A video of this review is available here.


Greetings from Irem, City of Pillars, they have a nice karaoke bar here.

This week we are reviewing Mummy the Curse – a book that came out some months ago and it is time to get this review of the Curse wrapped up.
The Curse is, as of this review, the newest game from Onyx Path – formally, White Wolf Publishing until the company reinvented itself out of necessity recently. The Curse is part of the new World of Darkness, or the revised setting that includes Vampire the Requiem and Mage the Awakening, among others. The Curse is also among a series of books and expansions for the setting that have a limited run, including Changeling the Dreaming and Prometheus the Created.

We will get to the art of the book in a moment. The layout, composition and design of the work are all solid – with clear sections for players and storytellers – and the PDF is full of wonderful bookmarks, hyperlinks and is searchable. Kudos. The book is further well executed in that it provides everything you need to play... well everything except dice, as it provides rules, systems, philosophy, antagonists, allies and story possibilities.

In the Curse, the story is about mummies – and while the game takes much of its inspiration from popular culture mummies, it makes significant departures.

For example, while these mummies do arise from Egypt geographically speaking, they are 6,000 years old and come from a long lost city-state predating the conventional understanding of Egypt. That long-lost city-state was Irem.

The five guilds that created and ran Irem and its empire created the mummies and the mummies serve 42 severe judges of the underworld – the grim and hungry Judges of Duat. Each of the mummies of Irem endured their own mortal death, horrific journeys through the underworld and after a fashion, struck a deal with one of those 42 judges and now spends most of their undead existence pursuing objectives and goals determined by a judge and their deal with a judge.

These mummies usually spend their existence in a state of death and are active under three situations;
•   First, some schmuck has broken into the mummy's tomb and stolen shinny things, which rouses the mummy into a frenzy of vengeance,
•   Second, mummies assemble cults to serve them and sometimes this cult awakens the mummy to some task,
•   Third, there is the Sothic Turn where the mummies awake every 1,400 years and one such turn occurs in 2013. Even during a Sothic Turn mummies are likely to be monomaniacal about something, probably pursuing the deal they made with that Judge of Duat 6,000 years ago.

Though never used in the book, Mummy the Curse is in many ways about the term agency. Agency here refers to the sociological or philosophical term, not the Hollywood term. Specifically, it refers to the ability of a character to make decisions, for humans to make decisions for themselves and this includes moral and ethical decisions.

To put it another way, consider robots in popular culture. Many of them seek to be more human, which is simply another way of saying they seek greater agency, greater capacity for decision-making and thus greater moral possibility. The mummies in this game were humans who became something much like a robot, surrendering much of their capacity for agency in exchange for a kind of immortality. If roused by a violation of their tomb, they must follow their programming and seek horrible vengeance. If roused to action by their cult, they must follow their programming and fulfill their obligations to the cult of personality they created. During the waking caused by the Sothic Turn they are at their freest, but even then they feel they should, rather than must, assiduously follow programming first installed by inhuman supernatural entities back when bronze was innovative technology.

The Curse pursues this dynamic by exploring memory, namely how memory is involved in identity and how both may conflict with a mummy's programming. The mummy might be active but their memory files are corrupted. The game also involves the supernatural energy that powers mummy, the relationship of a mummy to their cult and how all of this crashes into the modern World of Darkness with its technology and ways that are strange to a pre- Pharaohic Egyptian.

It is worth stressing the fact mummies might geographically come from Egypt but they are not Egyptian in the sense they are not products of the Egypt of the Pharaohs. They come from a lost world predating the Egypt of Hollywood movies and National Geographic Specials. The text of the Curse is good at conveying the eldritch quality of their origins and thus how they are not quite "Egyptian."

Unfortunately, most of the art and composition of the book does not match this tone of the text, as the graphic design, page boarders and most of the art are strictly the Egypt of Hollywood movies and National Geographic Specials. The art of Christopher Shy is a good exception to this rule, as it is suitably surreal and menacing. However, while the rest of the art is technically proficient, it does not match the eldritch Egypt of the text.

The Curse runs counter to many of World of Darkness games in that the characters start with a great deal of mystic power, their own cult of personality and possibly with considerable riches. To refer again to the robot analogy, when they first awaken the batteries of the mummy are fully recharged, they have their own tech support staff at hand and they are ready to take on the world – assuming this is within the scope of their programming. With time, the mummy's mystic power – or sekhem – depletes. It goes down quickest when the mummy goes beyond the perimeters of their programming.

The Storytelling system also employs a universal morality system... called morality. It runs from scores of 1 to 10, with low scores indicating characters are capable of depraved things such as wanton murder, torture for sport or even running around dressed like a mime. High scores indicate the kind of almost obstinate determination to get things right found among Catholic Saints and those people who actually make an NGO work as described.

Mummy the Curse runs into problems here because it links morality with memory – and the memory links to identify and thus agency. The ability of a mummy to remember varies, as 6,000 years is a lot to recall. However, it is a mistake to link memory and morality because memory is about knowing oneself and morality is about being righteous – those are not the same thing. Separating these qualities, rather than linking them, would have better served this game.

Mummy the Curse is a dense game, more the movie "A.I." than the movie "Terminator." This is not a bad thing, but it does mean it not a game for people new to RPGs or who prefer murder spree games like D&D to games of self-analysis.

In the end, I give Mummy the Curse a 15 on a d20 roll. Detractions are the art, though well executed, does not match the text well and the problem of memory and morality being the same thing. However, the game knows what it is and for the succeeds at its objectives, or depicting the humans who became monsters ages ago and their quests to fulfill their obligations and deal with bitter personal struggles along the way as they stride across the ages.