Chapter 7: The Ocean of Sand
This is scenario #2. I'm more pissed about this one, but not because of the scenario itself, but because I looked through
Dark Ages Cthulhu yesterday.
In honor of Morocco Mole, and the Rule 34 of him I've accidentally run across in the course of searching for images for this thread which has scarred my brain, I am going to finish this review while wearing my official Cthulhu Fez, which is a real product I paid real money for.
The Ocean of Sand concerns the lost Atlantean city of Katuris, which is somewhere in the sands of the Sahara which are disputed between Algeria and Morocco. You might recall this as essentially the subject of the ultimate scenario in
Secrets of the Congo, but in all fairness Africa is a
very large continent, and it is allowed to have more than one or two lost cities of ancient civilizations. That said, I'm like 95% sure this is the first reference to either Atlantis or Algeria in this book, and I would have thought a disputed border or remnants of ancient Atlantis might have come up before. Damn sight more interesting that immortals with their Persian binkies.
Finding lost cities in the desert isn't a particularly un-pulpish or un-Lovecraftian premise for a story. It worked for the first Mummy movie, and it worked for Lovecraft's
The Nameless City. But there's a couple issues.
First up, the designers of this scenario thinks that the PCs need a certain amount of challenge crossing the desert.
Any investigators who have not studied the environment of the Sahara, who are to knowledgeable of the various storms and dangers, should suffer a X2 skill penalty for all physical, and some mental activities while in the desert. The final choice of skills and penalties is left to the keeper. But for the inexperienced, the desert most commonly holds the promise of death.
This is basically a FUCK YOU to anyone that didn't read the first half of the book, with all the purposefully-fiddly rules for crossing the desert. It's the pop quiz that dickish Keepers pull on players who haven't done their assigned reading. Fuck that noise.
Anyway, the lost city of Katuris is, surprise surprise, still chock full of Atlanteans despite being quite literally buried up to its highest minarets in sand. So assuming you get to the lost, buried city, you have to deal with guardian Atlanteans, right? Nope! Despite the fact that this place is supposed to be occupied, there are no actual Atlanteans in any of this scenario, just some villagers who are hinted at being descended from Atlanteans. So I have no idea why they fucking bothered.
Anyway, like most adventures, this one begins in the library. No, seriously, you're supposed to hear rumors of the Lost City and then head off to the library to research things. In later games like
Bookhounds of London, you'd just spend a resource point and coincidentally have a book on the legends of the Lost City in stock, possibly with a map, and then you could go straight into working out how to get there, but the legwork section of this scenario involves repeated Library Use rolls, with optional Bargain, Photography, Cartography, or Art (Drawing) rolls to copy maps and shit.
We will now call out a moment of stupidity:
There were many city-states in the empire. Each governed their own province on different continents, and sometimes there were several city-states on a single continent. While the historical records have many names for these places, often they are located by the use of the root "Atla." Different cultures complicate names for this with different spellings. In Morrocco, the most obvious location for one of these cities is likely to be near the Atlas Mountains.
This is not why they are caused the Atlas Mountains. You fuckhead.
Anyway, if you get the right clues out of the slot machine, you're off to Mahgish, which is not one of any of the locations addressed previously. If the PCs enter murder hobo role and go after the village elder - well, they're in for a bad time, since he knows the spells Flesh Ward and Withering, and is quick with a scorpion, but in his house is a Mythos tome whose metal pages are inscribed in Atlantean (the author of the scenario should have used "Senzar", as that is the official Lovecraftian name for the Atlantean language, but that would be too much outer-god-damned trouble, apparently. It's like a 3e product that had Kobolds that could speak "Dragon" instead of "Draconic." Little details, y'know.)
You'd be forgiven for ending the adventure right there, since the book is better than anything you're getting out of the lost city and nobody can read Atlantean anyway. Including any of the villagers, apparently.
Anyway, presuming that the PCs keep the party going and head off into the desert, they need "3 successful weeks of Navigation rolls." Then the Keeper is instructed to have a simoom hit them, for fun, and so they can find the "Wailing Tower" (the only part of the city above the sand). You then have to muscle open the entrance in the middle of a raging sandstorm. I would suggest playing
Darude at maximum volume for effect.
