[OSSR]World of Darkness: Mummies

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Koumei
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Post by Koumei »

Not to derail the thread when it's already multi-track drifting, but does PACKS stand for something? And was that basically a set of "Here, you get this, this, this and this, and it costs this many points" mini-templates for starting characters? Or a whole "This is basically a finished sheet, tweak the numbers a bit" thing?
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Post by Ancient History »

Link to PACKS.

PACKS stands for Pregenerated Auxilary Character and Kit System. The thing is that in Shadowrun 4th edition you were given a big pile of points, and some guidelines for spending them, but it was still a complicated mess, particularly because you could seriously start off with half a million nuyen to buy equipment, and there were items as small as one nuyen in the equipment tables. So to hasten the process, I was contracted to write a "tier" system - compatible with BP, but pre-calculated packages of skills, equipment, etc. with which to speed up character generation - PACKS is what I came up with. You've got pre-calculated profiles for generic roles like "Hacker" and "Joygirl" (which are totally compatible and you can buy both to play a Hacker Joyboy or whatever), and Kits which are lumped groups of equipment for different purposes.

The only thing I didn't include was Attributes (because the way attribute costs and racial limits work in SR4 chargen is wonky); and I gave the BP/nuyen cost of each item in a profile/kit so that they were easily customizable. Naturally, when I cancelled my contracts and withdrew PACKS, they got somebody else to do their own versions of PACKS and they decided it would be much more effective to put the attributes in and leave the line item numbers out.

So when we say PACKS, we're basically saying a system that preserves the granularity and customizability of the huge-point-pool systems for those players that want it, but which offers a much more high-level pick-and-play alternative for new players or Mister Caverns trying to build NPCs quickly. It's not a perfect system - for example, none of my PACKS profiles are optimized with max starting skills - but it's workable. And was fairly well-received, for what became an unofficial product.
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Post by TheFlatline »

FrankTrollman wrote:You could really go places with Mummies and ex-girlfriends/unrequited love. As a Mummy, you have great attachment to people who don't know you and would think you are a creep if they did.

There's plenty of angst to be had there. You're powerful and possibly rich, you could force yourself into the lives of the people you pine for. But they wouldn't be happy about it. They aren't even the same as the people you remember because they have modern experiences and ideas.

But to really do the Mummy story, you have to go all out with the idea that people really are reincarnating and thus Christianity and the like are at least not fully "true." As we'll get to in the later bits, none of these Mummy books had the balls to go there. And thus, the question of "Why should we care?" never really got answered.

-Username17
Even In Nomine, where you literally can play a judeo-christian angel or demon and report to an archangel and have actually had angels called to the golden throne before God is willing to go there.

In the setting, there's a place called "The Marches", which is basically where abandoned gods and spirits go to retire. Like seriously you venture out far enough and you can get into a fistfight with Thor and play slapjack with Kali.

Which in the books and in the setting raise the question of if the tetragrammaton is merely another one of these beings who had better PR than anyone else, or if God is really God and all these other beings are impostors pretending to be gods.

The official angel/demon line is that God is totes legit. Questioning if he's just another poser with great advertising is heresy. That being said, sooner or later if you interact enough in the marches you start to wonder.

You'd think that WOD, with all it's hardon for contradictory information, would just run with it and say "We don't fucking know this breaks all the rules if what the mummies say is true, so someone must be wrong."

I mean, the whole Nod/caine thing comes pretty much from a bunch of vampires who are waging a political and martial war of disinformation and control. Their origin story probably is bullshit.
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Post by TheFlatline »

Ancient History wrote:Link to PACKS.

PACKS stands for Pregenerated Auxilary Character and Kit System. The thing is that in Shadowrun 4th edition you were given a big pile of points, and some guidelines for spending them, but it was still a complicated mess, particularly because you could seriously start off with half a million nuyen to buy equipment, and there were items as small as one nuyen in the equipment tables. So to hasten the process, I was contracted to write a "tier" system - compatible with BP, but pre-calculated packages of skills, equipment, etc. with which to speed up character generation - PACKS is what I came up with. You've got pre-calculated profiles for generic roles like "Hacker" and "Joygirl" (which are totally compatible and you can buy both to play a Hacker Joyboy or whatever), and Kits which are lumped groups of equipment for different purposes.

The only thing I didn't include was Attributes (because the way attribute costs and racial limits work in SR4 chargen is wonky); and I gave the BP/nuyen cost of each item in a profile/kit so that they were easily customizable. Naturally, when I cancelled my contracts and withdrew PACKS, they got somebody else to do their own versions of PACKS and they decided it would be much more effective to put the attributes in and leave the line item numbers out.

So when we say PACKS, we're basically saying a system that preserves the granularity and customizability of the huge-point-pool systems for those players that want it, but which offers a much more high-level pick-and-play alternative for new players or Mister Caverns trying to build NPCs quickly. It's not a perfect system - for example, none of my PACKS profiles are optimized with max starting skills - but it's workable. And was fairly well-received, for what became an unofficial product.
Your PACKS was more or less what let me generate NPCs in SR4 without ripping my hair out. Yeah it wasn't optimized, but I wasn't looking for optimized NPCs. I could toss together a humanoid NPC in a fraction of the time it'd take otherwise and have a decent idea of it's power level.
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Post by OgreBattle »

TheFlatline wrote:
In the setting, there's a place called "The Marches", which is basically where abandoned gods and spirits go to retire. Like seriously you venture out far enough and you can get into a fistfight with Thor and play slapjack with Kali.
Kali's still actively honored by a few million people tho' [ /offended]
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Post by TheFlatline »

True, but in the metaphysical world of IN, Kali is out in the hinterlands. They call it the "ethereal plane" but you still are your same "pure" celestial self as when you're in heaven/hell (referred to as the celestial plane). Which means that heaven, hell, and the marches are all technically the same state of existence, which lends a lot of theory to the "God's just a spirit with really good PR" theory.
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Post by Ancient History »

Going back to something you said earlier Flatline, part of the problem with oWoD is that White Wolf had it so that the Old Testament was essentially correct, and everybody else did get it wrong. Odin was a vampire. Set was a vampire. Horus was a mummy, and Isis was a sorceress. Baba Yaga was a vampire. The Christian hell did exist, and there were demons. It wasn't just implicit either; Caine actually shows up in the thrice-damned Gehenna book that rolled up the whole game. It was silly and bullshit and counterproductive and hellaciously unsympathetic to the beliefs of anyone that wasn't Christian or pretty-damn-close, but it was what it was.
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Post by TheFlatline »

Ancient History wrote:Going back to something you said earlier Flatline, part of the problem with oWoD is that White Wolf had it so that the Old Testament was essentially correct, and everybody else did get it wrong. Odin was a vampire. Set was a vampire. Horus was a mummy, and Isis was a sorceress. Baba Yaga was a vampire. The Christian hell did exist, and there were demons. It wasn't just implicit either; Caine actually shows up in the thrice-damned Gehenna book that rolled up the whole game. It was silly and bullshit and counterproductive and hellaciously unsympathetic to the beliefs of anyone that wasn't Christian or pretty-damn-close, but it was what it was.
Yeah I know. I just think it's funny that the game that is explicitly about being a demon or angel is more accepting to alternate cosmology theories than WOD.
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Post by Longes »

Ancient History wrote:Going back to something you said earlier Flatline, part of the problem with oWoD is that White Wolf had it so that the Old Testament was essentially correct, and everybody else did get it wrong. Odin was a vampire. Set was a vampire. Horus was a mummy, and Isis was a sorceress. Baba Yaga was a vampire. The Christian hell did exist, and there were demons. It wasn't just implicit either; Caine actually shows up in the thrice-damned Gehenna book that rolled up the whole game. It was silly and bullshit and counterproductive and hellaciously unsympathetic to the beliefs of anyone that wasn't Christian or pretty-damn-close, but it was what it was.
It's even stranger than this. The demons who torment the immortal souls WRAITHS and the demons summoned by the mortal sorcerers mages are not the demons who were angels who were cursed by God who are PCs in Demon the Fallen. No. Those demons are Umbral Spirits. They are like demons, and they can do most of the stuff actual demons can do, but they are not the same demons. Except when they are, and they are called Earthbound then.

And I still don't know how the fairies fit into the DtF cosmology.
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Post by Prak »

Blicero wrote:
AH wrote: Like Shadowrun, it had sort of a tier system going - you determine which set of attributes (Physical, Mental, Social) you thought were most important, and you got traits (7, 5, and 3 in this case) to divvy up among those attributes; same-same with Talents, Skills, and Knowledge. It would have been easier to just give out a big pile of points (like SR4 and Eclipse Phase and GURPS) and say "have at it," but the guidelines are supposed to make this stuff at least nominally balanced for play.
Is SR4's way really better? I've never played a WoD game, but it sounds like Frank used basically the same system for After Sundown. And it takes me a lot less time to make an After Sundown character than it takes me to make an SR4 character. And the choices I make along the way (about prioritizing Physical, Social, or Technical skills and such) definitely help me figure out how the character works.

The "big pile of points" certainly helps you customize, but it's a nontrivial option paralysis-inducer in even experienced players, I have found.
Every single time a game tells me to prioritize categories and then spend X/Y/Z points based on the priority, I just start spending points based on what I'm trying to do, and then say "well, I've got everything I want in this category, I've spent Z-2 points, so I guess that's tertiary." or "Well, I've spent X points on this category of attributes, and still need more, so I guess that's my primary."

This thread is making me want to rewrite the OWoD stuff into "The same game, but better designed for crossovers," because people would fucking buy it. A lot of people are afraid to learn a new system, or don't like how Frank condensed things in AS, but if I put down a book and say "It's the same as WoD, except for this one page that tells you what changed. This is the core book, each supernatural has a ~100 page splat book and acts as a template" people would at least try it. And by people I mean "my gaming group, and probably some others too."
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Post by Nath »

TheFlatline wrote:Even In Nomine, where you literally can play a judeo-christian angel or demon and report to an archangel and have actually had angels called to the golden throne before God is willing to go there.

In the setting, there's a place called "The Marches", which is basically where abandoned gods and spirits go to retire. Like seriously you venture out far enough and you can get into a fistfight with Thor and play slapjack with Kali.

Which in the books and in the setting raise the question of if the tetragrammaton is merely another one of these beings who had better PR than anyone else, or if God is really God and all these other beings are impostors pretending to be gods.

The official angel/demon line is that God is totes legit. Questioning if he's just another poser with great advertising is heresy. That being said, sooner or later if you interact enough in the marches you start to wonder.
It should be noted that In Nomine was adapted from French RPG In Nomine Satanis/Magna Veritas (INS/MV). Loosely adapted, but nonetheless adapted. As far as I understand, Steve Jackson Games removed much if not all of the satyrical content. And there was a lot of it. Consider the script of Kevin Smith Dogma could be used as a module with minimal changes (the major difference is that it would be unprecedented for God to go as far as New Jersey, as he spent most of the past decades in a trailer home in central France...).

So, in a nutshell, INS/MV is like a polar opposite of the World of Darkness. For a game that feature supernatural creatures in a contemporary setting, with a dozen or so of patron lineage to choose from, each with a specific power (at least they don't pretend to be sleeping, and they openly say they're too busy to help you now), plenty of setting secrets, and where every historical event of note involves said beings one way or another (well, the biggest the event, the more chances it was just a gratuitious "show of force" that allowed an angel or a demon to make an impression and get promoted...), you'd expect them to have taken a lot more open cheap-shots at WoD that they did (though they did release an "end of the world" campaign in 2003...).

