[OSSR][Call of Cthulhu]The Cairo Guidebook

[Ancient History]

I told you last time we were going to go through the various Call of Cthulhu African books, and this time we're going after the granddaddy of them all: The Cairo Guidebook, published in 1995.



Okay, during the 1920s...Egypt was basically a British protectorate, Egyptology was a major craze, especially with the finding of Tutankhamun's tomb, and affected everything from architecture and fashion to the occult and films.



Archaeology proper was in its infancy, and the idea of Ancient Egypt still had a huge amount of mystique. Frank and I talked about this a bit in World of Darkness: Mummy, but it's important to understand that Egypt has had the reputation of an old civilization for a long time - when the Greek and Roman civilizations rose, they looked on the Egyptians as an ancient civilization, full of powerful magic and strange gods. A significant chunk of the Old Testament is set in Egypt! Egypt has been a symbol of mystery, power, and oldness for centuries in the Western European context.



Of course, nowadays ancient Egypt is just one more Bronze Age civilization among many. But in the 1920s, Egypt still had its mystique, and Lovecraft and his contemporaries borrowed liberally from it in creating the Cthulhu Mythos, making half-assed allusions to Egyptian mythology in stories like "Imprisoned with the Pharaohs" and "The Brood of Bubastis," and with evocative quasi-Egyptian names like Nyarlathotep.



One of the major issues that you would think would confront any game designer is trying to connive a way to make the Mythos version of ancient Egypt work with what several decades of dedicated archaeological research has revealed - real No-Prize territory, but you'd think it would be a natural approach.

And you would be wrong!

You would also think that maybe they would take the opportunity to at least work together disparate references to Egypt that had already been made in various Chaosium products.

And you would also be wrong!

Instead, you have to remember that this is a product produced in 1995 that could honestly have been published in 1983. It's basically a book for playing Raiders of the Lost Ark with Call of Cthulhu. And this is about a single city, Cairo, because back then Chaosium did not do "region" or "country" guidebooks - indeed, apparently did not even consider such a thing until after the monograph Mysteries of Morocco came out.

So, this is a...very Chaosium sourcebook. I mean, by '95 standards, when White Wolf was starting to put out its splatbook avalanche and Shadowrun was putting out things like the Elf books, this thing looks positively primitive.



One more little thing before we get into the book itself - we're addressing the Cairo Guidebook because Egypt is, for many people still their introduction to Africa as a place. They understand that it is a part of Africa, but it also has a very long and involved history with European history, so it isn't usually treated quite the same as other parts of Africa. Egypt is, indeed, often seen as the gateway to Africa. Because it's more acceptable to talk about Egypt as an ancient civilization, whereas for most of the rest of the continent people's idea of its history is...sketchy.



We don't teach African history in schools. You may or may not have heard of "Great Zimbabwe," or remember there was an empire of Mali ruled by Mansa Musa because he appeared in Sid Meier's Civilization games. A few might remember that Carthage was in North Africa, ancient Ethiopia in the East, and Shaka Zulu in South Africa, but for most people - even to this day - the idea of Egypt having a civilization that reaches back thousands of years isn't one they're used to. They are, instead, used to thinking of Africa full of primitive tribes, being enslaved and enslaving others, but not really progressing socially or technologically.

This is a popular view. And it is wrong. African history is as huge and diverse and complicated as the continent itself, and because few of the societies had writing or elaborate ruins that survived, still mostly unknown to us. Imagine how much more mysterious and stereotyped it was in the 1920s.


Yes, that is Shirley Temple

So when 1990s Chaosium is doing 1920s Cairo, what you're really looking at is someone from the 90s trying to show you the most civilized part of Africa.


You can't see it very well, but there's a portrait of author Marion Anderson on the back cover.

[Ancient History]

Okay, so this book is technically like 106 pages, but the last couple of pages are literally a catalog of Chaosium products, complete with mail-in order form and an advertisement for Wizard's Attic. So really this is 101 pages, and that's counting the Index.

RPGs were downright incestuous during the 90s, and if you need any evidence look at the credits box:

Special thanks to Chris Williams of R. Talsorian Games, Inc. for researching the Arabic proverbs, and for allowing use of his work in this book.

