[Call of Cthulhu]Secrets of the Congo

[Ancient History]

So, I promised myself I wouldn't do any OSSRs until I finished Space Madness! - Which is sitting at about 10k right now out of a projected 50k wordcount. Because I have been neglecting it in favor of other projects. And I do intend to finish it. But then I ran across this, which is in the running for "Most Racist Call of Cthulhu Product Ever," and...I couldn't pass it by.

Let's start out with that this is a "Miskatonic University Library Association Monograph" - which basically means that this is a fan supplement that fans did all of the editing and 99% of the editing and layout on, and Chaosium obliged them by publishing it under their "official" logo and taking a large cut of the profits from its sale. So it's basically the precursor to Onyx Path in many ways, except that CoC never really had a "canon" to begin with, so all of their supplements are more or less optional. Hell, even the main book is more or less optional, as Frank and I pointed out.

So. How racist is Secrets of the Congo? Let's start with the back cover text.

SECRETS OF THE CONGO
...

There are still-wild regions of the Dark Continent, Africa. Darkest of all is the wilderness of Belgian Congo, at the very center of the continent.

Belgian colonial rule is harsh, and traditional practices such as slavery and witchcraft are widely practiced. Superstitions rule the vast number of tribes that live on or near the river.

The greed of the Belgian colonial administration, for ivory, rubber, and copper, surpasses even that of the Zanzibari slavers, feared for their raids among the Congo natives.

But the Dark Continent hides secrets as well. In deepest Congo, a treasure-house form primeval times awaits those who dare seek it out--and survive the search.

...it could be worse. That's not a ringing endorsement by any means, and it could also be much better. What this back cover copy tells you is that you're looking at a 1920s/30s pulp version of a chunk of central Africa.

That yellowish bit in the middle is the Belgian Congo, circa 1913.

And at the time, the pulps were horribly racist with regards to Africa in general and the Congo in particular, which has been called the Heart of Africa. It's the setting for Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1899) and the source of the white apes in H. P. Lovecraft's "Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family" (1920), which was in turn partly a pastiche of Edgar Rice Burroughs popular Tarzan novels, and H. Rider Haggard sent Alan Quartermain into the Congo after King Solomon's Mines (1885), and Robert E. Howard's Solomon Kane followed him there about forty years later...and all these references to colonial adventure lit should give you a real idea of the foundation on which Secrets of the Congo is built.

Because, you see, early science fiction, fantasy, and weird fiction in the pulp era arose pretty naturally out of the appallingly racist but fantastical colonial adventure fiction. So in a very real way, if you took the disparate references to central Africa in Cthulhu Mythos fiction written by Lovecraft and his circle of writer friends at Weird Tales, you're going to get a really weird racist caricature based in large part on the really weird racist caricatures presented by actual malaria-addled, gin-and-whiskey-swilling British big game hunters from the 1880s.

There's no nice way to put it.



So going in, you know that if the book tries to be accurate to the source material, it's going to be wince-worthy. I mean, when Kindred of the Ebony Kingdom started spouting shit about jungle villages, that was terrible because that was written as visiting Africa in the 2000s, and painting native Africans as helpless, superstition-laden primitives and goddamned roads are ruining the native way of life is terrible and racist. At least Secrets has the slight excuse that it's trying to be accurate to the horribly racist source material.

But then there's the flip side: Secrets is also going to be talking about 1920s/30s-era Belgian Congo, not the Congo Free State or the Congo region before the Scramble for Africa. So that's...that's going to be another entirely different thing to deal with.


That's King Leopold II of Belgium. He's got a good claim to being the Hitler of Africa. By which I mean, he committed genocide. Estimates vary between 8 and 10 million people died do to forced labor so that Leopold II could profit from the products of the Congo.

Okay. I think I've mentioned that Chaosium basically has no line development, so there's nothing like a systemic effort to cover the whole world like you might see with Shadowrun or Greyhawk; products come out covering a given area and/or period and they might be followed by others also set in the same period/area and they might...not. The regions/periods that get the most attention get the most products. Which is why, if you want to run a CoC game set in Victorian-era London, you are spoiled for products from Cthulhu by Gaslight to Cthulhu Britannica, while if you're looking for books on Africa you get The Cairo Guidebook, Secrets of the Congo, Secrets of Morocco, Secrets of Kenya, Achtung! Cthulhu North Africa, and various and sundry other little products. Any and all of which are guaranteed to ignore each other.