According to INS/MV, there are angels and demons, God is the one True God and Lucifer left Heaven to reign in Hell. Undeads are servants of demons under archdemon Bifrons. Sorcery works. Psionics are descendants from Adam and Eve.

Otherwise... Adam and Eve were not the actual first man and woman, just two regular folks God picked up to make a scientific experiment, and finally dumped them out of the lab (on the other hand, this did happen circa in 6,000 AD as the Bible states). Jesus was "just" an Archangel who hyped up the "special relationship" he enjoyed with the boss. And Islam was the attempt by Gabriel and three other angels to impress the boss by jumpstarting a new religion, and no one can say for sure He did or did not greenlight their business plan.

And then there are the marches. It is a play on word, a "marche" in French can mean either a borderland or a stair-step, suggesting heaven sits on top, hell lies at the bottom, and the marches are everything in between.

The most important marche is the marche of dreams and nightmares. Only the servants of Archangel Blandina and Archdemons Beleth have some powers in there. Beleth got his powers from nothing less than accessing the dreams of God (when he was still an angel, before following Lucifer). Blandina only was archangel Michael second-in-command (more commonly known as "Yves" in INS/MV, because he went low-profile at some point), who was the fuckin' biggest question mark in the entire setting - allegedly the first being created by God so he could then invent God.

All the "lesser gods" were said to born from dreams and nightmares, and their realm, be it Olympus, Valhalla or whatever, to be an offshoot of the marche of dreams and nightmares. Those gods nonetheless had real powers and could manifest on Earth.
It was one of the game secret that Demeter actually jumped ship and was offered a job as an Archangel.
And in spite of their gods being destroyed by demons during an actual Ragnarök, the viking einjerhars are still around, inhabiting mortal bodies and retaining some powers (It is said they could because God have a thing for ballsy warriors, and as a result some even got to join angelic forces). And dragons and fairies existed until they were "cleansed" by the Good Guys.

There is a theory that God appeared just the same way the lesser god did, and it is Michael/Yves who is the actual super special dude (I mean, even more special than he is said to be, as as "the source of all knowledge", he literally does know everything, and is only matched by his demon counterpart, Kronos, Archdemon of Time).
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Post by Ancient History »

Magic
Chapter 4, 2 Central

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Mummy Magic has always been a bit on the strange side.

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This lady has a cooking show called “Mummy Magic” and it makes no less sense than any of the magic systems presented here.

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AncientH:

It's important to realize that in real life, up until recently the various incantations and amulets and shit often been considered: 1) just part of the regular religious practices of various cultures, and 2) incredibly conservative. So the ancient Egyptians practiced an interconnected series of beliefs for thousands of years, and generated a huge body of ritual knowledge and incantations which the Greeks, Romans, Jews and pretty much every other culture they came into contact with were impressed by. Egyptian "magic" underlies pretty much the entire Western idea of Hermetic magic (and to a degree folk magic, though that stretches a bit), an idea only reinforced by the renewed interest in occultism and Egyptology during the Victorian Age - which is why Aleister Crowley, the Great Beast, his magical system is cobbled together largely from Egyptian mythology and Indian yoga and having sex with whomever he could con into doing it.

So when you're looking at Egyptian magic from a historical or academic view point, there's a vast amount of material there. Truly vast. But, like Vampire Thaumaturgy and Western Hermetic Magic, it's...not what you think of as blasting people or shriveling their bones or shit. If you look at the List of the spells in the Book of the Dead, it's some pretty straightforward funerary prayers...and that was taken from the Coffin Texts...and that was taken from the Pyramid Texts... my point being, you had to know going in that White Wolf wasn't going to be anything like authentic in their representation of Egyptian magic; charms against pregnancy involving crocodile feces just aren't good game material. You want something like the later Mummy films, cool shit with an Egyptian theme, involving sand, scorpions, and the undead.

Well...you sort of got that. It just wasn't very good.

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FrankT:

The Magic chapter in 1st edition is just called “Magic” because the Author felt like he should actually say things in a way they might be understood. That chapter is 24 pages long. The Magic chapter in 2nd edition is called “Hekau” because go fuck yourself and is 28 pages long. The Magic chapter in 3rd edition is called “Words of Power” and makes up for that being an almost explicable title name by being 58 pages long. If you think that the extra page count of the magic in The Resurrection might be to explain things better, you haven't been following the trajectory of this company.
AncientH:

It's important to remember that at the point when Mummy 1e came along, White Wolf magic was still incredibly primitive - but it was getting into a recognizable shape. Unfortunately, it was getting into recognizable shape about the same time that Mummy 1e was coming out, so this book could have been highly influential, but turns out instead to be a weird evolutionary by-blow - sort of like marsupials - you can see the relation to Vampires five-dot Thaumaturgy paths and Sorcerer's five-dot Sorcery paths, but the whole spells thing just didn't catch on. And it's not like the system ever got much expansion or refinement; it lurches from one edition to the next, not really pokevolving as much as mutating like the toxic avenger.
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FrankT:

Mummy 2nd Edition claims that “Hekau” means “Words of Power,” which is probably why The Resurrection calls the entire chapter “Words of Power.” After a minimal internet search, I've come to conclusion that the word they were probably looking for is either “Heka” (meaning “Magic” used through the will of the gods) or “Heku” (meaning “Magic” with connotations of being invoked verbally), while “Hekau” is actually a word meaning “Enchantress” (literally: a woman who uses Heku). [AH Note: Blood Sacrifice says "Heka" is singular and "Hekau" is plural, but Mummy 1e uses "Hekau" as "Names" - so, WTF.] This took less than a minute today because google, but I'm willing to grant that it probably wasn't as easy to check that sort of thing back in 1997. I'm less sympathetic to getting that kind of shit wrong in 2001, when you could probably just do an internet search. In The Resurrection, the Words of Power chapter begins with almost the same sentence as the Hekau chapter in 2nd Edition, and again informs us that Hekau is the Egyptian word for Magic and literally translated as “Words of Power” even though that is of course not what it means. Basically, they had a lot of words to write down, and simply repeating factually incorrect statements from the previous edition was easier than sending someone to look this shit up. It's not like they had sixteen fucking people working on the text and could afford to put someone on research duty, and besides why not just recycle rants from previous editions?

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In A World of Darkness: Mummy, they don't call Egyptian magic anything. It's just “Magic” or “Sorcery.” But they do make your brain bleed as soon as we get into the chapter proper. Every chapter in 1st edition
Mummy wastes some page count with some in-character dialog between a vampire and a mummy, but after we're done with that we get the bombshell dropped on us that Mummies are not able to cast magic with more dots than they have dots in the Self Control virtue. Remember, however, that in the chargen chapter they told us that we could choose whatever virtues we wanted off a list? So if we chose to have Honor or Truth as virtues instead of Self Control, I guess we just failed chargen and can't use magic at all. [AH Note: I later pointed out that apparently mummies in 1e had all six virtues. Which was insane.] Or something. Fuck, I dunno. Anyway, in first edition Mummy, Hekau is the name of one of the six paths of Mummy Magic. So the first source of using Hekau instead of Heku or Heka is in the original book back in 1992 – and White Wolf just passed that on adding embellishments to that mistranslation for 9 years rather than checking a primary source. Ugh.
AncientH:

Mummy 2e is based more off of World of Darkness: Sorcerer, but it's sort of a convergent evolution because the original Mummy 1e wDNA is still in there. In both cases you've got your Path/Magic Skill rating (1-5), which lets you buy spells/rituals (1-5), which you power by expending sekhem and rolling against a variable target number. Mummy 1e still had "Key Ingredients" like it was D&D or RuneQuest or something, but by Mummy 2e they'd managed to drop that.

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It wasn't a great and streamlined system by any means - but it was more-or-less functional. Until you got to the Resurrection. Which was 2e warmed over including the mechanics, some of which were copypasta'd and just don't make sense in the fixed-TN system that White Wolf had moved to.

The major difference between each edition was the watering-down of power. In 1e, mummies had huge amounts of Sekhem to throw around, making them default some of the most powerful (if far from the most versatile) magicians in the setting, able to throw down with methusalahs. In 2e, they were pale shadows of that - but they had more spells available to them overall. Resurrection had many more spells, less Sekhem to cast them with, and the mechanics just didn't bloody work on many of them.
FrankT:

In all three versions of Mummy, there are 6 paths of Mummy Magic, but their names get reshuffled some. Here, I'll present a table:
World of Darkness: MummyMummy 2nd EditionMummy: The Resurrection
AlchemyAlchemyAlchemy
AmuletsAmuletsAmulets
CelestialCelestialCelestial
FigurinesUshabtiEffigy
HekauRen-hekauNomenclature
NecromancyNecromancyNecromancy

You'll note that these path names aren't all the same parts of speech, which makes putting lists into sentences a right bitch. Also, this line was so neglected that despite having squatters rights on the name “Necromancy,” that got copyright infringed by a Vampire clan as soon as the Player's Guide came out. With some complex shenanigans involving Viking blood sorcery, it is possible to have two different paths of magic that are both called Necromancy that do different shit.

Also important to note that three of these magic paths are very specifically to do with making magical things rather than chanting magical incantations. There's one about making magic jewelry, one about making magic potions, and one about making those little sculptures from Egyptian tombs. There's only one which is specifically based on “Words of Power,” so the insistence that all their magics were called “Words of Power” in 2nd and 3rd edition is really puzzling even on its own terms.

And lest you think that perhaps those weird-ass names in 2nd edition were the result of Egyptology research on the part of the authors, no. Ushabti and Ren-hekau are taken directly from the spell descriptions in 1st edition. Also, I think I can source 2nd edition's movie reviews to a book about the genre from 1971. Basically I'm saying that there wasn't a lot of original research done for these books, and I include watching the fucking Mummy movies on that list of things they should have done but probably didn't.
AncientH:

As a note, the ancient Egyptians did indeed believe in alchemy, astrology, the power of names, talismans like amulets, funerary incantations, and tied in there a bit the shabti figurines. (Which were small representations of servants placed in the tomb and which could be magically commanded to do work; this was important, as before the invention of shabti when the pharaoh went into the ground, so did his staff.) This stuff was all so important, they actually replicated most of it when they were doing Setite Sorcery...I think I promised an explanation for that once, so let me add that in here.

IN THE BEGINNING...when Discipline discipline was fairly rigorous, the writers did not create a new Discipline every time they needed a new effect, or to justify a non-Tremere character using magic. So if you were a Vampire, and using magic, they pretty much just gave you the Thaumaturgy Discipline and assumed you'd picked it up somewhere, or else it was some other form of blood magic which was close enough. However, they eventually changed this mentality when they decided that Necromancy, which was supposed to be the more-or-less exclusive province of the Giovanni clan, to have paths and stuff like Thaumaturgy...and so somebody got the bright idea "Hey, what if other clans had something like Thaumaturgy, but different? Then they wouldn't be hogging the Tremere's clan discipline!"

