[OSSR]Secrets of Japan

[Ancient History]

Scroll One, Section Three: A Dark Retrospective
Japanese belief systems in the world of the Cthulhu Mythos

Asian religion, mythology, and folklore have fascinated Europeans for centuries. It's not that Westerners can't make Christianity bizarre and complicated, but compared to the elaborate, interlocking, and sometimes awesomely syncrenistic religions in Asia...ah, well. You can understand why people flocked to Theosophy, and seventeen-year-olds the world over look for some alternative to their parents' flavor of Christianity and settle on the one with cool imagery and no tenets more immediately offensive than vegetarianism. The fact that the Ramayana pretty much reads like a comic book and the best parts of Japanese myth involve monstrous raccoon with magical scrotums, you can probably appreciate why on the surface at least, people like the idea of playing with Asian religion and mythology.


Also, Kill Six Billion Demons is an awesome webcomic!

The place of Buddhism in the whole mix is...complicated. Yes, Siddhartha was born in India and spread his religion there, but after that it was largely chased out of India, spreading far and wide in places like Afghanistan, Nepal, Mustang, Tibet, China, Malaysia, Korea, and a backwoods island called Japan. And it rather helps matters along that the Theosophists drew a large chunk of their lore from garbled Hindu and Buddhist scriptures, and even more claimed legitimacy and descent from Secret Chiefs of the Great White Brotherhood in Tibet. Hell, the Nazi's sent an expedition to Tibet. And Lovecraft & co., fishing around for interesting weird tidbits to add to their stories, encountered Theosophy too.

Most of them weren't versed in it. The one or two times Lovecraft mentions Theosophy, as in "The Call of Cthulhu," he notably gets shit wrong. However, this doesn't actually matter because nobody in the history of Chaosium has ever attempted to actually follow what Lovecraft wrote with regards to the Mythos in Asia (beyond vague menacing talk of immortal sorcerers and cults in China and shit), or what the Theosophists wrote. They do a little bit more research on real-world religions in those areas of the world, but usually only to fuck it up.

For most Call of Cthulhu products, then, they tend to focus on the more pulpy and occult side of things - which isn't terribly difficult as a) many pulps fed off the idea that Tibetan Buddhist monks had occult powers (which they would happen to grant to deserving Mighty Whiteys), b) Tibetans themselves were pretty sure they had a long tradition of shamans and sorcerers, and c) the same can be said for much of the rest of Asia. So while it may seem on the surface a little bit like Yellow Peril nonsense...deep down beneath it all it really is Yellow Peril nonsense. Only with a bit more historical research and Cthulhu is behind some of it.


Artistic license is OK, really.

I mention India and Tibet because, of course, Mysteries of the Raj and Secrets of Tibet. The thing you need to understand about those is that they in no way agree with anything written in Secrets of Japan about Buddhism. Or Tibet. But mainly that they share no Mythos tomes in common, their depictions of the various sects of Buddhism don't jive, their views on the influence and nature of the various Mythos entities isn't the same, and it's questionable how much of this shit is actually compatible on any level.

This isn't a terribly unfamiliar situation for CoC - you should see what they've done with Egyptian Mythos - but the problem is exacerbated in this case because the vast majority of Mythos fiction is written by Westerns, and set in the West, so most of the Mythos tomes and spells are written with that inherent bias. You don't see the Necronomicon translated into Chinese or Korean that often (my collection notwithstanding). The major Asian Mythos text is The Seven Cryptical Books of Hsan, and that's kind of cringeworthy just to write. So basically every author of every Asian sourcebook sets out pretty much to rework stuff from the bottom-up. And the result is madness.


Not the Eye of Agamotto!

All that said, this section begins with a quick recap of Buddhism and its spread to China, followed by its major tenets. With a couple of twists.

In Cthulhu Japan, the core of human suffering is denial of cold cosmic truth, the Dharma, that the Great Old Ones and the Outer Gods are uncaring entities to which humanity is less than algae clinging to dead rock. Enlightenment is the realization that human civilization is a great illusion. Sanity is the clinging to that illusion Lord Mara keeps humans trapped.

(Accounts in The Forbidden Sutra relate that Lord Buddha's physical death at eighty can be attributed to a conspiracy. Corrupt agents of Lord Mara infiltrated Buddha's followers. A slow acting poison concocted from black lotus flower was laced into the Awakened One's simple fare of rice.)

It has been the doom of many.

This is...problematic. Most of the other attempts at shoehorning Mythos-stuff into religion either assume outright that human religions are wrong, and thus this is alien lore and mythology that they're incorporating into their framework of belief, or that there is something to the religion after all but its encounters with the Mythos are a secret undercurrent known to a few. Trying to actually subvert the historical underpinnings of the religion is a new one; it's a bit like Jesus Christ turning out to be the Son of Yog-Sothoth. (Okay, so some people have tried that, but not in a gaming context. I think.)

Dz goes on to elaborate on the Japanese twists to Buddhism, and touches on - but does not elaborate - the Mythos angles including the Forbidden Sutra (new Mythos text), and the cults of Buddha's Tears and the Brotherhood of the Black Lotus (which are all given romanji names I'm not going to fucking type). I especially dislike the latter, because Dz decided to call them Dugpas, which is a real-world Tibetan Buddhist lineage, and also "Green Caps" (vs. the typical Buddhist "Red Caps" and "Yellow Caps") because of their dealings with the Emerald Lama.



A lot of this refers to crap that Dz hasn't bothered to tell the readers about yet, and some of it is just fucking annoying in how it tries to undermine and subvert every aspect of Buddhism to some bit of the Mythos. Case in fucking point:

Perhaps the biggest question is: what exactly did Eisai and Dogen experience in China that brought "sudden enlightenment," "Zen mind"? Was it a trip to the fabled Tengu Monastery in the Dreamlands via the Plateau of Leng? Or was it a much more sudden revelation sitting in zazen upon a black lotus?

Azathoth's Court, outside of space and time, is one and the same as the place called Nehan/Nirvana by Buddhists. For mortal beings, it is a state of total extinguishing, of becoming one with the cosmic background.

Those who practice Zen meditation find "instant" satori when they achieve a rapport with Azathoth's plane. The indescribable state of enlightenment is that of being mute witness to the horror of Azathoth's existence in the center of our universe. Azathoth, whose nuclear chaos burns away the eternal spirit of Zen seekers of truth.

Azathoth--no mind, Zen mind.

I have no idea what the fuck Dz thinks this means, but aside from insulting pretty much the entirety of a religious tradition that practices zazen...what the hell does he think this does from a game mechanics point of view? I have no idea. Normally, seeing Azathoth is good for losing 1d100 Sanity and rolling a new character.

The sad thing is, Dz has obviously put a lot of thought and research into this, and maybe if he was writing a novel it wouldn't be quite as batshit insane. But it's a gamebook, dammit.

Lovecraftian Buddhism is a central background concept to the Cthulhu Japan setting. To strip it away or make it "optional" is to mute the very character of this unique Call of Cthulhu Setting. [...] Cthulhu Japan presents Buddhism as well as other aspects of Asian society in as balanced and well-rounded way as possible, the good as well as the bad.

Fuck you.

BTW, this whole "Cthulhu Japan" thing makes me think that this started out as a different work, they changed the title, and then the editors were too fucking lazy to go back and fix it. Arseholes, the lot of them.

There's...that's a lot here. There's a sidebar on Mythos Koans ("What is the sound of a shoggoth screaming?"), and some secret Mythos Japanese Buddhist history (apparently the Americans nuked Hiroshima and Nagasaki to upset the plans of the Emerald Lama).



...an alternative for lazy Keepers...

Some keepers may optionally decide to make the Cosmic Buddha and the Outer God Azathoth one and the same. Further, all Bodhisattva can simply be masks of Nyarlathotep.

Sure, and all royals are lizard people.


I'm sorry, I temporarily forgot that's actually a plot point later in this book.

<sigh> Okay, I'm getting frustrated with every little bit here...but let me speed things up a bit and talk about the crazy mechanics. There are a couple sections, some of which are labeled "optional," others of which are assumed to not be optional.

There are optional rules for Reincarnation. Basically, if you go this route, the Keeper lets you take up to 1d6 old skills (no more than 20% of their old values) and put them on your new character sheet. In exchange, you give up 1 SAN for every five percentiles. That sounds insane, but actually represents a positive character advance since you can always gain SAN easier than skill percentiles.

There's a list of Buddhist Occupations. This is actually a refresh of the earlier occupations of Buddhist Priest and Yamabushi/Shugensha, except with lists of "related spells," "related Mythos tomes," and a "Reading karma" ability which is apparently a rehash of the same rules in the Meditation sidebar on the very same page. Seriously, the same fucking information is presented - with variations! - at least three times in the goddamned book, and that includes twice on the same fucking page. I don't know what moonshine the editors were drinking, but it must have been the bad shit because they were obviously blind by 100 pages in. I don't even know what the "related spells" section is for, you still can't buy the things at chargen, so it must be intended mainly for NPCs.

Of course, I lose sanity with Dz's rehash of the Sanity mechanics.

The gist is that Dz equates Buddhist enlightenment with the Cthulhu Mythos skill, which he has renamed Bodai. (Bodhisattvas have Cthulhu Mythos 99%, Buddhas have Cthulhu Mythos 100%; anybody with Cthulhu Mythos 35% has achieve satori and is a Zen master.)

Magic Points are renamed Ki, Cthulhu Mythos is renamed Bodai. Meditation--Meiso (the new skill mentioned earlier) can reduce SAN Loss (which is automatic and depending on how many percentiles you have, no need to roll), and Meditation can also be used to help recover from SAN loss quicker (you're still going to be in therapy for a few weeks, but meh). Also, in Dz's setting you add your Ki score to your current SAN score to achieve your "effective" SAN. And you have a bunch of ways to increase your POW, such as reading Mythos tomes that increase Bodai, willfully seeking out The Buddha or a Boddhisattva and surviving, and, once again, by meditating.

The cumulative effect of these changes is somewhere between bullshit and OMG haxxors. You can finally have an effective sorcerer character, but only because the slow descent to insanity has been replaced by a bumper car ride where you can technically have an insanely high Cthulhu Mythos rating but not be in danger of hitting the funny farm anytime soon. Indeed, if you're careful enough to steer clear of learning much about the Mythos at all and focusing on non-Mythos magic, you can actually hack this stupid system to become a frighteningly effective sorcerer.

