Call of Cthulhu is a very weird game, and the company that makes it is fucking clownshoes. They are the coelacanths of the gaming industry, existing essentially unchanged from their primordial start to the present day. Sure, there's been a few mutations with each edition, but the game itself is an unfinished creation with a fanbase so devoted to the primeval ooze that they can, and have, and will buy anything they put out. The very popularity of the game thus ensures it is never going to evolve, because there is practically no selection pressure - Chaosium could (and has) simply reprinted old books and fans have gladly thrown money at them. There's a kickstarter from a 3rd-party game company producing a companion to a beloved thirty-year-old campaign which arguably wasn't terribly good to begin with, and Chaosium just released two fiction collections to celebrate other gaming products produced decades ago. The whole fucking company is a nostalgia mill, and it prints money.
Can we take a minute to step back and consider what the fuck a "Luxury" rpg even is? Do we really need to see Paris Hilton getting in on this action, slipping Vin Deisel a couple hundo and rolling her diamond-spectacled solid-iridium dice in a jeweled cup designed by Tiffany's and lined with the fur of something exotic and preferably on the endangered species list? But I digress.
When it comes to RPGs, the lack of any real pressure to do a good job, archaic development process, and complete lack of a cohesive vision of the game mean that Call of Cthulhu supplements tend to be...special.
I'm not even talking about a third party supplement cobbled together from fans that don't know any better, or some ancient POS taped and glued together and run off on a Xerox. Secrets of Japan[/oi] was a professionally-printed product of Chaosium, Inc. that came out in 2005. And even by the generous standard of a game that celebrates your brains leaking out of your ears, it is insane. By which I mean that it is legally unable to distinguish right from wrong.
This is a work of entertainment fiction and in now way are its contents intended to discriminate or slander against gender, race, color, religion, age, national origin, disability, marital status, or sexual orientation. Similarities between characters in this book and persons living or dead are entirely coincidental. Goddess help us if they aren't. The Mappo no Ryujin, real? No thanks. Pass the wasabi.
Case in point: Call of Cthulhu Sixth edition, which SoJ nominally is a setting supplement to, is 320 pages. That counts all the charts, the character sheets, the index, the front page art, everything. Secrets of Japan is 360 pages. For a company that struggles to produce an 80-page location book that doesn't accomplish the athletic feat of sucking and blowing at the same time, the scale of this book just boggles the fucking mind...and it was written by one guy. Michael Dziesinski. They had two guys editing him, Lynn Willis and David Mitchell, and Mitchell and Michael Scott are also credited as copyediting, but the text itself was written by one guy. Although the cover also includes a random assortment of other names, some of which appear to be the interior artists, but not all of them. For that matter, the copyright information claims the official titles of this book is Secrets of Japan: Keeper's Companion, which suggests two things: 1) this was probably intended to originally be two books, and 2) this book can't even decide on it's fucking name.
The terms B.C.E. and C.E. (before common era/common era) are used instead of B.C. and A.D. for all dates.
I can go on rants like this throughout the book. I will, in fact, probably be doing exactly that, because beyond these few little quibbles I've posted so far, this is an amazingly insane book. There's treatments of race in this book on par with World of Darkness: Gypsies or worse. The lack of editorial and line development supervision is appalling and stresses my highly developed continuity porn gland. The willful ignorance of the actual native-born Cthulhu Mythos additions is weird, and the wholesale "borrowing" of properties like Guyver and Godzilla is just really funky, even in a CoC supplement for a modern setting.
Going back to the "CoC books don't evolve" statement I made earlier...when you look at CoC books, they tend to fall into a few well-known types. There are location books, which initially focused heavily on Lovecraft country (Arkham, Miskatonic University, Dunwich, etc.) but are otherwise random (New York, London, Morocco, Cairo, Japan, etc.). There are collections of adventures, sometimes organized by theme and sometimes organized into campaigns. There are alternate settings, which is to say instead of playing in the 1920s America (Classic) you might play in the 1890s England (Gaslight) or 1950s America (Atomic Age Cthulhu) or 1980s (Cthulhu Now). And there are complete fucking hodge-podges of rules, artifacts, spells, tomes, monsters, and other assorted flotsam, much of it culled from the previous types of books. Those are the major supplements, and for the most part they don't interact. Which brings us to the next major issue I have with this book.