Except, well, they went a little overboard. A little? Ha. Okay, so in Blood Magic: Secrets of Thaumaturgy they introduced Setite Sorcery and Assamite Sorcery and whatnot, and then several years later they went back to the well with Blood Secrets...long story short, the Setites have their own brand of sorcery (several, actually, but the important one is) Akhu, which is based on ancient Egyptian magic - it's basically an alternate take on the mummy magic, and it actually does a slightly more solid job at it while covering basically the same ground of poisons, snakes, shabti, magic beer, mummies, etc. This kind of thing wasn't at all uncommon in the World of Darkness (old or new), but at least oWoD sometimes made an effort to acknowledge that you had different things going on in the same shared conceptual space. That said, I still can't find the rule that let Setites take Hekau spells/rituals as Akhu rituals, or vice versa for mummies...maybe I imagined it.
FrankT:

The system for determining how many spells you actually know from your various paths is needlessly baroque in all three games. In 2nd edition Mummy, they distinguish themselves by actually giving you a system in which it is possible to not know spells from your magic paths at all. You multiply your path levels by your Sekhem level and get a new pile of points that you buy spells from based on their difficulties. But Sekhem starts at 3 in this version, and there don't seem to be any spells that have difficulties as low as 3 (and some at difficulty nine), so it's basically certain that you will “have” some paths that you don't know any spells in. This really looks like no one thought this through at all. I can see how someone might have thought each part of the idea was good enough to toss around, but when you run it in sequence you have immortal sorcerers who don't know any spells. This is bullshit.

In The Resurrection, there are both Rituals and Spells given for each of the paths, and you know some amount of each of them. But the Rituals are supposed to be extended tests, and conspicuously lack the extended test nomenclature required to explain how one would go about casting them. Obviously there was some last minute change in how this magic system was supposed to work, and it ends up not telling us how it's supposed to work. When introducing the concept of rituals, they tell you what page to find the extended test rules in Vampire and Mage (but not in Werewolf or Changeling because go fuck yourself), and if you cared more than I do you could figure out which edition the guy who wrote those citations was working from by checking the page numbers. Not that would help you actually cast these rituals, because they are missing key information for any edition.

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3rd Edition Ritual casting rules might as well have been written in this, because it wouldn't make them any less usable to English speakers.

In first Edition Mummy, as Ancient History previously mentioned the numbers of power points and shit are very large and you are expected to do hourly and in some cases minute by minute accounting of inflows and outflows of power points.
AncientH:

One thing you notice in every edition of Mummy is they frontload the magic section with a discussion of augmented attributes. This is because in normal WoD, human stats max out at 5 - you can go higher if you're a vampire, or a werewolf in crinos, or if you've got magic. And these were explanations for what happened when you put on an Egyptian amulet or something and found yourself with eight dots in Strength. You would think this would be the same as an elder vampire with 8 dots of Strength, and this would be wrong. In fact, a mummy with 8 Strength can "Lift 10 Tons," "Outrun a cheetah," and "Fold pennies with the fingers."

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...and it gets sillier from there; mummies with Appearance 8 have to beat straight and gay people off with a stick, Intelligence 8 gives limited telepathy, etc. It's all very silly.
FrankT:

Mummies have a reputation for being very powerful. Some of that comes from the fact that the book straight up tells you (in every edition) that Mummies are very powerful. White Wolf players tend to be a pretty trusting lot when it comes to games telling them what is and is not powerful, so that's as far as it needed to go in a lot of cases. Also, Mummies get straight up more path dots than a Vampire or Mage, which struck a lot of people as unfair (nevermind how wildly different a dot worth of vampire discipline is from a dot worth of mage sphere). But to the extent this reputation was warranted, it was because Mummy Magic was allowed to do some very impressive things at very low levels.

While Vampires have to crawl all the way up to 4 dots of Protean before they can turn into a fucking bat (not even a badass bat demon, just a bat), Mummies can make a legion of domestic servants out of legos at level 1. There's some pretty boss stuff on these spell lists, and it bucks the usual White Wolf trend of holding out for level 4 or 5 to let you have basic iconic effects. Level 1 masters of the Celestial path can raise
water levels by a few meters in a lake or harbor. Level 1 masters of Necromancy can spirit project (something those sucker Vampires need Auspex at 5 to pull off). The power lists are short, but they are incredibly front loaded compared to other magic paths in White Wolf games.

However most people flip out over Amulets. Because it's a path of making permanent magic items, in which you expend time (note: your character is immortal) and get permanent and transferable jewelry that gives real and stacking bonuses to various stuff. Usually it's just an extra couple of dice on something or other, but you can give it to your friends and it stacks with everything else you might do. And while getting +2 Dexterity might not sound like a great capstone, learning how to make +2 Dexterity Amulets was generally cheaper than raising your own Dexterity by 2, let alone raising the Dexterity of everyone on the team by 2, which is what it amounted to. Figuring out that you could spend a few Background points and have an ally who was a Mummy that had some dots in Amulet making automatically made you at least a level 3 Powergamer.
AncientH:

The alchemy and amulets get a lot of attention, because they're patently much fucking better than comparable Path of Alchemy or Enchanting sorcerer paths, which are honestly a bit shit. More attention should probably be paid to Mummy Necromancy...I've gone about this before, but oWoD had many many types of Necromancy, but by the end of the edition the Vampire side of Necromancy was approach a very complete and well-thought out system of interconnected but distinct and useful abilities; they then flushed this down the toilet in nWoD, but it was nice while it lasted. Anyway, Mummy Necromancy is nowhere near as complete as Vampire or even Mage Necromancy, but it is oddly complimentary in many ways, as Mummies can do a lot of things relatively easily that Vampires and Mages cannot do easily - like create a potion that allows the entire party to see and hear Wraiths and the Shadowlands, or preserving a corpse for later, etc. The high-level rituals are difficult and expensive, but tend to be high-powered shit that nobody else in the setting has an easy paradigm to do - like creating Spectres, redefine Wraith Passions and Fetters, and physically move shit into the underworld.

...but, and this is the caveat, they don't have the fine control of abilities that made Vampire Necromancers in 3e actually useful; they could animate some zombies, sure, but not as easily or well. It was mostly just a collection of stuff for mages to troll through looking for good effects to steal.
FrankT:

By the time we get to Mummy: the Resurrection, the spell list has gotten really long. I suspect a big chunk of that was that they were paying Kenson by the word. There are a lot more spells to choose from, with like six per level instead of only two; but the spell descriptions themselves are immensely padded. There are bizarre asides, snippets of poetry, extended descriptions, and lugubrious comparisons. There's a basic level one spell that makes you immune to weather effects. No one fucking cares. The first paragraph reads:
M:tR wrote:With a simple utterance, the celestine negates adverse weather conditions within an arm's length of herself. Wind shears aside, rain deflects or stops and debris misses [sic] her. Even unnatural phenomenon like rains of frogs or sulfur bend around the mummy's weather shield. At best, the mummy feels nothing more than a fine mist from the most powerful thunderstorm. The effect lasts for the scene.
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[sic!]

Now aside from the fact that reading “debris misses her” was like reading a thumbtack into my eye, that spell description isn't half over despite the fact that it is already twice as long as it needs to be. And, it's all like this. The whole chapter is just a meandering diatribe that looks exactly like someone deliberately filling up space with trivialities to make a quota or exploit a loophole in a contract.

But as previously noted, what is completely absent from this cascading wall of text is any way to actually play this fucking thing. It doesn't conform to even the basic dicepool mechanics of the edition it was nominally written during. It uses a bunch of White Wolf words, but it doesn't plug into anything. It's exactly like the people actually writing this material were completely unfamiliar with any of the then-current White Wolf games and were just cargo culting their way through a writing contract with no mechanical oversight from any of the eleven people who were nominally in charge of creating parameters for this “game.”
AncientH:

Name-magic is a bit of a weird one. Yes, White Wolf tried name-magic too. Many times. It never worked terribly well and this was no exception. The basic idea is that the mummy magician learned a bunch of True Names and used them to do awesome shit like command animals and cause your eyeballs to explode. In fluff the mummy was supposed to learn a bunch of names to do this, but nobody ever wrote up any actual rules for how to do that until the Resurrection came along - and they're more like guidelines anyway.

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I would like to take a moment to point out that this book was almost certainly the basis for all magic in the first two Mummy editions.

The reason they included name-magic is because the ancient Egyptians used it. The Setites nominally do this too, but they were smart enough not to actually write any fucking rules for it.
FrankT:

These games really really want you to care about True Names. You don't care about True Names. The reason you don't care is because there is one path of true name magic (called “Hekau,” “Ren-hekau,” and “Nomenclature” in the various versions), and it's a separately learned spell for each and every type of creature or individual person. It's unclear whether you actually have to relearn the spell with actual XP every time you want to apply it to a new True Name, but regardless the effects aren't good enough to justify fucking around with true names. Yes, you can erase someone from existence and then not even their family remembers they ever existed – which is pretty awesome. But that costs 30 Sekhem and a permanent loss of a balance point and you have to find their true name and do [something unspecified] to apply that name to the spell – and you can just put someone's soul in a fucking jar and keep it there forever for three Sekhem as a Necromancer and you don't need to know them from Adam.

The fact that True Name magic is this tacked on extra path that doesn't play nicely with the rest of the game means that it's just as unusable as true name magic is in every other game. And that makes it even more unusuable than the rest of the magic, even in the 2nd edition when you don't get to know spells or the 3rd edition when the rituals simply lack the instructions on how they would be cast.
AncientH:

We didn't talk about shabti ushabti much, because Effigy magic is pretty boring: it deals with creating golems that serve you in this world, or (in 2e) relics in the Underworld. The latter are a pretty big deal...if you're a fucking Wraith. If you're kicking it in meatspace, not so much. But it gives you a really good excuse as a Wraith to have a Mummy ally. Because, seriously, you can go into business. Which is weirdly indicative of the problem with Mummy magic as a whole: the very best spells and effects are more valuable to other people than mummies. You've got that strange rarity, a breed of supernatural critter with access to a relatively good base of enchanting and shit, and no real weaknesses to compensate for - these guys really should be dominating the WoD magical economy. They're made to be allies, if they had anybody that they could actually sit and chill with without Horus giving breach-birth to a two-headed cow.

...and that's magic. Next, worldbuilding. Frank might need some fortifying beverages.

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Archmage Joda
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Post by Archmage Joda »

Are there any plans for reviewing Dark Ages?
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Post by TheFlatline »

Nath wrote:
TheFlatline wrote:Even In Nomine, where you literally can play a judeo-christian angel or demon and report to an archangel and have actually had angels called to the golden throne before God is willing to go there.

In the setting, there's a place called "The Marches", which is basically where abandoned gods and spirits go to retire. Like seriously you venture out far enough and you can get into a fistfight with Thor and play slapjack with Kali.

Which in the books and in the setting raise the question of if the tetragrammaton is merely another one of these beings who had better PR than anyone else, or if God is really God and all these other beings are impostors pretending to be gods.

The official angel/demon line is that God is totes legit. Questioning if he's just another poser with great advertising is heresy. That being said, sooner or later if you interact enough in the marches you start to wonder.
It should be noted that In Nomine was adapted from French RPG In Nomine Satanis/Magna Veritas (INS/MV). Loosely adapted, but nonetheless adapted. As far as I understand, Steve Jackson Games removed much if not all of the satyrical content. And there was a lot of it. Consider the script of Kevin Smith Dogma could be used as a module with minimal changes (the major difference is that it would be unprecedented for God to go as far as New Jersey, as he spent most of the past decades in a trailer home in central France...).

So, in a nutshell, INS/MV is like a polar opposite of the World of Darkness. For a game that feature supernatural creatures in a contemporary setting, with a dozen or so of patron lineage to choose from, each with a specific power (at least they don't pretend to be sleeping, and they openly say they're too busy to help you now), plenty of setting secrets, and where every historical event of note involves said beings one way or another (well, the biggest the event, the more chances it was just a gratuitious "show of force" that allowed an angel or a demon to make an impression and get promoted...), you'd expect them to have taken a lot more open cheap-shots at WoD that they did (though they did release an "end of the world" campaign in 2003...).

According to INS/MV, there are angels and demons, God is the one True God and Lucifer left Heaven to reign in Hell. Undeads are servants of demons under archdemon Bifrons. Sorcery works. Psionics are descendants from Adam and Eve.

