The World of Darkness is increasingly starting to remind me of a Judge Dredd story I read when I was little, in which a werewolf on a colonist ship goes out in search of prey. Unfortunately, his prey turns out to be another werewolf, and so they team up and jump a third person - who also turns out to be a werewolf, as is the fourth, as is everyone else abroad the ship, the Judges having cunningly sent all the lycanthropes in the city off on this thing, with vampires to follow. Between vampires, werewolves, mages, wraiths, changelings, mummies, kinfolk, weretigers, ghouls, sorcerors, hunters, hengeyokai, werebears, wererats, nunnehi, kuei-jin, revenants, djinn, merfolk, Gypsies, weresharks, etc, etc, the world’s getting a little bit crowded. Soon the Wolfies will publish IOWAN: THE REAPING, in which we discover the secret powers of John Deere, black coffee, and losing your arm in agricultural accidents, and there won’t be any mortals left at all.
Still, you can, like most people, simply ignore 90% of the supernaturals in the WoD and pick the ones you like. I’ve always had a soft spot for mummies, myself; I’ve got both the old Mummy books WW did, and they were pretty neat. Essentially, mummies were ancient Egyptians brought back to life over and over again by the Spell of Life, a concoction devised by the ancient sorcerors Osiris and Isis. There were only 42 mummies in the whole world (yay!) and you had pretty clearly defined opponents; the seven big bad Bane Mummies and all those nasty little vampire Followers of Set. I always thought the magic system was pretty nice, too; you had six nice and clear paths, which were powerful, but not overwhelming. I dug the whole ‘ancient immortal’ thing; it made a nice contrast from the ‘adolescent supernatural in big elder-ruled world’ of the other WoD games.
On the other hand, I never ran a proper campaign of it, and I’ve never met anybody else who liked it, so I’m kind of curious as to why it’s gone into a big sparkling hardback third edition. Maybe there’s a bunch of Egyptian gamers with compromising photographs of the Wiecks and a temple goat. Apparently this is the first product in their new Year of the Scarab which will do for the Middle East what the Year of the Lotus did to Asia. I’m not certain whether that’s a promise or a threat.
Basic things first. Physically, it’s pretty high quality; hardback, 226 pages, nicely laid out and printed, art generally in a shadowy, mysterious style. It’s got an index, and there’s none of the horrible backgrounds that made bits of Kindred of the East so totally unreadable. The writing is nothing fancy, but it’s straightforward and clear, both of which are definite pluses. Like KotE, it’s not a stand-alone game, but requires at least one other Storyteller game for the basic system. I like this; it avoids needless repetition, and there must be few gamers out there who don’t have at least one of the Storyteller games. There’s not too much reference to other books, and it explains unfamiliar concepts, such as the Egyptian soul, fairly well.
The book starts with a bang. The last great Underworld maelstrom - the one which ended Wraith, for those of you who’ve been following the uberplot - wrecked havoc on the Dark Kingdom of Sand, where Osiris slept and the Egyptian dead lived. It destroyed all but thirteen of the original mummies (which is bad news for all three of you with an existing Mummy campaign), it shredded most of the Egyptian souls, and it woke Osiris himself from his slumber of millennia.
Upon waking, Osiris declared that the old Spell of Life was faulty, and created a new one, which creates a whole new breed of Mummy, the Amenti, which is Ancient Egyptian for ‘player character.’ The Amenti are Osiris’ warriors for Maat, the Goddess of Balance (Gaia in a funny hat, werewolf fans!) and against Apophis, Darkness Incarnate (the Wyrm, pretty much.)
What happens now, then, is that a fragment of an ancient Egyptian soul (the tem-akh) seeks out a mortal who will die soon, and who has somehow failed in their life, due to an imbalance in their soul. When they die, the soul offers them a bargain; the two of them will unite, and they will come back to life and find new purpose. If the soul says yes, the two unite. The tem-akh temporarily possesses (and, if necessary, reforms) the corpse, and takes it to the Middle East, and the Web of Faith (a network of holy sites over the Middle East - the Ahl-a-Batin ‘Subtle Web,’ if you’re a Mage fan - full of Sekhem, magical energy) There one of the cults following Osiris finds it and performs the full Spell of Life, joining the two souls and creating an Amenti. Oh, the soul also goes before the Judges of Maat, big powerful spirit beings who see whether the union will work or not.
