I finally finished the player's book and I now feel I have to run a game of this stuff
I have not. Is it good? The premise of being a mummy seemed weird to me the olden days and I never checked it out.
in old Mummy you weren't even really a mummy, you were just some modern-day dead person brought back by Anubis to avenge the whatever. Lame.
New Mummy is super-interesting. It's a really, really interesting roleplaying challenge.
The gist is: you are actually a mummy, but from the lost civilization of Irem from before Egypt. We don't know about them because they were erased from history somehow. Only their mummies survived.
You are a mummy. In life you were a high-ranking artisan or scribe or craftsman in this really martial, death-obsessed bronze age empire, and served so well that you were chosen to keep serving after death. They did a ritual to you, sent your soul to Duat, Egyptian land of the dead, and you faced down a god, one of the Judges of Duat, and came back.
That was six thousand years ago. You've spent most of your time asleep in your tomb since then, and you've forgotten most of your mortal life. A cult has formed around you, moving your body around and keeping your tomb save from desecrators (or moving it to new places, like America). You can spend merits to pimp out your tomb or have a really powerful, extensive cult. Maybe your cult is now a corporation or a New Age religion.
Every so often, you wake up. Sometimes it's because someone's stealing from your tomb, but usually it's because the Judges of Duat have appointed you some kind of mysterious task - recovering a lost artifact, performing some kind of ritual on their behalf, or whatever. When you wake up, you are super-buff with crazy mummy power. You can do all sorts of insane things, like create sandstorms or tsunami, start 6.0 earthquakes, or call down meteors from the sky to obliterate anything in a mile radius...as a starting character. BUT that power fades quickly, and it fades even more quickly if you don't pursue the task you've been set by the Judges. When it fades to 0, you go back to sleep. But the shitty thing is that you're in a new world that makes no sense to you and you also have no memory, or your memory is unreliable. Bits of it slowly come back, but only as your strength drops, so you're not fully "yourself" until you're almost this wizened corpse again.
So you're basically the dude from Memento but with superpowers. You have this cosmic job that you're doing on behalf of sorcerer-lords you barely remember and you have to figure out what it is and how to do it with almost no help except from a bunch of crazy fez-wearing cultists you've never even met, and the clock is ticking, and if you take too long you have to start all over. And you're not sure how many times you've been through it before. Maybe the dude you're working with now was your hated arch-enemy in Victorian London. Maybe this girl on your team was your mummy bride, or your daughter. Who knows? It makes things awkwardinteresting.
Unlike a lot of WW games, though, the mysteries in Mummy have an in-game answer. There is actually a separate Storyteller section to the book that explains what's really going down, and the idea is that a player's experience will be of slowly peeling through the layers to the truth.
Mechanically, it supports playing as a team of mummies (in classic White Wolf fashion), but also a single mummy and his mortal cult, or mortals caught up in the Mummy story, or whatever. Since it's about memory, there's also a lot of support for playing through flashbacks and recovered memories and whatnot.
Creating a Mummy is more impressionistic because it's explicitly called out in the game rules that while the player decides his guy's appearance, general tenor, and the outline of his background, the rest is there to be filled in by the GM and it's expected that there will be surprises. It's a more collaborative process.
It's not something I would bring to just any table - it requires a lot of trust between GM and player - but i think the stories you could tell would be fantastic. You could have campaigns spanning hundreds and hundreds of years, with the PCs reconfiguring themselves each time.
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in old Mummy you weren't even really a mummy, you were just some modern-day dead person brought back by Anubis to avenge the whatever. Lame.
New Mummy is super-interesting. It's a really, really interesting roleplaying challenge.
The gist is: you are actually a mummy, but from the lost civilization of Irem from before Egypt. We don't know about them because they were erased from history somehow. Only their mummies survived.
You are a mummy. In life you were a high-ranking artisan or scribe or craftsman in this really martial, death-obsessed bronze age empire, and served so well that you were chosen to keep serving after death. They did a ritual to you, sent your soul to Duat, Egyptian land of the dead, and you faced down a god, one of the Judges of Duat, and came back.
That was six thousand years ago. You've spent most of your time asleep in your tomb since then, and you've forgotten most of your mortal life. A cult has formed around you, moving your body around and keeping your tomb save from desecrators (or moving it to new places, like America). You can spend merits to pimp out your tomb or have a really powerful, extensive cult. Maybe your cult is now a corporation or a New Age religion.
Every so often, you wake up. Sometimes it's because someone's stealing from your tomb, but usually it's because the Judges of Duat have appointed you some kind of mysterious task - recovering a lost artifact, performing some kind of ritual on their behalf, or whatever. When you wake up, you are super-buff with crazy mummy power. You can do all sorts of insane things, like create sandstorms or tsunami, start 6.0 earthquakes, or call down meteors from the sky to obliterate anything in a mile radius...as a starting character. BUT that power fades quickly, and it fades even more quickly if you don't pursue the task you've been set by the Judges. When it fades to 0, you go back to sleep. But the shitty thing is that you're in a new world that makes no sense to you and you also have no memory, or your memory is unreliable. Bits of it slowly come back, but only as your strength drops, so you're not fully "yourself" until you're almost this wizened corpse again.
So you're basically the dude from Memento but with superpowers. You have this cosmic job that you're doing on behalf of sorcerer-lords you barely remember and you have to figure out what it is and how to do it with almost no help except from a bunch of crazy fez-wearing cultists you've never even met, and the clock is ticking, and if you take too long you have to start all over. And you're not sure how many times you've been through it before. Maybe the dude you're working with now was your hated arch-enemy in Victorian London. Maybe this girl on your team was your mummy bride, or your daughter. Who knows? It makes things awkwardinteresting.
Unlike a lot of WW games, though, the mysteries in Mummy have an in-game answer. There is actually a separate Storyteller section to the book that explains what's really going down, and the idea is that a player's experience will be of slowly peeling through the layers to the truth.
Mechanically, it supports playing as a team of mummies (in classic White Wolf fashion), but also a single mummy and his mortal cult, or mortals caught up in the Mummy story, or whatever. Since it's about memory, there's also a lot of support for playing through flashbacks and recovered memories and whatnot.
Creating a Mummy is more impressionistic because it's explicitly called out in the game rules that while the player decides his guy's appearance, general tenor, and the outline of his background, the rest is there to be filled in by the GM and it's expected that there will be surprises. It's a more collaborative process.
It's not something I would bring to just any table - it requires a lot of trust between GM and player - but i think the stories you could tell would be fantastic. You could have campaigns spanning hundreds and hundreds of years, with the PCs reconfiguring themselves each time.