Not much of the city is accessible, but you can hit a couple "psychic events", puzzle over Atlantean technology you're not allowed to figure out how it works, look at the Atlanteans that decided to upload their memories and personalities into metal rectangles (great plan! Sortof. By fiat, they can't actually communicate meaningfully with the PCs in any way); a Temple of Tsathoggua with a surviving Formless Spawn; the "Chamber of History," which is covered in writing (despite this being an Atlantean city, the chamber's writing is Hyperborean. FFS, can you not keep your ancient lost civilizations straight within a single scenario!?); "The Forgotten Chamber" - which has an ancient power source called The Orb, which only apparently powers one thing, a gateway back to the village of Mahgish.
To say this scenario is telegraphed and half-assed is pushing it a little. Their major challenges are their own skill rolls, there's nothing much in the Lost City accessible, nothing worth looting, and by writer fiat the PCs aren't allowed to do fucking anything with what they do find. That's a bit harsh, even by CoC scenario standards. It's like those NPC-only artifacts in
Dungeon Magazine adventures.
Chapter 8: Societies, Cults, and Mysteries
Look, I think we all needed this.
This starts off talking about Moroccan colonial politics, specifically the various Moroccan independence groups/movements, such as one secret society, the Zawiya. The writer feels it is important to mention these, but not to give any details of its organization or stats for its members.
Native-grown cults include the Cult of Cthugha (seen in the first scenario) and the Cult of Shub-Niggurath. These aren't in any real way Moroccan-specific cults, really, since they have nothing to do with Moroccan history or culture, as the generic-ass names should tell you. They also have nothing to do with any ancient culture that used to occupy the territory, lost Atlanteans, or fucking anything else, really.
Following these lame-ass cults we get
Adventuring in Morocco - these are basically extended adventure seeds that can be used as the foundation of scenarios, involving a bunch of ideas that basically should have been give out earlier in the book, like a portal to the Dreamlands in the ghoul-occupied caverns beneath Oudaia Kasbah - which, and I want to point this out, the ghoul Inek is said to probably know how to read cuneiform. Why? HOW? The fucker has spent presumably centuries in Morocco. Was he originally Sumerian? Did he migrate for the weather? Does Bill Jones understand that the Sumerians didn't make their way to fucking Morocco? I don't know.
Other adventure ideas ideas: missing American child ($10,000 award - that's some cabbage!), ONI investigates gunrunning in Morocco, and encountering bandits on the road to Agadir - which immediately gives way to
three fucking pages of "sidebars" on optional mounted chase rules, including the d10 "Trouble Table for Mounts."
Rules are included for camels.
...and that is the chapter.
We do get an
Appendix, which gives stats for Dromedary camels, Arabian horses, mustangs, and the North African scorpion; as well as some handy Arabic and French words and phrases ("Bad" "Mauvais"; "Big" "Grand"; etc.), a bunch of scenario handouts, and in place of an index a "Complete Contents," where someone dumped the Word Table of Contents for every single header.
This book wasn't a hate crime. A hate crime would have cared more about its subject. It was just fucking boring, careless, and sloppy. We are left with more questions than answers. Why didn't the Atlantean city/references show up earlier? Why are the native cults so lame and characterless? Why is there a fucking Sumerian tablet with a Mythos text to Cthugha in a Roman ruin in Morocco, and why in the name of the Lord of Fire Vampires is their a ghoul that can read cuneiform in the tunnels? Why is Rick from Casablanca here, and why does he lose at shots 56% of the time?
I don't know. I do know, that in out "Call of Cthulhu looks at Africa" series, this entry has got to be the fucking blandest of the lot. I mean yes, it says "there are brown people here," but it doesn't actually pay much attention to them. Or the history of the region. Or the Mythos resources in the country. I don't know why you'd come here or what you would do once you got here. After two scenarios and a one-off adventure getting lost in the mountains, you'd have basically run out of any material in the country.
It didn't have to be this way. Morocco has
the oldest library in Africa, and a genuine ancient history that goes back to Carthage - or, if you'd like, into prehistory with the Atlanteans, Hyperboreans, Serpent People, and Deep Ones (remember them? Referred to once when the writer remembered there was a coast, and then never again?)
...not to mention colonial unrest, with genuine secret societies, Nazis in Casablanca, the whole bit. There's room for a great Mythos-influence Moroccan sourcebook. This ain't it.