Mummy: The Curse by Daeren

Introduction and Chapter One Part One: Rise From Your Grave

posted by Daeren Original SA post

Introduction and Chapter One Part One: Rise From Your Grave


As you might expect from a book that opens quoting Stephen King's classic tale of shitweasels and the magical powers Downs Syndrome gives you, Mummy: The Curse is difficult to explain. So difficult to explain, in fact, the very first words in it are dedicated to defending its own existence.


It does not give a good impression of your product when the first three paragraphs aren't the pitch, it's saying "No, we got this, trust me, just listen." This, however, was probably the safe bet, as the original World of Darkness's Mummy: the Resurrection is a line that many players either never heard of, or forgot nearly instantly. I've not played it myself - indeed, I suspect anyone who says they have is up to something - but it was was a weird, weird game, that actually started as a supplement for V:tM 1e, got Revised, then completely overhauled as Resurrection before support basically got dropped like a hot potato until a few footnotes in the books about the end of the world. It didn't really fit the rest of the World of Darkness, which had a high tolerance for some goofy bullshit but drew the line at regularly bringing up the undying demigods fighting the forces of evil Egyptian demons.

So, when White Wolf effectively transformed into Onyx Path, and began making noise to the effect of updating old lines, most people's thoughts went straight past Mummy to wondering how they'd handle Demon's very Judeo-Christian angles in nWoD's decidedly agnostic setting. Most fans were utterly baffled upon Mummy: the Curse's announcement, and nobody was quite sure what to expect. That, combined with the hard sell of pitching Boris Karloff in some bandages to the closest thing to a general public roleplaying games have, honestly all but necessitated something like this intro.

To those of you who looked at it and narrowed your eyes as memories of the authorial tone of oWoD rose to the surface, though, yeah, you're not wrong. Mummy: the Curse was developed by C.A. Suleiman, whose bibliography was mostly books from the original World of Darkness run and a few Requiem books. Mummy is a game that very much feels caught between the old and new World of Darkness, which is actually fairly appropriate for the themes of the line itself, but doesn't do good things for its accessibility. The initial release of Mummy was met with a decidedly tepid reaction, with some people enjoying what it was going for, and a lot of other people sent screaming in the direction by seeing old mechanical or narrative bogeymen lurking within.

I actually was one of the latter group until much later in the line's life, after a few supplements came out and the direction of the line became clearer to me. The core suffers from being a poorly laid out, shabbily proofread, generally meandering mess, and later books tighten things up and add some more immediately compelling hooks to the game. That's why I'm writing this review - I won't make the argument that Mummy: the Curse is a particularly good game, but it is a very interesting one to me, one with a lot of potential to tap into. If edition updates are still going on in five or ten years, a fresh update to Mummy could make it into a pretty amazing game as well as a unique one.

Enough about that though, let's talk about more than just the first three paragraphs.

THE QUICK PITCH

Mummies are immortal, once-human relics of an empire that rose and fell about the time when mammoths were still in the "doing okay, all things considered" phase of extinction, and they've been spending a long, long time trying to maintain their grip on a world that has long since moved on without them. They are patient, they are ancient and terrible, they are relentless, and they're finally starting to crack under the pressure of eternity.

THEME

Mummy's core theme and narrative is ultimately about memory. Memory is all that stops the Arisen from being pure automatons, slaves to their eternal purpose. It's what makes their sense of self, what defines them as persons, what makes the world more than an endless passage of time and duty. Every scrap of memory from the ever-widening abyss of time mummies exist in helps piece together a map of their own existence, leading to self-discovery, self-definition, and how people change and are shaped by their world being a hugely important part of a mummy's narrative arc. If you've ever played Planescape: Torment, you've already got the idea.

MOOD

The default mood as presented is the sense of ancient dread and occult horror, and later books (and later parts of the core) make it clear that introspective horror from reflecting on your own existence is fairly high on the list as well. However, there is quite a hefty dose of pulp horror-adventure, or just pulp adventure, in Mummy. It doesn't take a lot to reorient the themes - while both a standard sort of game and a pulp game mightinvolve a lot of old rivals and ancient evil, the pulp game is going to look less like your average game of Vampire: the Masquerade and more like a two-fisted tale full of Nazis to beat senseless.