Details...Secrets of the Congo is 125 pages and is written by Michael Fredholm von Essen, which is an excellent name, and based on the names of his playtesters (Thorleif Persson, Per Lundberg, Frederick Fooy, etc.) I'm guessing this is a largely Nordic gaming group in Scandinavia. Anyway, it's largely illustrated with out-of-copyright photographs, prints, etc. which, t'be honest, is how I might do this if I was forced to write such a thing, and is laid out in a double-column format and...not much else.

Look, let's just lower our expectations a little with this one, okay?

[hyzmarca]

That's King Leopold II of Belgium. He's got a good claim to being the Hitler of Africa. By which I mean, he committed genocide. Estimates vary between 8 and 10 million people died do to forced labor so that Leopold II could profit from the products of the Congo.

Leopold actually recruited native into his police force. But, he was a massive cheapskate who didn't want them wasting their ammunition on such trivialities as hunting for food. Thus there was a rule that whenever a police officer discharged his weapon, he had to bring back proof that he killed someone. If he didn't he would be severely punished. The preferred form of proof was a severed human hand. Eventually, they started laying bonuses to cops who brought in a certain number of severed hands. Of course, this made the cops who didn't muder a fuckton of people look like slackers, so the national police department instituted quotas that the cops had to make. Severed human hands became a sort of unofficial currency traded back and forth, both to meet quotas and to get extra food.

Of course, eventually the national police figured out that it was more lucrative to leave the person alive so that they could come back and harvest the other hand later. So you ended up with entire villages full of one-handed people.

[CapnTthePirateG]

Leopold also spent all the blood money on a teenage hooker.

[Ancient History]

The introduction is somewhere between one and three pages. I'm not entirely sure, since there is one header for "Introduction," and then it has several subsections like "Keeper's Information" which you don't normally see in an introduction. So the Introduction proper would appear to be the first five paragraphs, and the rest of this should really be "Chapter One." Whatevs, it's a fan supplement.


We roll how we roll.

The back cover copy was largely stolen from the second paragraph. The only thing it omitted was a bit about flying boats. However, paragraph three is where the crazy really starts:

But the Dark Continent hid secrets as well. In deepest Congo, a treasure-house from primeval times awaited those who dared to seek it out--and survived the search. An ancient flying city reportedly known as Devapura, built by an unknown civilization and last records in an ancient manuscript seen in the early eighteenth century by Jonathan Swift, who copied the details into a fictitious story about one Lemuel Gulliver, who reportedly saw the city flying in July 1707. Grounded in the heart of Africa for millennia and now inhabited by nameless horrors, will Devapura again rise into the sky?

A few things might jump out at you here, and they clear that up in the next couple of paragraphs, but I'll quit quoting and start summarizing: the authors aren't trying to be faithful to Lovecraft or Robert E. Howard's vision of the Congo. Sure, there's a cult in there trying to raise Cthulhu, but the primary fictional inspirations for this book are from the 18th and 19th centuries, while keeping more-or-less accurate to the horrors of Leopold II's bloody reign. So in this product is mostly for the simulationists looking for a 1920s African setting largely won out.

Also, points awarded for mentioning Chaosium's Secrets of Kenya, which came out in 2007, two years before this book, and how the two differ ("To sum it up, wealthy visitors in the 1920s would go to Kenya on vacation. In comparison, only those who had lost it all, or had no choice, would consider Belgian Congo."). This is the kind of thing which a CoC fan supplement does better the the official books.

Like most "sourcebooks," this book is apparently less a sourcebook than a series of adventures - effectively a small campaign - with supplementary material that covers the people, area, and era. I don't know if that even qualifies as a bait-in-switch at this point in Chaosium's history; I certainly should have known better. The author gives a breakdown of the adventures (not promising, but I won't spoil the surprise).

They also give some ideas for using this book in other settings - specifically the 1890s (Gaslight-era, for Chaosium fans) with Henry Morton Stanley and Dr. Livingstone fucking around, and a "Modern setting" which is...eh.