Oh, meditation also lets you see Astral Serpents. More on that later.

Having ripped Buddhism a new and biologically improbable asshole, Dz then tackles Shinto. As with the previous entry, this begins with a lot of actual research into Shinto, presented more or less realistically, but it's not far before he corrupts the whole thing and goes off the fucking deep end. This is the part that made me mad enough to actually OSSR this book.

To grok this, you first have to understand that as with many cultures, Japanese history goes back to prehistory, and the earliest tales of kings and whatnot have a certain mythic flavor. Gods and goddesses like Amaterasu start to pop up in the ancestry, magic swords make an appearance, divine right to rule starts to get mentioned. But if you ignore the obvious propaganda crap, and look at the archaeology, some points of agreement start to emerge. Mainly, the ancestors of the ethnic Japanese (like the Irish, the Americans...pretty much everybody; humans are not very good at standing still) wandered in from somewhere else, conquered the natives (in this case the Ainu) and set up light housekeeping for the next several thousand years, give or take a couple invasions, infusions of fresh DNA, colonization efforts, etc. Which is fine. Then Dz drops this on us:

Few Japanese realize just how far their imperial line can be traced back into time. Amaterasu is indeed the the true progenitor of the current, unbroken line of emperors ruling over modern day Japan. But as with any history, mainstream record books only fill in part of the picture. [...] The ethnic Japanese arrived en masse on the Japanese isles around 25,000 B.C.E. [...] Amaterasu was part of the elite class of sorcerer priests in the Golden Empire of the Sun on the lost continent of Mu. On Mu, the serpent race and humans co-existed for untold millennia until the Great Experiment. The result was catastrophic, dooming Mu to sink and bringing down the wrath of the Great Old One Yig and his mother, the Mappo No Ryujin, to devastate the arrogant populace. Amaterasu, along with two dozen others, performed a dangerous spell to open dimensional Gates large enough to transport

...the text cuts off there in an editorial or writer error, but Dz revisits this stupidity in galling detail a couple pages later. As for what this has to do with Shinto? Well Amaterasu and the rest of the high muckety-muck sorcerer-priests of Mu gave up corporeal existence to become the kami that Shinto is concerned with. Also, Japan is criss-crossed with ley dragon lines and the torii are dimensional gateways, if you know how to open them.

A high number of the more reliable torii Gates open into the Japanese Dreamalnds, which will be detailed in a future book.

I don't fucking think so.

tl;dr - Dz is taking the Xothic Cycle, a subset of Cthulhu Mythos stories put out by Lin Carter that center around the downfall of Mu, and marrying it to his own twist on the Japanese national myth (among other things). That probably sounded like a good idea at the time, but there are some snags. For one, Carter's Xothic cycle isn't universally well-loved; it is in fact a not-terribly-clever gloss trying to pin together some of the weirder aspects of H. P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, and Robert E. Howard's timelines - the ones that make geologists break out in hives and involve names like Lemuria, Atlantis, and Hyperborea. Straight Mike Mignola territory. On the other hand, Dz is no Lin Carter. His shit is straight insane and insulting and amazingly racist.


Lin Carter has many pens and inkpots on the chains he forged in life.

Case in point:

The offspring of these magical matings were serpent-human hybrids. But something had gone horribly wrong; greyish in skin hue, these hybrids were frail in body but possessed highly developed mental capacities. Possessing magical abilities far beyond both progenitor races, they contacted Yig and mocked him. Yig was enraged at the affront and the corruption of his chosen race. He called upon another Great Old One to lay east to Mu, forever ending the dreams of the Muvians. However, the survivors of Mu established the Yayoi culture in Japan. Muvian blood burns in the veins of modern Japanese, blood not fully human, but most definitely unique.

Okay, here's the thing: You can't treat modern nationalities and ethnicities like D&D races. It is, in fact, really fucking creepy to do that with completely fictional human nationalities and ethnicities, like they do in the Conan RPG. Culture is one thing, physical capabilities and non-human DNA are another. That shit was kinda weird when Tolkien did it. When Lovecraft did it, it was with an aspect of undiluted horror...and even he didn't try to tell people that all the Japanese are part lizard-people.


He didn't say that either, but I felt this panel appropriately reflects my level of WTF for this section of this scroll of this book so far. THERE IS NO CONTEXT IN WHICH THIS WOULD BE ACCEPTABLE.

Anyway. Shinto shamans can petition the kami for aid, in the form of ki or POW. Malevolent Kami can also siphon ki and POW, although trained shinto shamans can cause a backlash if they try that shit by spending POW. All the kami NEED PRAYER BADLY, and compared to the Great Old Ones are absolutely fucking worthless. Makes you wonder why they bother.

Because of the Great Experiment, all Japanese citizens are intimately, if unknowingly, linked to their distant past as descendants of Muvian survivors. Hundreds of generations have served to dilute the bloodlines of most Japanese, but the imperial bloodline has carefully maintained pure heritage by intermarrying and selectively breeding. The result is that the emperor and his kin remain strong in their bloodlink to the Muvian high wizard priests and sorcerer priestesses who sired them. Some ancient texts worldwide recognize this bloodline, calling them children of the "fallen race," the nephilim. Mythos scholars posit that the Muvian bloodline may be present in every line of royalty in the world.

Having the emperer fill the office as high priest of Shinto is no mistake of history or politics. Rather, it is a purposeful effort to maintain a solid link to the kami and the imperial Muvian blood. But emperors do not need to use guesswork to determine the purity of their bloodline: The Imperial Regalia, sacred Shinto objects and symbols of the state, are themselves Muvian relics. The Mirror of Amterasu shows a reflection for those of Muvian blood. The purer the lineage, the more solid the reflection.

Yes, Dz doubled down on the stupidity, and despite the lambasting of Western myths, even tries to cram the Nephilim in there. Poor bastards have done nothing to deserve getting mentioned in this book. For the record, Dz is wrong about the emperors of Japan. Not only are they not inbred (at least, not noticeably more so than other royalty), but the Shoguns made a practice of breeding their daughters to the emperors, to gain more control over the imperial line. More fapping on the Imperial Regalia will come later.

Like the Buddhists, we get a rehash-with-greater-detail of the Shinto occupations, this being the Hereditary Yokai Hunter, Shinto Priest, and Itako. We also get rules for geomancy (i.e. tapping POW and ki from ley dragon lines), although I don't know why. This is at least the second and probably the third or fourth time that CoC has put up rules for ley lines and crap, and they all work slightly differently. It would be so nice if they just got their collective shit together and agreed on a single ruleset, like Shadowrun editions 1-4, when it came to an issue on magic.

We also get the Channel Spirit skill re-presented in full. I seriously think Dz wrote the book first, then went back and wrote the chargen section afterwards and nobody bothered to fucking clean up or care that the exact same fucking rules are on two or three different pages. Channel Spirit, aside from being a terrible idea, also lets you see Astral Serpents. More on that later.

OTHER PERSPECTIVES basically covers...the rest of miscellaneous Japanese occult and religious weirdness that the author cared to address. We get the Kotodama Master, who uses a special calligraphy skill (already covered earlier, natch). This includes a special ritual where you sit in a room drawing kanji over and over until you figure out your True Name. It doesn't tell you what to do with that, or how to discover any other True Names, or what you might do with that, but looking over the list of "Related Spells," I think the implication is that you're supposed to cast spells via calligraphy. There is, in fact, a note at the end of the list that says "Furthermore, with the use of a true name, a Kotodama master can simulate any known Summon or Contact spell." I would have liked a little more elaboration on that.


Maybe even a picture.

Next up is "Dark Taoism." This involves rules for becoming a Taoist immortal, discussion of the Taoist Alchemist occupation, and a re-hash of the Oriental Medicine skill. Becoming a Taoist immortal sounds like a relatively sweet deal, but it's basically the process of becoming a D&D lich (i.e. poison yourself and hope you make the save), with the added bonus that you need to make your way up the Ivory Stair to the feet of the Jade Emperor and give a powerpoint presentation on why you deserve to live forever. Which is basically "all the oral sex the Keeper will ever want" - but, in exchange, you stop aging and if you do die you get reincarnated, but with a much better reincarnation package than those reincarnation rules presented a dozen pages ago.

The Fu Sui Sensei occupation is also presented; these guys don't tap into dragon lines like the Shinto guys, they...use...the Geomancy skill? To...tap the dragon lines...

Okay, if all this seems confusing, it's because Dz is presenting multiple character options to do similar things. He is doing this because Japanese culture is broad and varied, and Japanese occultists have a very large repertoire of traditions to draw from. However. Call of Cthulhu is really very bad at actually doing this in practice. Your occupation gives you limited skills, and as Frank and I said before, your chances of improving them are generally small. So while it is theoretically possible to be a master of the mystic arts in Call of Cthulhu, in practice you're probably never going to get the skill points to do jack shit. Fuck me, the Fu Su Sensei is supposed to be a fucking geomancer and doesn't get the Geomancy skill! The fucking Taoist Alchemist gets the Martial Art (Tai Chi) skill, and that's not one of the martial art skills covered in this book (with good reason, it's Chinese. Still.)

So while you might drool over the options to be a proper occult badass...the chances are you're going to be a specialist. And not even necessarily a good one.



And that, is the end of section three of Scroll One. Believe it or not, the rabbit hole of stupidity goes much, much deeper.


I would have lower blood pressure if I'd reviewed a game based on this instead.

[JigokuBosatsu]

Leaving aside the appalling racism and the egregious perversion of my religion...

What do my multiple kensho experiences mean for my Cthulhu Mythos skill? Am I now considered an Azathoth cultist? Because I gotta tell you, I listen to Jethro Tull as much as or more than the next guy, but I'm pretty ambivalent about helping bring about the annihilation of the earth in a torrent of nuclear chaos.

[Ancient History]

According to Dz, it means you have a minimum Cthulhu Mythos rating of 35%.

[Ancient History]

Scroll Two: Secrets
At forty pages, this is the shortest of the five Scrolls, and arguably the one of greatest interest to those looking to mine the book for raw materials for their Call of Cthulhu game. It is broken down into three sections, the first of which has the relatively terrible title "Catalogue Nipponica."



