The year was 1996, and collectable card games had exploded. No one could see that it was a bubble yet, everything looked so new, so shiny, IT MUST BE MINE! Even back then, you could tell that there was no aura of perfect competence around CCG designers; they were feeling their way as they went along, trying new things, gnashing their teeth when they didn't work, celebrating their brilliance when they did.
And yet...selling the cards themselves was not enough. Somehow they knew this. They worked on merchandising - life counters, little glass beads and cardboard tokens, card protectors, deck protectors, card binders, t-shirts, cheap jewelry...and books. No one quite understood what should be in these books, but they understood there should be books. Some of them were little more than cumulative, art-heavy card guides - Magic: the Gathering put out several lovely volumes of those, because the Internet was still a new thing and InQuest wasn't enough for some people. And there were strategy guides, many of which were ridiculous. Few were as ridiculous as The Art of Playing MYTHOS The Cthulhu Collectable Card Game A Tome of Arcane Knowledge.
What a handful of a title.
MYTHOS poked onto the scene in 1996 to general acclaim, and by 1997 was dead. In it's brief lifespan it released two editions (Limited and Standard) and two expansions (Dreamlands and New Aeons). As with most CCGs-derived-from-RPGs like Spellfire and Rage, the game capitalized on the large stock of art already possessed by the creators, in this case Chaosium and the Call of Cthulhu Roleplaying Game. Unlike those games, the rules for MYTHOS were thematically based on CoC as well.
The basic idea of MYTHOS was that you the player were represented by an Investigator, who would work to complete Adventures and earn Adventure Points; this was accomplished by playing certain cards mentioned on the Adventure cards, and had to be completed before all of the investigator's Sanity ran out. A basic condition-fulfillment CCG, influential in many ways on subsequent games like the Shadowrun TCG. In the process of fulfilling the adventures the player would put down various Allies, Artifacts, Tomes, Spells, Monsters, Events, and Locations; to add an additional level of challenge (and interaction), the players could fuck with each other in various ways, including sending their monsters against each other and killing their allies. In this way, you didn't always need to fulfill an adventure to win, as long as all your opponents lost their Sanity first.
Anyway, onto the book. A slim paperback in grayscale, with four authors and far too many artists, since they basically just stole as much card art as they wanted. The table of contents breaks the book down into three major sections.
Chapter 1: MYTHOS RULESMYTHOS(R) is a collectable card game based on the extraordinary tales of horror written by Howard Phillips Lovecraft and other authors of the 1920s and 1930s. H.P. Lovecraft was a native of Providence, Rhose Island. He wrote or collaborated on more than 65 tale during the '20s and '30s, using those years as the background for most of his stories. In the Call of Cthulhu(R) roleplaying game, Chaosium has further explored Lovecraft Country (the New England region in which most of Lovecraft's tales are set) and other areas of the world.
In MYTHOS each player portrays an ordinary person living an ordinary life. Your world is safe, sane, and well ordered. During the course of play this ordinary person, called an Investigator, discovers dark secrets about the world. Horrible creatures live int he most remote, inaccessible corners of the earth. They came her millions of years ago, and once they ruled. Humanity rose after their downfall. Now they sleep and dream of the demise of humankind, awaiting the day when they will again rule the earth.
The major part of the book is essentially an expanded version of the rules for the MYTHOS CCG. Slight changes and clarifications that differentiate it from the little rules book crammed into every starter deck are underlined for emphasis.
The immediate take-away from these rules is that they are terribly laid out, overly complicated, confusingly written, and stealing quite a bit from Magic: the Gathering while desperately trying not to look like it. For example, tapping and the graveyard totally exist, but aren't called that. There isn't life per se, but there is Sanity (maxed at 20), which is spent to bring various monsters into play and cast spells, so you're basically casting from hitpoints. For example:
The Chaosium website is a mishmash of crap dating back to the 1990s, with certain pages still sending hapless internet spelunkers on to the aborted Wizard's Attic - a Chaosium online game store which became quite infamous for shutting down unexpectedly with many unfulfilled orders. You can still read the rants online!
Random observations:
The first fist-fight you will have with your opponent is going to be over your Investigator card. Each player has to have one, and each one has an Education value, and you and your opponent(s) are not allowed to have Investigators with the same Education value. Which means if you both show up with the same Investigator, blood will be spilled over whom gets to play whom.
Your hand apparently contains 13 cards. Given that the standard deck size is 60 cards, with a minimum of 52, you're looking at a quarter of the deck in your fucking hand...and you refill it each turn.
Yes, that's explicitly a gag about losing all your marbles.Use some means of keeping track of your Investigator's Sanity: a 20-sided die, a piece of scratch paper, pennies or other coins, or our favorite, a bag of 20 marbles.
Only cards you play count toward the conditions for Adventures. So it doesn't matter if your opponent hits your investigator with Hydrophobia and you need Hydrophobia for your adventure; you need to play Hydrophobia for it to count. This saddens me, because it would have added another level of strategy and interaction on top of the game. And probably would have sped things up a bit.
Spells and tomes presents both a logistical and strategic challenge. You play Tomes, which can have a number of spells stacked in them. Then, if your Ally speaks the same language as the Tome, you can cast those spells (subtracting Sanity points when you do). So if you want to cast any spells at all, you need a tome in there - and it had better fucking be a tome that your allies can read. Of course, the better tomes are in more obscure languages which only a few allies can read. Also, the spells have signifiers on them so that you can only put a spell in the tome if the tome has a sign that corresponds to that spell. Then of course some artifacts can cast spells...