Even today, much of the Congro remains unexplored wilderness. One or more lost ancient ruins would not feel out of place. Beliefs in the supernatural and, one would assume, the Mythos, remain widespread. Cannibalism has survived as well, and although the natives of today would present a less "tribal" appearance, any one of the multitude of armed groups within the country would be more than able to cause problems for investigators.

Frank and I discussed in the GURPS Cthulhupunk OSSR how tricky it can be to move the Cthulhu Mythos into the modern day - not impossible, but it's increasingly difficult to have hidden cities in an era of GoogleEarth. Now, Africa is a lively place - and incredibly massively huge - so there's room for cannibalism in pockets, but the whole "natives" and "tribal" bit rubs me the wrong way. So I think there's some truth that you need a dose of suspension of disbelief to have the Mythos in the modern age; a hidden city in the Congo might be harder to swallow, but as long as we can avoid terrible stereotypes of Africans in general as primitive or stupid.


Granted, parts of Africa DO look like a real-life Shadowrun cosplay.

Okay, so how this is book (and review) actually divvied up? Well, most of it is the "adventure" or "adventures" - it's hard to tell exactly where one ends and the other begins. I should add that this TOC is a straight dump in a word document and lists every single goddamn header in the entire book, which is why it goes on for two pages. There's also a 20-page section on the history of the Congo, and that's near but not at the front. I'll try to get through that in the next post.

[Blicero]

Are you talking about Onyx Path rather than Obsidian?

[Ancient History]

...yes. Let me go fix that.

[Ancient History]

The Rival Congo Expeditions
Despite the title, this is basically "the hooks" for how to get the investigators into the Congo. In Hook #1, your Uncle Albert went searching for the ancient Hyperborean fortress of Devapura and never returned. This kind of dead-relative plot hook is so common in Call of Cthulhu scenarios (and, to be fair, a chunk of Mythos pastiches) it's practically the equivalent of meeting Mr. Johnson. To be fair, Lovecraft had a few similar hooks in some of his stories - "Arthur Jermyn," "The Shadow over Innsmouth," and "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward" all involve genealogical research as a starting point.


Which gives me an idea for a modern campaign!

Uncle Al left a crazy letter full of phrases like "a Negro tribe of darkest Congo" and an Egyptian manuscript. No, I don't know how the Egyptians are supposed to work into this either, unless it's a King Solomon's Mine/Ophir connection. Which leads us to our first fun mechanical bullshit:

A few hours spent in the library or the archive of the Arkham Advertiser will easily (through a successful Library Use roll; re-roll once per hour until the investigator succeeds; any spectacular failure will only result in further waste of time [...]

I don't know what "spectacular failure" means in this context, but I do know that re-rolling until you succeed means "set up light housekeeping."

On the other hand, the author acknowledges Uncle Al is a bit cliche, and suggests the Keeper emphasize the potential inheritance if they can confirm he's dead.

Hook #2 is that somebody has stolen some African relics from the Arkham Museum of Natural History and...they...decide to stage an expedition to the Congo to steal an ancient relic from the native peoples (the aforementioned cannibal Wakiwaki tribe...ghost, I feel bad just writing that.) I really don't follow the logic there, as expeditions usually take some time to organize, and the police should be better at catching people, but whatever.

The next couple pages have player-character hand-outs of newspaper accounts about Albert and the museum thefts. Which include things like "the dreaded Wakiwaki cannibals, a degenerate race of marsh dwellers" which we could have done without. Hell, it actually uses the phrase "great white hunter" at one point.


Bring me the head of that bitch he took to the prom!

There are also, of course, references to Dr. Challenger and Allan Quartermain, just in case the players were concerned that this whole debacle was actually Lovecraftian. Oh, and a writer of weird fiction named "Phillip H. Loveman." This is like a list of fanfiction don'ts.


Also stolen was a Congolese sword, like this one. Given that the art budget for this product was "whatever is public domain/what the writer's girl/boyfriend decides to contribute," this is actually a much better picture than the one in the book.

You might well ask why the Museum would approach the players to be part of this expedition...and this is a valid question, which the author tries to address. And adds various NPCs/potential pre-generated PCs to fill in the gaps. They also let you investigate the burglary at the Museum which supposedly leads to the expedition, which includes the references to Gulliver's Travels. This is...way more confusing and elaborate than I'm actually talking about here, involving a guard with gambling debts, a dead fence named Pickman, and a Belgian big-game hunter named Hubert van Damme. Really, we haven't gotten into the adventure proper yet and it is an insane mix of weird shit.


