More to Mention about Mummy?
over 4 years ago
– Thu, Nov 07, 2019 at 12:33:44 PM
Arise, our cult of backers!
Or, really, you have already Arisen, with the funding of this project and the ongoing efforts to awaken more rewards via Stretch Goal rituals. So, this update will be targeted more to the prospective backer, the kickstarter curious, and the Mummy obsessed who haven't yet pledged.
So, to help answer some questions and provide a bit more insight into this project for those needing a push to join in, I've collected a few scraps and bits of info - let's call them relics - that have been scattered around the web over the past weeks to maybe shed a bit more light on Mummy: The Curse Second Edition.
Much More on Mummy
No stranger to podcasts (he's a regular host of the Onyx Pathcast along with Chronicles of Darkness line developer Dixie Cochran and Eddy Webb), Mummy: The Curse Second Edition developer Matthew Dawkins joined the team at The Story Told podcast for a pre-launch discussion all about this project.
Click their logo below and give it a listen...
Now, I'll borrow some info that Rich shared in a recent Monday Meeting Notes post before the campaign launched. The team had been answering some pre-launch questions around the web, and bits and pieces were compiled together for this:
So, is this your Mummy? A fair question if you’re a fan of 1st Edition, and also if you weren’t sold on Mummy: The Curse the first time around. Here are a whole collection of answers to that very question by Impish Ian Watson and Matthew “The Gentleman Gamer” Dawkins, the game’s developer:
– There was a pre-Egyptian culture that spanned a large part of the world (just how big isn’t mentioned, but I think of it like Alexander the Great’s territory, or perhaps the Roman Empire). It was the first such empire in human history. It had no name, and thus is called the Nameless Empire. The center of the Empire, its Rome, was the City of Irem.
– Irem was run by a collection of sorcerer-priests who wanted to turn themselves into gods of the underworld, and so they chose a number of servants to convert into Arisen in order to serve them. The gods need Sekhem, their particular flavour of spiritual juice, and they need you to provide it — mostly by retrieving Iremite artifacts and bringing them back to the underworld.
– Mummies could have come from anywhere in the Empire, and their cults may have moved them from place-to-place for security or to follow an Iremite artifact. The Arisen quickly adapt to new cultures and languages when they wake up, so it’s possible to be “from” practically anywhere, even if the origin of their undead state is Irem.
– Mummies are sort of anti-vampires: where vampires spend most of their time awake with shorter periods of torpor, mummies spend most of their time dead with brief periods of wakefulness. Where vampires start off weak and get stronger over time, mummies wake up at the peak of their power and slowly dwindle as their period of activity comes to an end.
– If you’ve seen the Brendan Frasier Mummy movies, it’s something like that: you wake up, practically a corpse, running on instinct, but immensely powerful. As time goes on, your memory returns, life returns to your body until you appear human, and your power dwindles.
– You typically wake up for one of three reasons: your cult wakes you up for a specific purpose (say, to choose a new leader from a list of candidates), because you sense the Sekhem in a nearby artifact, or because a Sothic Turn has passed since your creation. A Sothic Turn is a 1,461-year period of the star Sothis (Sirius). In the former two cases, you typically “die” again as soon as your task is finished. In the latter case, you may be up and active for years at a time.
– Interestingly, you experience your periods of activity non-linearly. You might wake up in 2012, and then later wake up in 910 BCE, lamenting the lack of effective modern transport or communications.
– If you enjoyed the immortals from World of Darkness: Immortals, you’ll be happy to find yourself reunited with Blood Bathers, Body Thieves, Eternals, and more, in Mummy 2e, as they act both as antagonists and as potential allies and cultists.
– There are essentially three tiers to your character’s creation, allowing for a lot of character variety: your guild, your decree, and your Judge (being like an alien deific entity).
– In this edition, we provide tools for your journey and trials through Duat, the Land of the Dead, so the game doesn’t end when you sleep. You can even bring others with you on your journey.
– Sekhem Sorcerers are presented in this book, expanding on how they appeared in Dark Eras Companion. Again, they might act as antagonists or followers, depending on the group of sorcerers.
– Mummies are not bound to a set appearance or body, and are able to plant their “pillars” in cultists, only to take over their body as their own one receives harm. Therefore, your mummy can theoretically demonstrate any ethnic, cultural, and biological background.
– I’d describe Mummy as the Chronicles of Darkness game best-suited to Dark Eras play, due to its non-linear setup. Even if you don’t want to use the characters or splats presented in a given era from Dark Eras, Dark Eras Companion, or Dark Eras 2, each book presents a host of settings and events with which your mummies can interact.
There you have it, from some fellas that know the material!
Finally, there's often no better way to understand a game than to watch it played! So, here is the first episode of Red Moon Roleplaying‘s actual play of Mummy: The Curse 2nd Edition! Please check it out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AJiyP2UzLSc
READ THE MANUSCRIPT
One last relic that demonstrates the power of this game... all backers are able to read the current completed manuscript, shared over the five Tuesdays of this kickstarter campaign. We've posted the first section, which contains the introduction and the first two chapters. So, if the items above have tempted you to join our cause, know also that you'll be able to read the complete kickstarter preview manuscript before the campaign ends! So, join us and CHECK IT OUT (Update #1).
OH YEAH...
I'm asking you to join in (or, if you're already a backer, I'm asking you to spread the word and recruit more to help us out) not to fund this project, BECAUSE WE'VE ALREADY HIT OUR FUNDING TARGET!!! - Instead, it's time to create even more awesome things for this game! We're currently working on some Stretch Goal Rituals to awaken new rewards and options! Every backer that joins in gets to help us expand the rewards for all!
Hopefully that's given you a bit more information about this game, and you're eager to join us in our campaign! And, if you're already a backer, feel free to share a link to this page with your friends and gaming pals! Let's see how many more rewards we can unwrap!