Aside:

A fine point on language: "Japan" is the common English term for the island nation (with variations in many other languages), but in their own language the characters making up the name can be read as Nippon or Nihon. This has led to some really confusing terms being used, such as Nifon and Jippon...and that's before we get into the really flowery old names and shit. The point being that in English, it is technically as correct to say "Nippon" or "Nihon" as it is to say "Japan," and to use the term "Nipponese" in place of "Japanese," as William Gibson famously did in Neuromancer. However, because of the widespread use of the term "Nip" as derogatory in America during and after World War II, you rarely see the "Nippon/Nipponese" form in contemporary English.

This section basically contains the new Japanese-centric Mythos tomes in the book, snippets from which have been scattered throughout the book, but this is where their histories, editions, and contents are actually discussed and given stats. They're...okay. As I mentioned earlier, Secrets of Japan decided to use nothing from Mysteries of the Raj, and Secrets of Tibet decided to use nothing from either of those, so all three have ancient Sanskrit scrolls/books involving Buddhism and the Mythos.


Gotta catch 'em all!

Another aside:

Not that it's terribly important either way; the Mythos has far too many tomes. It does, indeed, have a shitload of tomes, and more appear in every product. There are enough tomes in CoC that if your character read them all, your character's Mythos skill rating would be somewhere in the high triple digits. This sort of underlines the issues with the CoC magic/skill system - there's no point in trying to collect all the books, because you will never "catch 'em all," because you don't have enough Sanity points to read them all, and even if it was just an OCD thing there are dozens of tomes which are never ever placed in any campaign or adventure because they're fucking useless, or the writer just wrote the book itself as a kind of living adventure hook. Tomes are often one-off things that last for maybe an adventure, and they tend to have relatively small numbers of spells. Half the reason new tomes are introduced is to introduce new spells, which bloats and unbalances the already unworkable CoC magic system.

However, tomes are rather flavorful and undoubtedly fun to write - I'm guilty of churning out a few myself - so more and more are cranked out. If I ever re-wrote CoC, I would probably encourage this, actually - let the players' library of Mythos material become a kind of experience track on its own, the kind of thing where they have a pool of library points they can dip into when they need to buy a clue or a spell or impress the hottie librarian or something. A bit like Bookhounds of London.

I'm not going to bore you by going through every one of these; most of them tie in to the Japanese-specific Mythos cults and Lovecraftian Buddhism or other flavors of Mythos magic related to Japan, and in general - probably because we're in a recognizable format and Dz isn't ranting about all the Japanese being part lizard-people - this is the most readable section of the book. They're nicely variable and strange and sometimes blatantly silly and come with bizarre rules, but that's sort of par for the course with this book. But there are at least four that deserve at least a mention.

The Forbidden Sutra is essentially the Japanese equivalent of the Necronomicon:

Orated in a poisonous delirium induced by the drug Liao, in the last feverish hours of Shakyamuni's life, these lectures were a dying legacy to his followers--but were never to see inclusion in his mainstream teachings. Upon Shakya's passing, Buddhism's new leaders, the eldest acolytes, immediately denounced his dying lectures as blasphemy and contrary to everything the fledgling religion of Buddhism represented. They declared to the gathered assembly of his faithful that, in his last hours, the Buddha was ill and not speaking with the clear mind of an enlightened being, but through the veil of suffering mortal flesh. It was decreed that the dying lectures should be forgotten so as not to soil the great teacher's memory. And so an already censored version of Buddhism began around 800 B.C.E. as an organized religion.

...and of course these forbidden sutras were carried on and promulgated in secret by various cults and heretics and honest seekers, yadda yadda. This isn't terribly new ground - every religion with a central text or text has issues with apochrypha, variant texts, etc. Indeed, the focus on which versions of texts are "true" is a central facet of a lot of religious schisms; you can see this focus particularly in the west in religions like Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and Mormonism, but in the east it's equally a matter of interest (and learned debate) among Buddhists, Confucians, etc. Hell, the idea of a secret, lost, or newfound text with authority that challenges the existing orthodoxy is a very old trope in world lit - and indeed, in Call of Cthulhu, where there are plenty of similar religion-themed Mythos tomes in the form of secret gospels and whatnot.

That said, most Mythos texts that connect with real religions tend to hedge their bets by at least allowing that the history of the text is alleged, and therefore refutable. You don't need to believe the words are actually written by Drunk and Bitter Jesus after he got off the cross. In fact, it often works better to have the origins of texts be pretty shady, no matter what claims to authority the cultist or tome itself makes. Unfortunately, Dz doesn't go that route. In his history, the Buddha was poisoned by a Mythos drug derived from the black lotus, and spewed out his final madness-inducing revelations, and this in turn spawned the Brotherhood of the Black Lotus/Dugpas/Green Caps, which I ranted about earlier.


Look, it's the Buddhist Dan Brown version of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Project Yurei White Paper sort of hits you out of the blue; it's not a typical Mythos tome, and it's not from a typical Mythos source - indeed, I can't say for certain the source is even mentioned into this book before this. It's a 100,000 page report on Yotsubishi Heavy Industry's subsidiary "Project Yurei," which has a "Psi-Mech Division."


I know where this is going.

Yes, the weird Japanese sci-fi anime did just creep into your CoC game, and this "tome" is peppered with terms like "para-technology" and "synthesis of human-machine hybrids using mathematical translations of Mythos spells" which basically could have come straight from CthulhuTech. Highlights are probably the alternate spell names, which include "Interview Noncorporeal Entity (Command Ghost)" and "Plasmic Barrier (Elder Sign)."

The Shinwa Taizen is a mythos version of the Kojiki, and this is where Dz take the time to flesh out his "Japanese people are part serpent-people" pseudohistory from earlier, basically doubling-down on the whole Xothic cycle connection. A sample:

These dormant genes still exist within each Japanese person and could be a traceable reason for the Japanese feeling of uniqueness. [...] The survivors of Mu displaced the native Ainu who were themselves settlers form the continent of Lemuria. [...] Today, those of Muvian blood bear the mark of this pairing of serpent and human, and not only in the arena of Japan, as they have scattered to the far sides of the globe. These are the children of "the fallen race," the nephilim. Carefully groomed for genetic purity, and inhabited by astral serpents, they occupy positions of power in every country around the world. Children of the Merkovian Kings, they are the hidden rules of the world.

We'll come back to the reptilians and astral serpents and Dan Brownisms in later.

The Sixth Ring is arguably the most interesting and non-standard book; it's supposed to be a supplement written by Miyamoto Musashi to his classic Book of Five Rings; as such, it's aimed towards martial artists, and while various versions give some small bonuses to Occult and Cthulhu Mythos skills, it gives a whopping +25% to +35% to a Martial Arts skill, with minimal (1/1d3 or 1/1d4) SAN loss. That's gamebreaking - it's the difference between accidentally kicking yourself in the face and successfully ripping off the enemy's scrotum with each attack. In addition to this, if you follow the katas in the book your martial arts attacks count as an "impale" (the actual rules for this are maddeningly vague), and you learn to cast up to four spells during combat by partaking in a special tea ceremony beforehand.


I'm here to drink tea and kick ass, and I just finished my tea.

Last and probably least is Supernaturalia Japonica, a big 'ol Mythos tome supposedly compiled by Lafcadio Hearn. He never actually did write that, because he was too busy having fun in his kimono and transcribing Japanese ghost stories and whatnot, but I like Lafcadio Hearn and I tentatively approve.

Section Two: A Japanese Grimoire covers the new Mythos spells, many of which are used by the tomes in Section One. There are the usual mishmash of bizarre mechanics and cultural weirdness; for example, there's a spell called "Awaken the Great Tortoise" which is basically one part Summon Cthonian and one part Cause Earthquake. You can usually pick out the most insane spells like "Bestow Karma," which basically translates to "I sacrifice ki and POW so that a specific bad dead catches up with the target in some GM-fellatio appropriate comeuppance." There's spells for contacting some entities we haven't really talked about yet, like the Emerald Lama, Kappa, Kitsune, and Tengu; various elaborate rituals for creating ancestral spirits, hungry ghosts, enchanted items, etc., spells for finding ley lines, exorcisms...there's a fair bit of overlap here with spells from other books.

My favorite might be "Instant Enlightenment," which requires no Magic, SAN, or POW, and (on a successful role) causes the target to lose 1d6 SAN and gain 1d3 Cthulhu Mythos points. That's basically a great spell for either a PC or an NPC; a PC can use it to quickly "catch up" his fellow PCs so they stop failing Cthulhu Mythos rolls (and hopefully speeding up the end of the game), while an NPC basically just spouts cosmic truths as an attack until the PCs go temporarily insane and then finishes them off at their leisure.

Probably the most terrible spell is "Purity of Blood," which measures how much Muvian royal blood you have in you. It basically reinforces the racist bullshit earlier and has no practical benefit.

The weirdest spell is "Summon Iso Onna," which calls up a Japanese mermaid...naga...thing. Which, if you kill and eat it, gives you a 10% chance at immortality (and a 20% chance to turn into an iso onna with legs, and a 60% chance of dying horribly as your organs liquefy. Good odds, by CoC standards, but one has to wonder why they didn't make this "Summon Deep One" - if CoC had a spell called "Summon Angel" or "Summon Demon" that referred to Christian cosmology and myth, players would spout "Bullshit!", but because this is a foreign Mythos apparently it's okay to say you're using your spells to summon Oni out of Jigoku like this was fucking Legend of the Five Rings.


No, seriously, we already have man-headed serpents in Cthulhu, why the fuck is this a separate entry?

Section Three: Native Treasures is what it says on the tin. Normally this involves a mix of magical artifacts and alien technology; here we get a bunch of minor Japanese-religion-related magical gear (most of which does nothing, some of which /does/ give a small bonus but is straight GM fellatio as to when), followed by a variety of Japanese-folkore-derived magical artifacts which have bupkis to do with the Cthulhu Mythos, except for a few scattered references to Mu and an ahistorical monolith taken covered with writing taken from the Yonaguni Monuments. Most of Dz's fapping is devoted the the Imperial Regalia of Japan, which you will never ever use or encounter, and which is all stupidly powerful and pointless. It also hits my rage buttons for shit like this:

Can command any being with at least a trace of serpent folk blood in his or her veins, which includes all ethnic Japanese and those of Korean familial stock. The most notable exception are the burakumin/eta, the untouchables, who appear ethnically identical to other Japanese but possess no Muvian blood, thus explaining many generations of shunning by mainstream society as "impure." Note that the small Hokkaido-based population of indigenous Ainu are also immune, as they are descendants of Caucasoid Lemurians.

