A Halloween Spooktacular
Yes.
Also yes.
That too.
No. That's not even a White Wolf product.
That would be better, but now you're just fucking with me.
Musical accompaniment: Bangles - Walk Like An Egyptian
Dracula is the most successful of the Universal monsters. The Wolf Man is second, because werewolf movies got a real shot in the arm in the 80s with the improved special effects available. A surprising third, however, isn't Frankenstein's monster...it's the Mummy. Yes, yet another form of the undead, which hearkens back to the Egyptology craze of the 1920s, the opening of Tutankhamun's tomb, ancient curses, the rise of Hermetic magic (which is based on a mix of Egyptian, Greek, and Jewish magical practices), and after many decades, Anne Rice's novel Ramses the Damned.
(A lot of early VtM art focused on quasi-Egyptian symbols, particularly the Ankh, which only tended to confuse matters more...but they were in good company for that.)
So it should come as no surprise that by the time that Vampire was a genuine hit, they tossed around for another concept - and settled, after a bit, on Mummy. No, the surprise is that they kept at it, revisiting the concept again and again, often without markable improvement but with substantial increases in page count. So, this being Hallowe'en month, we're going to look at three of the World of Darkness Mummy books.
White Wolf's three Mummy versions were moving towards a singularity in page count if nothing else. The original World of Darkness: Mummy (or perhaps “A World of Darkness: Mummy” or just “Mummy,” depending on whether you go by the interior text, the title page, or the cover respectively) came out in 1992 at 82 pages. The “second edition” of “Mummy” (where “Mummy” is the title rather than subtitle even on the cover page) came out in 1997 at 141 pages. And “Mummy: the Resurrection” came out in 2001 at a hefty 227 pages. That's about 12 pages of bloat per year for the first five, and about 21 pages of bloat per year for the next four. If White Wolf had bothered to make a Mummy book for New World of Darkness, it would have been one of those 300+ page monstrosities like Geist. So just as well that never happened.
They did actually touch on mummies in that ridiculous Immortals shovelware book, but the less said about that the better.
The thing about Mummy is that except for the last one, none of them were really intended to be standalone in any shape or fashion - they were clearly supplements designed to tack on to your Vampire chronicle (and later, to tack on to any WoD game). Part of the reason for this is a lack of general concept - if you look at most of the fiction involving mummies, they're not sexy walking corpses, they're hideous walking corpses that often come back in their decayed bodies for revenge, or to retrieve a reincarnated lost love, or recover some treasure from their tomb or something before returning to their sleep of centuries. They don't often shuffle about in groups, or do much else - they probably have the least interaction with even the other Universal monsters. Hell, when Marvel tried to use the concept in the 70s, they had to come up with an origin story involving alchemy, racism, and a fucking meteorite.
Seriously, it was almost Blackula.
And remember, White Wolf hasn't quite perfected its formula yet, so the idea of competing lineages and political shenanigans and whatnot hasn't gelled yet either. So in figuring out how to work Mummies into a Vampire/WoD concept, they're starting off from a very unfamiliar and unstable foundation - basically, a vague ancient Egyptian background and the need to be mummified and come back in some format that can interact with the mortal world.
All of the Mummy books feel really incomplete. Some of this is just that they were demonstrably made by the B or even C team (the title page of the first Mummy even mentions that the main team is off working on the upcoming Werewolf: the Apocalypse while this book is being produced), but a lot of this has to do with Jet Li.
Don't worry, Emperor Chin is just as confused by that point as you.
It has always been the official stance of White Wolf that there in fact are Asian Mummies, and Aztec Mummies, and Bog Mummies, and whatever else you got. But in none of these books do they especially get the kind of focus they deserve. You'd think that in adding 145 pages from the first edition to the third (and using a smaller font!) that they could get in a bit about Viking Bog Mummies and Incan Cave Mummies and shit, and maybe even some good old fashioned pre-historical Glacier Mummies to be Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer. And you'd be wrong. Even by 3rd edition, Incan Mummies and Taoist Mummies just show up with a little blurb about how inscrutable they are and a short list of alternate spells in the “Other Immortals” appendix. I have to give Mummy: the Resurrected some props for a decently researched and respectful paragraph about the languages of the Incan Empire and the Aymarra Kingdoms, but they frit all that goodwill away by having basically no meat at all.