I'm not entirely sure what this means, but given that Williams is credited on some Dreamlands stuff it could mean anything from "I'm borrowing material from your home campaign" to "thanks for the maps" (which are rather nice in this product, and completely uncredited.)

Foreword

Cairo and Egypt are very much a part of international life and fossip in the 1920's. Few people are unaffected by the romance and glamour attached to the ancient pharaohs of Egypt.

This is a one-page sell-sheet on Cairo as a historical 1920s location, hitting every note from Egyptomania to the Arabian Nights; Mythos references are absent, so don't actually expect much in that vein: this is more a simulationist product.

This book is dedicated to my grandfather, who had an office off the Muski, and to my father, who played in the streets of Cairo as a child. I wish I could have been there with them!
- Marion Anderson

Going to Cairo
This is 11 pages of getting to Cairo, and basically sets the tone and format for the book. It really is laid out like a 1980s product - the only difference between this and Green and Pleasant Land is the size of the paper, in most respects. So, there's no difference between "in game" and "out of game" voice; this isn't a product designed to look like a document your Investigator might actually have on their person, or read in a library. References to the Mythos, game stats, and other Chaosium products just crop up in the main text, like the suggestion of getting to Cairo on the Simplon-Orient Express and thus tying it in with the infamous Horror on the Orient Express campaign.


Which has bloated considerably with age.

It discusses the native Arabic tourguides (the dragomans), with a sample NPC; talks about Egypt's heat, climates, exchange rates; and then gives a brief rundown of Alexandria (because you have to get to Cairo somehow, and Alexandria is a main port). Anderson covers in very bare detail some of the specifics of what's available in the city as far as accommodations, transportation, booksellers, libraries, shops, and banks, then goes into sites of interest, ancient and modern...and when I say "brief and dry," I mean, "Shadowrun 1st/2nd edition without comments."

Libraries
British Book CLub (5 Rue Adib), 9:000 a.m. until 1:00 p.m. daily.

Sites of interest get a bit more verbiage, for history if nothing else, and each also gets a shaded grey box with a "Scenario Hook." These are, generously speaking, not terribly useful. The first scenario hook, for example reads in toto:

Scenario Hook: These passages have never been fully excavated or explored.

...this is in reference to some subterranean passages found near Pompey's Pillar. This is also where 90% of the actual Mythos references are placed, although sometimes I think Anderson forgets precisely which game she's playing. For example, the hook for the Mosque of the Prophet Daniel reads:

Scenario Hook: The investigators' dragoman says that the body of Alexander still lies ina glass sarcophagus beneath the mosque. He insists it's true; his grandfather--a dragoman for the Russian consulate in 1850--peered through a hole in a wooden door and there saw a body clad in gold sitting on a throne, with the crown of Alexander on its head, and around its feet were scattered hundreds of papyrus scrolls.

If disturbed, Alexander will preent the scrolls from being taken or read (treat him as a mummy; see Call of Cthulhu 5.1 page 133). These are the forbidden scrolls from the Library, "things man was not meant to know", and they are under his protection. Among them is a scroll of water breathing.

.

Call of Cthulhu, of course, does not have scrolls of water breathing. FFS.

The same page also introduces the Petesouchi, the crocodile people of the Nile, who are traditional enemies of the Deep Ones. They're...not mentioned before this book, not mentioned anywhere after this book, and even within this book they're not really mentioned much; the index says they aren't mentioned again until we get to the bestiary in 75 pages, but that's a lie because there's another reference in a couple pages. To call these a throwaway critter is to damn them with faint praise; these are an afterthought that shouldn't have survived the editing pass.

After Alexandria, we cover Port Said and the Nile Delta - which begins with a nice quote from Lovecraft's "Imprisoned with the Pharaohs" (here given as "Trapped with the Pharoahs.")


My favorite version of this was created by Lance Thingmaker, in honour of Houdini - whom Lovecraft ghostwrote it for. His book was shipped to the reader in a small postal bag locked with a small lock - the key to which was inside the bag. To get the book, then, you had to pick the lock. Clever, eh?

Port Said and the Nile Delta cover all the same stuff again: geography, shops, etc. only in briefer format. The most interesting bit is:

A community of deep ones dwell among the fellahin of the delta. Shunned by most, they are a secretive and closed community. Their houses and villages are crumbling and decayed, and only the most "human" of them make trips to Alexandria for the occasional necessary supplies. They are the sworn enemies of the petesouchi, the crocodile men that dwell in the Fayoum upriver.

