Sunday, July 17, 2005

Jeff's Gameblog: The Wraeththu Report

Well, Jeff bite the bullet and wrote a review. Enjoy....and hope that the man survived his encounter.

Jeff's Gameblog: The Wraeththu Report

"Colin Chapman started it. It's all his fault.Way back in August 2003 he posted a little item to the RPGnet forums entitled Most Pretentious and Artsy RPG Ever Created?: Wraeththu, starting a thread that exceeded 500 posts. Quickly on the heels of that thread, Wraeththu author Gabriel Strange (posting as gabby2600) ineptly responded with a thread of his own called Wraeththu: Bring on the Clowns. This was also a 500-response monster of a thread. Initially I joined in the guffawing dogpile upon Gabby and his antics, but somewhere along the way I became obsessed with finding out more about the actual game hidden under all the internet gibbering. I started routinely checking up on the official Wraeththu rpg website, stopping by the official messageboards occasionally, sometimes reading the blog of the primary author, and scouring Google for more information. I used the Illinois interlibrary loan system to get a copy of the novels upon which the game is based. (I only made it about 75 pages in before I had to return the book.) Eventually I was so fascinated with the development of the Wraeththu rpg that I started several RPGnet threads of my own: A Wreaththu Thread, Wraeththu: more sample pages (featuring Andy Kitowski's Spulturatorah! rpg), A Brief Wraeththu Update, and Wraeththu RPG on eBay. Once I even edited the Wraeththu entry at Wikipedia to include a missing piece of information.

"Worst of all, I just couldn't stop blogging about this game."