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I’ve gone past the point of bothering to go on and on about how Chaosium has lost its way, mostly because I’ve come to the realization that the stuff that I’ve been reviewing as of late - Goatswood, At Your Door, Unseen Masters - are the new standard for Chaosium. Instead of the gorgeous, full-page covers from Lee Gibbons (whom I’m still trying to find out about) and Les Edwards, we’re getting Photoshop collages – competent ones, but still Photoshop collages.
Instead of the truly alien thrills we got from the golden age, we’re getting products written by people who are obviously well-educated, and who mean well, but who don’t seem to have the right mindset to write truly excellent horror scenarios. I believe that Chaosium is currently doing its best to get back on track, especially with the dual-statted reprints of the excellent Arkham County books – and God bless them for doing so – but books like this come nowhere near to the kind of disturbing thrills and lasting imagery that a good Call of Cthulhu scenario can generate.
If you’ve seen any of the innumerable “ancient Pharoah is up and about and in an new body in this modern age” movies out there, you’ve got the basic plot of Utatti Asfet down pretty well. There’s nothing wrong with the premise, of course, but the execution here is so flat and pale that you have to wonder if big chunks of interesting material were stripped out to make room for something else.
The first chapter has the investigators at the 40th annual Congress of Inexplicable Phenomena, on the island of Tonga, which the characters are attending with Professor Lazlo Volk. I’ll lay aside the fact that the average Congress of Inexplicable Phenomena is more likely to occur in a Motel 8 outside of Duluth, Minnesota than on Tonga, at least for the moment. In any case, the investigators are there to…
…well, they’re not actually going there for any particular reason, save plot convenience. As a matter of fact, that brings up another thing: The baroque complications of the Cthulhu Mythos are a thousand times more interesting than the whole Atlantis-Nostradamus-crystal skull-Stonehenge-rain of frogs-Bermuda Triangle-aliens-want-to-probe-our dusky-nethers theories that you see detailed in old Time-Life books. I can’t imagine an experienced Call of Cthulhu investigator bothering to stand around listening to a forty-five year old man explain the connection between American Indians and their connection to the lost survivors of Atlantis when he’s already seen evidence that the real world isn’t stuck together nearly as well as you’d like. To be sure, the book recognizes that some of the attendees are going to be cranks, but it’s still a pretty tenuous reason to go to Tonga in the first place.
So, what do they do when they get there? The book doesn’t say. The book does go into great detail into what their adversaries are doing, including a day-by-day plan of one of the main villain’s henchmen, but there’s no real indication of how the scenario is supposed to play out. As a matter of fact, the investigators, if they wait for something to happen, can wait out the entire period without noticing anything happening at all. There’s a clumsy bit where one of the investigators is stopped and questioned by one of the main villains – “Don’t I know you?” – and describes the villain as uninterested in asking any questions that the investigators may ask in return. The problem is that it’s difficult to prevent players from fixating – and perhaps rightfully so – on that character when the main focus of the adventure is on somebody else.
For the rest of this section, as a matter of fact, there’s nothing that directly involves the investigators with the mystery at hand. The main conflict in the piece comes from a conflict between one of the agents of the main villain and a local cult, resulting in a series of conflicts between them, but if the Keeper doesn’t put special effort into making sure that the investigators know where to look, then the entire six-day conference goes past with the only Mythos encounter happening to another NPC, rather than to the players themselves. Compare that to Masks of Nyarlathothep, where the investigator’s contact winds up gutted by a cult in the first five minutes, figuratively speaking, of the adventure. The opening of the campaign is supposed to grab the investigators by the nuts and let them know that Something Is Up; the opening of this campaign sorts of makes a half-hearted clutch at something across the room, then goes into a coma.
Worse yet, there’s more detail on the life and customs of the Tonga people, including more than you’d ever want to know on the manufacture and serving of tonga, a local beverage enjoyed by Tongans. It may be interesting from an anthropological standpoint, but the point of Call of Cthulhu is horror, not scholarly knowledge; it’s like setting an adventure in Germany, then spending five or six paragraphs gassing on about how Germans are a friendly and industrious people, and how beer is made.
On the way back, of course, a Mythos incident does happen that the investigators are involved with – except that they can’t interact with it unless they happen to be able to breathe at 30,000 feet and be able to walk on the outside of a speeding jetliner without assistance. After they’ve set down, the book suggests that they’ll want to retrive some of the artifacts that may have caused the crash, but at this point, they may not even be involved with the Mythos in the first place – and if they have managed to tag the henchman of the minor villain as being involved with the Mythos, it’s doubtful that they’re going to let him walk away from Tonga without taking at least one shot at him. The campaign seems to simultaneously assume that the investigators are naïve of the henchman’s intentions, or knowledgeable but unwilling or unable to go directly after him. Either way, it feels railroaded in an almost passive-aggressive fashion.
