YMMV / Wraith: The Oblivion

• Audience-Alienating Premise: Wraith itself suffers from this due to its relentlessly dark themes, but special mention must go to Charnel Houses of Europe: The Shoah, a tabletop game supplement for Wraith about the Holocaust. Unlike the far more ill-conceived World of Darkness: Gypsies, Charnel Houses of Europe is by all accounts a well-written, well-researched book that treats its subject-matter with the seriousness and respect it deserves... but since that subject matter is the Holocaust, it is nonetheless not a book very many people use in play, even if they own it. The series as a whole sold badly enough that White Wolf decided to end its metaplot early by blowing everything up.
• Fan Nickname: "The Big Grey Book of Depressing", because of its less than cheery subject matter, and White Wolf's decision to print the books in grey ink on grey paper.
• Narm:
  • It's kind of hard to keep a sufficiently bleak mood going when there are alternative-rock quotes at the top of every other paragraph.
  • While all White Wolf's Old World of Darkness settings flirted with angst, Wraith has it as a core statistic and game mechanic.
• Too Bleak, Stopped Caring: You're dead. There's an angry voice in your head that wants you to start destroying everything. Your options are to mope around in the wasteland for eternity, destroy everything, be turned into someone's sweater-vest whilst remaining conscious for eternity, cease to exist, or try to Transcend (which on visuals alone is indistinguishable from ceasing to exist). Oh, and that last one's illegal. And the "Destroy everything" faction grows stronger by the day.

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