In the World of Darkness, the Underworld is where ghosts hang out. It’s the main setting for Wraith: the Oblivion and a secondary setting for Mummy: the Resurrection (as in, wraiths spend all their time there because they’re dead, and mummies spend part of their time there preparing to come back from death). It’s a pretty cool and Gothic place, where everyone walks around wearing their fatal wounds on full display and your trusty sword was probably some unfortunate slave who got melted down for his plasm.
The problem is, it’s also a pain in the ass to run games in, because a lot of things are more flavourful than practical – not to mention, not particularly well defined as to how they work in practice (see Changeling: the Dreaming and its “chimerical reality” for a similar problem). For one thing, it’s never quite clear if the Shadowlands (the part of the Underworld that lies closest to the Land of the Living, and from which you can affect it with magic) is a place in and of itself that just happens to be close to the Land of the Living, or if it is the Land of the Living as experienced by the disembodied ghosts that are haunting it. When writing my Mummy port, I’ve had to flesh out a number of things, and I’m still not sure about some of my decisions.
Case in point, the fact that there is very little actual matter in the Shadowlands beyond the plasm of the wraiths themselves (which is why they practice soulforging to get their gear). That’s very bleak and evocative – it’s a world where production and commerce literally uses the working class as gristle for the wheels, it’s all very punk and rage-against-the-machine. But what it means in practice is that you have to constantly veto the things your players try to do, because they have once again forgotten that they have no tools, not even so much as a strip of cloth to bind a wound with (in the Underworld, your clothes are part of your body and can’t be removed).
I mean, I love in theory, because it feeds the nightmarish feel of the Underworld – in a bad dream, you are always facing doors that won’t open and find yourself having forgotten something important at home (including, indeed, your clothes!). But in a game where the players are supposed to be able to do stuff, that feeling of helplessness is… not helping. I’ve been grappling with that for several sessions now.
Here’s my latest adjustment: from now on, players can spend Balance hold to cast a spell that would normally require some sort of tool or ingredient. That seems fair – wraiths, after all, don’t need tools to use their arcanoi, and mummies should surely be at least as powerful as wraiths. And it also means that Balance is still useful for something even after you’ve hoarded enough to resurrect but decided to postpone resurrection while you deal with some issue in the Underworld.
We’ll see how it goes.
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