Filippo Franco
I want to clarify that I wrote this review following the sending of Afterlife: Wandering Souls by the author, so that I can evaluate it.
We told you about an interesting and original anthology of indie games: An Indie Game Anthology, a collection of narrative RPGs written by two authors. We delved into the topic with an interview and we focused in two products in particular, The Wicked Sisters and We Die Here, that we analyzed in a preview.
One of the authors, Elizabeth Chaipraditkul, sent us another work, Afterlife: Wandering Souls (available on DriveThruRPG), and today we will discover it.
You can’t be at peace even when you’re dead
Welcome to Tenebris. You died and something went wrong.
This is how Afterlife: Wandering Souls starts. Whatever fate you thought would await you after death has been replaced by Tenebris, an infinite desert without sun, moon or stars, but with suffocating days and dark and freezing nights. You are without memory and with only one hope. The hope is to reach the Requiem, the end of the journey. Your greatest fear is Stagnation, the loss of hope and the awareness that you will never abandon Tenebris.
Afterlive: Wandering Souls is a particular game, born to explore a character’s dark past by accepting his imperfect human nature while recovering his forgotten memories. This character, known as Wanderer, travels to Tenebris facing dangers, exploring bizarre places and confronting his macabre inhabitants.
To infinity and the Beyond
Human beings, or rather their souls, do not belong to Tenebris. Their aim is to get back their memories in order to reach the Beyond. To do this, they must precisely wander, recovering fragments of memory, which give Resonance to the Wanderer. When he gets enough Resonance he has a Break. During a Breaw he dives into a complete memory of the past, he heals his soul a little and he approaches one step beyond. When a Wanderer learns all the lessons from his past life he follows the Marks of Death, tattoos on the skin that lead towards the end of the journey.
But the path is not easy at all. If you are unable to face the difficulties, you will lose Will. Whenever the Will is exhausted, one point of Stagnation is taken. Once four points are reached, a Wanderer loses hope and becomes an Unrequieted, a soul who sees Wanderers as pompous deluded. For many Unrequieted, the goal is to prevent other Wanderers from reaching the Beyond, carrying on an eternal conflict that will not end as long as no human remains on Tenebris.
Given the danger of the place, the Wandererrs do not travel alone but in groups called Crews. Over time, the team will witness each member’s recovered memories, cementing a unique and deep bond.
Me, myself and I
Wanderers appear as they were seen when they were alive. If a person felt constantly treated like a child it could look like this. On the other hand, not remembering his own death, he cannot know if he has ever passed the childhood age. But Wanderers manifest much more than an altered appearance.
Each of them has an Approach, a personal and personalized weapon with which it faces Tenebris. Talents are strange abilities that Wanderers possess, no one knows why. From healing to summoning creatures, they can be developed, learned and taught. The Marks of Death cover the body of the Wanderers as tattoos and appear on the skin after a Break, giving the character also a mechanical benefit that can be used in the game.
Tenebris
Tenebris is an infinite desert dotted with cities, ruins, forests and other strange places. The natives call them Mirages. Humans, Marauders or Uncorrected, are not creatures of Tenebris. The original inhabitants are mainly divided into five races: the Kiin, shapeshifter humanoid, the Nagiin, half human half snake, the Venefolk, magical humanoid sometimes with four arms, the Ungkiin, humanoid with two or four hoofed limbs and finally the Usurii, small bipeds bears devoted to spiritual improvement. But in the vastness of Tenebris there is room for many other creatures.
Then there are the Limbo. They are separate existence planes whose entrances are everywhere in Tenebris. Only humans can enter and other creatures don’t seem interested. For the Wanderers, however, each Limbo is a taste of the Beyond, a place, heavenly or hellish, where it can collect fragments of memory. They can be any kind of place and situation.
Moving between Mirages and Limbos, Wanderers meet the Dark: that is, they are subject to risks and dangers that they face as a group.
Character creation in Afterlife: Wandering Souls
There are three Core Stats: Body, Mind and Soul, which in turn supersede three Attributes to cover the various possibilities of tests that will be done.
Then there are values, Concepts and Vitality, which function like a coin in the game and therefore have temporary scores that can vary. The Concepts are three, each linked to a Core Stat and can be spent to make related tests easier. Body is related to Ferocity, Mind to Lucidity and Soul to Generosity. Vitality follows the same system and represent the well-being of the Wanderer. For the Body there is Health, for the Mind the Hunger and for the Soul the Will.
The character starts as a clean slate and the character creation is done in the game. No preparation is required and there are 90 unique choices based on what a player rolls or decides, making starting this game very interesting and very practical.