In New Orleans, the chapter opens with yet another dry, duller than hell description of New Orleans’ history and geography, including a recitation of the architectural styles of the area. If you’re writing a horror scenario, then I beg you on hands and knees: Please, please, please realize that flat information and dry recitation of facts is absolute murder when it comes to describing a situation. While I have to admit that Lovecraft had a boner for describing architectural details of a town – particularly Providence and Boston – he always made sure that they contributed to the atmosphere of the place he was describing, including applying valuable adjectives such as “rotting” and “decadent” and “crouched” to ordinary houses. While the author does make some effort to describe New Orleans, it’s mostly in unuseful tidbits like this:
Another style in the area is the courtyard residence. Many small hotels have taken these over, while others are used as houses. They have tall walls facing the street; from the outside they tend to look quite worn and dilapidated. Heavy wood doors allow access to the inner area, where the atmosphere is usually very serene and quiet. A small central courtyard open to the sky will be surrounded on all sides by the tall walls of the building. Fountains are not uncommon in these inner gardens, along with tile floors and flowering foliage.
Bring the streets to life with sights and sounds. Street musicians are common, especially Zydeco bands whose music spills onto the street from open doors of nightclubs. There are many bars throughout the area, especially on Bourbon Street, which leans heavily towards the adult end of the spectrum. Many of these clubs have themes. One, for instance, is Dave’s Tropical Island Bar; it features a tropical motif as well as a flaming fountain. At the back of another club the investigators may finally see the band, a man wearing only white pants and big rubber boots (as a shrimp fisherman would wear), and his wife, who is wearing nothing but cut-off shorts and the washboard which she is playing.
That catches the aspects that might be of interest to a tourist, or the usual crop of inebriate fools that populate New Orleans during Mardi Gras. However, if you’ve seen Angel Heart, or Hard Target, you’ve seen New Orleans in person. Hell, Angel Heart alone is a primer in how to make the city look ominous, especially in the way that the races – and the music – mix in strange ways. There’s a thousand different ways to spook people out when they’re in New Orleans. Draw from Angel Heart and have them chased by black dogs whom nobody else seems to pay attention to. Have them watch a strange funeral procession in which the coffin is too long, or too skinny, or the mourners are wearing white masks which conceal their race – or maybe more. Have the water seep up onto the street as a part of New Orleans gets a little too close to the Atlantic. Have an hog-butcher work in the open air, glancing at the investigators as they walk past. There’s a thousand subtle details that can add up to an aura of almost overwhelming fear if you do it right, but this chapter doesn’t even try.
And, weirdly enough, it’s in the second – or third, if you count the interlude as a chapter – chapter of the book where we get a good way to bring the characters into the adventure; one of the NPCs explains that he found some mysterious readings near Tonga, and describes his misgivings over some of the campaign’s villains. Shortly thereafter, of course, he’s eaten by a Hunting Horror disguised as a carnival float, which…is kind of a bizarre image, and not in the Thomas Ligotti-style sense of the word. The investigators do get a solid lead on a mysterious company that the doctor mentioned, but the book assumes that the investigators will break in and start tearing the place apart looking for clues, without taking many other considerations into account. (Even more weirdly, there’s a painting in the building of a tiny ship being tossed around in the sea that costs 0/1d2 SAN to look at – and there’s no explicit Mythos depictions. Huh?)
And again, the connections between the different parts of the scenario are hair-thin. If the investigators don’t break into a particular henchman’s apartment, they won’t find out about yet another henchman, and therefore won’t go to Thibeudeux, thereby missing an opportunity to encounter another Mythos entity with no particular connection to the plot. The only genuine scare in the entire book occurs if one of the villains of the piece puts the whammy on an investigator, in which case he has a bowel movement consists of a dead water moccasin snake and a half-pint of blood, which is going to put the hinks into any player.
The Sudan chapter is just as dry and dull, although there’s an encounter with some Sudani militia that serves to act as a signpost to something interesting. I should point out that there’s absolutely no reason that I can see as to why the investigators would go to the Sudan. As a matter of fact, I couldn’t figure out what the Sudan had to do with the plot as a whole; I only found out about the dark ritual that the main baddie was supposed to perform about halfway through. Compare, if you will, to Masks of Nyarlathothep, which laid out a careful evidence diagram of what evidence would lead the investigators to England, or Australia, or to Africa or what have you. It was right up in the front of the chapter, for crying out loud, and yet the investigators are supposed to hare off to one of the most dangerous areas on earth – during the Gulf War, even, when Americans with no particular motive are trying to move around a country which has declared its alliance with Iraq – on the basis of a few shipping notes found in an office. What the hell is going on here? It’s a question that I keep asking myself over and over again as I try to puzzle out what in the hell the authors of the book were trying to accomplish.
The finale of the book involves the main baddy going through a Mythos ritual in order to release Shaklatal, which is only mildly interesting in spots. There’s one minor Mythos thrill when a stumbling lackey is converted into a mass of scuttling, crablike legs, but once he commences the ritual, there’s not much for the investigators to do. Masks of Nyarlathothep had a horrendous fight in a gigantic rocket pit, with shoggoths oozing out of quiet pools and Chinese revolutionaries blazing away left and right; Utatti Asfet spends more time describing the villain and what he’s doing, confining the investigator’s actions to a lame “Well, you’d probably want to destroy the pressure lock when he’s in it” as a potential solution. Why not pit the investigators against the same tests as the main villain, and see who comes through it, Anubis-Gates style?
I read another review of this product online which mentions that the book is more fun to play than it is to read. That may be the case. But I can’t recommend the book in any way, shape or form; it’s a bland, poorly organized, profoundly unambitious, dry rehash of Egyptian mythology that’s not scary in the slightest and adds nothing to the Mythos. Avoid it.
-Darren MacLennan
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