In addition to no Aztec Mummies, these books also don't cover Robots. One wonders what these 450 combined pages actually do cover.
So basically with the book almost tripling in size from the first edition to the third, we still don't really get much past “also there are non-Egyptian mummies, and you might want to work something out your own damn self for that.”
So, Mummy First Edition was White Wolf not knowing what it was doing. That's fine, actually. Even traditional. Lots of games, when they're first finding their feet, will put out some really strange and different supplements until they hit on a working formula. This awkward adolescence phase of game development can last a really long time - like the entire length of AD&D - and some games just never grow out of it, like Rifts.
But at some point somebody tends to notice what sticks when thrown at the wall, and this fossilized poo then enters the consolidation stage. So where Mummy 1.0 was a weird beta thrust on an unsuspecting world and probably piked up by completionists and fans that didn't know better, Mummy 2nd Edition was a revisit to the concept but bringing with it a more complete idea of what the World of Darkness was and what the mummies place should be within it - which was nuts, because of course none of the WoD games were actually designed from scratch to interact, and had very different development teams and goals and didn't play nice with each other, so the result looks like the mad scribblings of a psychotic but is actually the careful effort of sane people following insane directions.
The third go at Mummy was a reboot. It was, in ways, a necessary reboot; after the last Mummy book, which had tied it in to the Wraith cosmology, Wraith got axed and the Sixth Great Maelstrom ripped through the Underworld; what's more, they were revising Vampire for the third edition and cutting a lot of the chaff, which included the no-longer-thematically-appropriate Children of Osiris. The result was a thematic and metaphysical and mechanical reboot which...uh...pissed off all the old fans, because their characters basically died, and went into weird Demon: the Fallen territory with the metaphysics, and the mechanics have never really had a chance to improve between editions, as instead of updates they just scrub them out and start over again.
From a staffing standpoint, the first Mummy has a single writer (Stephan Wieck) and a single editor (Robert Hatch). There are also thirteen people listed with special thanks, but they are all thanked for “in jokes” rather than real things so there's no way to tell what if anything they did to help out the project. Except the editor, who of course was one of the designers of Werewolf: the Apocalypse and is thanked for taking time off from that project to polish this turd edit the book. Mummy: 2nd Edition has two writers, a developer and an editor – so the primary staff is basically doubled. It also has only ten people to deliver incomprehensible joking special thanks to (but which still includes Robert Hatch, now acting as the developer and apparently “not killer” of one of the authors).
Mummy: the Resurrected isn't so much a book as a continuation of an institution. It credits fourteen people with “initial concept and design” (including the authors of the first two Mummy versions, one of whom is miscredited as Stewart Wieck – who I believe to be Stephan Wieck's brother), and seven “authors,” plus two more people on “additional writing.” Four of the authors and additional writers are also credited with initial concept and design, and the three authors of previous books are apparently just in there because they copy pastaed some shit from the old books, but that's still sixteen fucking people working on this project.
What's surprising is that even though the original Mummy was basically an auteur's work, the third version was a clusterfuck of people talking and writing past one another, and the 2nd edition was just a small work team, that the works aren't that different. Yes, as more cooks got involved the word count increased tremendously (almost proportionately), but they remained incoherent in pretty much the same ways. You might think that the thing produced by just two people working in concert might stay truer to “the vision” of the work while the thing produced by a committee that needs four fucking cars to carpool might stay truer to “the design specs” or something. But I'm pretty sure you'd be wrong. I certainly can't detect any such tendencies in any of the three works. They all kind of read like a word salad of untested and unsourced game mechanics and world elements.
Which is basically what they are. Because let's be honest, even in the third edition it's not particularly clear that the Mummy concept has a lot of legs to it - which is part of the reason mummy RPGs are so sparse on the group in general, while you can play a vampire in just about any game that allows magic and a few that do not. The Mummy games in the WoD stable also received relatively little support outside their books - First edition nominally had the greatest impact, because they actually included mummies in Vampire products and bane mummies as villains in Werewolf products here and there; both games had Egyptian-flavored elements (Setites, Silent Striders), so there was a kind of localized hekapunk thing you could go for there, silly as it looks twenty years later. Later games which emphasize the Modern Nights...not so much; the mummies are just one more kind of supernatural, like the Risen, which kind of get lost in the shuffle.