This isn't the strangest group of Deep Ones Chaosium has ever created out of whole cloth - but the enmity with the Petesouchi is odd to me, because no reason is ever given for it, and because nobody else ever picked up this book in the next 20+ years, apparently, no-one else has ever done anything with the Petesouchi, even when they needed crocodile-men or used crocodile-related Mythos cults and magic, like the Brotherhood of Sebek in Achtung! Cthulhu. And this represents one of the greatest frustrations with Chaosium's lack of coherent line development: they could have made some really cool connections and built a coherent, more interesting background for Keepers and Investigators to play in. Instead, it's the disconnected scribblings of ten dozen fans.

Anyway, the chapter finishes up with a blitz though the history of British control of Egypt in the 1920s. The chapter ends with this:

Scenario Hook: Political unrest and cultist activities make a deadly brew. The consequences of one secret agenda after another, layer upon layer, may be far from the kind of horror the investigators expect, but it could well be more deadly and sanity-eroding!

That is not a goddamn scenario hook. That is barely even a high level concept. You haven't even introduced any goddamn cults yet, just some random crocodile-people! Goddamn it.

Next up: Welcome! (to Cairo, it doesn't say).

[Ancient History]

The Spanish got a much better cover.

Welcome!
The title of this chapter is literally just "Welcome." Not "Welcome to Cairo," or "Welcome to Egypt," or "Welcome to the Beginning of the Rest of Your Life," just...Welcome!

Anyway, this is Generic RPG City Descriptor c.1990s. I'm not sure who started it or why, but it is generally recognizable across multiple game lines, and is basically identical format whether you're talking about AD&D or Shadowrun or World of Darkness or Call of Cthulhu. If somebody told me this was based on travel guides like the Fodor's Guides, I would believe them.

So, Welcome! covers the cost of living in Cairo and internal city transportation, a completely inadequate map, a generic welcome letter for tourists (this was apparently a real thing issued by the British High Commissioner), and pity descriptions of the local hotels, sometimes beefed out with half-assed "Scenario Hooks." Investigators on a budget can bed down at the Y.M.C.A. (men only) or the Y.W.C.A. (women only).

No word on the YMJA.

And then...we're on to the next section. No really, that's it, four pages of hotels and tramways. The only Cthulhu reference is a throwaway scenario hook involving the Children of the Sphinx cult.

The Sights of the City
The last chapter covered hotels and transportation, this covers...restaurants, theaters, private clubs, and scientific societies (don't get your hopes up, none of them are Mythos-related) before delving into Medieval Cairo.

This is not actually about Cairo during the Medieval period, but about surviving ancient buildings - the old town, basically. There's a couple wince-worthy moments when discussing the local color, including the word "Mohammedan," which you realy don't see very often these days.

Women in the strrets are usually covered from head to toe, their faces invisible behind opaque veils. The wealthy are accompanied by large bodyguards; the poor travel in groups for protection from infidels. Unescorted and unveiled women in the street are often spat upon by the faithful; in the company of men, unveiled women may hear themselves called "whore."

Something made it inevitable.

There is a brief section on the smells of the city, which includes such bizarre lines as "The smell of the tanning agents enhances the colors of the hides in the leather-workers' bazaar." Beware the dangerous smells!

Then we go into the various bazaars...the most interesting of which from a Call of Cthulhu perspective is the Bazaar of the Booksellers and the Gun-Makers' Bazaar (I don't know why for the latter, because you'd have to buy like three separate supplements to get a good selection of period weapons to choose from, none of which work on shoggoths.) Mythos references are somewhere between rudimentary and missing. For example, in the selection of NPCs one scenario hook reads:

A successful Mythos roll clearly identifies this as a deep one (Sanity loss: 0/1). This may lead to a whole stream of adventure in and around Alexandria!

Except we're in Cairo, bitch!

There is also...and I love this...a homebrew "Quick Generation of Market Stalls" table straight out of some D&D campaign. It involves 4d10 and a d% roll, my favorite part of which reads:

Stall is run by (roll d10): 1 Mustafa 2 Seleem 3 Hakim 4 Ali 5 Muhammed 6 Rashid 7 Ahmed 8 Giuseppe 9 Iannous 10 Joseph

If I actually used this, those ten guys would always be the same whenever they came up. So whenever you came across a stall run by Hakim, whether it was selling tobacco or cooking pots or ancient books, it would always be the same Hakim. Welcome my friends, welcome!