Speaking of Nazis, Mummy's fairly unique in the sense that the nature of spotty memory, narrative license, and eternal life giving you a lot of opportunity to set a game in a whole shit-ton of times and places, or even weave flashbacks (or flash- forwards) to events hundreds or thousands of years disconnected from the game's present, giving the game a very dynamic approach to a story of the endless cycles of eternal life.

UH OH HERE COMES THE METAPLOT

And already we come to one of the biggest things that made people reflexively pull faces at Mummy: the Curse: the return of an oWoD style secret history and metaplot. At this point I doubt I need to go into much detail about oWoD's love of metaplot and exhaustively detailed alternate supernatural history, because if you're reading this thread you probably know the drill. Mummy makes a return to form by splitting the core book into a Player's Handbook and a Storyteller's Handbook. The justification is that Mummy is a game about discovery and the forgotten past, so the secrets of the game are out of the way of the rules so Storytellers can dole out things to actually discover to both character and player...

except that shit didn't work in the 90s either. Players will read the section that tells them to fuck off elsewhere. Not only that, the rules sections are full of references to things only described and given rules in the Storyteller section, which more comes across as a constant elbowing in the ribs than a tantalizing mystery. Later books more or less abandon the pretense entirely, or are entirely about things that would have been hidden behind the Great Wall of Metaplot. The bigger issue with those later books is that they implicitly rely on you giving a shit about Mummy's secret history. In nearly every other line, the mysteries of Irem would be left to the Storyteller to make up, and indeed so little about them were given in the core that people running Mummy when it came out would have had to do just that.

Of course, that creates the situation where, say, some long-running game gives an explanation for the oft-referenced Lost Guild, then the book for the Lost Guild comes out and whoops now you've either got to retcon everything or the book's useless - which was, again, one of those things everybody else learned from after it happened repeatedly in the original World of Darkness books. Even if that's not a problem for you, it also relies on the incredibly well-worn oWoD narrative conceit of the mysterious wise NPC that figured everything out before you and -

I'm getting ahead of myself. Before we move on, one cute note:





Whoops. Yeah, that never became a thing. There’s something really appropriate about this game line trying to utilize modern technology to make something eternally relevant and long-lasting, and completely faceplanting.

Anyway, the introduction ends with the lexicon, which I will put at the bottom of this post for readability’s sake, then moves on to the Player’s Guide.








We get a brief introduction to the concepts of Mummy before we do a deep dive into the backstory, so savor it while you can. If you ever get really confused during the lorechat, just refer to the next few paragraphs a few times.

The Arisen lived about six thousand years ago in pre-dynastic Egypt, in a vast empire under the rule of sorcerer-priests called the Shan’iatu. In return for their loyal service in life, they were subjected to the Rite of Return, a mighty spell that unfortunately required them to die and be mummified. Their soul ventured to Duat, the Egyptian underworld, and underwent trials administered by its divine Judges. These trials forced them to define their spiritual nature forever afterward, and granted them eternal life…of a sort.

Using the occult energy of Sekhem, best described quickly as elemental life force and the power of eternal cycles, the Arisen’s body and soul reunited, with Sekhem maintaining the body’s form and providing channels of mystic energy mummies can enact their magical will through. Sekhem zaps mummies into states of temporary animation, during which they enact the will of the Judges by recovering vessels – objects full of Sekhem. The Judges demand this tribute from the Arisen as their most sacred duty, and it is the reason for their eternal service. Over time, the power that animates them wears down until they return to their death-like state until awakened once more. The Arisen experience and remember nothing during this period, and are almost always confused and disoriented upon awakening, their memory of prior active periods growing more and more faint as time marches on.

The power that can revive the dead fills the Arisen, and give them inhuman strength, endurance, and even sorcerous rites and commands descended from their former masters’ art. Driven by commands written into the Rite that animates them, the Arisen must make the choice between eternal life in servitude, or exploring their own nature, past, and the secrets Duat keeps hidden from them. A brave few even dream of defying their gods, risking their unimaginable wrath in hopes of finding a way to escape the Rite’s chains forever.

MYTHS, POP CULTURE, AND FACT

This is the true/false thing every WoD line does about its subject matter, so I’ll just copy and paste it to save time.


A QUICK SIDE NOTE:




This book’s a few years old now but I still want to have some sort of ghostly force that automatically slaps people who think illegible font is excusable if it’s for in-character documents. Mercifully, the core only has a couple of these.

THE GAME IN BRIEF
The next section briefly goes over many of the mechanical differences and oddities Mummy has in comparison to other World of Darkness games, as well as the details of what it does the same.