Otherwise... Adam and Eve were not the actual first man and woman, just two regular folks God picked up to make a scientific experiment, and finally dumped them out of the lab (on the other hand, this did happen circa in 6,000 AD as the Bible states). Jesus was "just" an Archangel who hyped up the "special relationship" he enjoyed with the boss. And Islam was the attempt by Gabriel and three other angels to impress the boss by jumpstarting a new religion, and no one can say for sure He did or did not greenlight their business plan.

And then there are the marches. It is a play on word, a "marche" in French can mean either a borderland or a stair-step, suggesting heaven sits on top, hell lies at the bottom, and the marches are everything in between.

The most important marche is the marche of dreams and nightmares. Only the servants of Archangel Blandina and Archdemons Beleth have some powers in there. Beleth got his powers from nothing less than accessing the dreams of God (when he was still an angel, before following Lucifer). Blandina only was archangel Michael second-in-command (more commonly known as "Yves" in INS/MV, because he went low-profile at some point), who was the fuckin' biggest question mark in the entire setting - allegedly the first being created by God so he could then invent God.

All the "lesser gods" were said to born from dreams and nightmares, and their realm, be it Olympus, Valhalla or whatever, to be an offshoot of the marche of dreams and nightmares. Those gods nonetheless had real powers and could manifest on Earth.
It was one of the game secret that Demeter actually jumped ship and was offered a job as an Archangel.
And in spite of their gods being destroyed by demons during an actual Ragnarök, the viking einjerhars are still around, inhabiting mortal bodies and retaining some powers (It is said they could because God have a thing for ballsy warriors, and as a result some even got to join angelic forces). And dragons and fairies existed until they were "cleansed" by the Good Guys.

There is a theory that God appeared just the same way the lesser god did, and it is Michael/Yves who is the actual super special dude (I mean, even more special than he is said to be, as as "the source of all knowledge", he literally does know everything, and is only matched by his demon counterpart, Kronos, Archdemon of Time).
Good points. While I was a big fan of IN, I never did get into the original French game, so I missed out on all the satire. Sounds like fun though.

But yeah Yves, even according to the "official line" is more important than any other celestial. It literally goes in the book "God created creation. God Created Yves. God named Yves. Yves named God."

Even taken "seriously" (although how serious you can take a game with magical artifacts like the "I'm with stupid" t-shirt that always points at your target so you can track them) calling it the anti-WOD is actually not a bad comparison.
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Post by Ancient History »

Are there any plans for reviewing Dark Ages?
Not at the moment.

World Building
May Not Be Available in All Areas

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Fortunately or unfortunately, but certainly not surprisingly, this game is never getting released.

Music: Mummy (1999) theme
AncientH:

While bad mechanics and unbalanced character generation with systems that may or may not work is a hallmark of White Wolf's World of Darkness, the key to the game was, in a large sense, worldbuilding. As with Shadowrun and the Forgotten Realms, the game designers discovered that people liked the idea of an interconnecting, detailed setting, and White Wolf in particular capitalized on the inherent inclusion of mysteries, secrets, revelations, fan theories and outright lies that they spun through multiple game lines; the fact that large chunks of the material actually conflicted (which faction did Rasputin belong to?) was actually a bonus, because real-life mythology tends to be sprawling and self-contradictory too.

The problems with this approach are two-fold: on the one hand, you've got a lot of people pulling on different strings, so that it is ridiculously easy to get continuity snarls...White Wolf really needed a world bible (or internal wiki) years before those were at all common, and you had different game lines claiming large sections of the shared universe (mostly Mage) with no overarching direction except for the occasional metaplot-heavy events...

...which is the other problem, because they almost universally sucked. Shadowrun can make big metaplot events happen (barely) because they're at least all using the same game system, but the WoD games all used variations on the same basic ideas which never quite worked out for crossovers. It also didn't help that the big crossover events, as few as they were, tended to be railroady and sucked salty scrotum sweat by making "revelations" that were terrible and/or completely devalued the characters that players had carefully made. Case in point, the ham-handed destruction of the Children of Osiris and the old-school mummies in Mummy: the Resurrection.

So, when it came to mummies and worldbuilding, the first step was natural, almost organic: cram in everything vaguely Egyptian in the setting.
FrankT:

There are only five chapters in the original Mummy, and none of them really have fuck-all to do with world building. It's one of the big reasons that book was met with such perplexity and indifference on release – the book didn't really tell you how to work these assholes into the rest of the game world, so people just didn't. So the fact that there are quite a few chapters given over to world building in 2nd and 3rd edition could easily be confused with White Wolf learning from their mistakes. What we're actually looking at is probably more likely to be fanwank overdrive for the 2nd edition and mercenary production of rote content for M:tR. That is to say that the people writing 2nd edition filled up most of their additional word count with their incomprehensible fan theorizing on how the different games of the World of Darkness could be made to fit together, while the people writing M:tR filled up page after page after page with basically gibberish interspersed with obliging completion of Justin Achilli's directives to set fire to various arbitrary parts of the setting.

In any case, this stuff is all really spread out. In 2nd Edition we have Chapter 2 “The World of Mummy” (14 pages), Chapter 5 “The Underworld” (12 pages), and Chapter 6 “The Many Faces of Rebirth” (12 pages). So all told, that's 38 pages, which is about 10 pages more than they gave to the spell list and about 6 pages more than they gave to character generation. In 3rd edition, we have Chapter 2 “The Resurrected” (18 pages), Chapter 5 “The Scales That Weigh” (18 pages), and Chapter 6 “The Land of Faith” (32 pages). That is an actual fuck tonne of page count – 68 pages of this crap.

What's really interesting is how formulaic White Wolf had become. Even though things are in different orders and in different formats, you'll note that the parts of the book which are broadly speaaking “world building” are the same chapter numbers. They've been jumbled a bit, but we're tackling chapters 2, 5, and 6 in both books. White Wolf books gelled pretty early on, and carried over habits both good and bad from one book to the next. They had hit on a winning formula pretty much by accident, and kept working with it cargo cult style until their company collapsed.
AncientH:

Mummy 1e began as a Vampire supplement, and throughout the editions that has basically been its core mythology - the demytholigization of the ancient Egyptian religion. The gist is that way back in the dawn of sandy buttcheeks, Ra and Osiris and Set were mortals - with Set being the black sheep of the family - and somewhere along the way they were both made into vampires. Set was cool with this, Osiris was not, and they and their progeny and whatnot quarreled. Eventually, Set killed Osiris, who became a Wraith, and Set killed Horus, and Isis used a spell she learned from Anubis to turn Horus into one of the first Mummies.
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Surprisingly, Set did not live happily ever after.
Naturally, this gets convoluted...uh...more or less immediately. Despite the fact that Management stuck to the idea that yes, all vampires are descended from Caine right through to the end, every now and again writers tried to muddy the waters or give alternative interpretations by different groups, so for example the Setites all claim Set was the first vampire and Osiris was a prick that had it coming. But keep in mind, the Followers of Set have a group of debauched nuns whose purpose in life is to protect the bloodline of Jesus Christ. My point being, there was room for lots of crazy shit in the oWoD, and they probably would have been better off embracing it.

Anyway, as the editions got on, the backstory got more convoluted. Mummy 1e is pretty basic; Mummy 2e tries to work in all the references to mummies and Egypt that have gone on up to this point, and the Resurrection burns the world to the ground.
FrankT:

2nd edition's “The World of Mummy” isn't much about the world. It's an obsessive fan list of all the types of Mummies ranted and hinted at in previous World of Darkness titles, with an attempt to lump them all together into a narrative that involved Horus. This book really wants you to join up with Horus and recognize how awesome sauce he is, but the whole thing comes off as lame. Really, reading this thing continues to feel like you're reading an earnest fanboy attempting to explain to you why the X-Men movies and the Avengers movies actually take place in the same world or something. These guys narrow the types of Mummies down to five
categories based on their relationship to Horus. But the people who stopped listening to Horus are called Ishmaelites (a term which means “Arabs” in old racist literature), and all the Incans and Chinese and Ice Agers and stuff are lumped in as “Others” and are just inscrutable foreigners.

3rd edition's “The Resurrected” has a very different title, but is conceptually quite similar. The non-Egyptians have been relegated to an appendix, and we'll get to that with the Storyteller materials for the different books. This chapter contains a rundown just on the six flavors of Mummy and a massive (and massively annoying) infodump on how the whole soul fusion thing works. The psychobabble is different, but basically this is exactly the same underlying concept as Hunter, Demon, nMage, and Geist. And really not that different from Exalted. I've heard that early on there was a plan to have Exalted tie in to World of Darkness, and gradually replacing all the supernatural types with various flavors of Exalted-style soul fusions could easily have been part of that. But of course, it is historical reality that whether or not any such grand unification was intended, it never came to anything and never will.

In any case, there are six flavors of soul fragment you can get grafted to you in M:tR, and each has a different name, and it causes you to get still another name when it's grafted to you, and what the fuck is this shit? Seriously, none of these assholes have bandages or even underwent a mummification ritual. It's just some regular dude who died and then came back to life with an Atlantean Angelic Egyptian soul fragment. nWoD did have these Mummies in it. They just called them Geists.

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Mumm-Ra the Ever Living is about 400% more Mummy than any of these assholes.
AncientH:

The thing in 2e is that Horus is chilling in Switzerland, supposedly leading the ongoing resistance against the Followers of Set and directing the mummies, but not really doing much. They go on to talk about how the various anti-Set factions in Egypt had formed a loose "Osirian League" - sort of a superfriends kind of deal - but it had all sort of fallen apart because we're talking sorcerers of the Cult of Isis, vampires under the Children of Osiris, werewolves under the Silent Striders (with the Bastet - werecats - and Mokole - were-crocodiles/dinosaurs) - and the Mummies and basically anyone else he could squeeze together. It was a tenuous alliance, and it didn't work very well, but I guess they technically won? Sortof? It gets confusing, because frankly Horus is in fucking Switzerland and there's no real gameplan there.

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We'll talk about the Children of Osiris next chapter. I know you're dying to hear some Scorpion King shit about badass Bronze Age battles between brother bloodsuckers. But beware! Bardo beckons.
FrankT:

2nd edition's “The Underworld” chapter is the kind of thing you might think was about the Underworld. Mostly it isn't. It starts with some weird rants about funerary practices in Egypt, but mostly it's about rectifying Wraith lore with Vampire lore. See, Wraith has a place for Egyptian dead people to go, but it also got conquered by a Wraith empire. So to make that fit with the whole Osiris, Vampire King of the Egyptian Wraiths deal, they created a second secret Egyptian Wraith kingdom that Osiris snuck off to with a bunch of Wraiths and Mummy Souls and shit before the Stygians came. And so on. This all makes about as much sense as someone explaining the Peter Parker Clone Saga, and serves about as much purpose at the end of the day. Also there are some game mechanics mixed in here, because it's a White Wolf product and of course there are.

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Confused Keanu basically wrote Mummy 2nd Edition.

3rd edition's “Scales That Weigh” chapter is pretty much the same chapter. Despite the different title, this chapter is basically also about the biological functions of Mummies and their relationship with the underworld. So, to the extent that the 2nd edition chapter was justified in being called “The Underworld,” the 3rd edition Chapter 5 one could have been as well. They have a lot more word count, and they mostly fill it up with long paragraphs answering various questions like whether a human with a mummy soul fragment can still get an erection (apparently yes). Then they lose me entirely by going off on long rants about how few Mummies sire children because the weight of aeons and the sadness of seeing your children die of old age, blah blah blah, Highlander. But you know what? That's all fucking bullshit. These Mummies came into being after the Sixth Great Maelstrom. That is an event which happened in 1999. This book came out in 2001. When this book came out, specifically no one had been an Amenti for longer than 2 years. Even today, if the first Amenti had responded to waking up in the morgue by running out and boning as many women as he could find – his offspring wouldn't be old enough to drive.