The "Personalities" section is sortof like "half-assed NPCs" in that they give detailed descriptions and even some useful plot hooks (one of the booksellers has a "well worn and fragile fragment of a copy of Al-Azif", which is an honest-to-goodness plot hook, not bullshit masquerading as one), but no stats. This is bizarre, because Anderson was fine with statting out porters and shit for the hotels last section.

Then there's a couple pages on the Citadel of Cairo...the most interesting part of which is not about the Citadel at all, but a scenario hook about one of the booksellers who is selling copies of a piece of Arabic calligraphy which...

The manuscript is a fragment of the original Al-Azif brought to Cairo from Damascus by Saladin.E ach time it is copied, the spell on the page causes a dead relative of the copyist to come back to life. The power required to perform this is drawn from the child copying the manuscript, and he becomes "ill." Soon it will be noticed that the dead are beginning to walk the streets of Cairo once more. Destruction of the original manuscript and all copies will reverse the effects of the spell.

This is classic Call of Cthulhu half-assedness. No mention of what the spell actually is (are we talking Resurrection or Create Zombie? I want to know before putting a bullet through grandma's undead brainpan.) or what the mechanics for it are. This is a book where not only is the main Call of Cthulhu rulebook optional, but apparently is being actively avoided. Indeed, so far this book is so generic you might pick it up for any 1920s game involving Cairo with no significant fantasy or supernatural elements. All...two of them.

Then we get a rundown of some important mosques and then on to "Old Cairo," which is an excuse to talk about some of the older (pre-medieval) parts of the city and the Nilometer.


Not quite what you might expect.

The most bizarre moment in "Old Cairo" comes from a scenario hook suggesting that "the Coptic Christian god" is different from...God. I can only presume that was an error, but I think we've established the editorial touch on this book is almost nonexistent.

Then we get to the museums of Cairo - including several pages on and a map of the Egyptian Museum, which has a stash of Mythos artifacts in its collection...which you don't have access to.



Call of Cthulhu has never been consistent in its language skills, so when a scenario calls out of "appropriate language skills (Ancient Egypt") I don't know if that means Other Languages: Ancient Egyptian, or Other Language: Egyptian Hieroglyphs, or...what.

I will say, at least in the Egyptian Museum Call of Cthulhu references are at least reasonably intelligent, prominent, used in the main text, and prolific - Anderson clearly expects the PCs to spend some time here, and even includes a fully-statted out NPC. By which I mean, of course, his stats are hopelessly inadequate and incomplete, but he's an Austrian who has German 80%, and that's about the best you can hope for.


I feel a sidebar on the German Archaeological Institute would not have been out of place.

Other museums are given short shrift, and then we're on to more mosques, which leads naturally into a section entitled Mohammedanism, which is enough to make me wince. it's actually not a terrible summary of Islam, it's just some of the language that seems on the "that's not cool" side of "shit your grandpa would say." Other than that, Anderson seems to be striving for NPOV.

Women in El-Islam
Mohammedanism is an all-embracing, but mainly masculine, faith. The mosques are open only to men, women are considered to be the property of men, and many laws are state in ways that make it difficult for women to take a man to court. In order to accuse a man of rape, a woman must have three male witnesses to the act willing to testify on her behalf. A woman cannot divorce her husband, but a husband can easily divorce his wife merely by stating that she is divorced. A divorced woman, like a raped woman, is considered unfit to marry. Multiple wives are still the norm in the 1920's for most wealthy Mohammedan men. Women must travel veiled from head to foot at all times, and must be escorted by a man when outside the house. Many Mohammedan women, however, wield great power within the household, controlling all monetary affairs and raising the children.

I would also like to congratulate Anderson on addressing Islam without feeling the need to tie it directly to the Mythos in any fashion, which is something that not everybody can manage to resist doing.

The next section covers hospitals and asylums, and the section after that a rather larger one on coffee shops.

The term "coffee shop" is a misnomer, as both coffee and tea are serve here, along with a wide variety of other drinks.