Probably the biggest difference is in how their power stat, Sekhem, works. Other games have their line’s power trait – Blood Potency, Primal Urge, Gnosis, etc. – start at 1, and go up by spending a large amount of experience. This trait is usually used in supernatural power rolls, defense against supernatural powers, determines how much fuel you have for your powers, and determines if your attributes can go over 5. Mummies have a dynamic Sekhem rating, which starts at 10 when they awaken from slumber and decreases automatically over time. This, in combination with how their powers work and how strong their innate advantages are, mean that mummies start games with the sort of power other games end with, and makes the narrative arc less focused on consolidating power and more about actually pursuing your goals and fulfilling expectations. However, over time, mummies get weaker and weaker, and juggling priorities gets harder and more urgent – especially because acting out of line with the cosmic fun polices’ dictates means you get weaker faster, and they don’t necessarily have your best interests at heart.

Before that is Memory, the Mummy version of Morality because this was before CofD threw that shit out the window for Integrity. It’s not exactly a moral code, though, and is more a measure of how well you remember your endless existence. Instead of starting with a rating of 7, you start with a rating of 3, because your long-term memories are vague, fleeting, dreamlike, and often contradictory. The higher your Memory, the more you rediscover your true personality and sense of self. Whispers “by a lone, wandering heretic” say that Memory is the key to a state called Apotheosis, beyond duty and the ravages of time. But it might be a lie. (It isn’t. The Heretic is a terrible oWoD throwback element. I hope you liked Golconda!)

Due to the nature of Memory, characters are expected to have little to no backstory at the start of the game beyond a few broad-brush strokes, because the character doesn’t actually remember a damn thing about themselves. The Storyteller (or player) reveals elements of their past as Memory increases.

Sekhem isn’t just restricted to animating mummies. It can also be found in certain objects called vessels, and the Judges of Duat want them. Badly. The Arisen’s primary goal is to get as many of them as possible by any means possible. Of course, this is rarely as easy as getting onto Antiques Roadshow and robbing Grandma blind, because vessels often have weird curses and rumors associated with them, as a side-effect of being full of mojo. Some are even leftovers of Iremite times, or made with Iremite secrets, and have magical powers of their own. These are called relics, and are similar to things like fetishes from Werewolf or artifacts from Mage. It’s these that have a bad habit of finding their way into the hands of collectors, occultists, and general weirdos who have no interest in giving them up without a fight. Mummies have an innate sense for the presence of relics and vessels, and are especially sensitive to ones that resonate with the craft their caste practiced in life.

These guilds are how mummies organize themselves societally, based on old crafts practiced and caste divisions. They pass down ancient secrets, rites, techniques, and the old ways of their society. Mummies all have instinctual knowledge of Iremite magic, but most must be taught, and the guilds keep the real-deal, heavy-duty magic as sacred secret arts.

In addition to this societal structure, the Arisen are defined by their decree, the statement of defiance and self-definition they made in the face of the torture they underwent in Duat. The nature of the decree determines which of the five Egyptian/Iremite elements of the soul they are most attuned to, and generally colors their personality even when Memory is high. These elements are ab (heart), ba (spirit), ka (essence), ren (name), and sheut (shadow). These are also the five types of not-mana the Arisen can use, collectively called Pillars. These can fuel supernatural powers, which vary from mummy to mummy.

There are two main types of power Mummies can learn aside from their innate advantages. The simpler of the two, and usually the subtler, are Affinities, which either enhance an existing power or advantage a mummy has, or provide a small set of stable benefits. Complex, overt power is the domain of Utterances, ancient spells descended from the art of the Shan’iatu that can bind ghosts, crack the earth open, wither flesh, and even perform feats as mighty as calling down the stars when used at the peak of Sekhem.

Lastly,


ORIGINS
Brace yourselves, because we’re taking our first dive into Deepest Lore.



Six thousand years is a long, long time. When a span of time gets big enough, people lose sight of what it really entails. Six thousand years ago was as far from Hammurabi's first code of law as we are from the traditionally given year of Jesus Christ's birth. Cleopatra lived closer to the invention of the smartphone than the building of the first pyramid, and the first pyramid doesn't quite make it to five thousand years old. In the last years of the Neolithic Era, writing had yet to be invented, the plough was the cutting edge of technology, and the scorpions came to the land of Kemet on the Nile.