Much of the game is really pretty much the same thing, trying desperately to combine the right circumstances and keywords to let you play certain cards. For example, to play Zadok Allen your Investigator needs to be Outside in the Miskatonic Region of Lovecraft Country. That's one of the easy ones. If you want to go to R'lyeh, you first have to play the three pieces of the R'lyeh Disc (which means you need Locations with the Artifact tag), and then you have to play a Travel by Sea card to get there.
After the rulesbook there is a FAQ. Some of these are real winners.
I think somebody struggled with algebra in high school.Q. When I need to round, which way do I round?
A. Like regular math. For instance 1.5 would be 2.
Thanks, that clears up...nothing.Q. Can I start the game in Europe or another Region?
A. Yes, but you are assumed to be in Lovecraft Country until you play your first card.
I can't decide if that's just poor game design or dicking with the players.Q. If an Adventure card requires a Private Eye, will a Detective work too?
A. No. Adventure card requirements are specific and must be matched as written.
Q. Do I have to activate the Star Stone of Mnar by turning it to make it work?
A. No. The effect of the Star Stone is always on. In the first Mythos set of cards the Lamp of Alhazred is the only Artifact that you have to rotate to turn on the effect and flip over to end the effect.
Two things come to mind: this is the exact same question that you would read in the earliest M:tG FAQs, and you really don't appreciate the simplicity and utility of a phrase like "tapping" until you can't fucking use it.
After the FAQ is a brief page of errata. My favorite may be:
K. J. Hooper - Should have Knows English.
Then we get into the Mythos Standard Tournament Rules. This is both forward-thinking and ambitious, considering the game would be cancelled the next year and it could not possibly have hosted too many tournaments.
Another game variation is "Mythos Monster Mayhem", where instead of doing any of this adventuring nonsense you and your opponents conspire to play monsters and wreck your opponent's shit; last player with any Sanity points wins.
A Mythos Story is an all-italics couple of pages where Charlie Krank in Montreal lays out how the MYTHOS CCG came to be, and some of his design philosophy. Neither is very deep or interesting; it was 1995 and Chaosium fielded several queries about making a Cthulhu-based CCG (since at the time Chaosium still seemed to have a legal lock on the property for game purposes, though they really didn't), and instead they decided to make their own. As Charlie said "After all, how hard could it be?"
To say Charlie was out of his element is generous:
I began by browsing through a copy of Hoyle, reviewing the styles of play for games such as gin and rummy, canasta, bridge, and a variety of others. ... Many traditional games used a 13-card hand. 13 being an appropriately Cthulhoid number, I settled on that number of cards in the hand early.
Translation: "I, Charlie Krank, had no idea what I was doing, so I looked up the only book I could think of on card games. It wasn't much help."
I preferred that there be a squence of playing cards that was then followed by combat, discard, and redraw.
"I, Charlie Krank, then decided to steal as much of what other CCGs were doing as possible, since it seemed to work."
Some of his thoughts are actually interesting:
I fiddled with some sort of randomizer - something akin to making a sanity check in Call of Cthulhu. I immediate discarded the idea of using dice in the game. Using dice violated the card-game feel that I was looking for I also tried using the cards themselves as randomizers, as is done in a few games. The closest, and most seriously, that I got to it was a system of three dots on each card. The dots were either red, yellow, or green, with the obvious meanings. Red meant that you failed, yellow indicated that you succeeded conditionally, and green meant success. The problem was that unless I was exceedingly clever, players would obviously build their decks with success in mind.
Then I tried have other players determine the success of their opponents. But it just seemed that players would be unhappy when revealing a card (and then discarding it) meant that a card you needed had just passed you by.
And some are batshit insane:
I toyed with building a small pyramid of cards, reflecting something of the "layers of an onion" motif in Call of Cthulhu, where the bottom layer would be the lesser cultists, the middle would be the cult leaders, and the top the monsters that they worshipped.
The amazing thing with all this is that somehow it did end up working; MYTHOS was lauded as one of the best of the early CCGs, probably ending up somewhere just south of Legend of the Five Rings.
The rest of the chapter is taken up by four examples of combat.
Chapter 2: CUSTOMIZING MYTHOS
The whole "collectable" and strategic/logistical element of CCGs was still a bit in its infancy, so this chapter is basically some ideas on what we today would call "deck construction" and the rudiments of play strategy. Except it really isn't, because whoever wrote it had no idea what they were actually doing. Part of this has to do with the game's RPG roots.
For example, those early MYTHOS decks included a blank CREATE YOUR OWN ADVENTURE CARD - identical to all the other adventure cards, but with blank boxes so players could fill in the own values. This was supposed to give players the ability to create their own adventures, and in The Art there is a section dedicated to helping the PC fill this card out. If anyone here thinks the whole exercise sounds a bit silly in any kind of competitive game, well, you're right.
Chapter 3: THE CARDS
This is not a full list of all the MYTHOS cards, this is not a full spoiler list of all the cards in the Limited Edition MYTHOS starter set. This is, primarily, 57 pages of looking at two cards at a time, with a brief paragraph or note on each one, showing off all the luscious Mythos-art. Then you get "The Complete Card List" for the Limited Edition, but it lists only the name, card type, package/rarity, and artist. This is then sorted by lists where the same cards are sorted by type rather than alphabetical order, a list of locations and allies with a few (but not all) vital statistics/keywords, spells and tomes by key symbol, and a list of the available adventures and their requirements.
One thing you may like is that among the fictional characters drawn from Mythos fiction are real individuals such as Arthur Machen, Lord Dunsany, and H. P. Lovecraft himself (as a special promotional card). I thought this was a nice gesture, and if the game had continued I would have enjoyed seeing this tradition continue - if only so Brian Lumley and Ramsey Campbell can square off in combat.
And that is The Art of Playing MYTHOS. A tome of arcane knowledge indeed.