That's...just amazingly tone-deaf. This wasn't written in 1975 or '85 or '95, this was put out in 2005, just ten years ago, and tries to provide a bullshit mystical justification for the centuries of very real prejudice experienced by the disenfranchised underclass of Japan...which still goes on today! That's seriously World of Darkness: Gypsies territory of actively encouraging discrimination by reinforcing bullshit ethnic stereotypes. At the same time telling the Japanese and Koreans that they're actually lizard people.



I'm not even getting into the weirdness that is the Imperial Regalia's individual powers. The Imperial sword Grasscutter is basically Stormbringer from Michael Moorcock's Elric saga, and I'm not making that shit up. It steals souls. There's a fucking Yithian stuck in there.

If you should meet Cthulhu on the road, Cthulhu will be cut!

Next up: Scroll Three - People

[Ancient History]

Special bonus rant: When I was younger and more prone to OCD-type behavior, I started a spreadsheet cross-referencing tomes, what spells they had, and where various spells could be found in CoC. This was important because of the complete lack of organization of any kind in CoC, as well as the tendency to call spells by different names in different books. This tends to highlight the multitude of editing errors and omissions - some fairly simply typos like "Call/Dismiss Emma" instead of "Call/Dismiss Emma-O", and some annoying like calling the spell "Army of Hell" when the actual spell name is "Enchant Army of Hell," and some are fairly major like "Contact Deity/Mara" which just doesn't fucking exist, even though they say it exists.

Also, I'd like to point out that there are two different places in this book with lists of spells associated with Buddhism, Shinto, etc. Both of these lists are not just incomplete based solely on the tomes in this book, but in places self-contradictory. For fuck's sake, editors, this is not a hard job. We're not asking you to do anything as fucking difficult as actually cross-reference multiple books, just keep the shit in this one book consistent! And they can't even fucking do that! Rawr!

[angelfromanotherpin]

I'm not even getting into the weirdness that is the Imperial Regalia's individual powers. The Imperial sword Grasscutter is basically Stormbringer from Michael Moorcock's Elric saga, and I'm not making that shit up.

Do the other regalia also crib from Moorcock? Does the mirror steal memories? Is the pearl connected in some way to a fortress?

[Ancient History]

No. The mirror doesn't reflect the images of foreigners. The mirror is fucking racist.

[Orion]

[RelentlessImp]

No. The mirror doesn't reflect the images of foreigners. The mirror is fucking racist.

Racist mirrors and a library of occult knowledge to impress hot librarian chicks. This is either the start of a The Librarian or Bureau 13 expy, or a game I would adore playing.

[OgreBattle]

If Iron Chef Chinese Chen Kenichi walked in front of the mirror, would he reflect? Calling Koreans and Japanese of the same blood is mighty progressive in some ways tho'.

[Ancient History]

Scroll Three: People



This chapter immediately pisses me off by having the entirety of section one - eight pages - be a shitty short story. I think it's nominally supposed to introduce us to some typical Japanese investigator types, but I don't care because it's badly written and stupid and boring. So we're skipping to section two, which pissed me off in new and exciting ways.



Section two covers "Institutions, organizations, and power groups in Japan." Which starts off rather badly by discussing the Emperor of Japan. As the Emperor was (at the time the book was written) a 71-year old "scholar of marine biology and ichthyology" with zero political power and no Mythos connections (beyond being the most "pure" of the ancient Muvian-Serpent people hybrids) to speak of this is a waste of space.

The section on the Japanese Government isn't much better; this is shit that, if it was to be included at all, should have been added back in the Atmosphere chapter. No-one wants this shit. No one cares what the political parties are in 2005, unless one or both of them are a front for a cult (okay, one small far-right ultranationalist party is a front for the Yakuza serpent people, but we'll get to that later).



Page 171, discussing the Self-Defense Force, is where I instinctively reach for a bottle of bourbon that isn't there because I don't drink. Here's why!

It is rumored MacArthur actually formed the Defense Forces in the 1950s after the creature Gazira rampaged unchecked along the coast of Eastern Japan for an entire week. Unable to return troops quickly enough from Korea, he formed the Defense Forces as fodder for the monster. But the beast left on its own accord, small consolation. The SDF was charged with covering up evidence of this gigantic mutation, created by U.S. nuclear testing in the Pacific. Over the years, Gazira has surfaced erratically from the ocean depths, causing billions of yen in damage as well as numerous deaths, all deftly covered up by press reports of earthquakes, generous "relief aid" to families of victims, and the encouragement of silence. So far, this mass cover-up has worked beautifully within Japanese society, and Gazira remains the country's biggest open secret--even spawning horror movies.

In case you missed it: Godzilla exists in Call of Cthulhu. And although the giant radioactive lizard has no actual connection to the Mythos, this has not stopped Dz from treating it like it is. Outer Gods dammit.

On the other hand, Dz decided not to go full megacorp. He talks about the Keiretsu and Zaibatsu, but doesn't actually discuss any of them in detail beyond the Yotsubishi Group, the one with the Psi-Mech division. I feel a little dirty actually writing that.

The Japanese education system is actually sort of relevant in CoC - many of the PCs will be teachers, professors, students, researchers, or librarians, and the ones that aren't are still going to want to draw on higher education resources from time to time.


I played a Groundskeeper Seamus once. Only character to survive Masks of Nyarlathotep sane.

Aside:

Most games don't give a shit about education. Shadowrun talks about universities from time to time, but mostly because of research there that they can steal, not because you want to browse the 5,000,000 volume digital library with access to the latest online journals (which have expensive subscriptions!) or to take a summer course or something. D&D only gives a fuck about education as far as it applies to wizards and bards, because they typically go to "college", and maybe clerics because people have an idea that clerics in the real world are supposed to be edumacated. But D&D education system is nothing like the real world medieval education, at least partly because all the really good occult learning was done by law and medical students and done on the QT. This is sad, because most D&D games also don't highlight how appallingly ignorant the masses were back in the old days, when illiteracy was in the high double-digits, and books were rare. In a game where even the barbarians can typically read and write six languages without really trying, it's just a different world.

The Yakuza...gets short shrift. They don't even get a mention of any Mythos connections.

Basically, all of section two is bullshit that should have been crammed into an earlier scroll. Full no-fucks ahead to Section Three: Cults and Secret Societies!


Groundskeeper Seamus had the same stance towards abortion.

After 180 pages and many references and uncoordinated hinting, we finally get a look at the cult situation in Japan. It's done in a rather surprisingly organized fashion, although again this isn't written as an internal document of the universe (except for some excerpts from the Project Yurei White Paper), so the audience is...unsure. It's basically third-person omniscient-except-when-Dz-decides-to-be-coy.

Buddha's Tears (Butsu no Namida, Butsu no Baka, the Forbidden Brotherhood) is a registered tax-free "new religion" that...well, it's basically the Universal Brotherhood but the surprise in your kid's meal might be the Emerald Lama.



It's supposed to have something around 150,000 members and "capital assets" of US$1.3 billion, with lots of community outreach internationally yadda yadda. That seems a little high because the Church of Latter Day Saints has about 15 million adherents and is supposed to have about $25-30 billion in assets. But then again, Buddha's Tears actively sell a drug called gamu boyuzu (which is described as a methamphetamine that new converts absorb through the skin through promotional materials - one way to get somebody to actually care about your flyers, I guess.)

There is a rather decent Secret History section which traces the Buddha's Tears back to Green Caps fleeing Tibet in the 8th century. We also get one of our rare connections to other CoC products, the Cult of the Bloated Woman which featured so prominently in the Masks of Nyarlathotep campaign.

As for goals... Spread the good word, I guess. Which is a kinda weird pyramid scheme, because the church doctrine says: "Nirvana is guaranteed upon the taking of 108 lives, equal also to the 108 worldly sins in this realm." That's a lot of murders. The official goals section talks about blood sacrifice this and occult experiment that, which is a bit wishy-washy, but apparently they're also planning ahead to trigger a proper apocalypse by summoning a Great Old One to the junction of three tectonic plates, and manufacturing anthrax and VX poison gas.


"...that's after it melts your skin off..."

They also - and I'm surprised at this - have included full stats for members of each of the four general membership levels. I mean, you still have to roll stats and shit, because this is CoC, but they've got the skills worked out. Not terribly well - the "Mouths" have Cthulhu Mythos 21% and 2d4 spells from a list of four - but by CoC standards, this is high-quality work.

...there are also two magic items, which probably should have been in the last scroll where it discussed magic items. The first is a rosary of 108 prayer beads, which suck up souls when you kill people. Kill 107, and it grabs your soul and sends what's left of you to your dear fluffy Buddha; the higher-ups in the church use these things to power their spells. Which is a good trick, and I approve. The other item is a "small collapsible hand crossbow made of sacred Japanese cyprus" - apparently, to fill up the rosary, you have to kill people with the bow, each shot with which costs 10 ki. That's...non-ideal, but I guess it means if you can survive the first volley from the cultists you have an easier time managing them.

The other Green Caps in Japan are the Brotherhood of the Black Lotus, who decided they liked the hooded robes and didn't want to go into any of this nonsense about being a tax-exempt religious body whose community service shelters double as a place to scope out the good hobos for sacrifice. No, this is a hardcore, old-school sect of fifty members plus several hundred spies, informants and contacts. Here, we get yet more dope on the Emerald Lama.


The Emerald Lama first appeared in the CoC supplement Malleus Monstrorum, which I haven't read yet. However, the release date on that book is 2006, so either someone was peeking at the drafts, or it was based on an even older avatar of Hastur I'm unfamiliar with. Here, apparently the Emerald Lama is the leader of the sect and reincarnates in a kid with a green birthmark.

The Brotherhood of the Black Lotus has connections with the Theosophists, the Nazi Thule Society, Aleister Crowley, the infamous Unit 731, and somewhat weirdly Robert E. Howard's Conan stories, because of their association with the Black Lotus. They are also the powers behind the mythic valley of Shamballah in Tibet (conveniently left out of the actual Secrets of Tibet), and in league with the Chinese Triads of the Golden Triangle as part of the worldwide trade in opium and the drug Liao (which is apparently derived from the black lotus - I think that's a Lin Carter connection, but I'm not sure).

