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Mummy: The Curse
Imagine being both dead and deathless at the same time. Imagine being cradled in the arms of death for years, sometimes decades on end, but all the while knowing that you will eventually not only arise again, but awaken to an unfamiliar world that mostly fears and hates you. Now imagine that your purpose, your entire existence, is bound within this cycle -- that you are chained to it for all eternity. You sleep, you wake, your serve your Judge's will in the lands of the living, and you return to the death-sleep once more. The ancient culture that empowered you is gone, lost to the sands of time... yet you endure.
In Mummy: The Curse, a Storytelling game set in the World of Darkness, you play one of these beings. Those who know they exist, from the cultists who serve them to the dark forces arrayed against them, call them the Deathless.
We call them mummies.
In Mummy: The Curse, a Storytelling game set in the World of Darkness, you play one of these beings. Those who know they exist, from the cultists who serve them to the dark forces arrayed against them, call them the Deathless.
We call them mummies.
296 pages, Hardcover
Published January 1, 2013
2 people want to read
About the author
C.A. Suleiman
31 books9 followersColin A. Suleiman is a writer, game designer, and musician who has worked primarily in dark fantasy and horror for role-playing games and fiction.
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June 2, 2023How? My library had it.
What? Phew -- how long do you have?
First, let's nod to the history of this game as we pass by: this game is part of the Chronicles of Darkness, which was the White Wolf (and umbrella of other related companies) followup to the World of Darkness, which was the overarching gothic-punk maelstrom of 90s affect that they captured in games like Vampire and Werewolf. In the World of Darkness, there were three main mummy editions: the first was about adding mummies to your World of Darkness; the second bragged that it included non-Egyptian mummies; the third was an actual standalone game, which posited that mummies were being returned to the world after a quake in the Dead realms woke Osiris, who saw that the mundane and magical world was out of balance.
This is the fourth game leaning on the idea of the "mummy" and I wanted to rehearse that history above because it reminds me of the problem I ran into when reading the Ravenloft book on "the ancient dead": in the popular imagination, what is a "mummy"? What's interesting about a mummy? What's a central tension in playing a mummy? You can see White Wolf work through this in the above editions: in the first version, mummies are just Egyptian undead, the level-zero base understanding of the monster -- probably because the game was invented to fill a publishing hole (iirc). In the second, with those non-Egyptian mummies, you can see them trying to expand the concept to something less culturally specific. In the third, mummies are again not so culturally specific (it's not all linen wrappings and canopic jars), and the game action is a little tighter: you are reborn into the world to bring balance.
Mummy: The Curse... kind of throws this all out and tries to invent a whole new game from the thin idea of what mummies are: you are an undead agent who occasionally returns to life to accomplish something, but your experience of time is out-of-joint, and your memories are never whole. And what are you the agent of? Well, you were created by an oppressive empire that once existed and took over your people, but has since disappeared from history. So are you an agent of that empire? Not entirely clear to me. Also, there are human cults that support you and a wide variety of enemies who are looking for revenge or seeking their own immortality.
Yeah, so? What the fuck is this? Is anyone playing it? Who is this for?
On DriveThruRPG, this is a bestseller, so people bought it, and it has 5-star reviews -- five of them! Even the positive reviews note how the text is dense and a little thorny, which... Look, these days, we have an "art-rpg" movement which basically says: "RPG books should be beautiful and evocative." (Example: Mork Borg.) I love the look of those books; I would also like to play those with a pamphlet-sized and heavily bullet-pointed technical document so that I'm not scanning a bunch of prose about how this or those spirits remember all the deaths at the blood-drenched hands of the imperial mongers, etc., etc.
So, first: this is a game that wants the prose to be savored, which I would be more in favor of if the game was either a) trading on more familiar tropes or b) included a little "what you actually need to know" segment.
Second, the game -- like Deviant: The Renegades -- has a fun, strong idea or ideas: you are a flawed agent for a memory-destroying empire. The game should be about regaining your history, turning against the empire or exposing its own history of blood. Heck, make it a little more ambiguous. ("What have the Romans ever done for us?") Heck, here's a Lasers & Feelings hack: your two stats are "memory" and "imperial power": the more power you have, the less tied you are to your own memories. Maybe you're not just fighting the empire, but those rebels who are interested in resurrecting the empire in their own image.
