The Inside Scoop on Gaming

Lemme explain something right up front. For the past five years, I've been a World of Darkness player. Oh, now and again I'd pick something else up, In Nomine, Dark Conspiracies, even the occasional Rifts suppliment until my interest deflated. No matter what, though, I was always there waiting for the latest splatbook or the newest edition of a game that has had umpteen other revisions. I was, and if you ask my friend Steve, still am, a wanker. Not that that has much to do with this review.

Y'see, in White Wolf, players really can buy every book that comes out. As a matter of fact, it's almost expected. If you're a White Wolf player and you don't have the Nagah Bunyip Player's Guide for Mage, you'll be shunned by the WoD community around you. Or at least you won't be able to play a Nagah Bunyip, which can be just as bad. (I have a friend who says that the only reason she still purchases White Wolf books is so that she won't be shocked when a fellow player pulls something crazy out of a new book.)

Point. Point. Oh, yes. Well, recently reading several Delta Green reviews, I decided I wanted to try out the game. I got Delta Green, I got CoC 5.5. I read through rather quickly, and my crazed affluenza demanded that I go buy more. I went back down to my local role playing game shoppe (TableTop Games in Lenexa, Kansas. Go spend your money!) and quietly perused the Call of Cthulhu books offered. This was when I realized that, yikes, there weren't many sourcebooks for CoC that were meant for players to buy. As a matter of fact, there were maybe three, other than the main sourcebook. So, I assured myself that I would run CoC, and picked up a bunch of books anyway.

That's my really, really long way of saying SPOILER WARNING!

The Golden Dawn is a book for Keepers. Out of its 192 pages, there are a total of 35 that are for players. Ten of those are handouts, five are calendar pages, one is a character sheet, one is a neat John T Snyder picture, three are character creation, reprinted from Gaslight. What I'm sayin' is that most of the book, all of the book really, is for keepers, since all of the pages that are for players are photocopy okay.

As such, this review is for potential keepers only. Though if you've made it this far, you're either a dedicated reader of reviews, or interested enough in the game that you needed two reviews and didn't just flip back and read the other review for Golden Dawn in the arch- whups, lost another one.

The book starts with an introduction to the geography of Victorian London and a general description of what life there was like. It's all reprinted from Cthulhu by Gaslight, but since that little tome is out of print, it all sort of balances out. It is somewhat dull, but it's a travelogue written by someone who was never there, so I suppose it has to be. There is enough detail to sufficiently fake it, but if you have players who know what's up, or who might even actually live in London, then I'd suggest you do some research beyond the book.

Next the writers of Golden Dawn (including Mister Alan Smithee, I don't mind saying that I'd love to know the story behind that one) explain that, no, they're not going to give a detailed explanation of a day in the life of a member of the Golden Dawn, nor will they go into the in depth details on how Golden Dawn magic works. Why? Cos it'd be pretty dull, that's why. The game is about the social bits of the Golden Dawn, and battling against squishy monsters, not long descriptions of how the seventh star is in the house of Libra, so it is now time for the Keys of Wisdom to be entranced in the Sphere of Kether for the rising of the Tree of blah blah blah. Not that that stuff can't be fun, hey, one of my favorite characters is a Hermetic mage. Still, things have their place. If you, as a keeper, want to include all sorts of that crazy stuff in your game, check out Israel Regardie's 'Golden Dawn'. It's absolutely amazing. (It's also absolutely expensive.)

After the above, we sidle into the glorious history of the Golden Dawn. The real history of the Golden Dawn. The sordid details that players shouldn't know until the Keepers decide to let them find out. From the falsified documents that allowed Dr William Wynn Wescott to claim he had found the true secrets of the Rosicucians to the creation of Samuel Liddel MacGregor Mathers' hodgepodge magical system. From there we go on the crazy rollercoaster ride that is the Golden Dawn, where it sits on top of the heap as the most respected magical society in Victorian England, to its rapid descent, with Mathers' megalomania, Aleister Crowley's insidious wossnamery and Dr Berridge's perversion paving the way to not only the disbanding of the order, but humiliation for many of its members.

Did I say Aleister Crowley? Yep. Not only will your characters run into the Great Beast himself, but they'll have opportunity to run into several of the more famous members of the order, such as WB Yeats and AE Waite.

