Mummy: The Curse
Oct. 30th, 2013 09:01 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chuckroBefore recorded history, the middle east was the seat of an empire called Irem, ruled by the mighty sorcerer-priests of Duat. Though they themselves forwent immortality, they had their servants undergo the Rite of Rebirth so they could enact their will through the coming ages. These servants awake once an age, brimming with occult power but shackled to the whims of the Judges of Duat. They are the Arisen.
Mummies are the unquestioned badasses of the NWoD, apparently. The book even refers to them as “gods”, or at least “godlike”. Every time they wake from death, their power trait (Sekhem) jumps to 10, and they have powers that let them boost their stats to incredible levels right away. They get innate powers that are each on par with what some other supernatural characters start with…and every mummy gets three of them. (They’re the Druids of the system: “I have class features that are stronger than your entire class.”) Most mummies have cults, some very long-lived and far-reaching ones. They also tend to have tombs, places where their powers are stronger and curses and traps threaten intruders even when they’re out (or dead). Oh, and they’re effectively unkillable: Not only does it take a lot for them to actually die, but a) they’ll revive if their body is at all intact; b) they’ll revive at the canopic jars containing their major organs if it isn’t; c) they’ll occupy a new body somewhere untraceable if you destroy all of that.
Their trade-off is that they are absolutely fate’s bitches, and their memories are terrible. Memory is actually their Morality meter, which starts very low and is critical to recharging many of their powers, and figuring out what the hell they’re supposed to be doing—because they might be fate’s bitches, but that doesn’t mean they get any useful instructions. They get a vague sense of a goal, and if they deviate from it, their awesome powers degenerate even faster than usual. (But even if they do follow it, Sekhem always degenerates as long as they're awake. Incredible power never lasts.)
This creates difficulties of doing multi-mummy campaigns, of course, because mummies wake up super-strong and with a major goal, either complete it or run ragged until they fail, then go back to the sleep of death and stay down for a while either way. You could never make a campaign of six mummies work, and even three would be tricky (as the storyteller’s section of the book notes). They give a bunch of suggestions for rotating through whose mummy is awake while the rest of the party is mortals or other supernaturals, and the ways this can work.
They were obviously trying to shake up the NWoD systems and setups for both this and the God-Machine Chronicle, which were the first major new publications by the Onyx Path group. In this case, the utter badassery of mummies and their different approach to morality is the shakeup. Most characters with a power trait of 10 are nigh-unplayable gods; mummies are specifically designed to give you a taste of that every time you revive.
Overall: I think these guys would make great NPCs or a single character in a crossover campaign, and there are a lot of mysteries you can hold over the players’ heads to mess with them. Totally my cup of tea.
Mummies are the unquestioned badasses of the NWoD, apparently. The book even refers to them as “gods”, or at least “godlike”. Every time they wake from death, their power trait (Sekhem) jumps to 10, and they have powers that let them boost their stats to incredible levels right away. They get innate powers that are each on par with what some other supernatural characters start with…and every mummy gets three of them. (They’re the Druids of the system: “I have class features that are stronger than your entire class.”) Most mummies have cults, some very long-lived and far-reaching ones. They also tend to have tombs, places where their powers are stronger and curses and traps threaten intruders even when they’re out (or dead). Oh, and they’re effectively unkillable: Not only does it take a lot for them to actually die, but a) they’ll revive if their body is at all intact; b) they’ll revive at the canopic jars containing their major organs if it isn’t; c) they’ll occupy a new body somewhere untraceable if you destroy all of that.
Their trade-off is that they are absolutely fate’s bitches, and their memories are terrible. Memory is actually their Morality meter, which starts very low and is critical to recharging many of their powers, and figuring out what the hell they’re supposed to be doing—because they might be fate’s bitches, but that doesn’t mean they get any useful instructions. They get a vague sense of a goal, and if they deviate from it, their awesome powers degenerate even faster than usual. (But even if they do follow it, Sekhem always degenerates as long as they're awake. Incredible power never lasts.)
This creates difficulties of doing multi-mummy campaigns, of course, because mummies wake up super-strong and with a major goal, either complete it or run ragged until they fail, then go back to the sleep of death and stay down for a while either way. You could never make a campaign of six mummies work, and even three would be tricky (as the storyteller’s section of the book notes). They give a bunch of suggestions for rotating through whose mummy is awake while the rest of the party is mortals or other supernaturals, and the ways this can work.
They were obviously trying to shake up the NWoD systems and setups for both this and the God-Machine Chronicle, which were the first major new publications by the Onyx Path group. In this case, the utter badassery of mummies and their different approach to morality is the shakeup. Most characters with a power trait of 10 are nigh-unplayable gods; mummies are specifically designed to give you a taste of that every time you revive.
Overall: I think these guys would make great NPCs or a single character in a crossover campaign, and there are a lot of mysteries you can hold over the players’ heads to mess with them. Totally my cup of tea.