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Mummy: the Resurrection gets back to White Wolf's roots, of having very young and inexperienced people whine about the burden of never aging.

In Mummy: the Resurrection, there's a whole thing about an alternate morality system for Maat. It works just like Humanity, except that every level is about whether you're doing your best to stop people from offending Maat. It's very lengthy, but it makes no sense at all because it's completely self-contained.
M:tR, example of sinning against Maat wrote:Any of the above intentional offenses against any living creature living in accord with Ma'at. Allowing any of the above offenses to take place without trying to prevent it.
So it's basically the same shit as we saw in Exalted. Being righteous and honorable just means behaving well towards people who are also righteous and honorable by your metrics, and foreigners or members of other teams can just be raped in the eye while they are on fire for all you care because crimes against those assholes don't even count. If your Balance gets high enough, eventually you start having to offer minimal dignity to people who aren't part of your secret club, but based on the maximum starting Balance values and the limits to raising it, it was literally impossible for there to be a single Mummy in all of existence who had that problem when this book came out. There's a whole thing where they talk about the various judges of Ma'at, and how you get the smite down for various sins (including some weasel words about how “impure sex” doesn't necessarily mean “gay sex”), and it's a bad fit for World of Darkness and a bad fit for Egyptian mythology and a bad fit for the morality they are seemingly attempting to impose on the characters.

And of course, there are some random rules in here as well, such as the XP costs and crap. Because of course there are.
AncientH:

I suppose this should get some mention for being a step towards the Road/Path system developed for Vampire: the Dark Ages, which was honestly a much better idea than trying to stick all characters everywhere under a "Humanity" score, but honestly it's a bit like the rest of the Mummy mechanics where it's more marsupial than honest mammal - I can't say any of this stuff even influenced the alternate ethos rules for Vampire with any certainty.

2e and 3e also have some slight tie-ins to Kindred of the East, which came out in '98 and was basically a dry run for Exalted; the KotE concept of Kuei-Jin is basically what you get when you iron out the metaphysical wrinkles between Mummy 1e and the Risen sourcebook (for those of you who have never read it: think of it as The Crow: The RPG). The entire Mummy rebirth cycle where they die and spend a bit of time as a wraith before coming back to their body is essentially the same as with the Kuei-Jin...with the added wrinkle that the latter go to hell and ride the line between mummy-like powers and vampire-like powers. Now, they could have worked this so that the games had a sort of middle ground where even if your PC died they could continue on as a Wraith during the same game session and then come back in a body next session, but that would make something too much like sense for most WW game designers...anyway, my point is, there's a thematic link there. And later on in the Resurrection there are Asian mummies that use Chi instead of Sekhem.

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Wait, wasn't I embalmed?
FrankT:

Chapter 6 of Mummy 2nd Edition is called “The Many Faces of Rebirth.” What it actually is, is basically a list of sample characters. First some ubermenchen who aren't given stats, and then some nearly completed characters that you can play just by spending their unspent freebies points and swallowing your dignity because you're playing a White Wolf sample character and that means that your character is amazingly badly put together. It's tradition. This whole piece is done in the traditional White Wolf style of story, roleplaying prompts, and picture to accompany a full page character sheet – so each sample character takes up two full pages. This entire chapter only has four sample characters. And the tribal warrior guy has all physical stats of three, so it's not like they are much use as written.

About the only real revelation in this chapter is when it's talking about how hard it is to do a census of the Immortals they let loose the bomb that Team Horus only has 42 dudes on it. All the Egyptian Mummies together are somewhere north of a hundred, so the earlier claim that Team Horus was the majority of anything was bullshit from the start. Even at the atrocious rate of space filling that White Wolf likes to do for sample characters, they could have seriously just written up every single fucker on Team Horus and let people pick one. That would have been only two more pages than Mummy 1st Edition. Put in the magic system and a longer discussion of “Not Team Horus” than this book presently gives and you'd still come in at the page count this book presently sails around at. But instead we get page after page of fan wanking to some dudebro's pet theory on how to reconcile the contradictory historical claims of Vampire, Mage, Werewolf, and Wraith. It's extremely tedious, and a bad use of space is what I'm saying.

Chapter 6 of 3rd edition is...

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Ironically, this run of Animal Man was pretty awesome and you should read it.

OK, it's called “The Land of Faith.” It's a 32 page rant about the Middle East from the standpoint of gushing about the great religions that it has spawned. By which they obviously don't mean Zoroastrianism and Mithraism, because don't let's be silly. I've already complained about the whole Web of Faith thing, and about how people who don't understand that Sikhism exists should not be allowed to talk about comparative religion wangs, and I've done some drinking, so let's get to this.

First of all, in few parts of this book, or any White Wolf book, is the fact that you have a lot of authors contributing to something more obvious. So you have someone in there trying their level best to be technically accurate and respectful and shit and using “BCE” for time periods, and then you have some other jackass who refers to Y2K as “2000 years after the coming of the Christian savior” and shit. The turnaround between having someone write a scrupulously factual piece about the different kingdoms of Egypt and having someone write some Muslimish dialog with all the ethnic sensitivity of Jar Jar Binks is so rapid that you don't even have time to put on your White Privilege Glasses and just get blinded by enough offense to score on the Pittsburgh Steelers.

So this book was apparently part of the “Year of the Scarab,” a year long event in which White Wolf brought out a bunch of books full of offensive Middle Eastern stereotypes. And so the Web of Faith thing was some sort of multi-book, multi-line plot that was probably supposed to prove something other than hearing Christian gamer nerds from Atlanta talking about religions that aren't their own is about as pleasant an experience as having curious children dry shave you in your sleep. Remember kids: chest hair is best hair. Spoiler alert: it did not.
AncientH:

There are 43 Egyptian Mummies (counting Horus). But then there are 7 other dudes - the Bane Mummies. "Banes" are evil spirits tainted by the Wyrm from Werewolf: the Apocalypse; Bane Mummies are more-or-less what it says on the tin - corrupted mummies made using Bane spirits and a perverted version of the mummy spell by Set. I'm not sure why he stopped at seven. You'd think that would totally be a thing. But anyway, 7 there are, and they are supposed to be your eternal nemeses/badasses for Horus and his bros to fight against. Because all the lesser mummies don't count.

Frank and I were talking about this weirdness today and it reminded me of another tie-in, to a fairly obscure and bullshit product of 1994: Vampire: the Masquerade Most Wanted.

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This 32-page "book" retailed for $9.00, and featured the inhabitants of the Camarilla's "Red List" - ten individuals that various clans had declared anathema and placed bounties on, declaring them subject to blood hunts by archons yadda yadda yadda - a mix of criminals, diablerists, infernalists, and people too damn dangerous or annoying for their own good; many of them break the rules in one way or another - hell, there's a werewolf ghoul on here. ONE of them was an ex-Follower of Set who in life really wanted to be a mummy, and even learned the spell, and got super pissed when Set turned her into a vampire instead. She went insane, hung out with the Children of Osiris for a bit, went insane again, and now is on a mission from God to turn all vampires into mummies...if she can remember the spell.

When people bitch about nWoD, and there are many legitimate reasons to do so, never forget that they used to pull this kind of crap all the time. And they called it worldbuilding.
FrankT:

Continuing with the Land of Faith, they actually throw out some locations, like you're actually supposed to play the game in the Middle East somehow. About the only “useful” information in all this is the relative shroud values (remember: that's like the gauntlet, but called something else) of various power sites. Despite the fact that the Web of Faith is supposed to be all Judeo-Islamo-Christian, a bunch of old Pagan shit is listed too. Because go fuck yourself. There's a little bit of descriptive text about various areas like Alexandria and Jerusalem, but it's fucking useless for running an actual game because it doesn't go into nearly enough detail. Functionally, it might as well just be some citations to some decentish city guidebooks or something. Actually, that would be much better.

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Every so often, the location descriptions will just throw in something so crazy that I am just at a loss for words. Like, where it talks about the historical location of Sodom and Gomorrah. Just like those were real places rather than stories, despite the complete lack of archaeological evidence to that effect. The bit on Bethlehem doesn't put a single weasel word into its breathless description of how the birthplace of Jesus Christ was established, nor does the bit on Jericho have any doubt that Elijah went up in a whirlwind to heaven there. Someone on the writing staff is using the fucking Bible like a historical text, and seems totally unaware that this might be in any way contentious.

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Remember when that dude on Fox News said that they'd found Noah's Ark already? Some of the bits in here are basically just like that.
AncientH:

Keep in mind, The Resurrection was the tail end of the Year of the Scarab, so nominally you were probably supposed to buy every product marked with a Scarab and cobble it together into a working setting - you can tell this was the idea because they strongly emphasized that mummies in M:tR are tied into the Web of Faith, and need it to recharge. However, given that several of the Year of the Scarab books are set back in the fucking Dark Ages, I'm at a loss to why you thought people would just be cool for staying inside their little cage for no apparent reason.

I suppose we should talk a bit more about the Middle East in the World of Darkness in general. Long story short: like Africa, India, South America, and other places full of non-white people, it has largely been ignored, and where White Wolf has graced a region with some attention, it's been a mess. The Dark Ages supplements take place during the Crusades, and the cultural sensitivity level never really goes up from there. The usual way the story goes is that the residents (mortal sorcerers, vampires, etc.) were pagan, but then they found Islam and now they're all Islamic, except for the old pagan ones and the white people Christians that wander in from Europe. I wish I could say I was kidding about that, but it's seriously the main thrust of both the Mage and Vampire plot arcs as far as the Middle East is concerned; the main clans are the Assamites, the Followers of Set, and the fucking Giovanni; the African clans didn't really crop up until Kindred of the Ebony Kingdom, and THAT particular piece of shit deserves its own RAGEview in detail someday.

Changing Breeds give the claw to all this, basically because they have their own mythology which is refreshingly mostly free of this People of the Book business.
FrankT:

In the description of “The Keening” it straight up repeats half a paragraph. Because all the text is shovelware anyway, and who the fuck actually reads this garbage? I mean, it's not like there were sixteen people working on this fucking thing. But that's not even the part that pisses me off. See, apparently the Prophet Mohammed cleansed Mecca and this caused the entire area to be painful to the enemies of Ma'at. Ma'at is of course a pagan concept, so the Prophet Mohammed would rationally be expected to be one of the most anti-Ma'at people in all of history. And indeed, his “cleansing of Mecca” was in no small part the systematic destruction of everything in the region that referenced old time pagan religious ideas like Ma'at.

But here, the Prophet Mohammed and fucking Osiris are super best friends because the authors are chickenshit. They thought it might be offensive to have the Prophet Mohammed be not on the side of the “good guys,” and so instead they decided to write up the founder of Islam giving the Buddy Christ thumb's up to a bunch of pagan idolaters. Because these assholes have no fucking idea what is or is not actually offensive to people who care about the teachings of Allah. Protip: having Mohammed shit all over the first commandment is probably more offensive than pretty much anything else you could possibly do. The would have gotten a lot of hatemail from this book if anyone had actually purchased it and read it at the time.

Weirdly, when it starts shilling extra books at you, it shills for Wraith: the Oblivion, despite the fact that the Wraith line had been officially ended, and this was the fucking book that was supposed to fucking replace it, you fucking assholes!

