Storyteller Bits
The End of the Book. The End of Every Book
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Pun intended.