I don't care, I'm picturing this.

Four pages are given to the flight to the Congo. This includes a brief itinerary outlining the 14-day trip by air and ship, as well as conversion rates for the Belgian Franc to American Dollar and British Pound Sterling in 1926 and 1937. These are the kind of details simulationists love, even though CoC isn't really set up for it since they just roll Credit Rating for pretty much every major purpose. Seriously, D&D and Shadowrun are pretty serious about currency, but CoC is usually very vague about cash-on-hand and how many assets you have.

On the other hand, you get a Curtiss F-5L Flying Boat to take you into the interior, and are encouraged to treat it as its own NPC. Which I encourage.

The most racist thing about these pages are several illustrations of white people being carried by black people. I mean...once, I get. But more than once, that gets disturbing.

Sometimes, being historically accurate is disturbing. But seriously, how many times do you need to see a white person being carried by black people in this book? Once should be more than sufficient.

Next up: The Belgian Congo!

[Username17]

Outright ignoring that Africa exists like Mage or just putting a big area labeled "Here be Black People" on that part of the map like Shadowrun's 6WA is an act of moral cowardice. On the flip side, if you're going to write about Africa it would be nice if you were to do it in such a manner as to not be constantly offensive.

-Username17

[Ancient History]

The Belgian Congo
This twenty pages actually covers the "meat" of the book, insofar as it describes the actual Congo, socially, geographically, historically, etc.

Africa is an enormous continent. It is almost as large as North America and Europe combined. It is nearly twice as large as South America. Few people realize this, since not that many people ever visit Africa. Besides, the African continent appears quite small on most maps of the world due to peculiarities of the Mercator projection on which these maps are based.

This is the first couple of sentences of the section, and already the authors have done a better job of grasping and presenting Africa as a continent than the folks at White Wolf ever did. It gets to the point where I might call this the least racist of the various Chaosium Africa supplements...although this is damning with faint praise, as Secrets of Kenya actually has "Great White Hunter" as a player archetype.


No, seriously. Not "Hunter" or "Big Game Hunter," but "Great White Hunter." WTF.

I'm a little less-clear on the natural history - the text literally claims that "the Congo basin was more than a billion years old even when the elder things settled on Earth," which might be stretching things a bit (the current course of the Congo River is only a bit over a million years old), but they obviously felt the need to work it into the stated timeline of Cthulhu Mythos Earth, which is more than can be said for most Chaosium products.

Flora and fauna are described (well, more named quickly - including manatees and honey badgers), as well as native foods.



Also, pygmies are mentioned several times, but you're assumed to know what they are, apparently. The tack for the pygmies seems to be a mix of accurate portrayal and 1890s interpretation, so for example you get passages like:

The land of trees was inhabited by strange creatures, as reported by explorers of various nationalities [...] and little men with tails, no doubt a reference to the enigmatic pygmies who inhabited these rainforests long before the negro Bantu tribes first dared to enter them and who were traditionally dressed in pounded-bark loincloths which hang down and look like trails.

They also weave a partially-fantasy pseudo-history of the "Old Kongo Kingdom" through to the Congo Free State to the Belgian Congo - this is all without any mention of Cthulhu Mythos-stuff, although it does include a couple cannibal anecdotes.

Once, in 1893, when then Commandant Francis Dhanis (1861-1909) finally regained control over his cannibal auxiliaries after two days of looting and ordered the enemy dead to be buried for fear of epidemics, the cannibals, at a loss, replied: "What enemy dead?"

...which I have no doubt was taken wholesale from an actual history, but seems a bit...I don't want to say lurid. Call of Cthulhu is one of those RPGs which doesn't shy away from a bit of cannibalism, going so far as to make it a common component in some spells. But it's sort of presenting a one-sided view of Africans in that regard. It's like writing about Australia and focusing on what crimes each prisoner who was sentenced there committed, rather than on those who weren't criminals or what they did when they actually got there.

If it seems like I'm making too much of all this, it might be because there's an entire three pages devoted to Congolese cannibalism.


Including an illustration of sharpened human teeth.