My favorite bit of which is:

Many cafes also offer alcoholic drinks. These are frowned upon by some of the more orthodox Mohammedan sects, but alcohol is widely available. Most Egyptians only drink enough to get happily drunk; few get violent. Home-made brandy served on the rocks is the most popular drink; it varies considerably in alcohol content from qawha to qawha. The ice serves to cool the brandy, and the brandy kills most of the bacteria frozen into the ice (usually made from whatever water is in the pipes), but even so, strangers often come down with severe dysentery after a couple of shots.

Nothing puts the brakes on a campaign faster than an investigator suffering from dysentery.

The section also includes a small random gambling chart. There is a 1d10 * 1d4 chance they are playing poker, and the champion gamblers only have an 80% chance of Gambling skill. I don't even know what that means in game context, and I'm too lazy to look it up.

The next section is Universities, especially Al-Azhar University and the American University in Cairo - fewer mythos references than you might expect.

Apropos of absolutely fucking nothing, we're given stats for a handful of Egyptian animals (dromedary camel, Nile hippopotamus, hyena, and jackal), which are apparently being stolen from the Cairo Zoological Gardens by the Children of the Sphinx cult and beheaded in a plot to reincarnate the animal-headed ancient Egyptian gods. Mythos magic doesn't work that way, but as we've established before Mythos magic is mostly whatever the Keeper wants it to be and is therefore completely random.

After a description of the Camel Market & Racetrack..

A male camel in "must" (in heat) is a strange and terrifying sight. A special pouch under his tongue inflates with his breath, and this monstrously swollen and bulbous tongue wobbles out of the corner of his mouth. In addition he secretes an incredibly sticky, foul-smelling, thick white saliva that bubbles and oozes out of his mouth and spatters on anyone or anything nearby. While in must a camel in uncontrollable, and makes an unusual wobbling hooting cry. He will mount any female camels nearby, and fights break out between rival males for the females. They are totally oblivious of any unfortunate humans caught between them and their intended targets.

I think a Call of Cthulhu book finally cost me Sanity points.

The next-to-last major section in this chapter are the Cemeteries of Cairo, which includes a decent (but not exceptional) readings on ghouls and tomb-robbing (apparently there's a thriving market for fresh human remains). The last section is The Darker Side of Cairo, which might also be called the fun side of Cairo, since it involves fewer mad humping camels and dysentery and more articles on theft, drugs, and prostitution ("Foreign women, mainly from other Mediterranean countries, are attracted by the profits to be made.") The scenario ideas in this section vary from the silly ("A woman in the suburb of Kahlifa sells large quantities of powdered heroin; she cuts it with the ground up skulls of mamluks taken from the nearby cemetery" - this lady has a terrible business model and retarded customers if they can't notice the bits of bone in their heroin.) to the actually offensive:

The "King of the Wasa", a huge fat Nubian who controls most of the organized prostitution and drug trade in Cairo, can be found each day sitting outside one of his palatial houses in the Sharia Abd el-Khaliq. He sits cross-legged on a bench, dressed as a woman, and veiled with the finest white silks. The ebony idol is worshiped by those he employs, who flock around him like wasps around a honey jar. [...] He controls and supplies the white slave trade, and provides cults with young white women for sacrificial rites. The police have tried to stop him but have yet to succeed; many of the top judges are in his debt.

Big Fatso is offended.

Next up...Excursions form Cairo! Or, "Why You Went To Cairo In The First Place, Probably"

[Blicero]

Does Call of Cthulhu have good rules for dysentery?

[Longes]

The section also includes a small random gambling chart. There is a 1d10 * 1d4 chance they are playing poker, and the champion gamblers only have an 80% chance of Gambling skill. I don't even know what that means in game context, and I'm too lazy to look it up.

If I'm not mistaken, it means Cairo's back room poker champions are world class "Only 2 other people like that exist" poker players who win a game 80% of the time. Unless they are playing against someone with a poker skill in which case the contested roll table comes out and everything becomes full of fuck (but they still probably win).

[Red_Rob]

If I'm not mistaken, it means Cairo's back room poker champions are world class "Only 2 other people like that exist" poker players who win a game 80% of the time. Unless they are playing against someone with a poker skill in which case the contested roll table comes out and everything becomes full of fuck (but they still probably win).

