade then you've probably already been weaned on a steady diet of Buffy, Anne Rice, Blade and Bram Stoker Francis Ford Coppola and know exactly what to expect and exactly what you're here for going in. 

With the other OWOD titles? Not so much. With them, the out-there OC IP is the central framework, and there's not really the same kind of ready-made onramp. 

In a lot of cases this is due to being victims of circumstance, in particular bad timing preventing them from piggy-backing off the cultural zeitgeist. Mage: The Ascension and Hunter: The Reckoning both suffer badly from this rotten luck - the former coming out three years too early to ride the Craft to Charmed Wicca pipeline, and the latter coming out six years too early to ride the Supernatural wave. And I suspect in both cases they were somewhat forced to improvise something to fill the gap, and resorted to doing so with varying degrees of clomping nerd bullshit that is often just really Out There man. Vampire, in contrast, was blessed to come out at just about the perfect time to be able to pick up on the experimental Lost Boys - Fright Night era of vampires and then slingshot off the Sexy Vampire Renaissance of the 90s, and thus never needed to try that hard. 

And that's not to say that really Out There niche stuff can't be good - the cult followings a lot of the non-Vampire OWOD titles have cobbled together is proof that people clearly do get invested in it - but it is going to have a lower ceiling on just how popular and successful the IP can get. As the old adage goes, not everybody drinks wine, but everybody drinks water. 

And this whole issue is probably most visible with Wraith, and most tragic because, when you dig down to that bedrock, Wraith is actually weirdly just about in the best possible place to replicate Vampire's success with the same survival strategy. 

It's not something you notice often, but when you sit down and really look at things, there's almost as many classic ghost stories in popular culture as there are vampire stories, and unlike the vampire stories, a lot more of those ghost stories actually centre ghosts themselves as protagonists. That means you don't even need to work as hard blending in out-of-subgenre elements. 

Those pop-culture influences are already enough to build a cool fun OWOD Wraith game off of. You don't need reams and reams of nonsense metacosmic spirit world politics, you don't even need a spirit world (seriously, why did White Wolf start confining their OWOD games to weird otherrealms?). You can just set players down and say "Alright, you're all ghosts, you have unfinished business in this life and there's some bad guys over there. Go Final Destination some motherfuckers. Go Beetlejuice the fuck out of them." and have a compelling fun game doing that. 

Because again, that's what Vampire: The Masquarade does, just with vampire pop culture. 

What do players do each night, you might ask? Well that's a great question, and the other great strength of Wraith is that it already has a really good solid answer for that too - just, again, buried under 700 tons of clomping nerd bullshit. 

The players try to transcend. 

It's been pointed out by some that Wraith for all its grimdark moping is ironically one of the most optimistic OWOD games because the ghostly ambition of resolving all the remaining lose ends tying them back and moving on to a better genuinely blissful afterlife is a goal that's actually viable in gameplay - you can practically achieve that over an adventure, in a way that you just can't with something like, say, riding yourself of the dark unholy thirst of the beast in Vampire. 

I'm compelled to agree, but I would go a step even further. That goal right there is on its own a perfect organic core story hook for you to base RPG sessions off of. That, right there, is the answer to the eternal question, as a wise blogger long ago once put it, of "what shall we do tonight Brain?" 

You try to work through your remaining life baggage so you can transcend to a final blissful existence. When in doubt, start exploring memories. 

Because ghosts, fundamentally, are MEMORIES. That's all a ghost is, a memory with an attitude and agency. That's why they're always tied to haunted places and objects, because that's how memories work - a thing or a place or a time reminds you of the memory. It's also why you can be haunted even by ghosts of people who aren't even dead, like when you're haunted by memories of an ex-girlfriend around an old anniversary. 

Someone on the Wraith team seemed to get this, because there's a good solid infrastructure in place already for that with all the fetters and tethers and such, but again, it's mismanaged and used as a footrest for 700 tons of unnecessary clomping nerd bullshit. 