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AncientH:

My guess is, they still had a lot of Wraith books gathering dust in the warehouse.

One of the issues I have with worldbuilding here is what I call the "group assumption." In Mummy 1e, the group size was manageable - I had more people in my ROTC detachment in college than there were mummies in the world, you could see that as being a relatively tight-knit bunch with shared lingo and everything, especially after a couple centuries. In Mummy 2e, you hit critical subreddit threshold - lots of different groups, each of which was kinda small and specialized. Like bloodlines compared to major clans. WoD has always felt that they could find a special group of like-minded outsiders for you, no matter how special a snowflake you wanted your PC to be.

But in the Resurrection...well, you're trying to get twice the sex with half the foreplay. The structure of the group dynamics is made to look like Vampire clans or Werewolf tribes, but there's no precedent for it, no in-world excuse for why we suddenly have some assholes calling themselves scrollbearers and others getting ankh tattoos on their genitalia. It's trying to develop an entire culture ex nihilo, and it's about as natural as the Village of the Damned pairing off with their life sex partners in kindergarten. I mean fuck, even Harry Potter had the gods-be-damned Sorting Hat; and when J. K. Rowling can spot and overcome a plot hole, anyone can.
FrankT:

Obviously, there's just a lot more page count in world building in Mummy: the Resurrection. I mean, there's a lot more pages in the book, and it had to get squandered somewhere. But really it comes down to the same issue in both cases: this is dogshit and needed to be scrapped. In both books the big mega-explanation is far too complicated and too far fetched. It's too intricate of a conspiracy theory to be persuasive, and the payoff isn't interesting enough for me to want to follow along. I don't give a fuck about Justin Achilli's big soul fusion idea, and I don't give a fuck about James Estes' big combined WoD history theory. These were not interesting big reveals, and having to wade through dozens of pages of JFK conspiracy theorizing to get there was too much for too little.

The other core problem is that I don't want to join the League of Osiris. I don't even care about the League of Osiris. They aren't second raters. They aren't third raters. They don't fucking rate. The Followers of Set can make pretty great villains, but they do not make plausible ultimate villains. They are B-list villains for Vampire, and C-list villains for Werewolf. That is all they will ever be. If your whole claim to being the champions of righteousness is that you fight those guys, then that's you vying with Daredevil to be a third string hero. And frankly, Daredevil is cooler than you are ever going to be.

As I mentioned earlier, I personally played a Follower of Set in live action games for years. Not once did I ever consider the League of Osiris as my biggest threat. I didn't really consider them at all. I was honestly more concerned about the Gangrel and Toreador. If the League can't even make their nominal primary opponents take them seriously, they just aren't serious. These books needed to either make me take the League seriously by having them actually do shit that mattered, or sweep the whole League under the rug and produce some actual plot hooks that I might give a shit about. They did neither of these things.

This world building exercise was a failure.
AncientH:

And, to take Frank's point a bit further: say that you actually don't have to worry about the Followers of Set for a moment. What the fuck is being a Mummy about? No edition of the game has ever answered that. In 1e, you just sort of had the whole "I am immortal" Highlander thing, where you lived your life down the centuries doing whatever the fuck you wanted, and any goals you set were your own. In 2e, they really emphasized the struggle with the Setites as some reason to get off your ass and interact with the setting. And The Resurrection...well, I guess the best they could say is the whole Ma'at thing was there for you to bring Balance to the Force.

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I cannot believe I couldn't find a decent Star Wars mummy picture.

But it still lacked...something. The thing is, Mummies don't need blood or dreams. They're not locked into an eternal struggle with the Wyrm. They're not trying to reshape reality, or resolve the holdover issues from their first life. So most of the wangst drivers for World of Darkness don't apply to them, and it shows in the terrible "Cool, so now what?" factor that comes from thinking about these assholes for even a minute.

And there's no excuse for it. These guys are wraiths in bodies - why don't they have fetters, or lingering emotional attachments from their first lives that they have to deal with in the shape of reincarnated lovers and children and shit? Why aren't they locked in a perpetual battle against the dark forces of Apophis, which is one aspect of the Wyrm? Why aren't they opposed to the technomancy, since they have a really good thing going with static magic and would like for their current paradigm to continue working because otherwise they might die the final death? Why wouldn't they be a part of the society of immortal vampires, and steeped in their Machiavellian politics and power struggles? Why wouldn't they be hideous fountains of banality that the faeries struggle against, considering they carry so much history with them? THIS SHIT IS EASY...but, they didn't do it.

Next up: Storytelling, Children of Osiris, and Liches
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Post by Stahlseele »

What. No Mummies Alive?
I am disappoint! *snickers*
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Post by Night Goat »

Has anyone ever actually played any of these Mummy games? I used to be a big White Wolf fan, and I've never heard of anyone playing mummies or even using them as NPCs.
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Post by JigokuBosatsu »

1st ed Mummy was the first supplement I bought after the VtM core book. Guess I am a sucker for John Cobb's weird art. Even in those foggy days of RPG understanding, there was never any question of actually playing a "Mummy game". Mummies- not the bane mummies, mind you, just your regular ol' mummies became recurring villains in the games that I MCd. The reading I had of what the Mummies were "all about" with their lack of wangst is that they were immortal, bored, whimsical dicks who happened to make golems and zombies and could shut down a coastline faster than the Longshoremen. And were unkillable like toons.

But damn, it's funny to look back at how bad these books were. All of 'em. Ugh. But man, the Mummy spells sure made great names for metal songs.
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Post by Night Goat »

That sounds like the best use someone could make of 'em. It's hard to imagine a group of people sitting down, making mummy characters, and I guess playing a Saturday morning cartoon against the Setites.
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Post by Username17 »

Stahlseele wrote:What. No Mummies Alive?
I am disappoint! *snickers*
Mummies Alive would be better than what they actually did, but we'll get to that a bit later.

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Post by Longes »

the African clans didn't really crop up until Kindred of the Ebony Kingdom, and THAT particular piece of shit deserves its own RAGEview in detail someday.
I'd just like to mention, that for african vampires it's a Level 2 sin to cooperate with the white masters against the africans, and Level 1 sin to commit blasphemy against gods, spirits and ancestors. Enjoy your stay.
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Post by Prak »

Stahlseele wrote:What. No Mummies Alive?
I am disappoint! *snickers*
I only saw that show a handful of times (damn you school starting at 8 and the good cartoons coming on at 9...), but it was the entire reason I wanted to play Mummy when I found the book. Well, that and my childhood fascination with Egypt.
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Post by Omegonthesane »

The GM's penis NPC in my former Vampire larp group turned out to be a Bane Mummy. Other than that, no experience.
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Post by Ancient History »

Storyteller Bits
The End of the Book. The End of Every Book

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The plot's a bit railroady, but that's because go fuck yourself.

Music: Imelda May - It's Good To Be Alive
AncientH:

Storytelling chapters in White Wolf products are weird things. Because they call it the Storyteller system, and they emphasize, more than D&D or GURPS at least, that the game is not just about being a monster with cool powers and collecting all the dots you can, but about the mood, the atmosphere, and the actual story. I don't know if I'd ever describe many of them as good, but at least until nWoD most of them were at least somewhat focused and relevant to the task - with a caveat.

They wanted you to play the game their way.

Not always. Especially not in the early days, when there was room for a bit of silliness and lots of the game wasn't set in stone yet, and people were more free with creating crazy powers because nobody had really worked out the finer points of what the system or metaphysics could be, so they were making it up as they went along. That's sort of what you see in Mummy 1e, with the Children of Osiris and whatnot - sort of a more innocent time for Vampire, when you could actually be "good guys" in a non-ironic way.

After that rather free-wheeling enterprise, however, there was - as there often is - sort of a revolt. A desire to get more serious, less playful, to kick out the fishmalks and the poseurs and focus on the real horror of the setting. And again, this was coming entirely from a love of the game, it was part of the consolidation and restatement of the setting that all good games tend to go through every now and again - Warhammer Fantasy, Shadowrun in 3rd and 4th editions, probably GURPS 4th edition, the Final Fantasy games - the desire is not to throw things away, but to interpret them in a way that preserves the theme of the game.

Of course, sometimes it's a lost cause, and sometimes the cause gets lost.

The thing about Mummy: the Resurrection is that it's really an inherently different game from the previous editions, as weak as they were. A bulk of the setting material and concept were ejected, and nothing was really brought in to replace it. It's a reinvention rather than an update with consideration for new mechanics and events that had happened since the release of the last book. And maybe it could have been saved if it had kept something of the soul of the original in terms of mood and storytelling. Old souls, newly bodied, yet still following through the same eternal mission and themes...but it isn't, really.

I'd feel sadder about that, but to be honest Mummy 1e and 2e didn't have much going on in the storytelling department either.
FrankT:

First Edition Mummy had an 18 page “Storytelling” chapter, followed by a 9 page adventure called “Hell's Highway.” 2nd Edition Mummy almost completely abdicated its prerogative to tell Storytellers what to do, giving only 12 pages in the “Storytelling” chapter (and some of those pages are like lists of Egyptian names and shit and are probably for players and merely typeset incorrectly). The authors seem to take the White Wolf idea that the Storyteller can do whatever they want a bit far, and mostly they just fall back on telling the Storyteller that it's their game and they can do whatever. Mummy: the Resurrection hits on many of those same themes, telling the storyteller repeatedly that they don't need rules, man, but because it's a shovelware project it still has lots and lots of pages. The Storyteller section in M:tR is three chapters, called unhelpfully “Secrets of the Scribe” (14 pages), “Serpents in the Garden” (18 pages), and “Appendix: Other Immortals” (14 pages). Secrets of the Scribe is basically what someone less pretentious and obfuscatory might have called “Storytelling” and Serpents in the Garden is what someone less pretentious and obfuscatory might have called “Antagonists.” You might think that having an entire 18 page chapter dedicated to talking about the bad guys might put the central conflict of the proposed story into more focus. And you'd be wrong.
AncientH:

So! What is the central conflict in Mummy? What is the purpose of the game? How do they spend their endless days and nights?

Uh...fuck if I know, man. According to three editions of Mummy you're supposed to care about two asshole brothers that couldn't get along about six thousand years ago, and still can't manage to get along even though one of them is dead and the other is undead (and the nephew of the undead one is every-living).

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I'm just going to leave that there, because I like to think of Horus and Set like the world's oldest bickering homosexual couple arguing who gets to be on top.

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I have the perfect person to play Set.

Unlike vampire where every night is a struggle or werewolf where every place and object has a living spirit you might have to bargain with/beat up, mummies...are kinda chill. I'm not saying you couldn't make it interesting, but the storyteller section doesn't actually present any issues you might have with day-to-day existence, and there's really no reason for multiple mummies to team up and do anything. I mean, at least mummies don't have any inherent barriers to teaming up, unlike vampires with their competing clans, but they don't have much reason to do so either. The key themes in 1e were loss, the meaning of life, revenge, and megalomania. You might recognize that of those, the only easy ones to work with are loss and revenge, and even then only if the player is willing to play along - Kharlibrun the Eternal Optimist just gets on everybody's nerves.

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Sorted.
FrankT:

The Storyteller section of first edition Mummy starts with another one of their in-character wank discussion bits. This was supposed to be like a literary theme or something, but fundamentally it just means that every one of these chapters is a couple pages shorter than it says on the box. Then it tells you the story of Osiris and Set. As Ancient History mentioned, this one goes off the reservation a bit on the mythology angle, with Set getting his penis chopped off in a spirit duel of something. This telling is interesting because it didn't get fossilized into the “Osiris Good, Set Bad!” crap that the later editions turned into. Back in the original Mummy, Set was an evil bastard, but Osiris was also an evil bastard. Back in the first and second edition of Vampire, an “Osiris” was a term for a vampire who kept human cultists and lackeys around so they would have something to eat. The whole “League of Osiris” as a bunch of generic and uninteresting do-gooders was a later addition to the canon, and it improved nothing.