Introductions
I wish. Really. I totally wish we were just doing Boris Karloff mummy material.
The covers of the mummy books are, let us be generous, not great. You're not going to be drawn in by sloppy Egyptian symbolism and piss-poor renderings of mummies; the 3D render sand on the Resurrection just sort of emphasizes the lack-of-give-a-damn that went into the first impact of these books. So it sort of becomes really necessary for the introductions to sell us on the contents if we were on the fence about buying it.
Fortunately, in the first edition the art improves quickly. This was back when WW had people like Janet Aulisio and Josh Timbrook in their stable and they could churn out some really nice and thematically appropriate black-and-white art, like the naked woman in bandages with a necklace of scarabs on page three. Early WW design principles are also clearly on display here, because there's a lot of solid black pages. Second Edition is probably cleaner from a page layout standpoint, but the line-art is almost...too clean, the early photoshop stuff looks like ass, especially in black-and-white. Resurrection just looks like it was assembled in Adobe and the art is that bizarre Vampire: Third Edition pseudo-blurry-photo style that looks like the art director was jacking overexposing Ben Templesmith drawings and then printing them out grayscale. Ugh.
Today you could just fill up a book like this with high-quality photos of actual corpses.
Page numbering at the beginning of White Wolf Books is always sketchy, and these books are no exception. If anything, it was worse in the old days. The first page of real text in Mummy: The Resurrection is labeled “Page 4,” and same with Mummy: 2nd Edition. But the first page of text in the original Mummy (or perhaps “A World of Darkness: Mummy”) was labeled “Page 7.” This is sort of maybe because there are some extra black pages at the beginning of the original Mummy (like with Dirty Secrets of the Black Hand that came out two years later, this was probably intended to screw with copyright infringers by making their printers use up a lot of ink). But mostly I believe that it is because back in 1992, typesetting and paste-up weren't things White Wolf was super great at doing, and they probably had some extra pre-introductory text that was either cut or never completed.
In any case, once we get passed these page numbering shenanigans for the introduction, we're going to mostly be on a 1 page for 1 page basis. The introduction stories run half a page in the first book, 10 in the second, and 14 in the third. And when all that's done, we'll be a total of 38 pages through these 450 pages of books because White Wolf math.
Mummy first edition was done back in the simpler days, when not every book had an introduction. Seriously, you just bought a book for Vampire with the title Mummy. What the fuck do you think it's going to be about? What more needs to be said? Anything between the cover and the actual contents is just filler.
The introduction of the original Mummy is almost entirely just a full page picture of a Mummy looking all badass. That's honestly all you need as far as an introduction to a Mummy game, honestly. They show a Mummy, the end. There's a half page of text about how Mummies are really old and this book isn't an actual game so much as a supplement to be played with either Vampire: the Masquerade or Werewolf: the Apocalypse (and the fact that those games didn't use exactly the same system probably wasn't known at that time to the author, because Werewolf the Apocalypse wasn't out yet); but fundamentally all you really need or get is just a badass drawing of a Mummy.
We get the big hulking Mummy, which is defensible but wouldn't have been my first choice. It's like the Abbot and Costello meet the Mummy mummy rather than the Boris Karloff mummy. Also a good mummy, but not my first choice.
It's a Janet Auslio mummy, so I'll forgive it. I love her artwork.
A little more background rumination for a moment: in Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles, the progenitor of all vampires is the Queen of the Damned, an ancient Egyptian medium who became a vampire after she was raped by the Pharaoh and a spirit came along to drink her blood...look, it's not a great story.
But the problem is, White Wolf is and always has been run by pandering Christians that made Caine, son of Adam, the first vampire, and pretty much all of White Wolf's mythology is based around the Bible being fairly accurate on lots of shit. This has always represented a bit of a quandary when it comes to appropriating other religions...well, not it hasn't, it's just that White Wolf has typically been pretty offensive about how they go about doing that, and these three books are no exception! So while they really like the Egyptian iconography that they appropriate for Vampire and whatnot, the core VtM/W:tA/etc. mythos isn't really about Egypt in any kind of sense - they connect to it when and if they feel like it, often in a blazingly silly way.
