The Keeper's Companion 2 is a miscellany of articles for Call of Cthulhu GMs. It's very much an optional book; a variety of useful and entertaining add-ons to the game, but nothing fundamental. It's more like a very thick all-CoC issue of Dragon than CoC's answer to the Dungeon Master's Guide.
A list of the contents makes it sound a little dull, and after looking at the page for it on Chaosium's website, I almost passed it up. I'm glad I didn't. Not all the material is worthwhile, but what's good in it is very, very good, and if you've glanced at the back and decided to give it a miss, it might be worthwhile to head back to the game store, look it over for a few minutes, and give it a chance to change your mind.
The highlights, for me, are two long articles, one on Prohibition and one on guns, and a collection of lists of past CoC adventures. The book is filled out with shorter material of varying quality.
Highlights
Prohibition
By Adam Gauntlett. A little over forty pages covering Prohibition in '20s America. Clear, entertaining, and very detailed, this is the best short introduction to the subject I can imagine. It tells, among other things, what kind of liquor people drank, and how they got it, and what it did to them; what kinds of law enforcement agencies dealt with alcohol, what their agents were like and what they did all day; how bootlegging worked, and who did it; and what the consequences were, legal and medical, of alcohol consumption, transportation, purchase, and sale. Sidebars describe interesting (and for the most part little-known) personages of the day.
"Prohibition" fills in a big part of the background of a '20s campaign, and reading it will help you make any campaign set in the era richer; even if only as a detailed source of interesting professions for your PCs, it's invaluable. It's interesting enough, really, to make you want to give old Cthulhu and that whole crowd a rest and play at gangsters and G-men for a while. There's no Mythos information that I saw, but plenty of hooks to hang a supernatural adventure on. For example:
" . . . no matter how many smugglers were killed by Coast Guardsmen many more were killed by brother smugglers, hijackers, and go-through men. . . . Often the Coast Guard arrived too late, finding only a burnt-out hulk or abandoned ship, a few bloodstains and bullet holes the only sign of what had happened." (p. 52)
If you can't make something out of that, there's no hope for you.
If the '20s bore you stiff, this probably won't change your mind. If you're even slightly interested in the period, though, "Prohibition" deserves a read. It feels a lot like one of the better GURPS supplements, minus the templates and stats.
Iron
By Grek Henrikson. Nearly thirty pages on how to make gunplay more complicated, but in a good way. It's aimed at readers who don't know much about guns. A few pages cover some unexpected aspects of firearms: loud ones can make you deaf for a while; big ones are heavy and awkward to carry; if you don't take care of them they go all blooey; if you pick a gun that takes a weird kind of ammo, you won't be able to buy it anywhere; that kind of thing. A list of malfunctions adds richness to those 00 rolls. The bulk of the piece is a list of guns, most of them appropriate for either '20s or modern play, with useful information about who would be likely to have them and how likely they are to kill anything.
If you don't especially like gunplay in your games, the added complications here will help you make gun battles disastrous in a more entertaining way than "Your bullets seem to have no effect"; if you do like gun battles every now and then, the added detail here can give them some more spice. And for the most part, it's the sort of detail you don't need to know much about guns to appreciate; no long lists of muzzle velocities and whatnot here.
The writing, too, has real charm and a droll wit; more importantly, it's clear and fluent, as is the prose in "Prohibition."
The Keeper's List of Lists
By Brian M. Sammons. A collection of lists of CoC scenarios, arranged to let you find adventures with the monster, god, book, cult, character, era, and location of your choice. Only adventures, not sourcebooks, are covered, and minor occurrences are omitted. Omitting minor occurrences is a very smart decision; it would be really irritating to hunt down some adventure on eBay because you love ghouls and the index says it has a ghoul in it, only to find that there's nothing but one out-of-the-way room with the description "There is a small, undernourished ghoul chained to the wall" and not another ghoul in sight.