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By Mummy 2nd Edition, the fight between Set and Osiris was basically this, but in the original writeup there was nuance and gravitas.

When 1st edition Mummy came out, the Setites were quite new, the first blurb on them only got published a few months before this book came out. So their mythos isn't really set up. This book probably could have defined them somehow for good or ill, but basically declines to do so. Set is bad, and he turns into a snake (like in Conan). The author of this book doesn't even know that the Egyptian version of Set has a donkey head, and incorrectly refers to it as a dog head. There's also a bunch of discussion about the mortal wizards who followed Isis – and these seem to be basically D&D Wizards, because Mage hadn't happened yet and Bill Bridges' tirades about the nature of reality and “magick” hadn't infected the company at all when this book was written. Things would probably have been better, had this book been taken as the primary source for “wizards,” but instead it was promptly forgotten about and of course Mage was eventually made by other people and went to a very strange place. The Children of Osiris in this are actually descended from Khetamon, who was some minor functionary at court who turned away from the vampiric wickedness of Osiris and Set. In the other books, this got retconned into Osiris having been a totally wise and cool bro the entire time and the guy who personally taught Khetamon the virtues of abstaining from indiscriminate murder. Because for some reason the people who wrote the later versions of Mummy thought the problem with the limited story material in the original Mummy was that it was too interesting and nuanced.
AncientH:

Yeah, at some point they had the rumor that Osiris fled to the Himalayas because the word "Bardo" is actually a Buddhist term...but I'm getting ahead of myself; the Children of Osiris are probably half the reason that Mummy 1e sold and half the reason people bought Mummy 2e (and were extremely disappointed).

So the Children of Osiris weren't actually detailed in Mummy 1e, they were detailed in The Hunters Hunted, released the same year. They represented something which, again, Vampire and WoD really wanted but didn't know they wanted or really have a mechanism to handle until much later: a way to change your Clan affiliation to a different group or bloodline. The Children of Osiris weren't really a bloodline in the traditional sense, they were a sect - while they had a special discipline all to their own, that discipline was just something they had knowledge of, they didn't have it inherent in the blood or any discount for learning it as an in-clan discipline. Really, this was the same inherent issue that the Baali faced - and while the Baali solution was the Apostate merit to "adopt" members into their clan, the Children of Osiris rose and died before that really took off as a concept. (What people really wanted, of course, was something closer to nWoD where you could make your own bloodline - or, if they had gone a little farther, join a new bloodline[/i] - but that didn't happen, and nWoD was a pile of shit.)

Bardo itself was introduced in part because the Children of Osiris were "good guys," and in part because the struggle to maintain your humanity was fucking hard when you had to roleplay feeding every night. The Bardo discipline itself is a grab-bag of tasty abilities (recover lost Humanity at one dot, general-purpose antimagic at two dots, subsist on animal blood at three dots); higher dot versions get weird with a "mummification ritual" that puts elder vampires into torpor, briefly turning into a daywalker, and a ritual at 9 dots for bringing a vampire back from Final Death - you can kind of see why this was never reprinted and eventually nixed.

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Party's over, dudes.

The problem was that the Children didn't fit into the normal vampire society - and while they could have made something about that, instead they chose to ignore them as twinkly vampires in a Ben Templesmith 30 Days of Night kind of world. Much the same could be said of mummies in a lot of ways - these guys were decent in their first incarnation, and could have been reasonably powerful independent operators with lots of different supernatural ties. When I ran my only successful WoD campaign, there was an international chain of underground magic stores run by a mummy; he was the go-to guy if you needed a fetish or to dispose of a nasty relic or just wanted a pint of virgin's blood and some grave dust and were willing to pay. He would hire the PCs or just act as a contact (for a price, always for a price). And that's fine...for an NPC.

For a PC, I really think they should have emphasized the ally angle - somebody that could act as a peer to vampires and mages, werewolves and wraiths (fairies can fuck off), able to move between those worlds and interact with people, neither stewing in corruption nor so powerful as to upset the board, but able to pull their own weight - and they would have had some different requirements, maybe every mummy has a personal mission from Horus they have to work towards or something. The thing is, if they thought about it they could have made it work...but they didn't. So, the mummies and the Children of Osiris are gone.
FrankT:

First edition Mummy was very definitely grounded in being a Vampire expansion. Which means among other things that there has to be a Masquerade. It's not like the later versions where every line came up with their own terrible reasons why humans didn't know about that flavor of supernatural, they literally just are part of the Masquerade. There's a spiel about why the good Mummies and the bad Mummies and the Osirians and the Setites all conform to the Masquerade. Honestly, unlike the Sabbat material, this time it's the bad guys whose explanations make more sense. Setites and Bane Mummies work behind the scenes and keep to the shadows, lest humanity find out they are surrounded by monsters and take arms against them. That... basically makes sense. I can totally buy that. They are evil, they don't think humanity would appreciate that, so they hide. The fucking end. Meanwhile, the “good” mummies hide their immortal states because Horus thinks mortals would get totally jealous otherwise. That's the only given reason. So... if humans knew that there were immortals... then they'd try to extend their lives? There's a bit on “theme,” but only a bit. Looks like a set of notes to come back to when the author was ready to write a section on themes for a Mummy game rather than an actual product.

Earlier Ancient History and I had a back and forth about the virtues. This is because in 1st edition Mummy, it's totally contradictory. Here's what it says in chargen:
Mummy wrote:Vampire presented three virtues – Conscience, Self-Control and Courage – which are described in detail in the rulebook . Mummy characters may select these virtues, or any of the additional ones listed below.
That's pretty explicit that you have the choice to mix-n-match whatever set of virtues you want off their hybrid list. But... there are these sample characters in the Storyteller chapter. And they have six virtues each. Which is definitely not what it tells you to do in the player's section, but seems to have been what the author was going for at least at some point. Remember that the book's editor is spending most of his time working on the dog rape book, so actually bringing different chapters into agreement on basic shit like “how many stats you have” would be totally too much work. The shitty little “obviously designed on an Apple” character sheet has space for all six virtues... which doesn't really say anything either way. So I dunno.
AncientH:

There's also a bibliography at the tail end of the Storyteller section in Mummy 1e, and front and center is Budge's Egyptian Magic. Called it.
FrankT:

Yes you did.

Anyway, Mummy 2nd Edition's Storyteller section is much like advice written to the MC in say, AD&D 2nd edition. There isn't much here, and a lot of the word count is taken up with continually reminding the Storyteller that they can change things if they want. So they don't stat up any villains who don't already have stats because that would spoil the Storyteller's fun (yes, it really says that). They especially call out trolling players who read Storyteller sections of books by secretly changing shit from underneath them.

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Aside from having been apparently written by an insecure DM on a teenage power trip in 1986, there's a little bit on how Mummies interact with other supernatural types (which sounds like it would be pretty important player information, but since the answer is basically “not much” it doesn't much matter), and a bit on how to incorporate Mummies into other chronicles (“Don't”). There's not much to talk about here, so instead I'll go into what a fucking terrible idea Werewolf was. The entire thing with “The Wyrm” being the villains and including all the Vampires basically meant that anything that tries to take that shit seriously (as this book does) basically chokes trying to do a Being Human or Monster Squad type scenario. Since Werewolf presented the entire main game line as being on the wrong side of an apocalyptic battle of ridiculously black and white morality (and I mean “ridiculously” in every sense of the term), there was nothing to talk about. And crossover fiction was fucked from the word Go. Because this book insists on trying to have all the different game lines be simultaneously true, when it comes to crossing over with Vampire, the fucking flagship of the company, the author can only suggest that you “may have some difficulty” in putting together a group that doesn't try to kill each other immediately. Fuck this book.
AncientH:

Nominally, all the gamelines in White Wolf have a sort of Manichean look at things - Changeling had Seelie and Unseelie, Vampire had Camarilla and Sabbat, Werewolf had Gaia and the Wyrm, Wraith had wraiths and spectres, Mage had the Traditons and the Technocracy...but that was just the on-top, surface-level us-versus-them thing that writers could wrap easy taglines around. The inner politics of each game were always way more complicated and interesting and baroque, involving many different groups and splinter sects and bloodlines all looking to do this, that, and the other ... and yeah, while there were groups that were irredeemably evil by the context of the setting (Black Spiral Dancers, wights, spectres, infernalists, etc.), those were sort of the bastard's bastards...and when you got down to the level of individuals, well, the group dynamics sort of fell apart and you had just individual motivations. Which worked; the huge sectarian complexity of the setting and the ability to have moral arguments about teaming up with these vampire Children of Osiris guys to go kill those vampire Follower of Set guys can make for some interesting in-character roleplaying at the table.

Which, again, is a mark against Mummy - because they lacked all of that interesting politics; even in the Resurrection when they tried to ham-fistedly force it on the mummies by dividing them into six I-don't-give-a-fuck immortal high school joy clubs. Without the politics, Vampire is a game of surviving night by night, feeling your humanity slip away a bit at a time, and you're surrounded by like-minded people. Without the politics...Mummy is still just lukewarm tapioca.
FrankT:

Mummy: the Resurrection has a shit tonne more stuff in its Storyteller materials than the other two. But that's because it has three chapters and a denser font. The “Secrets of the Scribe” section is most like what we'd call a Storyteller section. It's verbose, but it's not informative. Where 2nd edition Mummy's storyteller section is almost empty because it doesn't seem like there's much point in giving a baseline if the MC is just going to change everything, M:tR is a shovelware project, and as such puts out a lot of words. But ultimately it doubles down on nihilism to a degree that's difficult to wrap one's mind around.
M:tR wrote:So what does that mean to you? Everything else in this book is ultimately optional. Telling a story isn't just an exercise in crunching numbers and pushing dots, it's an exercise in creativity. Sometimes the most powerful stories happen when you break all the rules and throw expectation out the window. Just don't do it too often.
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Even the rule to break the rules is a rule that M:tR doesn't think you should follow.
This chapter basically throws a bunch of deep questions at the reader and asks you to ponder them. How much will a character want to associate with his first life (that is: the life of his soul fragment) or his second life (that is: the rest of him)? How far will a character go to fight this arbitrary red lasers versus blue lasers war he's been drafted into? And so on and so on. These are presented as Storyteller themes to work through in chronicles, but they actually needed to have been turned back on the people concepting this fucking thing. The whole soul fusion horse shit doesn't make sense. How much will a character identify as Soul Fragment 1 or Recently Dead Dude? That is not a question for the storyteller, that's not even a question for the player. That is a question for the fucking designers. Me personally sitting here writing this review, I have no interest whatsoever in imposing Egyptian royal morality on the world. None. That is not low on my list of priorities, it's not on my list of priorities at all. So unless becoming a soul hybrid biases my priorities very strongly in favor of those from a religious zealot born in 2500 BCE, this entire war they are offering me interests me not at all.