All the players start on the same boat in the presence of a boatman, who introduces them to Tenebris, while rolling dice stats are set through descriptions of the previous life, what you learned in life and what you know now of yourself. Then the boatman gives an Approach to each player, to symbolize how he faces obstacles. A bow for those who rely more on the Mind, a shield for the Soul and a sword for the Body. After that, you roll for the Talents and the Curiosa, unique objects that produce wonderful effects. Nine Death Marks are already being chosen which, as we shall see, one by one after each Break they will emerge on the Wanderer’s skin.
System and gameplay of Afterlife: Wandering Souls
The system is quite simple: the player declares what he intends to do, the master decides the difficulty of the test between, usually, one and five and the player rolls as many d6 as the sum of a Core Stat plus an Attribute. Any result above 4 is a success and you must at least match the difficulty to make it. In case of failure you get an experience point, in addition to the consequences of failure. Or the player can decide to suffer a memory, losing a point of Will, but thus avoiding the consequences (and unfortunately also the experience point!). Few other rules complete a simple and lean system, obviously aimed at narration.
The typical gameplay of Afterlife: Wandering Souls therefore consists of the Wanderers who enter Limbo to find fragments of memory while carrying on their “lives” on Tenebris. Generally there is a personal story, with its own goals. In the meantime a Limbo is discovered. The crew reachs it, enters and a Wanderer faces it in order to recover the memory fragment. Once in Limbo a player can name the memory fragment: he relates what is in the Limbo to its past, resolves it and obtains a Break. All the other characters, who have left the Limbo, will get Resonance Points.
In repeating this cycle, the Wanderers face their memories by confronting the defects and wrong choices of the previous life. When a Wanderer reaches three points of Resonance, he has a Break.
What are these Breaks? Narrative moments in which a Wanderer enters a catatonic state and brings a Mark of Death to the surface. Mechanically they unlock a Mark and its associated power as well as giving a new Talent or a Talent’s ability. It is a step closer to the Beyond.
A sea of sand and contents
The Afterlife: Wandering Souls manual also offers various insights for the game. It talks about the Alligiances between Wanderers, who gather according to their vision of Tenebris. There is information on the language, the Mortua, the calendar, the currency, the races, the Unrequieted.
It then continues with a description of some Mirages. These places in Tenebris are unique and strongly characterized, almost as if they represent archetypes rather than real locations. Ancestor, for example, is a city built on a huge brachiosaurus. Average Point is an average city, where normal people live never to extremes. Babel is a 77-story circular tower where linguistic confusion reigns. Exodus Thirteen is a huge metal ring populated by sentient cyborgs. The list is long and full of imagination; it shows ability to paint physical spaces in a few lines that generate thoughts and reflections..
Same thing for the list of various Limbo proposed in the manual. Places very dissimilar to each other, brushed in a few lines with ideas to make the Wanderers interact and to name a fragment with a clever correlation between a concept and the place described. From towering gardens to steampunk cities, from dark swamps to labyrinths of broken glass, hats off for creativity and style.
Thn we find a chapter describing how to manage the game with insights on the mechanics, useful lists, narrative suggestions. Not particularly nourished, but there is no need for great explanations. The game is based on a few concepts and the real heart is the kaleidoscope of Wanderers, Mirages and Limbo that a story goes to tell, therefore there is justly little to explain to a narrator.
Life after Afterlife: Wandering Souls
After discovering this game I have an even greater esteem of its author. She has been able to combine two very different aspects terrifically. On the one hand there are the setting and the system, both simple, easy to understand and well explained. In a few sentences you understand everything and it is clear what game you are going to play. These extreme clarity and simplicity have as counterbalance the extreme creativity and style of the narrative elements proposed, in particular the places, both the Mirages and the Limbos. These are the ones who avoid making this simple game something simplistic or flat. Instead, they give meaning and depth to the system with a huge buffet of not only descriptive and interactive possibilities but also double reading. It should not be forgotten that Wanderers reach places to reinterpret them as memories.
It goes without saying that the game must be lived with the duality in mind. The real side and the underlying meaning. Players must be focused and ready to give their emotional contribution. The narrator should be talented enough to knows how to make the cues of the manual live and expand. He should also be quick, with creativity and improvisation skills, to provide ideas, to create correlations and to keep credible and meaningful the relationship between places, Wanderers and their memories.
From a graphic and layout point of view, there is a lot of clarity in the single column format with a large and light font. Text boxes and the use of italics and bold are simple but do their homework. The images do not lool like masterpieces but they are still pleasant and for the most part rather evocative. The vertical floral borders, despite the central skull, do not help the tone of the setting but give a pleasant touch to the pages.
In short, Afterlife: Wandering Souls is not a game for everyone, but I think it can reserve great satisfactions for mature players who will be able to get involved and get their hands dirty with feelings and sensations, without neglecting the pleasure of the classic elements of a roleplaying game.
