Making Mummies Ain't That Hard
The Mummy speaks!
Music: Mummy Alives Theme - Metal Cover
FrankT:
So a number of people have posed the question “What are Mummies about?” and honestly the answer as far as these products go is pretty much “Nothing.” But that creates a related question, one of “What could Mummies be about?” And the answer there is of course “Lots of stuff.” In order to be an effective Mummy RPG, it has to be playable as a game, enticing as a story, and suggestive of longer campaigns. There are plenty of directions you could have gone and made for a playable experience. Basically, it needed to hit the following points:
- The game needs a short pitch that you can give to someone unfamiliar with the game (or the World of Darkness) to get them to be willing to try it out.
- The game needs a place for episodic adventures with minimal required buy-in so that you can run one-shot adventures without needing tailored pre-made characters.
- The game needs a world that has stuff in it for people to expand upon and explore, such that they would like to continue telling stories in the world and possibly even buy more books.
- The game needs a place for longer character arcs and quests so that there can be year-long campaigns and possibly even LARPs that last for over a decade.
AncientH:
Most of these are based off of existing properties and concepts because, frankly, that is what people want. Nobody bought a Mummy book and expected vampires, unless you've set them up to expect that ahead of time. And while ideally these are stand-alone, it's nice to think that they could tie in to the World of Darkness at least as well as the shitsmear that is Mummy e1-3.
FrankT:
The Mummy Option
Seriously, your game is called Mummy, how can this not be your first option? The characters are immortal sorcerers from various cultures and time periods who have been out of circulation for a very long time. Awoken in the modern world, they find that they have melodramatic plot hooks connecting them to the past lives of various random people and relics scattered around the present day. So you strongly feel friendship, hatred, or even love for people who are actually having new lives with new memories and don't know you from Adam. Also, because your companion Mummies lived at different times, they have different melodramatic hooks into some of the same people based on things that happened in yet other lives.
You have to balance interacting with reincarnations of people you feel strongly about to unlock your past life memories and powers with the ever present danger of getting locked into the cycle of repeated tragedy that put you out of commission for a thousand years and more in a bog or tomb in the first place.
AncientH:
Highlander Option
You are immortal. Inside you are the blood of kings (or gods). Having your origins in ancient Egypt, you have loved, lost, and battled your way down the centuries, mastering different skills, rarely staying in one place for very long lest your neighbors notice and turn against you. Besides being eternally in your prime, you are mostly immune to the ravages of death, save for a few specific methods. You often involve yourself with mortal conflicts, pursuing your own interests, but your true allies and enemies are your fellow immortals, some of whom have fallen to madness over the millenniums, others who are frighteningly sane but who nurse ancient grudges as a meaning for existence, and some others whose goals simply do not align with your own - and they alone know how to kill you, and perhaps to take your power as their own. More and more these days, however, they must be circumspect - it has grown harder to pass among the mortal masses, and their immortality is not the kind that can be shared, though some mortals have tried to steal it. Most immortals lead transitory lives, others are actively hunted.
In a WoD contest these could be vampires who diablerized a god and have been transformed, freed of the limitations of the curse (but sought out by others who wish their power); or they may be like Tarzan, who received his immortality through a blood transfusion with another immortal. Theirs is a patient society, where new members emerge but rarely, but old and forgotten elders crop up unexpectedly. Many immortals congregate together, pooling their resources, pursuing joint goals, and simply sharing the company of the few others on the planet that can understand and relate to them.
Highlander chronicles are essentially a sequence of boss fights; a powerful Immortal has a goal that the PC Immortals would be against, and the PCs either get in the way (and have to be dealt with), or are arbitrarily attacked to prevent them from getting in the way (and when that fails, they have to be dealt with). The powerful Immortal has enough mortal followers and other immortals that the PCs can fight their way up the food chain, so to speak.
FrankT:
Mummies Alive! Option
You are ancient mummy guardians who are woken up because there are ancient evils that are doing their evil dirty work once again. The various bad dudes want to steal life force from various people who are the reincarnations of important Pharoahs and priests and shit, so you have to run around and protect random civilians from very specific supernatural assassination attempts. So you have to repeatedly either successfully bodyguard these people without them knowing you're around, or somehow convince them that you are the good guys and they should accept your help.