The Brotherhood has the basic goals of confusing mainstream Buddhism, opposing the tengu, and generally encouraging "the corruption of humankind and the return to worship of the Great Old Ones." So, basically reality television and bath salts. Their goals today also include genetic research, as they think if everyone is part Mythos monster then it'll be easier to declare victory. Or something to that effect.


It's a lot easier to take the Third Oath to Dagon when you already have gills.

Probably the greatest "Oh Dz, No" moment in this chapter is...WWII! Yes, Dz manages to make Japanese involvement in WWII worse:

The Imperial Army was aware of the Brotherhood's great occult wealth and, taking a page from the Thule Society in Germany, sought out Green Cap strongholds on mainland Asia during WWII. It is believe the Manchurian Incident was a major power play by Japanese imperialists to wrest power from the Emerald Lama's followers. The sacking of Manchuria, Taiwan, and Burma were all desperate attempts by the new Japanese esoteric splinter group, Buddha's Tears, in alliance with the Dragon Lords and using the Imperial Army to claim several key Mythos tomes, to initiate genetic change of Japanese Empereror Hirohito. The goal: to open dimensional Gates to the Six Realms and unleash the Great Old One, Mappo no Ryujin.

Yes, nothing like having your appalling military genocide as nothing but the scheming of different occult groups. Speaking of which, there's also this tidbit:

During WWII, the Order manipulated imerpial officers within Military Biological Unit 731 to aid their temporary allies, the Dragon Lords, in creating a serpent person-human hybrid using Chinese victims. The experimentation was an unmitigated failure, killing thousands in cruel experiments.

Look, I'm all for Nazis and whatnot to play to pulp sensibilities...hell, it worked for Indiana Jones.



...but there's something a little galling about blaming all of WWII on a couple of occult organizations. I'm probably making a bigger deal of it than it is, but perhaps it's because the Japanese continue to try and wiggle out of admitting guilt for some of the shit they did during WWII, I don't like even the hint of crap that lets them off the metaphorical hook.



The description of Shambalah is...complicated.

Monks raise rice and barley, along with mind-altering substances to aid meditation such as the black lotus and the silver lotus. Solar energy provides power via a system of crystal technology once used in Atlantis. The greatest asset is the Tower of Shamballah, not a physical sturcture but rather the sage leader of this valley of ascended masters, the shining lotus, rulers of the spiritual plane, and fire of life--the Emerald Lama. [...] It is believed that the vril race are the same beings the Thule Society first contacted, leading to a personal meeting of Adolf Hitler and the Emerald Lama. Strangely, it was only weeks after this meeting that Hitler became more and more detached from the actual events of the war, resulting in fatal tactical mistakes which led to Germany's defeat.

My giveafuck scale must be broken. Apparently Shamaballah is a Real Place(TM) full of wise and corrupt monks that farm rice and barley and really good drugs and is ruled over by an avatar of Hastur that's head of an eeeevil cult.


I'm much more comfortable with Hellboy punching Nazis than multiple occult influences on Hitler. Go figure.

The Dragon Lords are...uh...Yakuza. Run by serpent-people. Also behind ultranationalist political fringe group; sort of the Japanese equivalent of the Golden Dawn in Greece or the National Front in the UK. Except with blood rites and a version of Shinto that focuses on serpent- and dragon-worship.

All members of the Dragon Lords have almost unnatural levels of national pride and love for all things uniquely Japanese, often shunning anything perceived as Western whenever possible. These are the people you will see wearing traditional clothes like kimono and Japanese sandals, geta, on the streets. They don't stick out as much as one would think, due to the presence of normal Yakuza who also favor traditional garb, and older people who may dress similarly.

House of the Venerable and Inscrutable Colonel? Hai!

Okay, so the Dragon Lords are really a front for the Serpent People, who also survived the destruction of Mu, albeit without the blessing of Yig...because, seriously, the freaky half-serpent-people babies gave Yig the fucking finger. Fuck them.


Yig does not have to stand for this shit! And if he wanted half-human children, he'd go do the deed himself! As he did, in "The Curse of Yig" by H. P. Lovecraft!

Also, we get more dope on Shamaballah, this time claiming it was founded by remnants of the Muvian wizard-priests and Lemurians. Seriously, Dz was just making this shit up as he went along. And repeating himself:

Today, those of Muvian blood bear the mark of this pairing of serpent and human, and not only in the arena of Japan, for they have scattered to the far sides of the glove. These are the children of the fallen race, the nephilim. Carefully groomed for genetic purity, inhabited by astral serpents, they occupy positions of power in every country around the world. Children of the Merkovian Kings, they are the hidden rulers of they are the hidden rulers of the world. The Dragon Lords represent only a regional variation of the worldwide cult of the serpent.

Right, so it's reptilians all the way down. For anyone wondering about this whole "Astral Serpent" business, there's a new spell presented here - why hear and not in the actual grimoire section, I don't know - where a serpent person can basically possess a human body and puppet it about. As opposed to the spell where they just eat you and wear your skin; given the option let's hear an "All hail our scaly lords!" Seriously though, I have no idea why serpent-possession is better than serpent shapechanging, serpent illusion magic, or basic serpent-eats-you-and-assumes-your-shape. But there it is.

The Dragon Lords have a pretty solid goal: "place either a serpent-possessed human or a serpent person wrapped in illusory human form in every position of power in the world." Short, sweet, I like it.

...then it goes hazy. They've invested in genetic research to create a flu virus that will turn all humans into human-serpent hybrids.

If the Dragon Lords' plans are successful, then in one generation of births, Homo serpentus will replace Homo sapiens as the dominant species on Earth.

Seriously Dz, you don't have to work Cobra-La into your fanfiction.

Also, the Oyabun of the Dragon Lords is a major shareholder in the Yotsubishi Group. Sort of like how the Cigarette-Smoking Man used Mulder and Scully to investigate matters of potential interest to the Conspiracy, then shut them down and clean shit up as needed.

More stats! Some of these are hilarious.

Alla re armed with illegal weapons, favoring poison-coated katanas and silenced guns, and all will throw disposable gang members at opponents.

Which is one way to do conservation of ninjutsu, I suppose.

Project Yuzei (Pu-ro-je-ku-to Yurei) is the parascience arm of Yotsubishi Securites International, the Japanese corp poking and prodding at the Mythos, including the infamous Psi-Mech division, and traces its history back to WWII as the Japanese version of the Thule Society.

Many spectacular failures ended up laying waste to peasant rice fields, but the spirit of the project remained even though the Allied Occupation Forces dismantled the war machine and the many wartime zaibatsu.

Basically, these are the same guys from Demon Hunter X (1998).

Objectively, these guys are interesting because they're the CoC equivalent of the SCP Foundation, albeit Japan-centric, with a much-tighter budget, and far less development. But they go investigate Mythos stuff, conduct experiments with magic and advanced technology, and store the really dangerous stuff in vaults (which said byproducts occasionally break out of). We get only the barest hint of what some of the gear they've developed is or can do, and most of it probably should have been in the fucking equipment section a couple scrolls back:

Neural Disruptor, paralysis for 1d6 rounds;
Ethereal Snare, confusion for 1d10 rounds;
Psychometric Stasis, hypersensation for 1d6 rounds;
Hydrostatic Lock, faint for 1d10 rounds.
Psychic Static Generator, Blocks all ESP use for 1d6 rounds.
Armor: 2-point carbon fiber lab coats or 5-point kevlar vests.

As a note "ESP" isn't a well-defined ability in CoC, so that's basically Mister Cavern fellatio as to whether it does anything. However, there's an "Optional Rule: Psychic Abilities" on page 199 - technically the next section - which might apply. The Optional Rule is...not great? It suggests to leave the psychic abilities (it presents Clairvoyance and Psychometry as the two possibilities) to the NPCs; PCs that want to can, with proper oral sex technique and the Keeper's permission, pay 1 POW for either at character creator, or after a particularly painful in-character head trauma. Side effects are encouraged to be nose bleeds, extreme discomfort, and possibly temporary insanity.



The abilities themselves are no great shakes by CoC standards; Clairvoyance lets you see things that would normally be invisible, but in Call of Cthulhu that's usually a good thing, as if you can see it you start making Sanity Checks. Psychometry is a "let the GM rape my character at will" card, since it's an involuntary ability that costs 0/1 SAN whenever it's used, and the Keeper decides when it gets used.

Section 4 is a gaggle of NPCs, with stats. We've got a couple psychics, a disembodied spirit, a Shinto shaman, a Mythos entity wandering around in the body of a grumpy old man, some Yakuza, a bunch of cultists, miscellaneous Japanese assholes, a demon hunter, the Black Monk, an Oni Lord, a young kami that looks and acts like a Yakuza, a "half-Kami" Empress of Japan from the Japanese Dreamlands, a bunch of assholes from the fiction in the first chapter, and "Rei/Agent Hachi-Rei, Bio-Morph."

The ultimate achievement of Psi-Mech Division's experimentation, Agent Hachi-rei is a sight to behold, perhaps if only to see to what insane lengths this group will toil without regard to ethics.

Subject Hachi-rei, simply meaning "number 80" in Japanese, is the only name this hybrid creature has All of its human identity was destroyed in meshing it with the living bio-armor of unknown origin Psi-Mech recovered. Hachi-Rei has been implanted with false memories that she is a simple university student named Rei. Actually, her human half is the result of the first known human cloning, also achieved by Psi-Mech. The original Rei is a young woman who lives in Fukuoka Prefecture. She is totally unaware that this abomination wears her face. The true Reiko Hamazaki is the daughter of a rich executive in the multinational corporation Niko, which manufactures the popular GameStation 2 console.

Yes, it's basically Guyver married to Evangelion. Literally. The thing is called an "alien symbiont" and in an active state forms "bio-morph armor" with tendrils, and a "Forehead Nexus Cluster" that can fire a "bio-laser."


This is a very proto-CthuluTech game.

And that's this scroll done! Next up, Scroll Four: The Six Realms

No, this really isn't a Legend of the Five Rings sourcebook in disguise.

[DrPraetor]

I still haven't read the last post, but to me this is fairly true to the source material. I think Dz just didn't get the part of the CoC memo where writers are told do not use the Horror at Red Hook as inspiration.

HP Lovecraft was totally racist and he thought foreigners were worshiping perverse powers in an effort to drag the Anglo-Saxon race into debauchery. He would be 100% behind Buddhism as a cover for cannibals. He was also fine with using some oriental creature as a monster of the week; it was later authors that wanted a coherent mythos.