See, with Shadowrun, you have a highly cohesive setting. The text in one book will refer to material from previous books, and the characters in that book are expected to be living in the same world as in the previous books, and even if they don't mention it directly they carry forward idea that all the books describe the same setting and so should agree on at least the major points of the setting. And indeed, it is the basic assumption that underlines all shared settings and sharecropper universes, from Greyhawk and the Forgotten Realms to the old World of Darkness, where vampires and ghosts rubbed shoulders with vampires and mages in the Umbra.
Call of Cthulhu doesn't do that.
That is to say, there is a book (The Cairo Sourcebook) which describes the Cthulhu Mythos in Egypt. But there is no guarantee that any other book or supplement for CoC will ever refer to that book. It is, indeed, quite likely that you will be reading a completely different book like Miskatonic University and find that they mention some ancient Egyptian Mythos tome or doodad which should probably have cropped up in the Cairo chronology, but didn't. Maybe a few years later some fan will pick up the thread and try to issue a correction or try to earn a no-prize by providing a gloss so that both books can be correct, but at the end of the day you just have one author that could not be arsed to find, read, and comprehend another book so that the shit he wrote would fit with the shit already written. This is something a line developer would normally be on the lookout for, but of course CoC has never had a consistent vision toward line development - so this shit happens all the time; it is the rule more than the exception. The material on the Mythos in ancient Egypt in CoC is strung out over at least half a dozen supplements, any or all of which may contradict the rest, and there's zero attempt at getting any of it to jive.
Because at the end of the day, it's all headcanon. There is no "canon" to the Call of Cthulhu setting because calling it a setting is to miss the fact that the vast majority of the books exist on their own, floating in their own little universes that don't refer to or interact with any of the rest. All any Mister Cavern can do is take the parts they like and ignore the rest. It's mind caulk all the way down.
For Secrets of Japan, this annoyed me especially with regards to two products.
Mysteries of the Raj is a slim print-on-demand fanwank that Chaosium produced under a program when they basically agreed to let fans write, edit, illustrate, and layout their own fan-supplements in exchange for Chaosium publishing them and keeping most of the money. It was basically an early draft of the Onyx Path business plan, and the supplements they produced tend to be very marginal, both in terms of quality and areas of interest. Yet, they were supposed to be official Chaosium products.
Secrets of Tibet is a BRAND NEW supplement released for Call of Cthulhu 7th edition, although nominally compatible with 6th edition as well. It is basically your average CoC locations sourcebook. Except...
Secrets of Japan doesn't mention or refer to Mysteries of the Raj. I can understand why; MotR is a rag. But Secrets of Tibet doesn't mention or refer to either Secrets of Japan OR Mysteries of the Raj. And quite substantial portions of all three books talk about Buddhism, Tibet, and the Mythos connections between Buddhism, Tibet, and the Buddhist diaspora. That amazes me. Even if you wanted to ignore MotR as fanwank, why the fuck would you write a Mythos sourcebook for Tibet and just conveniently forget all the material on Tibet that has already been written? What if some asshole picks up Secrets of Japan, wants to learn more about this weird connection with Tibet mentioned in the book, and picks up Secrets of Tibet? Well, said asshole will have wasted their money twice. Even the few Mythos elements that they two books have in common, like the Emerald Lama, are treated differently. None of the fucking Buddhist Mythos tomes in any three of the books actually match.
The Emerald Llama disapproves.
And this is, in a rather roundabout way, the reason why you can't have a book about Deep Ones or Ghouls or Yithians in Call of Cthulhu. You can have campaigns and things built around those critters as a theme, but you can't have an actual supplement because that would involve digging through the reams of background crap and finding out oh shit, we have like six varieties of Deep Ones and some of them overlap and others just contradict each other. Chaosium's inability to actually plan the development of their setting in any way has effectively stifled their production, and forces more work on the Keepers. You might ask yourself why you're buying the sourcebooks at all, since the stats are horrible and the fiction doesn't matter, and there is no good answer for that.
When faced with Chaosium development decisions, I liked to meditate on cats. They're fluffy.
So, the book is organized into a piece of fiction called "The Yonaguni Monuments," an Introduction, and five Scrolls, each of which is broken down into one or more sections, and then some Appendices. I'm going to do a Scroll a post, if I can. There's a lot to cover.
