So today I’d like to talk about one of my favorite tabletop roleplaying games of all time: “The Whispering Vault”.
This game of creepy, cosmic horror came out in 1994, but I didn’t get a copy until a couple of years later, as I have the 1995 second printing. This softbound game may seem rather plain in appearance, at first glance, and also rather slim, at only 140 pages, but oh what wonders await within those pages! Mike Nystul crafted an amazing TTRPG, with delightfully weird and wonderful black-and-white illustrations by Pat Coleman, Mark Ernst, Earl Grier, Daniel Gelon, Jeff Laubenstein, Anson Maddocks, Larry MacDougall, Dave MacKay, Jim Nelson, Mike Nielson, and Mark Tedin. Yeah, that’s a bit of a list!
Anyway, so what exactly is this game about? Well, that’s not so easily explained. The setting is rather… unique. It is effectively a form of cosmic horror, but completely different from the quintessential TTRPG in that genre, being “Call of Cthulhu”. In “The Whispering Vault”, you don’t find human characters investigating horrors from beyond space and time. Instead, in TWV you play… well… Dead.
Look, things are about to get a bit weird, but bear with me.
So in TWV, you have two realms of existence, the Realm of Flesh, and the Realm of Essence. Basically, our world, and the world of Spirit. So in the Real of Essence you have Shadows watching the Realm of Flesh, trying to interact with us. But only the most aggressive and dangerous are able to cross over to the Realm of Flesh, and that’s bad. But worse yet are beings called the Unbidden, who cross over to our realm and try to enact their own twisted desires. These beings are powerful enough to change reality to suit their passions, which has a real “Hellraiser” vibe to it.
Anyway, the player characters are Stalkers, which are beings raised up from the spirits of deceased people, who are tasked with returning to the Realm of Flesh and capturing or destroying rogue Shadows and Unbidden. Those that are captured are cast into a place where they can cause no further harm, the aforementioned Whispering Vault.
Now the players I ran TWV for described it as “Superheroic Horror”, in that they were beings with special powers, who chased their prey through various time periods, and then battled these dark beings to save Humanity. But I disagree with that assessment, as I feel it is a bit… reductive. Yes, what they say is precisely true. This is exactly what your characters are tasked with doing. They have special powers, can change their persona as needed to the setting and time they visit. And yes, they have to deal with very alien and aggressive beings.
But.
If you have ever played “Kult: Divinity Lost”, you may have a better idea of what Nystul seemed to be going for in TWV’s setting. The Stalkers aren’t just upraised spirits of deceased humans, because that tends to lead the players into thinking their characters still have a deep connection to their lost lives, loved ones, and so on. No, Stalkers are well and truly molded by the Realm of Essence, and are effectively Shadows themselves. They simply have something innate within their personalities that makes them suitable to protecting Reality in the Realm of Flesh.
This is the distinction here. Humanity isn’t what they are protecting as the primary goal, but the Realm of Flesh itself. Yes, Humanity is a part of that, and Stalkers will interact with humans in their given tasks, but there is so much more to it. What matters is that Reality remains intact, in the end.
In fact, what my players believed their characters to be like better describes rogue Shadows that enter the Realm of Flesh. It is the inability to let go of their connection to the Realm of Flesh that often drives Shadows mad, leading to them ripping their way into our realm, where they become everything from baleful spirits haunting a home, to monstrous creatures thirsting for blood. And all of this completely ignores the Unbidden, which are effectively demigods (after a fashion), who attempt to shape reality into their own twisted form.
Normally, you have these beings of Creation that dream, and those dreams become reality. Sometimes those Creators choose to come into the Realm of Flesh, and create what I can best describe as a pocket universe, where only their passions shape the reality therein. Those are the Unbidden, and are way more difficult to extract and cast into the Whispering Vault. These are the true cosmic horrors of TWV, and in my mind give the game its truly sick flavor.
Perhaps I am at fault for not giving my players a better idea of what sort of game they were going to play here, and thus they developed a skewed impression overall? Or maybe they just couldn’t grasp the unnatural aspects of the game? I really couldn’t say, as we only played a few sessions, before they all chose to return to their favorite TTRPG at the time, being “Werewolf: The Apocalypse”. I should not have been surprised they would seek the safe shores of a much less alien game, after playing “The Whispering Vault”.
At least they didn’t run all the way back to “Dungeons and Dragons”.
The system used in “The Whispering Vault” is a basic dicepool mechanic, rolling a number of d6 against a target number, which in itself is based upon difficulty of the task. Players do the vast majority of dice rolls, and actions tend to be quick and fluid… Except for when it isn’t. Using powers/magic tended to confound my players, as they were asked to do something I had never really asked of them before: Use their imaginations.
You see, “The Whispering Vault” is a narrative-based game, released in an era where that sort of game was few and far between. Yes, the game I discussed last month (“Feng Shui 2”, as its predecessor “Feng Shui” before it) was a narrative game, as well. But my players weren’t really up to describing the results of their actions, rather than having me do so as the GameMaster, and that slowed up gameplay considerably.
If you’re not picking up what I’m putting down, my players really shouldn’t have played “The Whispering Vault”. It just wasn’t a good fit for them, and that was on me, as the GM.
That all said, “The Whispering Vault” is an amazing game, if you like your horror Cosmic, Unique, and not a little bit Weird. It had gone out of print many years ago, but has been brought back, if only in digital form, through the grace of Phillip Reed, a most talented and prolific game designer.