[Ancient History]

I still haven't read the last post, but to me this is fairly true to the source material. I think Dz just didn't get the part of the CoC memo where writers are told do not use the Horror at Red Hook as inspiration.

There was no memo:


Okay, let's get this out there now...yes, Lovecraft and his contemporaries were racist. We can be glad more of that didn't make it into their fiction. However, that doesn't give us the excuse to try and apply D&D-style racial bullshit to a contemporary setting and real ethnicities. It's one thing to have a game set in the 1920s and play up "The Yellow Peril" by having the bad guy be a Fu Manchu ripoff in the local Chinatown - terrible, as Egg Fu was terrible, but you're playing to the pulp aesthetic. In any kind of contemporary setting, saying that the Japanese are all hybrid lizard-people is just you being a raging asshole.



Also, you're wrong about Lovecraft. Yes, he was racist and against foreign immigration, but he respected Asians for their cultural achievements and he never went in for oriental creature-of-the-week in any of his stories. Just because a guy is racist in the 1920s sense doesn't mean he immediately threw on a hood and paid his five dollars to join the Ku Klux Klan.

[Ancient History]

Scroll Four: The Six Realms


Not depicted: Asgard. R'lyeh. Xoth. Yuggoth. Erfworld.

The Cthulhu Mythos has a tendency to destroy other mythologies it interacts with; when your god doesn't really answer prayers even when you cut the living heart out of a sacrifice on his altar but my god rises out of the deep and cracks open your step-pyramid like a pinata to get at the well-aged corpses inside...well, the material nature of the Mythos tends to trump the immateriality of most religions. You can trace this back to Lovecraft being a weird realist, a dedicated materialist and atheist who came up with his own artificial pantheon of corporeal horrors. Most of CoC takes this in stride; they might not like to weigh in on religion directly, but your clergyman character is not going to wave a cross at a Deep One and command it to retro vade, satanas.

Although to be strictly fair, some optional rules in various articles and supplements let clerics exorcise ghosts and things.

So the fact that the Japanese Mythos gets a pass here is...eh. It mislikes me. You don't see fucking Norway with Gates to Asgard and Ettins and shit. But there's sort of precedent in that CoC has absorbed some other stock supernatural monsters and whatnot, so I won't kick up too much of a fuss. I mean fuck, Bast was technically part of the Cthulhu Mythos, just because HPL loved cats.


This fact has been subject to abuse.

I will also give Dz some small credit in addressing this fact, as well:

Long time players and keepers might be wondering how the Six Realms fit into the existing Cthulhu Mythos framework. The easiest way may be to fold them into other well known dimensions, with the Six Realms simply being a Buddhist perception of what Westerners see as the Dreamlands and such. The various Jigoku could certainly be pockets in the Underworld of the Dreamlands. Tengoku could be a dimension immediately adjacent to and accessible from the Dreamlands. Yomi, the realm of the dead, the Ethereal Plane adjacent to Earth where ghosts dwell. Many asuras are possible aspects of Great Old Ones and so reside in distant places in the cosmos accessible only by portals and Gateways. Nehan is actually outside of time and space where the Outer Gods like Azathoth reign.

Well, that's not so bad. Just fold it into the existing cosmology, that works fine, been done with plenty else...oh, wait, there's more...

Optionally, rather than placing the Six Realms of Desire entirely within pre-existing Cthulhu Mythos dimensions, keepers might consider them separate and unique dimensions well known only in the Asian continent. This expands the Cthulhu Mythos and the places for investigators to explore. The thing to remember is that all of the Six Realms are accessible from Earth...but only by using the right keys and rituals to open the portals, of course.

<sigh> And he was doing so well. This is the kind of shit which Kindred of the East pulled, where just because you're in Asialand you play by a different ruleset. It's annoying and bullshit Magic Negro Asian crap. Look, the Call of Cthulhu RPG might not have anything resembling a well-thought-out and metaphysically sound cosmology, but it does establish a few things, which is that the Mythos is universal. It's like the strong and weak nuclear forces: you might not understand what all that shit does or how it works, but it's everywhere and applies to everything. I understand the desire to make X region of the map special - after all, you're writing a whole book on it! - but there needs to be some greater justification than "Oh, you're in Japan now. Yeah, their gods are real. Suck it, North America!"

I'm not arguing against uniqueness, I'm just saying that if you're going to have Japan be special, it needs to be worked into the context of the game. If you're going to promote the Japanese Mythos over the Korean or Vietnamese or Malaysian or <insert any other country/culture/ethnicity/etc.> Mythos by declaring it to really exist, you need to back that shit up. Dz fails to do this.

Aside:

I've seen people try to shoehorn Catholicism, Islam, Mormonism, and more into the Mythos. It doesn't often work very well. As with the "Lovecraftian Buddhism" presented in this game, trying to cram the various entities and cosmologies of existing mythologies into Lovecraft's stories of intergalactic and other dimensional aliens is at best an ill fit, and at worst ends up being tantamount to a hate crime. Part of the problem is that most religions are positive or affirming in some way, and the Mythos generally...isn't. It's people-neutral. It's people as ants. There is no special place for people in the Cthulhu Mythos, as much as Chaosium tries to make it about people and cultists at some fundamental level. Cthulhu doesn't care if he's worshipped, ultimately. Humans probably can't effect when or how R'lyeh rises. We're a temporary infection that will thrive and eventually die, waiting for the cosmic clock to click to the next aeon so that Cthulhu will be free again. It's not even a case of Where's your loving god now?, it's a case of: your god and Cthulhu can't both exist, and Cthulhu is over there having a nap.

So all this stuff about cults and religion...I think Chaosium dropped the ball on this, badly, and most writers too. I don't think most of the Mythos entities give a damn about human sacrifice, and it's an argument as to whether humans even have souls in Lovecraftian fiction. Most cults are those who realize the essential inconsequence of life - it's a party, and when Cthulhu wakes the party stops. So why shackle yourself with petty human laws and morality? Why worship at the altar of deaf gods, why aspire to anything when in the end, there is nothing we can do against the inevitable? Well, you have a few immortals that think they can do something - seekers of knowledge like Joseph Curwen - and those who hope to survive, or hate the human race enough they want the party to end early - and there are creatures like the Deep Ones who are on the other side and say "Hey, join us and the party lasts forever - maybe not for you, but for your kids!" But, I have rambled a bit long and away from the subject at hand.

The Six Realms are pretty much the ones ripped off for Legend of the Five Rings, and are addressed very briefly. So Tengoku (Realm of Heavenly Beings), Erf (Realm of Humans), Animal Kingdom, Realm of Asuras, Realm of Hungry Spirits (Yomi, Yellow Springs), Jigoku (16 hells: 8 hot, 8 cold), and Nirvana/The Pure Lands (where the Buddhas and Bodhisattvas hang out).



Each realm description comes with separate entries for the major races/gods/goddesses/other entities that live there. Sometimes that means you get stats, sometimes that means you don't. Lord Buddha, for instance, is now and Outer God who is "immune to all attacks except those of other beings also from outside of time and space" and "The Buddha does not move in conventional ways; rather he phases into the physical plane." In appearance, he's an unmoving statue. Apparently the downside to total Enlightenment is near-total non-interference; if you attack him, he just arbitrarily increases your Cthulhu Mythos knowledge until you're insane or enlightened enough to stop wasting your fucking time.


The Buddha has had enough of your shit.

In Asia there are no angels and heaven is not a reward for the just.

The main entry for Tengoku is Hisui Tennoh, the Jade Emperor, a new Elder God that can bestow immortality (cue regurgitating shit from much earlier in the book; editors, why do you hate your humble servants the readers, who have to wade through this crap again and again?), among other things.

Any Mythos spell or secret can be acquired in the libraries of the Kings of the Four Directions. A traveler must answer a riddle and the king of that palace will allow access to his libraries. Failure means transformation into a servitor. The information in each library corresponds to the sphere of guardianship of that king.

You can begin to see the problem here already; Dz has tapped into Japanese and other Asian folklore and turned this into a version of the D&D Outer Planes where mighty heroes go on quests and shit. That is not in keeping with the character of Call of Cthulhu. This is a game where you might run across the decayed corpse of a cat and need to be institutionalized for six weeks. Wandering into the Palace of the Northern King and challenging him to a fucking riddle contest is something you do in your head from the safety of your padded room while praying the nurse forgets the doctor ordered you six enemas a day.


And now, time to break open a can...

Erf Realm has the standard pantheon of Japanese monstrous critters, which is weird to me because you patently don't need fucking Kappa in a game that already has like six flavors of Deep Ones. But such is life. And there is lots annoying shit in this chapter. Case in point:

When a foreign or uninformed cultist uses a Contact spell in Japan, the likelihood (65%) is that a native o-bake will answer the call over the expected Mythos creature. For example, Contact Deep One yields a kappa, Contact Mi-Go finds a tengu answering, and Contact Elder Thing has a tengu arriving. Any attempt to Summon a type of vampiric being on Japanese soul may call a kitsune. Of course, variants to specifically call o-bake are available: Contact Kappa, Contact Kitsune, Contact Tatsu and Contact Tengu. In the case of oni, Summon/Bind spells must be uses for this servitor race.

Still not as silly as moe Nyaruko-chan.

Unlike the rest of this section, some effort is actually made to adapt the local Japanese critters into the Mythos: the Kappa are a physical race of mysterious origins, possibly a misguided experiment or offshoot of the Serpent People; the Kitsune are alien elementals drawn to Earth through gates that "migrated like gypsies over the centuries from China, then Korea, and eventually to Japan"; Tatsu are fucking eastern dragons who are either elemental manifestations of the Erf or possibly offspring of the Great Old One Yig and the Mother of All Serpents, the Great Dragon Mappo; the Tengu are an alien race trapped on Erf after they threw down against the Byakee and Hastur and lost (fun fact: "As part of their ascetic training, all tengu are highly adept at several martial arts, and would be considered on par with the most legendary of human fighters (85%+)" - thus, reinforcing the generally accepted idea that in CoC, skills are everything and you suck at skills. Thanks for playing!).