It can't work like that. Think about the ramifications, if a player with Gambling 80% wins a game 80% of the time against someone with no gambling skill at all, what about a player with 30%? Do they only win 30% of the time, i.e. they are worse than someone with no skill at all? On the flip side you would imagine two unskilled players would each have a 50% chance of winning. So does an 80% gambling skill mean you win 80% more than usual, i.e. against an unskilled opponent your 50% rises to 90%? What about games with multiple players? What about if they all have gambling skill?

For a rules junkie the true horror of CoC has nothing to do with the mythos...

[Occluded Sun]

No, it means 20% of the people you'd find in a Cairo gambling den know nothing whatsoever about gambling and probably don't know how to evaluate probabilities or take part in any games of skill, because they don't know how those games work.

[Longes]

If I'm not mistaken, it means Cairo's back room poker champions are world class "Only 2 other people like that exist" poker players who win a game 80% of the time. Unless they are playing against someone with a poker skill in which case the contested roll table comes out and everything becomes full of fuck (but they still probably win).

It can't work like that. Think about the ramifications, if a player with Gambling 80% wins a game 80% of the time against someone with no gambling skill at all, what about a player with 30%? Do they only win 30% of the time, i.e. they are worse than someone with no skill at all? On the flip side you would imagine two unskilled players would each have a 50% chance of winning. So does an 80% gambling skill mean you win 80% more than usual, i.e. against an unskilled opponent your 50% rises to 90%? What about games with multiple players? What about if they all have gambling skill?

For a rules junkie the true horror of CoC has nothing to do with the mythos...

Well, since you asked.
The rules for contested skill rolls don't exist, so if the Gambling 80% character is a PC then he wins any game 80% of the time, whether he plays World Poker Tour finals or pub in Cairo. If the Gambling 80% character is a NPC, then his skill means fuck all because PC is the one rolling the Gambling check.

Two common house rules exist:

• * Both sides roll, the one who rolled lowest wins. Gambling 80% means fuck all.
  * You divide both skills by 5 and use the resistance table. As the Gambling 80% guy is the defender, he automatically wins against people with skill of 30% or less, and has a decreasing by 5% chance to lose as his opponent's skill increases (by 5%).

[schpeelah]

Doesn't CoC have that giant crazy table where you cross-reference your and your opponent's numbers to get your target number?

[Longes]

Doesn't CoC have that giant crazy table where you cross-reference your and your opponent's numbers to get your target number?

It does. The resistance table. But it's only for attribute checks.

[Ancient History]

Does Call of Cthulhu have good rules for dysentery?

No it does not. In fact, it has no rules for dysentery. It also does not have a Gambling skill. Call of Cthulhu is a game of the mind, where if a rule does not exist, you probably imagined it...or it's buried in a RuneQuest supplement.

Excursions from Cairo
Aside from the libraries, museums, and souks, the main point of Cairo is...to go other places, apparently. Namely, Giza! And in these pages we get the low-down on the pyramids.



Lovecraft's only real reference to the pyramids was "Imprisoned with the Pharaohs," which was ghost-written for Harry Houdini. Lovecraft actually lost the first version of the story in a New York taxi, and he and his wife spent their honeymoon night re-typing the goddamn thing. So in a very real way, Lovecraft was cockblocked by Houdini.

This section is pretty dry and factual when talking about the pyramids and the Sphinx. Lovecraft, following Houdini's loose draft, suggested horrible rites take place in underground chambers far beneath the sands...which might actually exist, although HPL would be just as surprised as the rest of us, because he thought Houdini was feeding him a line of shit about getting kidnapped by cultists in Egypt.

Then there's some information for traveling up the Nile (i.e. south), to Tel el-Amarna, the city of the heretic Akhenaten, and various tombs to the north and south. This gives space to the single most extensive "scenario hook" in the book...really, just an excuse to actually cram some Mythos into it - claiming that Akhenaten uncovered the tomb of the Nephren-Ka, who caused him to convert to the worship of Azathoth as Aten. Then people unwisely disturb Nephren-Ka's tomb-labyrinth or something and a bunch of Arab workers die and resurrect the Black Pharaoh, Nyarlathotep.