The tem-akh may be any of five bits of the nine-part Egyptian soul - which creates the splats for Mummies. It’s quite a neat way of doing it; the new soul fills in a gap in the old person’s life - so that, for instance, somebody who neglected their body might be joined with a ka, the part of the soul that protected the body till resurrection. A shy scientist who didn’t have the force to succeed might be joined with the khaibit, the animalistic, id-like part of the soul. Think of it as postmortem self-help.
I rather miss the ‘ancient immortal’ element, but you still get to have those interesting memories of your First Life in ancient Egypt, and it’s much less angsty than most White Wolf games. After all, to some extent, you’ve already been healed and unified. They seem to have thrown in the Udja-Sen, who are mummies whose tem-akh wasn’t judged worthy and was purged away, and are all torn up about it, as a concession to the angst-bunnies, but that’s no great harm. Each of them has a strength and a weakness. There’s a big problem with the strengths; they generally allow you to substitute your Balance score - which I’ll get to in a minute - to reroll a particular type of skill roll, such as art or resistance. Unfortunately, Balance for a beginning Amenti is generally from 1-3, which makes this pretty crappy. I think they meant that you get to reroll and allocate extra dice from your Balance pool; this seems to be the way in the Sefekhi description, anyway, and makes much more sense.
Character creation is a slight variation on the traditional Storyteller 7/5/3 for attributes, 13/9/5 for skills. Instead, you create your character as a mortal first of all, with 6/4/3 for attributes, 11/7/4 for skills, and then add on 2 attribute dots and 5 skill dots when she becomes an Amenti. You’re encouraged to do this in a way which reflects your character’s new soul - somebody who gains a khaibit tem-akh, f’instance, might gain two dots in Strength, representing their raw animal fury, somebody whose tem-akh was a general in ancient Egypt might gain three dots in Leadership. This is nice; it rounds out both parts of your character and emphasises the ‘melding of two souls’ theme. You get one dot in a Hekau (magic path) suited to your tem-akh, and then an extra three dots, and round the whole thing off with freebies.
The one big problem is Balance. Balance is one of those all-powerful attributes that WoD games seem oddly prone too, like Arete in Mage or Quantum in Aberrant (and, to a lesser extent, Generation in Vampire.) You can’t have a Hekau rating higher than your Balance score, and it affects all kinds of other abilities. It determines how well advanced along the path of Maat you are, and to gain dots you have to face the Judges of Maat, who examine you for sins - there’s a very nice section describing them, and the tests they might put you through. It’s somewhat like Humanity from Vampire, too - if you do bad things you can lose Balance. Unfortunately, Balance starts at one, but can be raised to three with 8 freebie points. Frankly, any sane player is going to do this; I can’t see why they didn’t just start it at three for everyone, with the option of lowering it if you feel it’s more appropriate to your character. Easily fixed, though.
Hekau hasn’t really changed since the last edition of Mummy. There are six paths; Alchemy, Amulets, Celestial, Effigy, Necromancy, and Nomenclature. Each level of each path has various spells, items, or rituals available; you spend Sekhem (energy) to cast spells, create items, or work rituals. Most items aren’t permanent, but they last long enough that you can build up a decent stock of them. It’s a nice system; flexible without being chaotic, and not overpowered. Munchkins are going to seize on Nomenclature, which is the most direct form of magic, allowing the transformation and destruction of objects through their True Names, but there’s an innate balancing factor in that you have to research something or someone’s name beforehand. You don’t have many points to spend here as a beginning Amenti, but the range of effects is enough that every dot counts.
Other neat stuff that Amenti get to do - well, they’re full of life, even more so than those who’ve only been born once. Their perceptions are heightened, they don’t age (this actually contradicts the details of extra lifespan given in the Ba background, which I suspect are a leftover from previous editions), and, unlike the earlier mummies, created by a flawed spell, they can have children - who are normal humans. On the other hand, this also means that they have none of the supernatural resistance or strength of other supernaturals, except possibly through magic; an Amenti going directly against a werewolf or vampire hand-to-hand is probably dead meat - at least in this life.