It gets to the point where I can't even be sure where fact and fiction diverge. I have no doubt that cannibalism was something that was done in that region. There are accounts of it from European explorers, there is archaeological evidence for it. But I also know there's a lot of fictional and sensational accounts of it, and it's not clear how widespread it was, and some of the information in this section is probably just plain incorrect - and I can't tell if that's sloppy scholarship or done on purpose for atmosphere. It does seem to have way too much emphasis placed on it for something not tied directly into the Mythos in any fashion (which, given the presence of ghouls and cannibalism-based Cthulhu Mythos spells, you might expect).


tl;dr: It's not quite this bad. Sortof.

Congolese sorcery is touched on in a following section - bordering on the anthropological, the only reference to Cthulhu Mythos magic is about raising the dead ("In Call of Cthulhu terms, they raised zombies, pure and simple.") We get a few more stats (and another reference to Secrets of Kenya) when the book turns to disease, and you find out how many rolls you need to make while suffering diarrhea (CONx3 under d100, roll once per day).


Sorcery is an ongoing problem in Africa, less because of it actually existing as social conditions arising from accusations of the same leading to discrimination, assault, and murder.

...and that's the blistering introduction to the ins-and-outs of the Belgian Congo! Next up, the aventure proper begins with "The Nightmare at Vivi Station."

[OgreBattle]

What is an rpg book suppose to do if your writers feel like they don't know Africa and don't know Black people but there's a giant blank spot in the world map marked "Africa". Well other than "hire a Black person who is enthusiastic about Fantasy Africa writing"

[Grek]

Do some research. It's not hard.

[virgil]

Do some research. It's not hard.

Actually, it is. If the writer is white, then there will be enough built-in racism and ignorance to make any attempt at portraying Africa fraught with landmines. Obviously, there are levels of severity, but it remains something that will require more care and forethought than other elements of the setting. I would dare to say that if you actually care about such things, you can at minimum avoid being constantly offensive.

[Grek]

Its really really not. Secrets of the Congo is set in 1920 and was published in 2010. Not only did Google exist back then, it was within living memory for history book writers to talk to people who saw the events happen and get their take on the story. There's no excuse not to at least do some basic research on the topic before writing.

Go to the Republic of Congo and Democratic Republic of Congo embassy pages and read through the history sections. They're in English and specifically designed by people from the region to give ignorant westerners the basic gist of the country's history. Plus, it was written by Congolese people, so it has that going for it. Once you're done reading the executive summaries sitting right there on the first page of a basic Google search, you can get on Wikipedia and search of all the names and places you just read about. Read the pages, then go click all the source links. Read the sources. If anything strikes your interest, read the source's sources for that topic. Then get on Google Maps and look at the geography a bit. Put all of those places you read about into perspective.

The result won't be particularly groundbreaking, but it's not like you're going to end up making hurr hurr spearchucking cannibal jokes like you would if you based your research off of pulp novels.

[shlominus]

Do some research. It's not hard.

Actually, it is. If the writer is white, then there will be enough built-in racism and ignorance to make any attempt at portraying Africa fraught with landmines. Obviously, there are levels of severity, but it remains something that will require more care and forethought than other elements of the setting. I would dare to say that if you actually care about such things, you can at minimum avoid being constantly offensive.

then get a poc to write such a sourcebook or at the very least consult with people knowledgeable and sensitive about the topic. that might open up the possibility of not being "constantly offensive".

i know, pretty radical, right?

[Leress]

Do some research. It's not hard.

Actually, it is. If the writer is white, then there will be enough built-in racism and ignorance to make any attempt at portraying Africa fraught with landmines. Obviously, there are levels of severity, but it remains something that will require more care and forethought than other elements of the setting. I would dare to say that if you actually care about such things, you can at minimum avoid being constantly offensive.

The bold is kinda bullshit. I am no more qualified to write about the Congo than anyone that doesn't have knowledge of the area and time period, regardless of ethnicity. Saying that a person 'race' means that they have built in racism and ignorance is well ignorant.

then get a poc to write such a sourcebook or at the very least consult with people knowledgeable and sensitive about the topic. that might open up the possibility of not being "constantly offensive".

i know, pretty radical, right?

The 'race' of the person would not matter, get someone of another race doesn't excuse any racist shit in a sourcebook.