In first edition Mummy, this isn't really notable because they were pretty focused on the whole "Mummies are resurrected ancient Egyptians that were mummied angle, because magic." Mummy 2.0 had to deal with more of the Expanded Universe, which is why it seems much more schizophrenic. Resurrected...we'll get to that, but put it this way: Frank might need several large drinks when we get to talking about Christians, Muslims, and the Web of Faith.
In WoD, this actually happened.
The second edition's introduction actually starts with a three page in-character rant that is entirely in italics. Long blocs of italicized text are unreadable and I am not going to read this one. I got far enough to realize that it was talking about Ankh-es-en-Amun. That's a slightly creative spelling of the main love interest character in both the Karloff and Fraser Mummy movies, so that's legit. Kind of blatant for a movie rip, but I'll allow it.
What follows the in-character rant is a proper introduction where it claims that this book has happened because the World of Darkness has had its underworld and souls and shit hammered down since the first edition happened (what with Wraith and shit happening) and they wanted to make a new edition to make it all play nicely together. That's... I don't know man. The idea that any edition of World of Darkness has ever had a system of magic and the underworld that could even generously be described as “developed” and “codified” is so out to lunch that I can't really engage with it.
This introduction doesn't really call it out per se, but this is still not a complete game. You're supposed to run it with the entire rest of the World of Darkness. Which since we're talking about a series of games that didn't even have the same mechanics for kicking a dude, let alone have vaguely compatible metaphysics, was a lot of hubris. Evidently the authors of Mummy: 2nd Edition just sort of didn't notice that the mechanics in Vamprie and Mage and Wraith weren't the same, and so blithely telling people that the book was to be used with “all of them” really meant that the book wasn't compatible with any of them. The entirety of Mummy: 2nd Edition is written according to what a couple of bros on the C-team thought the consensus house rules of different table top World of Darkness games were in 1997. And they don't tell you what they thought those were, so much of this book is incomprehensible – and it wasn't any better at the time.
Basically, Mummy 2nd Edition is like a New World of Darkness book, except that every time it cites the World of Darkness Core Book, that is a book that doesn't fucking exist except in the minds of the authors.
The intro ends with a bibliography in which they rant about how Abbot and Costello Meet the Mummy is the worst Mummy film. It's not. It's actually like the 2nd best Mummy film (although if you accept the Brendan Fraser films as part of the series, it might be the 3rd best). While nowhere near the brilliance of Abbot and Costello Meet Frankenstein, it's nonetheless a movie you should watch. The Mummy's Curse is not.
Mummy 1st Edition has some intro fiction too, but it's pretty much ripped straight from Anne Rice - with the bombshell drop that there are only 43 mummies in the world. That's right, you could theoretically have more mummies at a LARP than actually were supposed to exist during 1st edition. Gotta love White Wolf.
Re: the Underworld thing - I think that somewhere between first and second edition somebody did mean to sit down and write a setting bible for how the Underworld worked in WoD games; the only reason I know that didn't happen is because it hasn't been leaked yet. But the broad outlines were laid down fairly early - the afterlife is another dimension, starting off with a coadjacent sort of astral plane and then moving on into increasingly bizarre afterlives; Hell is an endless lightless abyss at the center of it all, and if there is a heaven, you can't fucking get to it. Souls == wraiths for basically every purpose worth discussing, vampires are technically walking corpses but it got complicated, critters like fairies and the Changing Breeds which reincarnate largely give the Underworld a pass. The mechanics of Necromancy have gone back and forth a bit, but tended to get refined every generation...
...which brings us to Egyptian magic and mythology again. I'll go into this more later, but the folks at White Wolf have an allergy to admitting any sort of actual "god" except the Tetragrammaton actually exists; most "gods" tend to be jumped-up vampires or lying spirits or something. Egyptian deities are...more or less the same thing, but slightly more ambiguous (except in the case of Set, who is, as mentioned a 3rd generation vampire). So individuals like Thoth and Anubis exist and are supposed to have connections to this-or-that group in different game lines, but they aren't mentioned much, aren't given any stats, and references to them tend to be contradictory.
Mummy: the Resurrection looks like a late period World of Darkness book. Right down to having a page of completely illegible text at the start of each chapter. It's not all in Da Vinci Forward Regular, some of it is supposed to look like Romanesque stone carving or something. Anyway, fuck it. We won't spend too much time harping on these pages of illegibility, save to remind people that this abysmal practice was entrenched in this fucking company way back in 2001.