Baddies you say? Well we'll get to those in the companion piece to this one. Oh yes, don't you worry about that, I have big plans all about playing stone-cold baddies galore. 

Oh wait, you mean bad guys, antagonists to fight? 

Ah well yes they're important too. We need someone to use those rocking Final Destination powers on. But I'm still not convinced you need a dark cosmic primordial evil with an army of evil spirits for that. After all, Vampire: The Masquerade - remember, the most popular OWOD game by a fair margin - does just fine without all that. In that one the bad guys are just a combination of antagonistic humans in your way and other vampires that are even worse than you and don't even pretend to care about humans or humanity. And that works. That 'hell is other people' concept works just fine, you don't need to go dragging in cosmological dark lords to justify it. 

And I feel like that formula would work much better for Wraith. Forget Oblivion and Spectres and all that, the bad guys in your way are just antagonistic humans and bad ghosts - no big cosmological reason why they're bad, they were just assholes in life and now they're assholes in death. People do be like that sometimes. Now go, get out there and Final Destination those motherfuckers. Go Beetlejuice the fuck out of them. 

See taking those kinds of antagonists, combining them with the core gameplay loop of exploring memories and resolving the loose ends holding your ghosts back from moving on, and a framework of classic ghost stories, produces a really focused, compelling tabletop RPG, with a focus on personal stakes and storytelling. No it doesn't have any grand sweeping cosmological battle of good and evil, but that's OK not every OWOD game needs one of those. In fact quite a few of them would probably be better off without it. You can have a fun cool and compelling game about a bunch of ghosts trapped in the real world (well the OWOD real world) cleaning up their memory baggage so they can move on to the better place they're supposed to be. With awesome Final Destination powers. 

And that, is what would make a Wraith game work for me at least. 

Cultural Touchstones 

So what are the pop culture touchstones that White Would should be drawing on for Wraith? What classic ghost stories should be the basis for its DNA? Well looking through my wall of VHS tapes, these for starters. 

Final Destination -  the reference that started it all. Raving about how excellent a source for game powers the film is, it's also a really really great classic example of a ghost story, at least of sorts. Final Destination is ultimately a classic ghost story without the ghost, with the characters instead being haunted by death itself. If you're wanting a good classic touchstone for what it's like to be haunted, this one is an excellent first pick. 


The Frighteners - gotta support the home team! As well as being a criminally underrated gem in its own right, The Frighteners is a great example of a ghost story with ghosts as... well not really protagonists but deuteragonists or deutragonist-adjacent at least. The dynamics between the main characters also give a good suggestion for what an ensemble party of ghost PCs might look something like, and while the surface design and concept of the antagonist is similar to what I think they were aiming for with the Spectres in the old game, the ultimate twist about the antagonist is a perfect example of the "hell is other people" type of antagonists that a good fresh Wraith game really should be focusing on more. 

Beetlejuice - it just wouldn't be a list of classic ghost pop culture without Tim Burton's magnum opus (yeah die mad about it old Batman fans) somewhere near the top. Beetlejuice, in case you are not familiar, is a tragic tale of achieving the ultimate pinnacle of the highest heaven, being cloistered up in your hobby room for all eternity with a 32 year old Geena Davis who utterly loves you, only to then have it all agonisingly ripped away by a couple of obnoxious yuppies and an immature edgelord who is summoned with the invocation "Beetlejuice Beetlejuice Beetlejuice" (repeating it also sends him back). Oh and Winona Ryder is there too. 

But I digress. The key thing about Beetlejuice, and what makes it such a key ingredient in what Wraith should be aiming for as a ghost RPG, is that Beetlejuice is probably the classic modern ghost story that's actually centred around ghosts. The protagonists are ghosts, one of the main antagonists is a ghost, and the central focus of the story is about ghosts navigating and adjusting to life after life. That makes it perfect bedrock to build a ghost-focused RPG on. 