They came from the seemingly endless desert on the sleeves of strange men and women, sorcerers and ghost-tamers, who command fire and banish the hungry dead with a word. They bring the knowledge of crafts to the people of Kemet, but save the secrets of sorcery for only the sons and daughters they steal away when they see talent. The strangers call themselves the Shan’iatu, and Priests of Duat, the world of the dead. They make themselves lords of the living and build a nation, just as the 42 Judges of Duat are lords of the dead under their god Azar. These sacred necromancers appoint a divine Pharaoh as high priest of Azar, and become a senate of holy necromancers only nominally under him.


Under the scorpion banner and scepter-head, the Shan’iatu yoke and lash the tribes of Kemet into castes. Artisans, acolytes, laborers, and an ever-expanding body of soldiers push the boundaries of their territory outward, until the time comes when all under the Shan’iatu must be commanded as one, from a permanent capital. It’s said that the Shan’iatu never named the city they made, nor the empire it would soon lead, but later civilizations would call it Irem. Those who lived there merely called it the City of Pillars, after the sacred occult architecture it was built upon.
The Nameless Empire is born from fumbling tribesmen drafted to become artisans, bolstered with sorcery and secrets ripped from the world itself. Obsidian blades anointed with blood cut through bronze, figurines made with corpse-ash gain a false life. The Arisen, on the rare occasion they remember even a hazy impression of their time alive, remember moments like these most, for all were members of the craft-guilds of Irem.

That doesn’t mean some weren’t soldiers too, however. Every guild’s art was bent in part towards the militarization of the Nameless Empire, whether making arms and armor, or strange rites that make a simple pot rip souls from slaves, or an instrument that causes madness in the listener. Tribal identity is broken, their peoples scattered and reformed into legions. Tribes that refuse to join the City of Pillars are killed to the last child, and their very existence is erased from every graven record by the Shan’iatu.

After a hundred years of preparation, the Shan’iatu lead the Nameless Empire to conquer the known world.


The forces of Irem march south, up the Nile. Tribes that appear useful are enslaved, while those more useful as corpses are butchered. In a year’s time, modern-day Libya and Sudan are utterly crushed, but when the Shan’iatu wheel north to Canaan, they hit an unexpected wall of resistance. The Ki-En-Gir were not an empire like Irem, but they have a professional soldiery, and seers to advise them. Though the Nameless Empire wields superior resources in nearly every way, the foresight of Canaan’s mystics force the conflict to a bloody stalemate. Irem sends generals and diplomats to the Ki-En-Gir city of Ubar, described as a cursed citadel where the veil between worlds is threadbare. When they come back, Ubar is gone, swallowed by the desert as if it never existed. Tribute begins to flow from the east after this Pact of Ubar, in gold, horses, and enslaved seers. The seers in particular are immediately brought to the Shan’iatu’s personal precincts, and are never seen again.

The Nameless Empire is at its height at this moment, growing fatter and richer with conquest, glorifying itself with ever-more imposing pillars and temples. It is now that all Arisen lived, and labored for the Empire, until the day of the Rite.


The Arisen remember little of the Rite beyond this point, but all share the same memory. They walk westward, through an endless desert, away from a weak, red sun on the eastern horizon. They have none of the advice or rituals or protection later dynasties of Egypt would give to their dead, only an instinct to keep walking – and perhaps some places, demons, and incantations invoked during their ritual murder. Slaughterers, demons wielding impossibly sharp stone knives, stalk them through the wasteland. Beetles and snakes and locusts pursue them, biting at their heels. Firestorms roar through the desert, and every one must find a way to survive them or die a true death. Some bury themselves in the sands, others slather themselves in cold clay that the flames harden into armor, and others slice themselves open so the blood will put out the fire.



At the end of the desert is a colossal black iron gate, guarded by demons and demigods who force the Arisen through trials, riddles, and tortures that question the Arisen’s right to be here, to survive, to exist. Beyond this first gate are more trials, more agonies, and more gates, until the seventh gate stands before them, in a desert of crushed gems and lapis lazuli trees. Here waits Shezmu the Executioner, patron of the Nameless Empire’s army, who crushes the weak into blood-wine for Azar.


And…take a deep breath. There won’t be another plot dump quite that bad for a while. Because this book is so ridiculously front-loaded and dense, I’ll be ending the post here to prevent information overload, and because I'm nearing the character limit.

Next time: Unlife among the Living, the Guilds, and the Judges