Note that there is no mention of the Mythos in the history. Crowley wasn't an avatar of Nyarlathotep, Berridge didn't worship Shub-Niggurath and the Golden Dawn wasn't a front for a cult of Yog-Sothoth. However, at the end of the history portion, there are several suggestions for links to the Mythos. Taking many of the more questionable aspects of the Order's history (the Order took a harsh blow when Mathers gave his secrets to a husband and wife named Oros when he thought that the wife had great spiritual powers, then the Oros couple disappeared with them. Later they were arrested on rape charges, claiming that they were using Golden Dawn rituals) and offers a seed having to do with them (were they members of a Shub-Niggurath cult?)

After the history of the Golden Dawn is a brief Keeper's explanation of the magic that the PCs can obtain. I warn thee now, GD magic doesn't cost the players anything. A player with GD magic isn't balanced with a PC without because he had to put points into the magic. How much magic a PC has is determined by a complex calculation that involves their POW, INT, Credit Rating, Occult and Cthulhu Mythos. Most of this is repeated in the player's section, but with the removal of several key paragraphs. In my opinion, there isn't nearly enough magic here. If you're going to take a game like CoC which is about powerless characters facing hideous evils from beyond the ends of the universe and let the characters have magic, don't do it halfway. Most of the magic allowed to players are just various forms of divination. Astrology, Cartomancy and Dowsing. Alchemy is mentioned, but they pretty firmly say 'it doesn't work'. Warding rituals and Talisman creation are there for the higher members of the Order, but all except for Astral Travel are given but a brief overview.

Ah. Astral Travel. Let me say now that I despise Pagan's rules here. It's a nice idea, filled with possibilities, but I just really don't like them. Everything done in the Astral Realm costs Sanity, but it doesn't take off while you do it. When you return to your body, all the sanity loss hits the PC at once. It's cruel and it doesn't make much sense. They claim that the loss of sanity reflects a character's losing contact with the physical world and becoming one with the Astral Realm. Buh? In my opinion, sanity should be lost in the astral realm, then slowly be regained when they return to the physical realm. That would reflect a person's slowly regaining stability in the physical realm, and maybe next time they'd think about spending too much time in the Astral Realm. Either way, that's up to the Keeper to decide.

Of course, where any Cthulhu suppliment falls or flies is going to be in the adventures. More than half of the book is made up of four adventures written specifically for Golden Dawn players. The first deals strongly with the Astral Realm, and, while it should be easy for new players, does have an option for the Keeper which could (and did, in my game) create problems. None of the players should have the ability to enter the Astral Realm, so when one of their comrades gets caught, it takes some tricky maneuvering to get him back. My players didn't make it. Maybe yours will. The adventure also offers the players a chance to get in good with WB Yeates, making him a potential patron. Though I think he's played like a greedy little swine, that could just be me.

The second adventure deals with the old British folk tale of Black Annis. It doesn't really delve greatly into the mythological aspects of her character, instead focussing on her obsession with a man who begs the investigators to rid his family of a curse Black Annis put them under generations earlier. It's a toughie with a final battle that will cause casualties. I'd suggest giving your characters an adventure between the Room Beyond (er, the adventure I mentioned above) and Hell Hath No Fury (this adventure) or Black Annis will eat them alive. Literally.

La Musique de la Nuit has the characters going to Paris to meet up with Mathers. They're offered a night at the Paris Opera with Gaston Leroux, which quickly turns into a muder mystery, a haunting of the Opera by a Phantom and an encounter with a new Mythos race known as the Yiddithians. This is one of my favorites, if only because my characters got through it with zero violence.

Sheela-na-gig is seeded from Hell Hath No Fury, and deals with something that caused one of my players to storm out of the room and start crying. Yes, it deals with King Arthur. And he's a bastard. And he worships Shub-Niggurath. And hopefully your characters will kill him before he assassinates the Pope. (Well, that's not in the adventure, but you can bet he's plannin' on it!) I really like this adventure, if only because I'm against this whole neo-Celtic thing that's started up, with all this Celtic music on my radio and people claiming that the Celts lived in harmony with the land and the spirits and yar yar yar.

After that is all the players' information. It's mostly a compressed version of what we've seen before, but with all the neat stuff taken out so the players don't know that you're planning to turn Aleister Crowley into a Malka- woah. Nevermind.

So, for anyone who likes the idea of a Gaslight campaign, and likes the idea of making your Gaslight campaign a bit strange, this is the place to do it. It really is quite a good book, and one can tell that the writers put their time into researching it. I still wonder about the Alan Smithee thing, but I can't allow that to affect my review. Remember, though, it's Keepers only.