I suspect this might be another case of someone on the Wraith team having the right idea, because I suspect that a lot of the nerd baggage in the game came about as an attempt to riff on the afterlife politics that also crop up in this film. But if that's the case then they also sort of missed the point completely, because the story here isn't about the afterlife politics, the story is about two newly ghostified people trying to make sense of their new existence and find their new place in the world. And that is exactly the sort of story that Wraith should really be focusing on. The rest is just garnish. 

Oh and there's also lots of rich inspiration for alternative powers to Final Destination too. 

Ghost - OK so there's two classic quintessential ghost stories centred on ghost as protagonist, and I need to throw in both of them if I want to avoid having my pop culture guru license revoked. But that's OK because I was going to do it anyway. Ghost is of course THE classic ghost movie, it is for ghost stories what Dracula and Interview are for vampire stories, but it's also EXACTLY the sort of personal stakes, personal-level story about exploring memory and tying up loose life baggage in order to ascend to the right place that should be Wraith's bread-and-butter. Give me a game where I play out something like this, and your game will be very popular and successful. 

Corpse Bride - Yet another ghost story with a ghost as deutragonist sort-of, and a focus on ghost characters navigating unresolved life baggage. A lot of what applies to the other entries above also applies here. It's almost like there's a common creative influence it shares between one of the others...

Thirteen Ghosts - while the other entries on here are all strong ingredients for what Wraith's story focus should be, this one is a key ingredient for what Wraith's aesthetic and visual design ought to be taking cues from. The story of the film itself is transparently threadbare and largely just an excuse to get characters exposed to freaky visuals, but those visuals themselves are on point. The look, design and character backstories of the titular ghosts are what has carried this film since its release, and are exactly the sort of place to look for when working out what Wraith characters might look like. Heck take the titular 13 ghosts from this film and you've already got a pretty respectable gallery of Wraith NPCs and/or pre-built PCs right there. 

Ghosts - rounding out the core lineup is this fun little gem of a TV show, as a good example of how ensembles of ghost characters can work over a serialised arc not dissimilar to the average RPG adventure, all delightfully framed by the charming charisma and dynamic magnetism of star actor Rose McIver who is a treasure to watch and a credit to every production she's in. 

Oh and there's also some obscure UK derivative of the show too I think. I suppose that's probably worth a watch too. 

Ghost Chips - Again, gotta support the home team! 

An astute observer will probably have noticed one recurring pattern across all these titles. None of them have the same sort of roof-top leather katana fighting action of Vampire, nor do they have the low-down gritty blue-collar brawling action of, say, Werewolf: The Apocalypse. The basis for a white-knuckled action game this is not. But that's OK, because not every OWOD game has to be like that, and in some cases it's a mistake for every OWOD game to try to be. It's OK to just be a personal game about personal character stories with personal character stakes. 

There's room in the OWOD for that. 

Ah ha haha.. 

YEEE-HOOO! 

Ah hahah hah hah! 

Ha hahahah hah hah hah, YEEEE-HOOOO! 

Hav'n trouble with the nerds? 

You tired of having your tabletop games neglected? 

You wanna get rid of them pesky profit losses once and for all? 

WELLL come on down to see me folks, 'cause I'm the nerd world's leading upcoming writer! 

Yessiree, come on down here and I wanna tell ya, 

I'll do ANYTHING! 

... 

I'll scare 'em REALL BAD, the POINT IS folks, I'm gon' do anything to get yer business! 

Hell! I'll possess MYSELF if I gotta! 

WOAH! YOWWWWWWW I got deemons runnin' all through me, ALL THROUGH ME! 

Come on down here and see it! 

And hey, if you act now, you get a free golden new game concept with every critique! Ah now you can't beat that can you. 

And bring the lil' parts down here! Hell we got plenty of snakes an' lizards for 'em to play with, there's no problem with that at all! 

So, 

Say it once! 

Say it twice! 

Third time's the charm! 

And remember! 

I'll eat anything you want me to eat, 

I'll swallow anything you want me to swallow, 

So come on down! I'll... 

I'll chew on a dawg! 

AWOOOOOOOOOOH!