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Secrets of Japan

When I agreed to review Secrets of Japan from Chaosium, I was expecting a book about one-third as thick as the one I got. Secrets is a surprisingly hefty tome for a soft-cover. It's 360 pages with black-and-white interior illustrations. Not quite as big as their monumental Beyond the Mountains of Madness, but pretty big nevertheless. Each page has a light gray watermark consisting of some sort of kanji (Japanese text) or illustration, but it's usually faint enough that it doesn't interfere with the readability of the pages. This is a very impressively detailed book. It's primarily a culture book, with most of the information being dedicated to telling you about Japan and how to run a game there.

The book opens with a 24-page piece of flavor fiction, a complete short story called The Yonaguni Monuments. It involves the travails and culture shock of an American scholar who travels to Japan to investigate some ancient, underwater ruins. All in all, it's a decent introdution to the setting, although the author's style seemed a little jumpy for my taste and a number of the events were rather haphazardly tied together.

After that, we get into a general overview and commentary on running a Call of Cthulhu game set in Japan. This includes a useful pronunciation guide and a discussion of ways in which Japanese differs from English... such as words not being able to end in a consonant. This means that the best transliteration of many foreign words will be slightly "off" in Japanese... such as substituting "sho-go-thu" for "shoggoth". There's also a nice discussion of Japanese honorifics and when to use them.

The book has a weird mix of factual information mixed in with tidbits of Mythos lore. So, for example, when the author talks about the appeal of high technology to the younger Japanese, it's mixed in with comments like "This level of technology has not been seen since the ancient Hyperborean civilizations rose," that sometimes makes it hard to separate out real-world fact from liberties taken with the setting to make it better fit the Cthulhu Mythos.

There are even some optional rules for culture shock, the biggest effect of which is losing +2 Sanity when you fail a Sanity check if you're already stressed due to culture shock. The book also goes over some possible effects of their culture on folk's sanity. For example, they cover karohshi (working yourself to death) as a largely Japanese-specific mental illness. There are even rules for the beneficial and detrimental effects of "group-think", where a Japanese character can suffer less Sanity loss from a failed check if they are part of a large group that has mostly resisted the effect. Unfortunately, this mob mentality means that if the whole group is likely to panic, Japanese characters find it harder to avoid losing control.

We get a variety of Japan-specific careers for your investigators. These range from the obvious (Corporate Salaryman, High School Student) to the unusual (Yakuza, Buddhist Priest) to the esoteric (Hereditary Yôkai Hunter, Taoist Alchemist). It seems like a nice list, although I kind of expected to see Geisha among them. The Yôkai Hunter gets probably the coolest typical equipment, including a custom-made titanium katana. I've no idea where you order those from.

Interestingly, they also have the Itako career, which is described as "they are blind female Shinto shamanesses who have been given the gift of supernatural sight for the loss of their natural ability." They start with the Channel Spirit skill, which lets you meditate and spend a magic point to allow a supernatural being to possess you briefly. In the Call of Cthulhu universe, this is a very risky skill to use, even if you're trying to contact a benign spirit... on a botch (a roll of 96-00), you get something else instead.

Among the other new skills are Bushidô, Calligraphy, and Oriental Medicine (covering more esoteric arts such as correcting ki imbalances). Most of these have useful game abilities, such as actually recovering lost Sanity through the use of Oriental Medicine. The Meisô (Meditation) skill has optional rules that make it immensely valuable for Investigators if your Keeper uses them... at high levels, your skill at Meditation can actually stop up to 3 points of Sanity loss per check. That's the sort of skill that I'd expect every PC to invest in if you let them.

Since this is Secrets of Japan, the book wouldn't be complete without a section on martial arts. They describe 9 different martial arts skills, including Ninjutsu and Sumo. There aren't any real game effects listed for these skills... instead, they're just standard combat skills where exactly what circumstances they can be used will vary.

Chapter 2 covers Japan in greater detail, describing the important cities and regions, money, common equipment, et cetera. We get pictures of Japanese money in various denominations and even a small section on etiquette, such as how deep to bow or how to exchange business cards. This section is short, but funtional.

Chapter 3 is where we start to get into the meat of the setting. It starts with "Degenerate Buddhism" and goes on from there. Each section discusses a particular religious or philosophical belief, each of which have been corrupted by the unpleasant cosmological truths of the Call of Cthulhu universe. For example, for believers in degenerate Buddhism, there is a shortcut to the spiritual nirvana which extinguishes all human desires: spiritual communion with Azathoth. Even Fu Sui (better known in the west as feng shui) gets a mention, with a list of spells related to its use. Dark Taoism is a particularly interesting one, with Taoist alchemists bargaining with an eldritch entity known as the Jade Emperor for immortality. Those who are rejected will be given immortality of a less desirable sort: forever transformed into a living but immobile jade statue. The Emperor's citadel is apparently filled with many horrific examples of such "art".

We get 27 pages of information on these religions and philosophies, including such nifty tidbits as rules for handling reincarnated characters. Yes, if your investigator in a 1920s game bought it while facing down a Shoggoth, why not bring him back in modern times in a new incarnation? There are bunch of suggestions for handling investigators' past lives or even their future ones. For example, the characters could be trapped in a sequence of events that keeps repeating, incarnation after incarnation, until they finally get it right. Considering how fast you can run through PCs in a Call of Cthulhu campaign, it may not take you long to run through several generations.