I want to give props for effort, but from a strictly canonical viewpoint this is wrong - Nephren-Ka is the Black Pharaoh - and of course this ignores all versions of both Nephren-Ka and the Black Pharaoh referenced before, and in itself is ignored by all subsequent products.


Although it does appear to have inspired one metal album.

After a brief pit-stop to talk about some sand dwellers in the western desert, the tour continues on to Luxor and Karnak. The only real item of note is a hidden spell carved on a temple wall in a sacred lake - effectively, "Contact Azathoth." Which is the most convoluted player reset button yet established in the game, since you have to perform a ritual at night that costs a permanent point of POW and 1d6 SAN, for which sacrifice you get to see Azathoth, which costs 1d10/1d100 SAN. Whoo.

Then Thebes and the Necropolis...this stuff is all interesting if you're an Egyptophile and want to have running gunfights in the ruins or something, but none of it is in the least Mythos-related...and on into the Valley of the Kings, complete with a discovery timeline...and then Aswan (note: this is before the dam went up and the temple was moved)...and that is the end of the geography lesson. Thanks for playing.


The props for this setting deserve way more props than the setting itself does.

People in Egypt
The who's who of who is in Egypt in the 1920s, from E. A. Wallis Budge to Lawrence of Arabia (who was probably full of shit, but whatever). There's also a couple pages on the bedouins. The book says there were only 35,000 of them in the 1920s, but that seems a lowball figure since according to all-mighty and all-seeing Wee'kah-Peed'ya there's 902,000 of them in Egypt alone.

Then we get to the Secret Groups - don't get your hopes up. While mention is made of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and the Freemasons, products expanding on those luminaries wouldn't be out for years and would ignore this book anyway. Three cults are mentioned in brief: the Brotherhood of the Black Pharoah (from Masks of Nyarlathotep), the Children of the Sphinx (from Masks of Nyarlathotep), and the Brethren of Seth (a vampire cult. If you're wondering what a vampire cult is doing in a Call of Cthulhu product...all I can say is Seth is not the first or the last vampire in CoC, sadly).

We also FINALLY get some information on the Petesouchi, the crocodile-people that are perhaps the one shining original aspect of this book. It turns out they're descendants of the cult of Petesouchos, a deity so obscure that wikipedia lacks a separate article on him, but appears to have originated from back when the Greeks were running things. Other than that, they're...basically the same as Deep Ones, born human and changing as they get old, yadda yadda. In fact, it doesn't mention why the Deep Ones are their mortal enemy, which seems a serious oversight.


You. Had. ONE. Job.

A paragraph is devoted to the Sons of the Mamluks, a secret Egyptian group dedicated to the extermination of cultists, whom I think could have been much more useful if their presence was felt more in this book.


Basically clones of these guys, minus the cool tattoos. C'mon, give 'em an Elder Sign at least.

The last part of this chapter is Magic in Egypt, which starts out promisingly:

Egypt is a country bathed in magical power since the earliest civilizations began. The first cultures had spells for all aspects of life and death. Simple charms and talismans used by the ancient Egyptians, such as the scarab charm, are still in use today. Every cab in Cairo has scarab affixed to it, regardless of the religious beliefs of the driver.

It talks briefly about ancient Egyptian magic, giving most of the page to the Book of the Dead, which various NPCs are supposed to know 1d4 spells from, but...how do I put this...

There are no stats.

I don't know if this is supposed to qualify as retarded or lazy, but it is extraordinarily disappointing. I mean, it's fine if you say that the Book of the Dead is just an occult text and none of the "spells" (they're more like prayers) in there actually work. CoC 5th edition and later just straight out tell you that the Egyptian Book of the Dead is an occult work, not a Mythos tome, no spells. But this whole book has been treating the book of the dead like a functional grimoire. The goddamn crocodile people were explicitly said to come from a spell in the book of the dead! I WANT SOME GOD-DAMN STATS. Not having any stats - or spells - or mechanics of any description is damn near criminal. I mean for fuck's sake, this is just the epitome of don't-give-a-fuck-about-the-Mythos in a book which is ostensibly a supplement to a Mythos roleplaying game.

Later books actually address this, by the way. Egypt gets a number of Mythos tomes, beasties, unique spells, cults, whatever the fuck you want. Some of the sources even agree, which is a miracle. But not here. This book is barren.

Next up: Gods of Ancient Egypt.