I dislike the "Y&#333;kai" as Dz has presented them, for several reasons. For one thing, most of the previous critters in this chapter can be classified as Y&#333;kai; it's a very broad group equivalent to when people in Europe or D&D say "fairies." So I think Dz misuses the term badly. Dz fits them into the Mythos by saying that they're spawned from the excess energy spilled off by Great Old Ones and Azathoth and shit, which is just kinda fucking lazy. He also has an 11-step program for you to make your own, which is really fucking annoying. Fortunately, he also provides several examples. Unfortunately, these are all pretty terrible. There's the Iso Onna, which should just be a female Deep One variant, and the Rokuro-Kubi that has a Reed Richards neck...


Look, I said weird, not "not terrifying."

...and the Bake-Neko, or monstrous cat which wanders around in the shape of an old woman...


I was looking for something else, and found this. Enjoy.

...it really just boils down to your bog-standard bizarre supernatural folktale shit. This kind of thing might work better in a Gaslamp Cthulhu game set in Tokyo in 1890, but in 2005 you're expecting Deep Ones and Ghouls and getting Bake-furu-geta (haunted secondhand items). Not even a shoutout to The Eye or Ringu. There's even a sidebar on parts of the Japanese soul for fucksake! This shit wasn't cool during the Mummy books.

Yomi is the realm of the Hungry Dead, so you'd expect either a) ghouls, or b) zombies, possibly c) both. AND YOU WOULD BE WRONG. Instead, we get Gaki, which are traditional corpse-eating spirit critters, hopping vampires, and various other assorted ghostbusters fare. This is...not ideal. If for no other reason than CoC is largely not set up to handle the restless dead, much less half a dozen different varieties of them. The fact that each comes with its own means for dispelling (some of which just say "vulnerable to magic attacks" - well gee fucking thanks) doesn't really help - does a fucking Elder Sign keep these at bay? Who knows? Nobody uses these goddamned things in a CoC game because there are no tomes with spells for keeping the damned things in check or making them go away. Plus are any of them really necessary? I mean yeah, Lovecraft & co. had fun with raising the dead and vengeful wizards instructing the very worm that gnaws to have their revenge from beyond the grave, but even Thomas Carnacki didn't have a fucking proton pack in his pocket.

Oni...on the face of it, Oni should be terrifying. They have really exceptional STR, CON, and SIZ scores, which translate into substantial damage bonuses and hit points, plus armor. But, they're still using Tetsu-Bo (45%), Bite (20%), and Stomp (35%). So you're not going to tackle these things unless 1) you are a martial artist and can kick ass up close, 2) you have a modern firearm and can kick ass from a distance, or 3) you have some explosives and wave at the stupid fucking troll as the timer ticks down. Unlike a shoggoth or something, taking these guys out is just a matter of inventive damage - and PCs are known to lay hands on flamethrowers and armored cars and shit. The Oni's best attack misses 55% of the time. Any reasonably competent party of adventurers can hand these things their asses.

Having finished terrible adaptations of Japanese folklore, the text deigns to talk about actual Mythos entities, starting with Astral Serpents (with a bizarre and ultimately useless sidebar on chakras). Other critters include a Japanese avatar of Nyarlathotep and the Emerald Lama.

Spoilered so as not to offend Grek. NSFW.

There, now we all feel dirty.

The thing about the Emerald Lama is that I like the concept.

The Emerald Lama seeks to engage the intellectual weakness of researchers and mystics. Seekers of knowledge who fall into the trap waste away in meditation lusting upon the very idea of enlightenment, lost in the illusionary joy of achievement. They become living mummies, each one a living brain trapped in a desiccated shell for eternity. An early symptom is increasingly irrational thirst for Mythos knowledge to the exclusion of all else. Mara tempts with sensual pleasure; the Lama presents a much subtler trap, the entrancement of knowledge. The seeker becomes enamored with mystic powers and abilities gained through Tantric blood rituals and obsessed by the raw power of Mythos secrets. This encourages the attachment to desire and an unquenchable appetite for knowledge: man's first and most potent desire (and greatest weakness); a failure of every Buddhist tenet.

This is great. This is so excellent and true to the nature of the Cthulhu Mythos, and players in general, that I wonder if Dz actually wrote it. Hell, it even ties into Buddhism nicely, because Buddhism does teach that mystic powers are cool and all, but ultimately a distraction from enlightenment. I might have made fun of the Lama throughout the book, but I genuinely like the concept - it's very much appropriate to Hastur as an experience, right down to the intimation of the Buddhist practice of self-mummification.

Of course, then Dz has to spoil it a little.

What purpose does this serve? If too many humans become enlightened and are able to understand the true nature of the cosmos, redefining what is "sane," then humanity might eventually become functional in a Mythos world rather than pawns of the Great Old Ones. Surface humans might still fulfill their greatest potential despite meddling by the mi-go. They might even surpass the feats of the K'n-Yan. This cannot be allowed.

This is...I dunno, fucking petty? I like the idea of the Emerald Lama as sort of this externalized concept of the self-defeating principle of the human race, the ravenous hunger for knowledge and power that deflects us from true wisdom and enlightenment, the destructive obsession which is the key hallmark of the munchkin powergamer and Lovecraftian protagonist alike.

Mechanics-wise, the Emerald Lama is probably a little too physical for its own good; it hits you with entrancing visions from it's third eye and then uses its tentacles to suck out your soul and spinal fluid. A rocket-propelled grenade or carefully-aimed landslide would pretty much do for this guy.

Mappo no Ryujin is a new Great Old One, and one that probably covers too much theological ground.

Other Aliases: Mappo Dragon, Mother of Yig, Apohis/Apep (Egyptian_, Azhi Dahaki (Persian), Bida (West African), Illuyankas (Hittite), Kukulkan (Mayan), Leviathan (Christian), Nidhogg (Norse), Quezalcoatl (Aztec), Ryujin (Japan), Tiamat (Babylonian), Tien Lung (Chinese), Typhon (Greek), Uroboros, Vitra (Vedic), Yam-Bahar (Canaanite), Zu (Sumerian)

Where the fuck to start...okay, so the Mother of Serpents is treading on the toes of both Yig (who was already identified with Kukulkan and Quetzalcoatl) and Shub-Niggurath (there is, weirdly, rather little about Shubby anywhere in this book; it's an appalling oversight). But it's Dz's personal baby of a GOO, tying in to his abominable fiction and retarded Muvian-serpent people-hybrid backstory throughout this book; supposedly the Mappo Dragon is kept contained in the Yonaguni Monuments off Okinawa in an "eight-pointed Elder Sign."





Mara, whose spells have been missing this entire fucking book, turns out to be an avatar of Yog-Sothoth. Surprise! Also, they cram Gazira into a half-page. The "Smasher of Cities" has Stomp 90% and Breathe Radioactive Fire 60%. I hope he doesn't hurt himself.



Other mythos entries are addressed in brief. Some of the stupider ideas are re-addressed. For example:

The cult Buddha's Tears have devised a video tape of tentacle anime which, when played 108 times, causes Chorazin to manifest through the television set and attack the victim. They plan to mass distribute this new tool to spur Mappo in the coming year. Other plans by the cult include introducing this same ritual item in digital format to spread via the internet.

YouPorn has strict guidelines regarding cursed sextapes.

While the great Cthulhu does not have any active agents in Japan, he hardly needs any: the proximity of the archipelago to R'lyeh means that since Japan's beginnings, the Japanese felt the slumbering dreams of this Great Old One. Cthulhu's dreams have subtle shaped Japan's lifestyle and aspirations. It is of note that the modern anime and manga realm have a popular tentacle horror series about Dai-Turu, "Great Tu-lu," that many otaku (hard core fans) consider a cult hit. Tulu's resemblance to Cthulhu is remarkable. The "cute-culture" of modern fad-conscious Japan has also seen many plush toy likenesses of Cthulhu on the market. A lasting cultural icon by the Nirio company is the "Hello Kthulhu" line of cute dolls in clashing pink and green. Nirio Co. is prolifice, selling everything from Hello Kthulhu toilet seat covers and Hello Kthulhu waffle makers to Hello Kthulhu talking keychains. Keepers might opt to make cuddly "super-deformed" Cthulhu a focus for the slumbering Great Old One's telepathic attacks on dreamers. Cute and creepy.

I think I threw up into my brain a little. I'm not against Hello Kthulhu in principle, it's just that the tone of this fucking book is all over the place. Get your act together, Dz.


Also on this page: Cthulhu is scared of a Ganguro girl. I can understand that.

...and that's scroll four! Next up, the fifth and final scroll (but there are also appendices): Scenarios and Sinister Seeds!

[Grek]

Could we please not post images of children who aren't wearing pants? That would be great.

[Stahlseele]

That's Hastur from the Nyaruko San Anime.
Wanna have something else to complain about?
It's a trap!

[nockermensch]

Could we please not post images of children who aren't wearing pants? That would be great.

It's not a child, they're actually 500 years old.

[Ancient History]

I've spoilered the pic for Grek's sensibilities and in case anyone is viewing this at work.

[Grek]

It's not that I'm offended (although I am), it's that viewing that is technically illegal in my state. And I'd rather not go to prison.

[Ancient History]

Scroll Five: Scenarios and Sinister Seeds


This scroll is a bunch of scenarios set in Cthulhu Japan. Section one starts off with "starter scenarios" - introductory adventures for Investigators to get their feet wet with. First off, welcome to a Tokyo! Time to solve us some murders.

The first scenario, "The Hin-no-Mazu Slayings," is seven pages long, confusing, and pointless. An onryo a malevolent undead spirit that is possessing people (we are given stats for a homeless man, a drunken salaryman, a bar hostess, and an 11-year-old schoolgirl - I imagine a sort of Dark Sailor Moon transformation for that one) and committing grisly murders. That seems fair, if a little out of the PC's league; the onryu's nickname is "Angel of Death" and it's specifically immune to everything the PCs can throw at it except magic. The suggested end to the scenario is that the PCs find the original desecrated grave of the onryu and use traditional Japanese rites to lay it to rest. They don't actually tell you how to do that, or who desecrated the grave in the first place, or how to stop it from happening again. It's really just stuffing the ancient evil back into the can and trying to seal it with a bit of gaffer tape. Plus, there are howlers like this:

For foreign investigators, the Japanese language may present an obstacle to overcome. However, foreigners carry an advantage of being outsiders; people may be more willing to talk to them about topics that might otherwise be off limits if they were fellow Japanese citizens.