Presumably you have some sort of star charts or scrying pools or something that give you the power to find out who is up for potential kidnapping and sacrifice by team evil next (and for what time period).
AncientH:
Pyramids/Small Gods Option
In the wilderness there are ancient, invisible, intangible things; call them spirits, call them demons, call them gods, but they feed on the beliefs of humanity, and when that belief is strong and focused through rituals they gain power. Through the ages these beings have spoken to the madmen and fanatics, and set themselves up as figures of belief - behind every shrine, every temple, every saint, every god-king has been one of these things...waxing strong, warring with their own kind, forming pantheons, and at last slowly diminishing as they are forgotten, their temples abandoned, the shrines desecrated, and new gods are raised. And in the ancient era, there were kings and queens, deified before or after death, placed in tombs and monuments designed for their eternal afterlife in the staunch belief that they would live again.
Unfortunately for them, they were right.
A cataclysmic event has occurred - a shift in the nature of reality - and all the stored belief of humanity has been let loose. Everything anyone ever believed in is coming true. The gods of ancient Egypt battle across the sky, the demons beneath your bed whisper and grab...and the dead rise. The god-kings of ancient days have risen, their withered corpses breaking forth from forgotten tombs and museums; burning with power, crippled with the injuries of decomposition. Yet, because they are almost gods themselves, they are some of the few with the power to battle against the gods and monsters that walk the cursed earth, and empowered by the belief of their people and descendants, they may yet preserve what remains of the world.
Think of it like a zombie mummy apocalypse - except the zombies are the heroes. And you're the mummies. Fight the monsters, figure out how to save the world (probably by capping off the pyramid or something equally useful). You can't die, but if you lose any more parts life can suck a whole lot more.
FrankT:
Creatures of Light and Darkness Option
The player characters are space gods based on ancient myths. It all takes place in the fucking future, and you play people who were mummified today but are running around a thousand years from now. You manipulate time, throw black holes at people, destroy planets, shit gets crazy. Your enemies are similarly overpowered, and have a plan that involves eradicating the concept of time or something.
When you die (not “if”), you get reincarnated, sometimes by praying to yourself. When you fail to save the universe (not “if”), you go back in time and try again.
AncientH:
Living Mummy Option
You lived in ancient Egypt. You may have been a servant or a prince, a farmer or a priest, a magician or a scribe. You lived, and you died, and you were mummified - or perhaps you were simply buried alive; the details are lost to you. Thousands of years later, perhaps during the Victorian Age, perhaps in modern times, you were unravelled...and woke up, alive.
Now you are an ancient soul in a modern age - mortal, at least as such things go, but after rehabilitation you can move again, you have learned the language of this new century, and begun to acclimate yourself. As a sort of time traveler, you are of interest by many groups - some of which wish to deify you, others of which wish to control or exploit you for their own ends. For yourself, you are simply adrift from your time, with few familiar touchstones...and the lingering mystery of your resurrection. Already, there are rumors of others like yourself - others who have disappeared. Some kidnapped by cannibal cultists, others taken by a conspiracy of the Resurrected.
Because whoever mummified you in the first place - they still exist. You are their early experiments. Troublemakers, rebels, perhaps merely convenient subjects...and now that you have awoken, they see you as a threat to their own long unfurling plans. Dare you oppose them? Similar sequence to Highlander, except in this case you stage it as a series of mysteries - each investigation brings you closer to solving the mystery of your Resurrection.
FrankT:
Stargate Option
There are dimensional portals that take you to shard realms that are the dominions of powerful and jealous ancient mummies from various cultures that rule these shard realms as god kings. Your group of young upstart mummies and heroes who are reincarnated people from Egypt, Aymarra, Nordia, or China can activate ancient artifacts to let you explore these worlds and overthrow the god kings with the power of modern weaponry and friendship speeches.
There are various humans living under the mummy gods in the shard worlds, and you can free them and recruit them into your army of liberation.
AncientH:
Bubba Ho Tep Option
Thousands of miles from home, in a strange land called America, you have awoken...and you are hungry. Separated from your tomb, your talismans, and your canopic jars, the rituals designed sustain your spirit in the afterlife have almost failed, and in desperation your spirit has reunited with its flesh, to bring movement back to the withered limbs. To sustain yourself, you must feed on the souls of the living as you seek to recover or replace what you have lost.