You see, the Amenti get to come back from the dead, pretty much as many times as they like. Each time is going to cost them a little permanent Willpower or Sekhem, though, and if you run out of Willpower you’re gone for good, so you don’t want to make a habit of it, and I can see where quite a bit of Amenti experience points will be going. Otherwise, you can only be killed by doing something really dumb, like standing in a nuclear explosion or committing deliberate suicide. The amount of time you belong dead is determined by a background called Ba; anywhere from a year to a day. While you’re dead, though, you get to mess around in the Underworld (from Wraith, pretty much), and even interfere in the mortal world a little, if you’ve got some skill in Necromancy. I can see problems if only one of the party gets killed and has a low Ba rating and no Necromancy; time to play an NPC for a while.
So, you’re a Mummy; what do you actually do? Amenti are very much good guys; much less ambiguous in their allegiances than most WoD characters. You’re on the side of Light and Balance and Truth; get out there and fight evil. Evil in this case is a) the evil vampire Followers of Set, b) the bad Set-created Bane Mummies, c) evil spirits in general, d) zombies, e) cannibal cults. Plus you have all the normal problems of interacting with your old friends and family (or disappearing totally), enjoying life, advancing in Balance, and so forth. Inter-supernatural politics is played down much more than in other WoD games; there’s differences between mummies, but you’re pretty much all on the same side.
As for crossovers with other games - well, if I were running it, I’d keep it down pretty much to Wraith and Vampire, myself; maybe even having the Followers of Set as the only vampires. Cut out Mage entirely, and use the sorcery rules (or hedge magic, or whatever it’s called in whichever supplement you have) instead, maybe have the werewolves as a distant rumour, and forget Changelings.
Mummies regain Sekhem much faster when they’re within the Web of Faith, the magical network of holy sites within the Middle East, and weaken if they spend too long outside it, so the vast majority of games are going to be set there. This is a good thing - I’m all for playing in a new and different environment, and it avoids the strangeness of KotE’s ‘only Orientals can become kuei-jin’ and ‘all Asians have the same culture.’ Your Amenti’s mortal life and death can have been anywhere in the world, and the underlying culture is a single, ancient one; Egypt.
However, the section on the Middle East in the book is absolutely fucking awful. It’s fine as far as detailing the supernaturals in the region goes, but it gives no sense of contemporary culture or politics, and barely seems aware of the major issues of the region. For instance, the entire Palestinian Diaspora gets ‘This caused considerable resentment on the part of Jerusalem’s Palestinian population, which joined in anti-Israeli actions. A peace agreement between Israel and the PLO led to a measure of self-rule for the Palestinians, although conflict has never died completely, and it flares up from time to time,’ and, on the West Bank, that ‘Tensions often run high here, and conflicts between Israeli settlers and Palestinian inhabitants erupt with increasing violence.’
You’d think that the exile, for whatever reason, (I am so not getting into ‘the Israelis forced them out’ versus ‘the Arabs lured them out’) of over half a million people, and the terrible consequences it’s had for the region, would get a little more coverage, wouldn’t you? It’s equally bad elsewhere; the entire 20th century history of Iraq is five lines. Six extra pages, and they could have given at least brief summaries of the political makeup of each country and something of its culture and history. As it is, you get the impression that nothing’s happened in the Middle East since Ancient Egypt.
What’s even worse is that what little information there is is often wrong. For example, they don’t seem to have noticed that King Hussain of Jordan (who is apparently secretly controlled by an ancient Assamite vampire), died in 1999. They say that Jordan ‘recently negotiated a peace treaty’ with Israel; there’s been one since the 1970s. They claim that Constantinople was renamed Istanbul in 1453 by the Ottomans; this didn’t happen until the 1920s and the foundation of modern Turkey. I could go on; virtually every third sentence is wrong. This is the worst researched, most glib, most ignorant, most deeply stupid section of any gaming book I have ever read; it should either have been left out entirely or done properly. By this standard, it doesn't look good for the rest of the ‘Year of the Scarab.’
Still, that’s what travel guides are for, and the game still has the potential to be a lot of fun. The section on interacting with other supernaturals is very good, particularly the bit about vampires gaining temporary Humanity through sucking Amenti blood, and how they become addicted to this, alternating between horrible acts to get it and wracking moments of remorse. There’s a pretty cute appendix on Chinese and Aztec mummies at the back; I especially like the Chinese Wu Tian, immortal protectors of Heaven. For $25.95, it’s a pretty good game in its own right, and a decent supplement to another WoD campaign. I’m going to rate it a 4 for style, because it has some nice touches and a good straightforward style, and a 3 for substance; it would have been a 4, save for the sheer godawfulness of the Middle East section.
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