But the game as written is so full of stuff, not to mention the typical White Wolf splat of "what guild did you belong to? and when you stood before the Judge of the Dead, what of these 5 principles did you dedicate your undeath to?" Oh, and then there's the whole other style of game with the human cults who support or hinder you, who are treated as characters in a way. Oh, and there's also ... several Judges who are godlike in this world and whose favor --
There's too much in this game and also too little. Maybe that's a feature, in that each group can sort of decide on their own game and its themes and limits. (There's the whole thing about how mummies experience time out of order, so you might have a modern-day adventure followed by a Dark Ages adventure, followed by a Martian colony adventure, which is so interesting to me, but also feels under-supported by the big book.) But for me, I'm frankly more interested in the Lasers & Feeling hack I just spit out in a second. (Or, gah, you could do an Ars Magica-style game where you have mummies and human cultists.)
What? Phew -- how long do you have?
First, let's nod to the history of this game as we pass by: this game is part of the Chronicles of Darkness, which was the White Wolf (and umbrella of other related companies) followup to the World of Darkness, which was the overarching gothic-punk maelstrom of 90s affect that they captured in games like Vampire and Werewolf. In the World of Darkness, there were three main mummy editions: the first was about adding mummies to your World of Darkness; the second bragged that it included non-Egyptian mummies; the third was an actual standalone game, which posited that mummies were being returned to the world after a quake in the Dead realms woke Osiris, who saw that the mundane and magical world was out of balance.
This is the fourth game leaning on the idea of the "mummy" and I wanted to rehearse that history above because it reminds me of the problem I ran into when reading the Ravenloft book on "the ancient dead": in the popular imagination, what is a "mummy"? What's interesting about a mummy? What's a central tension in playing a mummy? You can see White Wolf work through this in the above editions: in the first version, mummies are just Egyptian undead, the level-zero base understanding of the monster -- probably because the game was invented to fill a publishing hole (iirc). In the second, with those non-Egyptian mummies, you can see them trying to expand the concept to something less culturally specific. In the third, mummies are again not so culturally specific (it's not all linen wrappings and canopic jars), and the game action is a little tighter: you are reborn into the world to bring balance.
Mummy: The Curse... kind of throws this all out and tries to invent a whole new game from the thin idea of what mummies are: you are an undead agent who occasionally returns to life to accomplish something, but your experience of time is out-of-joint, and your memories are never whole. And what are you the agent of? Well, you were created by an oppressive empire that once existed and took over your people, but has since disappeared from history. So are you an agent of that empire? Not entirely clear to me. Also, there are human cults that support you and a wide variety of enemies who are looking for revenge or seeking their own immortality.
Yeah, so? What the fuck is this? Is anyone playing it? Who is this for?
On DriveThruRPG, this is a bestseller, so people bought it, and it has 5-star reviews -- five of them! Even the positive reviews note how the text is dense and a little thorny, which... Look, these days, we have an "art-rpg" movement which basically says: "RPG books should be beautiful and evocative." (Example: Mork Borg.) I love the look of those books; I would also like to play those with a pamphlet-sized and heavily bullet-pointed technical document so that I'm not scanning a bunch of prose about how this or those spirits remember all the deaths at the blood-drenched hands of the imperial mongers, etc., etc.
So, first: this is a game that wants the prose to be savored, which I would be more in favor of if the game was either a) trading on more familiar tropes or b) included a little "what you actually need to know" segment.
Second, the game -- like Deviant: The Renegades -- has a fun, strong idea or ideas: you are a flawed agent for a memory-destroying empire. The game should be about regaining your history, turning against the empire or exposing its own history of blood. Heck, make it a little more ambiguous. ("What have the Romans ever done for us?") Heck, here's a Lasers & Feelings hack: your two stats are "memory" and "imperial power": the more power you have, the less tied you are to your own memories. Maybe you're not just fighting the empire, but those rebels who are interested in resurrecting the empire in their own image.
But the game as written is so full of stuff, not to mention the typical White Wolf splat of "what guild did you belong to? and when you stood before the Judge of the Dead, what of these 5 principles did you dedicate your undeath to?" Oh, and then there's the whole other style of game with the human cults who support or hinder you, who are treated as characters in a way. Oh, and there's also ... several Judges who are godlike in this world and whose favor --
There's too much in this game and also too little. Maybe that's a feature, in that each group can sort of decide on their own game and its themes and limits. (There's the whole thing about how mummies experience time out of order, so you might have a modern-day adventure followed by a Dark Ages adventure, followed by a Martian colony adventure, which is so interesting to me, but also feels under-supported by the big book.) But for me, I'm frankly more interested in the Lasers & Feeling hack I just spit out in a second. (Or, gah, you could do an Ars Magica-style game where you have mummies and human cultists.)
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