[virgil]

Because white privilege *doesn't* exist and definitively make it easier to fall prey to stereotypes when writing about Africa or people of colour in general? Even many (most?) very progressive allies will admit to internalized racism they need to be vigilant about. Ignorance isn't baked into the example when I specifically responded to Ogrebattle who specifically described the hypothetical writer as ignorant?

then get a poc to write such a sourcebook or at the very least consult with people knowledgeable and sensitive about the topic. that might open up the possibility of not being "constantly offensive".

i know, pretty radical, right?

The 'race' of the person would not matter, get someone of another race doesn't excuse any racist shit in a sourcebook.

They're not trying to excuse any racist material in the sourcebook, they're trying to avoid "constantly offensive"; and in a hypothetical situation where the only information you have to differentiate between two writers is whether they are a person of colour or not...my money is on the PoC being less likely to create that situation.

[Grek]

Black Americans are no more likely to be well informed about the Belgian Congo than any other American. In order to know about the Belgian Congo you either need to be from the Ivory Coast region, or you need to do actual research. Having dark skin is neither a sufficient nor a necessary qualification.

[Ancient History]

...as exemplified by Grek, who apparently does not know that the Ivory Coast is actually far north and west of where the Congo River meets the Atlantic Ocean.

[Grek]

...as exemplified by Grek, who apparently does not know that the Ivory Coast is actually far north and west of where the Congo River meets the Atlantic Ocean.

I got all of my information about the Congo from EU4. This is why I'm not trying to write a book set there.

[Ancient History]

The Nightmare at Vivi Station
The investigators arrive in Africa, and the mouth of the Congo River, stopping at one of the first missionary/trade outposts, Vivi Station. Unfortunately, it is also under the "harsh military rule of Colonel Strauch" and a missionary named Father Escher is engaging in horrific medical experiments involving local orphans and crocodiles. There are no signs of Uncle Al.

When the investigators arrive, Father Escher is in the process of conducting stage two of his plan, to breed the hybrid orphans that his experiments have produced with a group of recently captured native girls.

Couple things here. First, crocodile-people are largely absent from Lovecraft's fiction - the only real example is in a "posthumous collaboration" written by August Derleth long after HPL was dead, based on a note in Lovecraft's commonplace book. Two, Call of Cthulhu already has crocodile people, in the Cairo Guidebook - so this is just excessive. Three, the oldest of the orphans crocodile-boys is 14, and the oldest of the captive girls is 16, so we're basically looking at a scalie pedophile.

I'm ready for breeding, doctor.

To top off the bizarre squick, we get our first "National Geographic" style pictures of topless native women.

As for the half-breed cannibal boys, there is no easy solution. Leave them or kill them, either way the investigators will be in trouble. It would be better for mankind and the inhabitants of the Congo to kill all the half-breeds, but genocide and wholesale murder of children would not (one may hope) be an option for decent investigators. But again, to let the young cannibals grow up and multiply will pose a threat to all natives within reach.

Your reward for killing Escher and stealing his shit is the spell Devolution/Evolution, which is found in his notebook. Really, this whole scenario went to a dark place. Let's move on.

In the Clutches of Mami Wata
Flying farther upriver, the investigators come across the Ngombe ("water people"), who live in temporary huts and rafts on the wooded marshlands, along with an American trade named McCoy. McCoy has jungle fever for a dangerous native spirit called the Mami Water, which appears to him as a beautiful native woman, and he's about to have his final fling with her. It's up to the investigators to save McCoy from following his dick into the jaws of death.


Wife got the whole damn planet in the divorce.

To make things more (?) interesting, there's a local witch doctor afflicted with elephantiasis.

...a disease that is characterized by the thickening of the skin and underlying tissues, especially in the legs, male genitals, and female breasts. The disease can cause certain body parts, such as the scrotum, to swell to the size of a basketball.

Google at you own risk. Anyway, it costs 0/1d4 to see the witchdoctor Limi, but he can give you some low-down on the local Mythos.

As for Mami Wata:

As a further note, let it be known that Mami Wata has been known also to engage in love affairs with females. Mami Wata is a spirit, not a woman, so the physical aspects of her body are less important in this respect. In the late 1970s, a female witness reported that she always sees the spirit in the form of a woman, but in her opinion it must really be a man, for sometimes she dreams that they sleep together, and in the morning she feels as if she has had genuine sexual intercourse. SO the Keeper should not let the gender barrier interfere with his or her ability to complicate life for the players.