"Scroll Two" starts a new set of chapters, beginning with a section on new Mythos tomes. Most of these are pretty much what you'd expect, although they do have nicely detailed histories and backgrounds for scholarly PCs to research. Several of them are openly dangerous to peruse. One of the more amusing ideas here is The Sixth Ring, the secret teachings of Musashi Miyamoto (a very famous swordsman and author of The Five Rings) which were not passed on to the public. Here he describes the mystical means by which he further improved his swordsmanship to supernatural levels, techniques which he didn't want the general public to possess. A major benefit of this tome (in addition to the spells that it possesses) is that a proficient martial artist who studies it long enough will gain the ability to take two turns to make an attack into an automatic Impale. Considering that there are a few monsters that can only be harmed by successful Impales, that could come in quite useful.

The spells here are even broken up by belief system, so that the Keeper can readily determine what sort of spells a Taoist mage might possess, compared to a degenerate Buddhism monk. Most of the spells are the typical Call/Dismiss and Contact spells, but there are some novel ones. Create Ancestor Spirit details the rite whereby a human soul can be bound as a ghostly defender of a clan or location. Enchant Army of Hell lets a band of cultists transform themselves into mighty demons for the duration of a single battle.

The second half of the book is mostly adventure resources and material, and there's quite a bit of it. We get writeups of several cults, a bunch of new monsters (all of which come from Japanese myth, of course) and major organizations in the Japanese government. There's even a huge corporation whose bio-research department is busily meddling in Things Man Was Not Meant to Genetically Engineer. This area even includes the Six Realms that reality is broken up into in Japanese myths... roughly translated as Heaven, Earth, the Animal Kingdom, the realm of Evil Spirits, the realm of Hungry Spirits and the Hells. These are all treated as parallel dimensions closely associated with the Earth, much like the Dreamlands. I rather like their take on the fox spirits, which are depicted as being native to the Dreamlands. That's a good way of handling them, since they're largely the Japanese equivalent of faery folk, with strange powers and customs.

Now, this is a good point to mention one problem I have with the book. Some of the material is too hokey for my taste. What do I mean by that?

Well, let's take one obvious example. They have stats for Godzilla.

Of course, it's not called Godzilla, or even Gojira, but when you have a giant, radioactive, fire-breathing lizard called "Gazira" (anglicied to "Gadzella" in the West), um... it's obvious what they meant. In fact, Gazira even has such a strong territorial instinct that it often fights with other, similarly sized creatures, whenever they intrude into its territory.

We also get a young woman who is actually the result of a secret research project. She's bonded to a powerful alien symbiote that allows her miraculous healing ability... and which will transform her entire body into a monstrous bio-mechanical form during times of stress. Yeah, I think I've seen that Anime before, under several different titles.

And there's even some Mythos laced Anime titles that do bad things to people who watch them too many times.

So... this kind of stuff really turned me off at first. It was so different from the style of Call of Cthulhu that I usually run that it seemed out of place and unwelcome. But, after going over the entire book, I've got a better opinion of it. See, this tome has so many different inspirations and covers so many bases that of course there are some of them that I'd never use. But the material is there, if you want to use it. And there's tons of material here. This is a very dense book.

Adventures in Japan

Now, alas, for what I personally consider the low point of the book. The sample adventures. We get three "big" adventures and a couple of dozen "Sinister Seeds".

Some of these were good. But many seemed woefully underdeveloped or just didn't make much sense. One features a secretive cult whose gigantic underground headquarters seems more appropriate for a game of James Bond 007 than Call of Cthulhu. It even has lava pits in the lowest levels.

Another relies on way too many coincidences for my taste, where the PCs will encounter a magical serial killer... pretty much by pure chance, not once, but three times. Oh, it's not that big of a deal to write up some filler to justify the PCs being in each location, but it still bugged me. Along with the section where the author suggests that the PCs be forced to return to a particular NPC's abode by having one of them suddenly realize that they accidentally kept the fellow's pen. I know the Japanese are very big on polite behavior, but would your Investigators interrupt an important case to stop back by and drop off a borrowed pen?

Even the Sinister Seeds are sometimes little more than "A bunch of school kids vanish! What could be happening?"

Still, this isn't an adventure volume or a campaign pack, it's a setting. So I won't hold this against them too much; it's the setting material that's really crucial.

And the setting material is quite thorough (at least it seems so to someone like me, who's never been to Japan). They even go over Japanese history and the major events of each time period, in case you want to run a historical saga instead of a modern-day one. And a brief description of all of the other countries in the region, in case your characters have to travel to more spots than just Japan.

Finally, we get a Cthulhu Japan character sheet (very similar to the normal one, but with several new skills listed) and a full index.

Nyarlathotep's Seal of Approval

So, overall, what did I think of Secrets of Japan? Well, it's a very impressive book. It's got a very broad and eclectic collection of material for enterprising Keepers. There's a ton of detail here and the index should make it easier to find things (I haven't really tested that). The interior art is generally pretty good. It even includes some humorous cartoons such as the "Chibi Cthulhu" advertisement in the back. It's a little odd seeing stuff like that in a serious Call of Cthulhu product, but it's obvious that the designers wanted to include the less serious possibilities, too.

It's very readable and generally (although not always) does a good job of distinguishing fictional additions from real world events and locations. If I wanted to run a game set in modern day Japan, I'd definitely want it handy, even if I wasn't using the Call of Cthulhu system or setting! I give it a 4 for substance (it would have been 5 if the adventures had grabbed me more) and a 4 for style. Actually, for Call of Cthulhu products in general, I'd consider this to be an unusually stylish book... most of them are more practical than pretty, but this one is both. A really nice product.