You can probably tell whether or not this will be useful to you; if it's your kind of thing, you'll love it, if it's not, you'll ignore it. I love it. I want to buy the compiler a pony. If you have a lot of CoC adventures and need a quick reference, this'll do it for you; if you're a collector and want to know what to be searching for on eBay, you'll want to have this open on your lap and the bibliography at www.yog-sothoth.com open in another window. But if old CoC adventures don't interest you much, this won't either.
(Anyone, though, will get some giggles just reading the entry headings. Gods and monsters are listed with their subtitles, so you get things like "Clowns, the murderous, not happy kind," "Jennykin, mutant offspring of a cursed bodybuilder," and "Death Leg, severed, homicidal leg." And it's interesting to see which creatures have gotten heavy coverage and which have been neglected--why so many adventures with Hunting Horrors (eight) and so few with Flying Polyps (two)?)
The Rest of It
The Mythos Collector lists ten new tomes, along with new spells and creatures related to the tomes. It's not clear to me whether these come from previous CoC works (as the subtitle "Previously uncollected tomes, spells, and creatures" suggests) or are original to this volume; I suspect the latter. While there's no shortage of already-existing books and spells and creatures for CoC, these strike me as far better than most, and you could build a fine adventure around any of them. Not every Keeper finds compilations of this sort useful, but if you're the sort that does, you're likely to find something here that you like.
Mythos ex Machina collects technology and artifacts from various CoC adventures and arranges them by race. Spells and artifacts often suffer when taken out of their original context, but most of these look pretty solid. If you're looking for some stuff for your Mi-Go and Deep Ones to be carrying around, this could come in very handy, even if you own many of the source adventures already; but like The Mythos Collector, it will be less useful to Keepers who prefer to homebrew every little thing.
Deep One Diary is a short story in diary form about a medical examiner who autopsies a Deep One/human hybrid, accompanied by an autopsy report. Either one could be a useful readymade handout for an adventure involving Deep Ones, and they provide details about hybrid physiology that you might want to steal, but on the whole this struck me more as pleasure reading for CoC enthusiasts (with some gaming-related details) than a CoC article proper. (That's not a complaint, by the way; it's a perfectly reasonable inclusion for a book of this sort.)
Frogtalk is an odd little piece, three pages long, by two authors; the first part proposes a genetic mechanism for Deep One/human interbreeding, and the second part critiques the first and suggests an alternate explanation. It's reminiscent of the "Professor Emerson" reports by Graeme Price in Delta Green: Countdown, but without the conceit that Deep Ones are real (at least in the second part). It's a bit like a pair of posts from a really good CoC forum; I liked it.
LaVey, Satanism, and the Big Squid, 5 pages long, discusses Satanism, Aleister Crowley, and people who treat the Cthulhu Mythos as real. It suffers from a term-papery feel; it demonstrates that the author knows what he's talking about, but doesn't leave you with much more information than when you started--it's heavy on summary and evaluation, light on information. It mentions that there are people who take the Mythos as real, for example, and explains why that's kind of stupid, but doesn't say much about who those people are, what they do about their beliefs, or how to learn more about them; no mention of the paperback "Necronomicon" by "Simon," for instance. There are some bursts of detail, but it seems oddly random what gets talked about at length and what gets mentioned in passing. I don't know anything about the circumstances of its publication, but I wondered if this might be an inexpertly cut down version of a much longer work; if not, it would have benefited from some editorial advice and a rewrite. It's worth reading for the witty remarks, though: the Temple of Set, we're told, "broke off from LaVey . . . when the thrill of being socially ostracized by nearly everybody apparently wore off," (p. 55) and Aleister Crowley as a young man was "probably no more or less offensive than any Goth poser of our generation." (p. 56)
Should you buy it?
Depends on where your interests lie. For me, "Prohibition," "Iron," and the List of Lists made it well worth the $30 (U.S.D) it cost me; if you play a modern game, don't like guns, and don't need the lists, it probably won't be worth your while. It's not for everyone, and it's not essential; but if you have a chance to flip through it, do: you might decide you need to make it yours.
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