Am I totally missing the danger of this thing?* It knocks you out (rather easily, I admit) with Stun Damage but after that...

*On its own, not as a member of some other force.

33 minutes ago, Alderaan Crumbs said:

Am I totally missing the danger of this thing?* It knocks you out (rather easily, I admit) with Stun Damage but after that...

*On its own, not as a member of some other force.

A lot would depend on how your table handles critical injuries when taking stun damage. If you can take critical injuries like usual, this thing is a beast. After all, it can continue attacking your unconscious form after you are down, inflicting critical wounds until you expire. I'm almost certain that's how they were intended to be played, too, with the crit of 1 on their spectral claws.

Also, with the ability to pass through solid objects - such as walls or floors - they're going to be pretty good at hit-and-run.

EDIT: Aaand... @RichardBuxton beat me to that last part. ?

The simple fact it’s classed as a rival indicates they shouldn’t be too though. But with the half Damage they’re going to be a challenge, 3 Defence will really help, and most pc’s will fail the Daunting fear check.

I feel the Failure of a fear check against a Wraith should have the potential of causing Trauma too, so in all likelihood the pc’s will be starting tge encounter on the back foot.

Then there is the Spectral Claws, Crit 1 with Breach is nasty. And they can flee almost instantly by moving downward into the ground or through a nearby wall. I see them using a hit and fade tactic to harry their foe and chase them into even greater danger.

Great points! Thank you both for pointing them out.

"Despite the fearsome nature of Waiqar's forces, none of them are as dreaded as wraiths..... wraiths which haunt places stained
by anger, despair, or violence..... (possibly) manifestations of tragic or violent deaths involving dark emotions,
ones so powerful that death itself could not still the intense hate, passion, or jealousy involved.

Often just the sight of a single wraith is enough to send disciplined units screaming in retreat, and many an adventuring band has been
reduced to a single gibbering survivor who barely returns to tell their tale....

(There are) wraiths, banshees, and frenzied bone constructs too destructive to be allowed loose except
when the utter annihilation of entire battlefields is desired."

Sounds fairly scary to me, the GM needs to tell it so - certainly implies some encounters might warrant an even more lethal version of a wraith, although rival with the stats it has already makes it middle-tier and flexible on numbers so you can set the number of rivals to the required difficulty (p133 CRB) - perhaps even a nemesis level one if it's a key NPC adversary, although in most cases rival will fit best, or you could take inspiration from wraiths in creating any other undead nemesis, remember the difficulty of any rival can be adjusted to the needs of the game in question, the party strength and its significance (its proximity to big bad boss status if you like!). One thought I had for my game is I like the idea of using such entities sometimes when they're just a ghostly presence- for horrror and horror-in-fantasy, sometimes things can just be scary not 'attack harmful' as well, other times they can be both. Especially if as GM you want to make somewhere really spooky you can pop in a few extra purely descriptive ghosties and the like that don't attack just give people the heebies. Wraiths are probably also good for something very scary but not too lethal to adventurers in their RoT description. Unless there's hordes of the things!

Plus what people have said above, especially Richardbuxton's trauma point- a GM could make a failed fear check quite nasty narrative-wise and perhaps consequentially for a stronger party. And fear can spread- once someone screams, that itself could cause fear and break a party's nerve....

Don't forget as well as the half damage, solid object pass-through (if you really want to up the horror maybe it passes through one or more of the party- shiver time, it says terrain but I see little reason why it couldn't pass through a person!) and spectral claws, it also has 'undead' and wailing cry albeit with a low crit risk- along with the potential for them to be present in numbers or with other nasties and in already creepy places.

In the orc spiritspeaker description it says

"wraiths (can) directly attack whoever holds their cursed object." so if the GM desires or the particular game says so just having the wrong object in your possession could mean an attack from a wraith that isn't even there if a spiritspeaker is present to make that connection (or maybe has previously) and can somehow trick the target into holding the object.

The twilight rune description gives another insight into wraiths not highlighted in the wraith description- they are very stealthy entities-

"In actual darkness, the wearer becomes a akin to a wraith, able to slip past the most alert sentries."

hence implying that, especially in darkness, wraiths could easily slip past you (or surprise you, you're safely hidden behind a wall, or so you thought....)