Which is the basic problem with this whole premise: it's weird as fuck and I don't know how to roleplay a character in it. The chapter, and I do mean pretty much the entire chapter, is just talking around this fundamental point. Or really, lack of point. There is no given explanation how adopting Neolithic-era social conservatism is supposed to restore balance to the force, nor is there any compelling argument as to why we might want to do that. Essentially, the designer just sort of assumes that you are on board with the Werewolf “Fight the Wyrm” imperative, but coming at this book as a non-Werewolf player there isn't any reason for any of this shit (and remember: Werewolf was not their most popular line, most of their players weren't in to Werewolf). If you don't have 100% buy-in on Werewolf, there's nothing to pull you in for this work. And even if you do, there's still the issue that the whole hybrid souls thing undermines most concepts of “self” and this book does a shit job of explaining what the fuck they are talking about.

And then there's the whole Web of Faith nonsense. They actually want to force your characters to stay geographically inside the Web of Faith, despite the fact that's all in the Middle East and even the people who wrote this book don't care enough about the Middle East to even mention Zoroastrianism. If they don't care about this area of the world, why are the players supposed to? And why is this in the Storyteller's section at all? Fuck this book.

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AncientH:

The Resurrected did try to give the mummies some new enemies. Sortof. For starters, they discuss the Bane Mummies. Seven ancient, twisted, eternally resurrected servants of Set/Apophis/the Wyrm/whatever. Which is fine, but there's only seven of them.

Then they introduce the Reapers. These are basically fast zombies created by the Bane Mummies, but with a catch: each Reaper has been mummified and has four canopic jars, each containing an evil spirit. If the Reaper manages to kill a mummy and get their appropriate organ into one of the jars, they get to live again. Honestly, I'd probably root for the Reapers in that scenario.

Then there are the Amkhat, the corpse eaters. These guys are new. They're a mortal cannibal cult that found out "Holy shit, if we chow down on mummies, we get permanent magical bonuses." These guys were never heard from before or after this, because they're kind of stupid, but some very similar themes did crop up in products like Demon: the Fallen where mortals could eat dying demons and gain their powers or some shit. I think it was an effort to produce a sort of scary ghoul-type antagonist for mummies, but it failed terribly.

Vampires. Not like, Followers of Set in particular, just vampires in general. Keep in mind, vampires can't actually eat or ghoul mummies, so I don't even. Also, just in case this was picked up by a White Wolf fan who recently had a lobotomy or someone who had never picked up an RPG before, it gives a stunted, misguided view of vampire society (Assamites are referred to as "Hashashin") and don't use any actual vampire Disciplines in the character examples - because presumably they were under the mistaken belief that M:tR was a standalone book.

"Restless Souls" apparently covers wraiths, elemental spirits, and "ifrits" (bane spirits from Werewolf). Yeah, that's...handy. There's a separate section for the "Walking Dead."

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Keep in mind, I think the rules for the Risen were 3-4 years out of print at this point.

Then they sort of run through Shapeshifters, Wizards, and Hunters real fast, with a myopic focus on the Middle East-centered ones...and not even all of those. The bestiary includes camels and house cats.

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I have killed before. And will again. We'll see who has more lives, bitch.
FrankT:

A World of Darkness: Mummy (or perhaps “World of Darkness: Mummy”) has a sample adventure at the end of the book. It's not much, but it's infinity times more than the later editions got in promoting a plausible vision about how to play this fucking game. The adventure is called Hell's Highway and it naturally starts with a quote from an AC/DC song you can probably guess. This adventure posits that you're going to pull a Highlander: the Series bit, where you shift the action periodically to flashbacks from much earlier time periods. This kind of storytelling works great for TV Shows about immortals (for example: look at the Being Human episodes about vampire society), but I have my doubts as to how well it would really hold together in a roleplaying game where multiple authors are contributing to the current and past scenes as they are being acted out and, there's no guaranty that the kind of past/present resonance such a motif is supposed to evoke is going to pan out. I have even bigger doubts as to how well that sort of thing would work for characters where not all of them are equally old or had different backstories because they were generated independently by different players – kind of seems like you'd be splitting the party and that is usually a bad thing in games like this.

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Also, it kind of pads things.

The bottom line though is that this adventure involves conflict between Gaia the Earth Mother and Demons from Hell. And um... that really isn't what White Wolf settled on for consensus cosmology. The author obviously was only dealing with early draft versions of the apocalyptic battles in Werewolf (what with the final draft having not been written yet when this book went to print), and what actually gets written here just doesn't fit. This adventure became non-canon almost immediately, and that sort of left World of Darkness: Mummy out of a home. Perhaps that's why the later versions of Mummy didn't bother including a sample adventure, but they suffer for it.
AncientH:

Weirdly, the adventure reminds me of nothing so much as the sample adventures in [url=http://tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?t=55098]Unknown Armies[/i]. Something about "you have no idea what the rules are you're expected to play by" in the whole concept.

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Like this, except less fun and interesting.
FrankT:

Mummy: the Resurrection has no sample adventure, but it does give an entire chapter to the bad guys. This could really have have created the sort of hook to get people to buy in to the game. I mean, yeah, the Horus pitch is really boring and not compelling at all, but if the Team Evil pitch was good enough we might join the Osirean League anyhow. I mean, we don't root for the Allies because we think Churchill and Stalin are swell guys.

Of course, it doesn't really come through. The Serpents in the Garden chapter wants us to fight the children of Apophis because... they are opposed to Ma'at. Really, that's about it. They have Corruption instead of Balance, which is the opposite of Balance. That's all it says, you're just supposed to take the Balance dictums and invert them. I don't know whether that means they are supposed to protect people who don't live in harmony with Ma'at (which is almost everyone), or whether they are supposed to murderstab people who do live in harmony with Ma'at (just team Blue Laser), but either way it's just Jets vs. Sharks bullshit and I don't care.

There are Bane Mummies, and they do bad stuff and sometimes eat people. Also they are ugly, because that's how you know they are evil. This is said without irony. I could almost get worked up about Bane Mummies, except apparently I can't actually do anything to them (Apophis can spawn them whenever and wherever it wants), and there are only ever a maximum of seven in the world at a time, so they aren't a big problem even though they are apparently an unsolvable one.

Fundamentally, this book is trying to get me to accept the Church of Set as the big bad of the World of Darkness setting, and I just fucking can't take that seriously. This isn't special pleading because I used to play a member of the Church of Set in a live action game. I am fully aware that Setites are bad people.

But they are bad people in the way that pimps and drug dealers are bad people – not in the way that cannibalistic rapist serial killers are bad people. And while that might sound like a pretty weak defense, this is the World of Fucking Darkness, and there are several factions of cannibalistic rapist serial killers. The Setites are neither powerful enough nor wicked enough to be the big bads of the setting. The big bad of Werewolf is sort of snake themed, and the Setites were explicitly snake themed, and Werewolf authors always thought it would be tidy if the Setites were the big bad behind everything, but that wasn't born out in the actual Vampire material. The Setites were, always, a mid-level villain group.

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In the card game, there's a political event you can arrange where the Setites become members of the Camarilla and are treated as normal vampire citizens. It's called “invitation accepted” not “shit has gone crazy and we're joining forces with Mecha Hitler.”
AncientH:

I've never understood why there aren't more bad mummies. Like, immortals operating under a curse or the accumulated evil of their lives has overtaken them, or the Setites got them addicted to crack and whores, or they fell too deep into their studies of necromancy and...wouldn't mummies make their own best antagonists? I mean, it worked for Highlander: the Series, more or less.

Also, now that I think about it, there were totally carnivorous werewolves and vampires. They should totally be able to eat mummies and gain their powers. That would be another reason for the games to interact, and some additional tension between the characters.
FrankT:

Most of the other monsters are fairly bad hacks of creatures from other parts of the World of Darkness into M:tR. That kind of breaks my brain actually. See, M:tR doesn't have a system. It's a bunch of numbers that you're supposed to plug in to whatever other game you own. So you turn to the Vampire book for the rules for like jumping or combat or what your fucking numbers mean in any context at all. And then they give rules for vampires in M:tR, which you can then use to go look at the fucking Vampire book to decipher.

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If you were to be continuously and eternally fucking yourself, this is how it might be portrayed by Giger. In White Wolf, you get much the same effect by looking up rules for vampires translated into another format that you can then use the rules for vampire to attempt to decode.

This is a basic sort of thing that World of Darkness games had been doing from the beginning. Vampire gave some rules for werewolves and wizards at the end, because the assumption was that you didn't have those books and you might want to fight a wolf man or whatever. Werewolf gave rules for vampires, and so on. Because these were stand alone games. But Mummy isn't a fucking stand alone game. It doesn't have any action resolution rules, it's supposed to piggy back off of some other game. So putting in the quick-n-dirty rules for playing with other supernaturals is completely pointless!

Fuck!
AncientH:

I really do think if they were to do WoD over - and I don't mean Onyx Path bullshit, but a real company rebooting the IP - they could do a lot by just...not including all this bullshit with bad stats for things already covered in other books. I really do hate how bloated and ugly the Resurrection is with its mix of old-bad and new-bad ideas.
FrankT:

As mentioned at the beginning of this series, the Appendix of M:tR has some pretty well researched discussions of mummification in other cultures. It kinda looks like someone was putting together a proposal to have mummies from different parts of the world such that you might actually give a shit. And then, rather than go with that, they did this fucktastic Web of Faith shit. But they had some nice historical research sitting on their hands, so rather than dump it, they stuffed it into an Appendix. And... that's it.

So we have a bit on Mummies from South America and China, and it is much more interesting than anything else in the book. But it's not tied in to anything. There are no plot hooks, no people worth talking to, no places or things to care about, no conflicts, no goals, no nothing. Someone had a good idea, and instead of developing it they stuffed it into an appendix with some prevaricating about how the people you're supposed to care about (and don't) are unaware of what these guys are up to. The end.
AncientH:

The Other Immortals are, as we mentioned, kinda half-assed too. For example, you've got Chinese mummies based on the mythological Eight Immortals, and they use Chi instead of Sekhem, but apparently no thought is given into how that might interact with, say, other Chi-using supernaturals like the Kindred of the East or Demon Hunter X (oh, how I would love a Chinese Mummy with a technomagical blaster implant fueled by Chi). It doesn't even tie in to any of the other supernaturals in their necks of the woods. Damn shame.

Uh...okay, I think I forgot about liches, so before we move on to the wrap-up post, let me tell you about liches.

One of the things in Mage is that they can explicitly turn themselves into vampires, if they work out the right spell. It's the whole basis of House Tremere becoming Clan Tremere, and the Tremere weren't the only ones to do it. More to the point, Mages can obviously also turn themselves into mummies - that's pretty explicitly how mortals became mummies in the first place is through a bad-ass work of magic(k)! But, they don't really address the actual mechanics of how you'd do that anywhere...sortof.

In one of the Dead Magic books released near the end of the Mage: the Ascenscion line, there's a spell for becoming a Lich. I think it was a bit of Etruscan necromancy, but I can barely remember. The point is, the Lich is sort of a middle ground between being a vampire and a mummy. You're alive, you're immortal (in the not-aging sense), but you don't reincarnate and you're doing not-nice things to your soul, so you're not really using True Magick anymore - instead, you basically use a lot of really powerful static magic, like vampire thaumaturgy or mummy hekau. It's the kind of thing that if you squint and tilt your head a little, looks a lot like a slightly watered-down but nominally attainable version of mummydom, minus all the bullshit.

Which is really, all people really want. Next post, we wrap shit up.

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Pun intended.
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Whipstitch
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Post by Whipstitch »

FrankTrollman wrote:
Stahlseele wrote:What. No Mummies Alive?
I am disappoint! *snickers*
Mummies Alive would be better than what they actually did, but we'll get to that a bit later.

-Username17
It really would be. Mummies Alive! had an overarching plotline you could write on the back of an envelope and that is a good thing.
bears fall, everyone dies
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