I tried to find a good picture of Mami Wati, but she's basically an African mermaid with a snake act, so it's hard to find one that clearly shows that, doesn't suck, AND doesn't show boobs. Instead, here are some lesbians.

Next entry: further upriver.

[Ancient History]

Fair warning: I've been digging through my Cthulhu RPG shit and I kinda feel like doing a series of OSSRs on Cthulhu Takes On Africa. It'll be fun!...ish! Or not.

The Outpost of Progress
The Investigators arrive at the last trading outpost on the Congo River; from here on, they have to hike overland, into the jungle. To guide them is the well known big-game hunter Baron Bror von Blixen-Finecke, nicknamed "Blix."


All of Blix's dialogue will be spoken in Cary Elwes' accent from 'Shadow of the Vampire.'

In addition, the PCs get ten expendable bodies in the form of 30 bearers and 10 askaris. If I were running this game, I would represent them by a group of M&Ms in the center of the table, and whenever a PC ate one, that would be a dead NPC.

Uncle Al passed through here several months ago. So, off into the jungle! Seriously, I have no idea what else the PCs are supposed to do here, and I suspect an entire session could be had by PCs snooping around rolling skill checks for stupid shit as they sniff for clues, or to uncover some hideous conspiracy that doesn't exist. Most players aren't good at taking little hints like Fly, you fools!

The Cannibals Attack
The PCs make camp, are attacked in the middle of the night by cannibals, and one or more are captured. The others go off to rescue them (fucking really? I kinda doubt it. This is Call of Cthulhu. You split the party, you're not getting rescued. And it's just a railroad capture anyway.)...and discover:

In the torch-lit cannibal village, the survivors realize that their captors are only semi-human, being an ancient hybrid breed of men and serpent-people.

God dammit, not again. It was bad enough with the cannibal half-crocodile pedophile ring two stops ago - who, I would like to add, are completely unrelated to these cannibal half-reptile people. There are entirely too goddamn-many half-serpent people in this book for this shit.


And I say that as someone that LIKES snake-people.

My main issue isn't even that they're half-serpent people, it's that they are completely superfluous half serpent-people. It's like your bartender turning out to be a Yithian alchemist. It has nothing to do with the entire story, except maybe make you feel slightly less guilty about killing a bunch of black people because they're not really human. And I feel fucking dirty just writing that.

Anyway, these are the dreaded Wakiwaki cannibals, which is...well, it's Hollywood camp is what it is. Primitive cannibal-types in the jungle wearing scary masks and sacrificing people on grisly altars. Uncle Al is with these dudes, just hanging back and being kind of chill.


Just to be extra insensitive, there's a picture of an African with facial scarring and suggesting they might actually be vestigial scales.

Also the chief/witchdoctor of the Wakiwaki is "an accomplished blacksmith" - which means Art (Blacksmith) 60%, I love it - and despite having a Cthulhu Mythos skill of 5% and no spells carries a magic spear which is actually better than anything you can enchant using the basic spells in the Call of Cthulhu main book.

An enchanted spear made by him will always hit the target if within range, whether thrown or used for stabbing. A Congolese enchanted spear has a spearhead of metal and does 1D10_1_db of damage, impales, and acts as a magical weapon against Mythos creatures unless the creature is resistant to impaling weapons.

The PCs are supposed to escape - presumably by shooting the literal spearchucker chieftan from a safe distance with an elephant gun, somehow...


It's not racist to call him spearchucker if he actually chucks spears. It just...sounds and feels really racist.

For reasons I don't grasp, this section also includes a fairly lengthy list of Congolese weapons - with illustrations, which is helpful - and their own home-brewed CoC mass battle rules. I can understand why they would do this, but I don't know what they would do this, if you get my drift.

A purist wargamer will notice that thee battle mechanisms are stacked against the tribesmen.

Newsflash: post-Great War firearms work a lot better than spears, swords, and matchlock rifles.

Next up: The Flying Eater.

[Leress]

typo below the facial scared person: '

... an Africa ...

[Ancient History]

Leress: Fixed.

Now, let us finish this.

Devapura and M'Bolo Bakula, the Flying Eater
The intro for this chapterette has a picture of an African torture scne or ritual - it appears to be a painting.