Similar concept to vampire, except you have Appearance 0 and you drink souls instead of blood. It is a strange time, and you are out of sync with it. You really want to get back to the afterlife, with shabti servants can til your fields and you can dwell in marble palaces for all eternity, instead of being stuck in this dessicated shell. To do that, you and your fellow mummies need to gather together or make enough tomb goods...and that means dealing with a gothic punk world of redneck vampires that travel by night in motorhomes and sleep by day, or backwoods werewolves and inbred witchfolk...any of whom may seek to hinder you, and of whom may be an ally in the restoration of your proper afterlife. The PCs are friends or relations in the same family working to restore the family tombs.
You could have a whole society of mummies with a pecking order working for their promised eternal afterlife, a sort of blue collar class of the Damned - (like here) - and some mummies are tomb robbers who steal what the need from other mummies, and some are merchants that trade for it (including some highly questionable favors), or whose tombs have been seized by rivals.
FrankT:
Pharaoh's Curse Option
Also called the Friday the 13th: The Series option. There were a bunch of cursed treasures that were buried around the world, and tomb robbers and archaeologists dug them up. Now the stars are right, and the fact that the cursed items aren't in warded vaults anymore is “bad.” You're a bunch of tomb guardians who had laid dormant so long that you were unable to rouse yourself to stop the initial desecrations. But now that evil magic is being pumped into the world and causing crazy shit to go down, you have also been powered up and return to human form and a semblance of life.
So you have episodic adventures which are each centered around an ancient cursed object, which either turns a normal human into a psycho killer or attracts evil monsters who want it or both. Your task is to retrieve each item and put it safely in a warded vault and not let the evil magic break free or continue to cause havoc on the world of the living. Ultimately, this can work up to fighting one of the various global evils that are responsible for their being a bunch of cursed demon-filled artifacts in the first place.
AncientH:
Mummified Cat Option
All cats have nine lives; you had the good fortune to be mummified during a past incarnation, and contact with that mummy has awoken to you your past lives...and all the lore and powers you gained during that time. Some cats may only be on their second life, and relatively weak (but able to reincarnate 7 more times); elders may be on their last life, but able to recall the powers from all their previous 8 incarnations.
As the Awoken, you have a supernatural awareness and sensitivity; you can travel in dream to Ulthar, walk through shadows to distant times, enjoy the confidence of wizards and witches as their trusted (and pampered) familiars, spy the rites of necromancers and devil-worshippers... they are the natural warriors and generals of cat-dom, who act out against the drowners of kittens and the cruelty of poisoners, as well as the stranger threats of the Cats from Saturn, ancient cat demons, pet cemeteries awash with necromantic energies and the like.
It's a fantasy cat game with vampire-like blood potency mechanics; the dogs can be werewolves and the Cats from Saturn are like vicissitude-meets-feline-HIV; as the Awoken you are the guardians of catkind, and you go on missions to save the kittens and gain revenge against dogs and stuff. Campaigns/chronicles tend to settle around stopping major threats, like a human cult trying to resurrect a cat-headed hybrid mummy dedicated to an evil aspect of Bubastis or a mad stray named Cathulhu that's trying to open the gate and allow the Cats from Saturn access to this world.
FrankT:
Basically, this shit ain't hard. Egyptian shit is cool looking. Immortality, reincarnation, and resurrection are good lead-ins for stories. Things have a number of excellent excuses to start in media res, and since everyone had something conventionally fatal happen to them there are plenty of reasons for characters to want revenge and/or atonement. It shouldn't be difficult to pitch this in a way that stands up as a game and a story.
AncientH:
I'm running a bit on empty at this point. This wasn't as bad as some of the other books we've reviewed...I guess from a game perspective it's all about the road not taken. There are so many ways White Wolf could have done the Mummy books and concept right, and so many ways they did the Mummy concept wrong...and in many ways, it's indicative of how badly they handled the old World of Darkness. It is so telling that with all the mistakes they made, the terrible mechanics and weird setting nonsense and horrible railroady decisions and inability to keep anything straight...and yet, and yet. There is something to World of Darkness games where you feel like if only it was done again, from the beginning, with more thought and insight instead of a hamfisted and faltering effort...but, that way lies madness and writing your own RPGs.