Style: 4 (Classy and well done)
Substance: 4 (Meaty)

The Golden Dawn
Author: Scott Anilowski, Garrie Hall, Steve Hartherley, Alan Smithee, John T. Snyder and John Tynes Category: game Company/Publisher: Pagan Publishing Cost: $19.95 Page count: 192 ISBN: 1-887797-02-5 Capsule Review by Adam Schroeder on 09/02/98. Genre tags: none	Lemme explain something right up front. For the past five years, I've been a World of Darkness player. Oh, now and again I'd pick something else up, In Nomine, Dark Conspiracies, even the occasional Rifts suppliment until my interest deflated. No matter what, though, I was always there waiting for the latest splatbook or the newest edition of a game that has had umpteen other revisions. I was, and if you ask my friend Steve, still am, a wanker. Not that that has much to do with this review. Y'see, in White Wolf, players really can buy every book that comes out. As a matter of fact, it's almost expected. If you're a White Wolf player and you don't have the Nagah Bunyip Player's Guide for Mage, you'll be shunned by the WoD community around you. Or at least you won't be able to play a Nagah Bunyip, which can be just as bad. (I have a friend who says that the only reason she still purchases White Wolf books is so that she won't be shocked when a fellow player pulls something crazy out of a new book.) Point. Point. Oh, yes. Well, recently reading several Delta Green reviews, I decided I wanted to try out the game. I got Delta Green, I got CoC 5.5. I read through rather quickly, and my crazed affluenza demanded that I go buy more. I went back down to my local role playing game shoppe (TableTop Games in Lenexa, Kansas. Go spend your money!) and quietly perused the Call of Cthulhu books offered. This was when I realized that, yikes, there weren't many sourcebooks for CoC that were meant for players to buy. As a matter of fact, there were maybe three, other than the main sourcebook. So, I assured myself that I would run CoC, and picked up a bunch of books anyway. That's my really, really long way of saying SPOILER WARNING! The Golden Dawn is a book for Keepers. Out of its 192 pages, there are a total of 35 that are for players. Ten of those are handouts, five are calendar pages, one is a character sheet, one is a neat John T Snyder picture, three are character creation, reprinted from Gaslight. What I'm sayin' is that most of the book, all of the book really, is for keepers, since all of the pages that are for players are photocopy okay. As such, this review is for potential keepers only. Though if you've made it this far, you're either a dedicated reader of reviews, or interested enough in the game that you needed two reviews and didn't just flip back and read the other review for Golden Dawn in the arch- whups, lost another one. The book starts with an introduction to the geography of Victorian London and a general description of what life there was like. It's all reprinted from Cthulhu by Gaslight, but since that little tome is out of print, it all sort of balances out. It is somewhat dull, but it's a travelogue written by someone who was never there, so I suppose it has to be. There is enough detail to sufficiently fake it, but if you have players who know what's up, or who might even actually live in London, then I'd suggest you do some research beyond the book. Next the writers of Golden Dawn (including Mister Alan Smithee, I don't mind saying that I'd love to know the story behind that one) explain that, no, they're not going to give a detailed explanation of a day in the life of a member of the Golden Dawn, nor will they go into the in depth details on how Golden Dawn magic works. Why? Cos it'd be pretty dull, that's why. The game is about the social bits of the Golden Dawn, and battling against squishy monsters, not long descriptions of how the seventh star is in the house of Libra, so it is now time for the Keys of Wisdom to be entranced in the Sphere of Kether for the rising of the Tree of blah blah blah. Not that that stuff can't be fun, hey, one of my favorite characters is a Hermetic mage. Still, things have their place. If you, as a keeper, want to include all sorts of that crazy stuff in your game, check out Israel Regardie's 'Golden Dawn'. It's absolutely amazing. (It's also absolutely expensive.) After the above, we sidle into the glorious history of the Golden Dawn. The real history of the Golden Dawn. The sordid details that players shouldn't know until the Keepers decide to let them find out. From the falsified documents that allowed Dr William Wynn Wescott to claim he had found the true secrets of the Rosicucians to the creation of Samuel Liddel MacGregor Mathers' hodgepodge magical system. From there we go on the crazy rollercoaster ride that is the Golden Dawn, where it sits on top of the heap as the most respected magical society in Victorian England, to its rapid descent, with Mathers' megalomania, Aleister Crowley's insidious wossnamery and Dr Berridge's perversion paving the way to not only the disbanding of the order, but humiliation for many of its members. Did I say Aleister Crowley? Yep. Not only will your characters run into the Great Beast himself, but they'll have opportunity to run into several of the more famous members of the order, such as WB Yeats and AE Waite. Note that there is no mention of the Mythos in the history. Crowley wasn't an avatar of Nyarlathotep, Berridge didn't worship Shub-Niggurath and the Golden Dawn wasn't a