Really? This is the same nation you said just the other page has conspired to convince the rest of the world that a giant radioactive fire-breathing lizard doesn't occasionally wander out of the sea and trash the local villages. What on earth has made Dz think that Japan is open and welcoming to foreigners to the point that they'll gladly talk about all these local slayings? Do the Japanese just instinctively feel that they're NPCs, and are determined to follow their roles to keep the "heroes" moving along as fast as possible and with the minimum possible collateral damage?

The whole approach to this scenario is weird and painful - the first "episode" is literally a paragraph where the PCs see a news report on the murders. Seriously, it's not like the cops even come calling and ask if you're like to take a look at some freaky corpses or anything. Why do the PCs even get involved? What transitions us from episode to episode? Why is this nominally a Mythos adventure at all, when there are no Mythos critters or tomes involved? Actually going through the two traditional paths in any CoC adventure (library or dynamite) will fuck the PCs over in this scenario. It's terrible.

The second scenario involves "the Kappa-Mon Card Game." - and that's it, I'm done. I don't care. If I wanted to play fucking Pokethulhu, I would play Pokethulhu.



The fact that this "introductory" scenario appears to involve corporate shenanigans and a raid on a secret fanatical Buddha's Tear's cult temple out in the Japanese wilderness just cements the insanity. It's seriously a temple complex with four sublevels on the map, an appearance by the Emerald Lama, and a section entitled "The Grand Summoning Rite." This is the sort of shit that should have been a campaign, not an introductory scenario in a sourcebook. Matters aren't quite helped by the fact that the book gleefully reprints stats from earlier scrolls.


Emerald Lama: Been There, Done That, Got the T-Shirt.

Then we have a lengthy scenario based on "The Yonaguni Monuments," the intro fiction for the book. It involves Triad smugglers/pirates and scuba diving to ruined underwater cities, where you have the exciting opportunity to screw up and set off the apocalypse.

Section Two is "Sinister Seeds." These are marginally better, since they emphasize a premise, a hook ("task") for getting the PCs involved, and possible consequences and twists. Most of these aren't particularly good, although some are at least moderately creative. Some of them just...don't gel, and there often isn't enough information to actually hang an adventure on. The twists in particular tend to run together, like so:

SR is exploiting the young talent he manages. His homosexual orientation is common in the entertainment industry, but dark rumors abound about SR and his sexual harassment of his young stars. Stars who fall out with SR regularly disappear from "the business," ruined. Some of the disappearances may be murders, but SR is so powerful that the authorities dare not investigate. J-Pop star Naomi has an enchanted item, the Mirror of Matsuyama (see pages 150-151 for details), which was slowly feeding upon her soul in exchange for keeping her young and beautiful. Some Mythos element may be manipulating SR or he may be active in the Mythos himself.

Just before you ask: the actual stats for the Mirror of Matsuyama don't give it any powers for keeping people young; it's seriously just a hungry ghost trapped in the mirror that slowly steals your soul as it makes you look like her and then possesses you. I have no idea why SR's homosexuality would even come into play in this scenario, until "Naomi" is a really convincing trap.

Other scenarios involve esoteric tai chi exercises, Japanese mermaids, the Kobe earthquake, "Kthulhu's Karaoke"...



...I think you get the drift. These are all set in Japan (well, except for the little Monster Island which seems ripped straight from the pages of Planetary), but few if any of them are actually Mythos. The only one I tentatively approve of is "Shadows of the Tentacle" which involves erotic manga and Y'Golonac.

Section three covers "historical scenarios" - i.e. how to set Mythos stories in Japan in prior eras. I tentatiely approve, but think they could probably have devoted more space to how the actual Mythos fit into all of this, rather than just a High Points in Japanese History primer.


My desire for this book has led to suffering. O&#7747; ma&#7751;i padme h&#363;&#7747;.

Appendices
Okay, so there's a "cultural lexicon" of Japan, a timeline of Japanese weird events from 1890 onwards, a truly bullshit appendix three called "The Silk Road" which is basically a CIA Factbook-style snapshot of the rest of Asia, a go-to on the University of Tokyo, and a selected bibliography which includes a list of websites (with the caveat: "Internet sites are unstable, and these listings may become invalid over time.")...followed by character sheets, a completely illegible "Supernatural map of Japan" they encourage you to photocopy, a hand-drawn guide to the Tokyo subway, and a completely worthless index which is twice as long as it needs to be because they crammed it into the gutter so they could use the outside half-pages for some really shitty Asian-esque art. Oh, and a full-page ad for Chibi Cthulhu, an About the Author, and a full-age ad for Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth.


That was actually a decent game.

You will have gathered, from many many ragefaces and exasperated comments and whatnot that this book is bad. Which is true! But what you must understand is that this book is not just bad, it is bad even by the standards of Call of Cthulhu sourcebooks, which are themselves a high standard of badness. Dz took it upon himself to write an ungodly long sourcebook devoted to his vision of a Cthulhu Mythos Japan, which mainly involved as little of the actual Mythos as he could fucking manage - Shub-Niggurath is mentioned exactly once, the fucking Mi-Go avoid the place as not having anything worth their time or interest, and Cthulhu has been relegated to a plus doll and the inspiration for a thousand naughty tentacle anime. The racism is more than a little insulting, the editing is practically non-existent, the rules are terrible and broken even by CoC standards...

...and at the end of the day, with all the material generate and the history and geography presented, there's not much there. The cults aren't particularly good or interesting; the Japanese mythos critters by themselves aren't worth the time or attention; the Cthulhu Mythos in Japan is given scanty enough mention except through the torturous medium of Japanese Buddhism and even that is so halfassed that Secrets of Tibet just up and ignores all of it. I'm used to CoC location books being boring, but this is...it's longer than the fucking corebook, and at the end all it did was raise my blood pressure. It was floated into the ocean of CoC material and instantly sank; there is no trace of it in any other book that I know of. It just...is.

Which is maybe part of why I grew so fucking tired of Call of Cthulhu in the first place. It's more than just the primitive system, it's the primitive approach to game design in the first place. The books just...exist. They don't really interact with each other. There's no sense of a bigger world, or a bigger plot. They're so generic they're almost GURPS books, but GURPS would at least be written better, and mention other relevant GURPS books from time to time. How can anyone even say this book is complete? It started from nowhere and went nowhere, by way of 300+ pages of sheer noise.

I think there's a core skeleton of salvageable material from this book. Strip out the tomes, the spells, maybe even some of the cults. I'm not against the Emerald Lama, though I'd like to see something more interesting for Shamaballah, and even the fucking Tengu aren't the stupidest thing I've ever seen. But the Mythos history - especially the whole Muvian/serpent hybrid/Dragon Kings/nephilim/Merkovian Kings bullshit - is just such a cluster fuck of bad decisions on top of bad decisions, and incompatible with so much...who the fuck would ever bother? I think maybe you'd dip into this book if you needed more Buddhist-flavored Mythos tomes in your Secrets of Tibet game, but as for the fluff as written, this book just offends me.


I can't even read this, and I like it better than Secrets of Japan.

[Ancient History]

I rant out of steam a little at the end there.

[DrPraetor]

HPL was insane. He was a virulent xenophobe with a foreign alter-ego as his pen-name, an anti-semite who married a Jew, and he had to write horror stories about inbred fish people to resolve the self-loathing he felt on discovering that he was part Welsh.

So to say that he was respectful of this or another culture - I'm sure that he liked the cool parts, he probably would have been a prolific pen pal with Japanese horror writers if he'd had the opportunity. However, the Chinamen in the horror at red hook are practicing whatever religion they have, which is debased and involves cannibalism, because that's what HPL thought of The Orient and their religion/culture.

He did have a particular sensibility which is very difficult to imitate (this book does very poorly even adjusted for difficulty, no argument there).

So HPL's take on Japanese folklore would have looked very different - his story with a Medusa (for example) doesn't have a monster that hews particularly close to Greek myth. So a Mythos Japan in which there are aliens who are very loosely based on Tengu and so forth, or in which the Japanese cultists turn into oni as a result of cannibalism, which are a type of ghoul, could work. Actual spirits are right out, though - animism is simply the wrong zeitgeist.

So you can have Mythos vampires - Doctor Who did a good job ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_of_Decay ) while Rifts did poorly ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alien_Inte ... elligences );

[Ancient History]

HPL was insane. He was a virulent xenophobe with a foreign alter-ego as his pen-name, an anti-semite who married a Jew, and he had to write horror stories about inbred fish people to resolve the self-loathing he felt on discovering that he was part Welsh.

That's a bit much. Lovecraft was a racist hypocrite who disliked foreign immigration about as much as contemporary conservatives, and made exceptions for his friends and twisted his logic in circles to exempt them from his prejudices. But he never joined the KKK or claimed that all non-white people were baby-eating cultists. And the Welsh thing is just one theory put forward by one critic.

[/edit]I would agree that the racism of the period, and Lovecraft in particular, is an issue that needed to be addressed more in Call of Cthulhu the RPG. Unfortunately, it hasn't been, because it's written by a bunch of assholes who think Yellow Peril and "savage races" is cool, even when projected into the 21st century. Tonedeaf does not even begin to describe it. That fact that some of them are so idiotic, like Dz, to mix that with D&D-style fantasy racism just underlines the problems with the whole fucking setting being blissfully unaware of itself. It's White Privilege the RPG.

[kzt]

[/edit]I would agree that the racism of the period, and Lovecraft in particular, is an issue that needed to be addressed more in Call of Cthulhu the RPG. Unfortunately, it hasn't been, because it's written by a bunch of assholes who think Yellow Peril and "savage races" is cool, even when projected into the 21st century. Tonedeaf does not even begin to describe it. That fact that some of them are so idiotic, like Dz, to mix that with D&D-style fantasy racism just underlines the problems with the whole fucking setting being blissfully unaware of itself. It's White Privilege the RPG.

Hey, if George Lucas has no problem with it, what makes you think it's a problem?

[Koumei]

Ah, George Lucas. The only incident where Disney gained control of the canon of something, rather than the actual creator, and the fans went "Well that's a fucking relief".

You might have run out of steam, AH, having vented so much at the badness of the book, but it was still a good read and at least you finished it. I might do that with a review, one day. (I won't)

I'll admit I haven't actually read much of the book I do have - a lot of the stuff that ties into mechanics and religion clash and all that. But just the section on "some cultural stuff" and "so you're a foreigner?" is pretty decent, and still makes this less bad than RIFTS: Japan (TM). I should start (and never finish) a rageview of that one day.