[Username17]

Veiling was totally optional for women in 1920s Egypt. It wasn't a weird choice, but not-veiling also wasn't a weird choice.

-Username17

[Ancient History]

Gods of Ancient Egypt

Are they behind the white people?

Ancient Egypt actually had a couple cycles of mythology, because they were a very long-lived culture; this section pays lip-service to this (it is actually largely an anecdote about busy people buying pre-mummified animal offerings in an ancient scam), and for the next page-and-a-quarter is simply a list of ancient Egyptian deities with no other connection to the Mythos except a scenario that suggests the gods of Egypt inhabit an unnamed city in the Dreamlands which you can get to by walking through the ghoul tunnels beneath Cairo. If that sounds a bit like the Wraith city in the underworld of the oWoD...well, there are worse crossovers I can think of.

Historical Timeline
What it says on the tin. Notably absent: any reference to Nyarlathotep. Indeed, the first mention of the Mythos is in 1171 AD, when Saladin brings a copy of the Al Azif from Damascus. This is also the last reference to the Mythos. Entries get more frequent after it hits the 1920s, presumably so that Keepers can work headlines into their camapgin as necessary.



Glossary
A smattering of Anglicized Arabic, as well as a list of Arabic Proverbs. My favorites of which are:

"The best kindness is done quickly."

"If you ask a mule of his lineage he will only say that one of his parents was a horse."

"The camel driver has his plans, and the camel has his."

"Trust in Allah, but tie your camel first."

"He who has burned his mouth with milk blows on ice cream."

Then there is an extensive Bibliography. Which amazes me, as Anderson managed to misquote Lovecraft throughout the book. Then the index, the catalog, and...we're done.



What have we learned? Well, as sourcebooks go, this was a book report on 1920s Cairo. Not even an entirely accurate one. It was so far on the simulationist scale that nearly all references to the Mythos are little more than an afterthought. It is also unusual among Chaosium books in not including a lengthy scenario at any point.

But the biggest failing - above the lack of Mythos references, the lack of mechanics, the lack of new spells and grimoires, the completely optional approach to skills and rules - is that there is no real discussion of what the fuck there is to do in Cairo. Why are you there? What can you do there that you cannot do elsewhere? What, in fact, is the fucking point of this book?

There isn't one. I hesitate to say it's completely useless, but it's one of those vacations where the Keeper pretty much has to bring whatever they want to entertain themselves with them. Even GURPS books would have more plot hooks per page than this.


And they did. You could actually run a much better adventure with GURPS Egypt + GURPS CthulhuPunk than The Cairo Guidebook and the Call of Cthulhu main book.

I said when I started that the approach to Egypt by game books tends to be...as a place apart from the rest of Africa. That is demonstrated throughout this book by the general lack of connection between Egypt and...anything else. Egypt, in this book, is pretty much isolated, with no discussion of its neighbors or being part of Africa at all. The writer manages to avoid too many racial blunders, although living up all the stereotypes of Arabs and Bedouins, but only because they generally avoid mention of any other people in the context of the book at all. Except for a fat "Nubian" that dresses as a woman and controls the white slave trade.

[Username17]

I can understand the impulse to put magical water breathing into Call of Cthulhu. Such as CoC has iconic locations at all, they have a great propensity to be under water. For every Arkham or Kingsport that you can visit, there's a R'lyeh or Y'ha Nthlei that you can't. Being in the Mythos and not being able to breathe water is a little bit like playing Star Wars with no Jedi or Middle Earth and not being allowed to go to the Elf Lands.

The thing is... getting water breathing doesn't actually solve the problem. Like, at all. The fact that you can't breathe in Y'ha Nthlei is certainly an insurmountable obstacle for having your characters have adventures there, but it's not the only one. I'm not sure it even makes the top five list for why you can't adventure there, a list which would surely be dominated by issues like the unavailability of any form of transport to get you there, the fact that learning the local language would take longer than the expected life of the campaign, and that the player characters have the life expectancy of a black gay communist Jew in a Nazi camp.

-Username17

[Longes]

"Trust in Allah, but tie your camel first."

"He who has burned his mouth with milk blows on ice cream."

These two found their way into Russian. The first one is used with God instead of Allah, the second talks about water instead of ice cream. But these are legit proverbs.