front for a cult of Yog-Sothoth. However, at the end of the history portion, there are several suggestions for links to the Mythos. Taking many of the more questionable aspects of the Order's history (the Order took a harsh blow when Mathers gave his secrets to a husband and wife named Oros when he thought that the wife had great spiritual powers, then the Oros couple disappeared with them. Later they were arrested on rape charges, claiming that they were using Golden Dawn rituals) and offers a seed having to do with them (were they members of a Shub-Niggurath cult?) After the history of the Golden Dawn is a brief Keeper's explanation of the magic that the PCs can obtain. I warn thee now, GD magic doesn't cost the players anything. A player with GD magic isn't balanced with a PC without because he had to put points into the magic. How much magic a PC has is determined by a complex calculation that involves their POW, INT, Credit Rating, Occult and Cthulhu Mythos. Most of this is repeated in the player's section, but with the removal of several key paragraphs. In my opinion, there isn't nearly enough magic here. If you're going to take a game like CoC which is about powerless characters facing hideous evils from beyond the ends of the universe and let the characters have magic, don't do it halfway. Most of the magic allowed to players are just various forms of divination. Astrology, Cartomancy and Dowsing. Alchemy is mentioned, but they pretty firmly say 'it doesn't work'. Warding rituals and Talisman creation are there for the higher members of the Order, but all except for Astral Travel are given but a brief overview. Ah. Astral Travel. Let me say now that I despise Pagan's rules here. It's a nice idea, filled with possibilities, but I just really don't like them. Everything done in the Astral Realm costs Sanity, but it doesn't take off while you do it. When you return to your body, all the sanity loss hits the PC at once. It's cruel and it doesn't make much sense. They claim that the loss of sanity reflects a character's losing contact with the physical world and becoming one with the Astral Realm. Buh? In my opinion, sanity should be lost in the astral realm, then slowly be regained when they return to the physical realm. That would reflect a person's slowly regaining stability in the physical realm, and maybe next time they'd think about spending too much time in the Astral Realm. Either way, that's up to the Keeper to decide. Of course, where any Cthulhu suppliment falls or flies is going to be in the adventures. More than half of the book is made up of four adventures written specifically for Golden Dawn players. The first deals strongly with the Astral Realm, and, while it should be easy for new players, does have an option for the Keeper which could (and did, in my game) create problems. None of the players should have the ability to enter the Astral Realm, so when one of their comrades gets caught, it takes some tricky maneuvering to get him back. My players didn't make it. Maybe yours will. The adventure also offers the players a chance to get in good with WB Yeates, making him a potential patron. Though I think he's played like a greedy little swine, that could just be me. The second adventure deals with the old British folk tale of Black Annis. It doesn't really delve greatly into the mythological aspects of her character, instead focussing on her obsession with a man who begs the investigators to rid his family of a curse Black Annis put them under generations earlier. It's a toughie with a final battle that will cause casualties. I'd suggest giving your characters an adventure between the Room Beyond (er, the adventure I mentioned above) and Hell Hath No Fury (this adventure) or Black Annis will eat them alive. Literally. La Musique de la Nuit has the characters going to Paris to meet up with Mathers. They're offered a night at the Paris Opera with Gaston Leroux, which quickly turns into a muder mystery, a haunting of the Opera by a Phantom and an encounter with a new Mythos race known as the Yiddithians. This is one of my favorites, if only because my characters got through it with zero violence. Sheela-na-gig is seeded from Hell Hath No Fury, and deals with something that caused one of my players to storm out of the room and start crying. Yes, it deals with King Arthur. And he's a bastard. And he worships Shub-Niggurath. And hopefully your characters will kill him before he assassinates the Pope. (Well, that's not in the adventure, but you can bet he's plannin' on it!) I really like this adventure, if only because I'm against this whole neo-Celtic thing that's started up, with all this Celtic music on my radio and people claiming that the Celts lived in harmony with the land and the spirits and yar yar yar. After that is all the players' information. It's mostly a compressed version of what we've seen before, but with all the neat stuff taken out so the players don't know that you're planning to turn Aleister Crowley into a Malka- woah. Nevermind. So, for anyone who likes the idea of a Gaslight campaign, and likes the idea of making your Gaslight campaign a bit strange, this is the place to do it. It really is quite a good book, and one can tell that the writers put their time into researching it. I still wonder about the Alan Smithee thing, but I can't allow that to affect my review. Remember, though, it's Keepers only. Style: 4 (Classy and well done) Substance: 4 (Meaty)