For reasons I do not understand, "Appendices" is a single full-page illustration of a burning wicker man with people trapped inside, while leering people with fangs and claws and spears dance naked around it. It's not a bad illustration, it just has nothing to do with the contents of the book.
The bibliography is mostly good, with some odd selections (Hammer of the Gods: The Led Zeppelin Saga for example, and The Jack the Ripper A to Z). Also, Mythago Wood, with the note:
It's a good book. Not very Lovecraftian. Less Celtic folklore than you'd think. I keep meaning to read the sequel, but haven't gotten around to it yet.Inspired the forest Oakwood in "Hell Hath No Fury." A novel with a rich background in Celtic folklore. The sequel is Lavondyss.
It's not a bad reading list, although at three pages, double columns, it runs a bit long and is a weird mix of specialist works and weirdly generalist encyclopedias. Fewer CoC books than you would think, although they name and title-check various appropriate fanzine articles...but not Green and Pleasant Land.
Appendix B - A Player's History of the Golden Dawn
Intended, I think, as a kind of handout, this is an abbreviated history written for what PCs would know about the GD, without any of the backroom shenanigans. Would be more interesting if the backroom shenanigans had included actual Cthulhu Mythos connections, like the Hermetic Order of the Silver Twilight as a spin-off or something, but work with what we've got, I guess?
Appendix C - Creating Victorian Investigators
This is a reprint of the rules from Dark Designs, which summarizes the rules from the out-of-print Cthulhu by Gaslight, lightly modified - mostly because the initial Credit Rating is weighted more toward upper-middle-class investigators; being rich also gives you a bonus to your Etiquette skill.
Appendix D - The Outer Order Curriculum (Player Version)
Mostly the same as the Keeper version previously, but they don't tell you what the Pentagram Ritual actually does, nor do they reveal that Astrology, Cartomancy, and Geomancy are all "Mister Cavern decides what happens."
Appendix E - The Inner Order Curriculum (Keeper Version)
I think they meant "Player Version" because like the last appendix, it's identical to the Keeper version except they leave out the actual stats for the spells. Which is kinda sucky.
Appendix F - Miscellany
Topics they decided we couldn't do without apparently included "Photography in the Victorian Era" and "Swordfighting Rules":
Fuck you. Also, CoC's admittedly mediocre combat engine already covers characters with swords. The main change from this set of rules is that your weapon takes half-damage when it parries, and this can potentially cause more frequent weapon breakage. I don't know why anyone thought that would be a good or useful addition, considering how few people are armed with swords and sword-fighting - like, very few of them in the four scenarios in this book. I went back and checked.These rules are intended as an unofficial supplement to the regular combat rules for Call of Cthulhu to govern combat between characters using swords. They may be used, ignored, or altered as the Keeper desires.
They also collect the New Skills (although they seem to have forgotten Geomancy), and all the New Spells (which seems like a bit of a waste, to print them twice in the same book - but then again, look at the other appendices).
Appendix G - Player Aids
Documents intended as handouts for the four scenarios.
Appendix H - Calendars & Notes
Jesus fucknugget Christ, it's literally a calendar for 1893-1900. This shit is obscene in the days of omniscient Google.
...and that's the book.
Thoughts & Ruminations
It may appear I have heaped scorn on this book, because it did not go far enough. The Golden Dawn is a compromise between simulationists and those that want to play actual sorcerers, and the weight of it largely came down on simulation - allowing the GD access to "real magic," even so far as to letting PCs have access to it, but not giving them a lot of it, or making it very useful or effective on its own. Because if Aleister Crowley could toss fireballs, he absolutely would.
It could have been really easy to tie the Golden Dawn in with the Mythos a bit more. There are plenty of Egyptian trappings, and lots of Mythos connections with Egypt, from Nyarlathotep to Bast to the Black Pharaoh Nephren-Ka. The Hermetic Order of the Silver Twilight could be one of the many break-away sects. There's room to expand here, but as with a lot of CoC games, you are the one that will have to do the expanding. The writers and game designers won't do it for you.
However, as I said at the beginning, from a system perspective this is probably the single best effort to give the PCs access to actual magic. It is woefully underpowered and arguably incomplete, but... it is something. It is more than anything else. It is even expandable, relatively painlessly, and without much effort, because there are occult grimoires in the game already, and spells labeled as "Hermetic" in some supplements, and they can fit pretty seamlessly into a GD campaign.
You just can't say that about anything else in CoC. Even when they let you start with spells, it's a random grab-bag of effects. Gaining magic in the course of play is always difficult and painful and pricey, and without any rhyme or reason beyond the immediate needs of the story. Players obviously want to play sorcerers in the game, but actually getting to the point of being able to throw down counterspells and counter-curses is just...well, you're not likely to ever get there, even after many sessions of diligent play.
Which is, of course, by design. None of Lovecraft's protagonists are Masters of the Mystic Arts; some of Clark Ashton Smith's characters are, but people usually ignore his more high fantasy stuff.
It doesn't have to be that way. But it's the way it is. Call of Cthulhu isn't a game of intelligent design, it's a game of slowly accumulating traits over time, because you never know when a bit of junk DNA might be useful. I'm pretty sure you could create a half-decent voodoo supplement just be compiling all the random voodoo rules in various sourcebooks. No one will ever do that, because all of those spells and rules were written by different people and some of them were published by different companies than Chaosium. Whenever someone needs a voodoo rule in CoC, there is a flat 50% chance that the designer will just create their own new rule rather than try to refer to an existing rule. That attitude is endemic to the game.
Does that mean that certain parts of the game flat-out contradict each other, or at pointless, or overlap? Yes, yes, and oh definitely yes.
This isn't a bad book. There are some questionable choices and it's about twice as long as it needs to be and the systems are a little weak and the scenarios are a bit blah, but it's still a better-than-average CoC book and it has a magic system. Not a great one, but one where you can actually go and buy spells that do stuff. Not always good spells, but...spells. Even spells that let you make magic items that help you, and don't require human sacrifice or anything. So it has that going for it.