The Mummy: the Resurrection introduction has a lot more stuff in it than the others do. It's more pages and presented in a denser font. They use up some of that extra space with overly florid ninggobble (“For millennia, the Nile Valley has cast its irresistible spell over the youngest of the world's children” it totally actually says that), but most of it is just covering a lot more ground. We get a piece where it tries to define way too many fucking special terms, a place where it defines its own bit of multi-planar cosmology (of unclear compatibility with other World of Darkness cosmologies), a bit where it rants about why you should care about Egypt and Jesus (yes, really), and of course a piece where it rants at you about movies you should watch and how to get information from Egypt's tourism board.
The bibliography is literally copy-pasta from Mummy: 2nd Edition, lambasting the pretty decent Abbot and Costello Meet the Mummy with literally exactly the same sentence. Except that they change the listed year of release from 1955 (which the older book lists correctly) to 1945. So they changed the wrong review in the only way it would be possible to make it more wrong. Also they suggest learning about Egyptian themes by watching the Heston version of The Ten Commandments, which is advice so insane that maybe I should just leave it as-is. If you do that, you deserve what you get. They also admit that Ramses the Damned is a porn fantasy about Cleopatra, but they tell you to read it anyway because it has a “World of Darkness feel.” I just... I don't even know.
There's this giant tirade about the “Web of Faith” which is a thing that the “three great monotheistic religions” created that connects holy sites throughout the Middle East. This is a personal bugbear of mine, but Judaism is not one of the three great anythings. The third “greatest” monotheistic religion in the world is Sikhism. Then there's Juche, and Judaism comes in fifth unless you count some of the weirder offshoots of Christianity or Hinduism as separate or monotheistic respectively, in which case it gets pushed farther down the list. There are marginally more Mormons or Spiritists than Jews, for example. But what really blows my fucking mind is how tone deaf this entire section is. If I sit down to play a game where we play ancient Egyptian priests of Horus, I am virtually positive that about the last thing on my list of things to do that day is to sit around having interfaith discussions about the deeper truths that connect Christianity and Islam. Because seriously, what the fuck is this shit?! This is the same “Jesus told me that Pagans are wrong” bullshit that Justin Achilli went on to shit all over nWoD, so I assume it's him pissing all over the product with his god bothering bullshit here as well (he is listed as one of the contributors). But it's historical fact that all this Web of Faith nonsense went over with the WoD fans about as well as aresolized herpes. Why didn't anyone stop him from patterning nWoD on this book?
That's the bottom line strangest thing to me about Mummy: the Resurrection. It looks exactly like a late period nWoD book. It was not a great selling book. The Mummy line was a commercial failure all three times, and yet when it came time to revamp the entire line they decided to pattern it off of... this? Why did they decide to make all their books just like this book that didn't sell that well? Seriously... why?
The pre-opening indecipherable fiction to Mummy: the Resurrection is basically the connecting bit between Mummy 2nd edition and M:tR. In between those books, the Wraith gameline had ended, and the Sixth Great Maelstrom - think of it as a planet-wide spiritual hurricane - had kicked off. One of the Dark Kingdoms was the city of Amenti, corresponding (sort of) with the ancient Egyptian afterlife, and was ruled over by Osiris. When the Maelstrom hit, Osiris got off his ass to shield the city...and immediately started losing.
The Web of Faith...ugh...is a latter-day creation of White Wolf, intended primarily to assert the superiority of the Judeo-Christian-Islam axis of related faiths in the region; part of it goes into some weird Mage territory, so I don't know if this was the first official mention or not. It's one of those weird things where related religious traditions don't mind sharing bits of mythology with each other, even as they're certain that the others are wrong, but maybe less wrong than those pagan faiths.
Now, you could argue maybe White Wolf was going to do something clever with this - after all, the connections between Judaism, Christianity, the monotheistic sun-worship of Akhenaten, Egyptian ceremonial magic, etc. have fueled a lot of heresies and conspiracy theories - but in the end it looks like a more convenient "oh, it's the Middle East, it's all the same thing" approach. So when Osiris decided to re-embody his Mummy servants in living bodies, bonded to new souls, he did so through the Web of Faith. Even though that makes no sense. Even in the context of the Web of Faith itself making no sense. They didn't even do anything interesting with it.
Sadly, not Nyarlathotep.