That's a little fucked up, and I don't see how it is relevant.

The Investigators have escaped the cannibal Wakiwakis and Uncle Oh-Shit-He's-A-Cultist, and are apparently moving headlong into the jungle with their pursuers hot on their trail! Well, no. Any PCs worth their salt would fight it out, kill all of the cannibals, and take stock of the loot on the bodies. I swear that players, as soon as they get characters, throw all common sense and self-preservation to the wind.

Anyway, as they're running through the jungle, Uncle unleashes the magic that causes Devapura to fly again (wrong time, asshole), and the PCs and Wakiwakis apparently don't get the memo and have a chance of randomly falling off the now-floating pitch black section of the jungle. You'd think they'd hear and feel it going airbone, but...of course...they aren't alone. M'Bolo Bakula, a flying polyp, is also living in the city, and the PCs have quite literally no defense against it. So they're highly advised to either quickly figure out how to Pilot (Flying City) or GTFO.

That's about it, really. Cannibals, Uncle Cultist, flying polyp, flying city. It's pretty sandboxy at that point. Run away, explore the city, throw people off the edge, etc. Uncle Cultist, it turns out, plans to use the destructive powers of Devapura to forcibly disarm the entire world, then destroy the city, ensuring world piece. A few bats have flown out of that belfry, and the PCs aren't getting their inheritance unless he conveniently ends up dead.

Uncle Aaron may well have gone utterly mad, but he remains an idealist at heart. An idealist of the most dangerous and lethal kind. He will enforce global peace, even if that means killing half of the planet's population. The end justifies the means.

One potential offered by the author to the PCs is actually interesting: teaming up with the cannibals against M'Bolo:

Some Keepers may argue that the descendants of serpent people would never ally with mere humans, since the serpent people were always implacable enemies of humanity. however, the serpent folk were natives of Earth, not the servants of Cthulhu or his ilk, except perhaps the lone individual like any human cultist. Moreover, the Wakiwaki are not full-blooded serpent folk, they are the descendants of half-breeds produced by matings between the two species many generations ago. The Wakiwaki are vicious cannibals, and some of them are of more serpent folk blood than others, but all have plenty of human blood as well. They can be negotiated with, like any other tribal people, however hostile to strangers they may be.

This is almost a noble sentiment. But you're dealing with PCs.


Anybody else want to negotiate?

The description of the city is generally circular, 4 miles in diameter, on a curved plate of "adamant." It's weapon is a "weapon emitting a beam of fire from an iris valve in the center of the adamantine underside."

Pretty much this.

The PCs get usual Sanity awards for defeating the flying polyp, the cannibals, surviving, and gaining control of the flying city, more or less in that order. The Keeper is then advised to do something to take away their new toy before they take it out for a spin. Because, y'know, fuck you if you want an ancient Hyperborean flying city to rain fire on your enemies.


This actual illustration from Gulliver's Travels is in the book.

Rise of M'Bakadala, He Who Swims and Eats without Mouth
After losing their alien city/sweet ass ride, but mildly cheered up by the ability to confirm that Uncle Cultist is dead - I personally would have twisted off his head and preserved it in a bottle of brandy - the PCs head back toward "civilization," arriving once more at the Outpost of Progress.

...where they are ambushed by the Hubert van Damme expedition. You remember those assholes?



This is another railroad-y moment where the PCs are supposed to be captured without dying or killing all of the enemy.

Hubert van Damme is a far greater villain than the hapless Uncle Aaron, but he will start monologuing just the same. However, being chained and under armed guard, there is presumably little the investigators can do to take advantage of van Damme's apparent need for self-glorification.

This "monologue" involves the Keeper using the word "[EDITED]," which is probably going to cause some dirty looks at the table.

Van Damme's plan is to sacrifice several goats and an elephant in a ritual to summon Cthulhu, whom he believes sleeps beneath the Congo River. While the PCs twiddle their thumbs, or reflexively fail Locksmith rolls trying to escape, van Damme summons a Spawn of Cthulhu...which is then killed by a herd of elephants. Van Damme slips away into the jungle.

I...wasn't expecting that.

To say that this is anticlimactic is wrong. This is bullshit. Even the writer doesn't know what's going on. His best guess is that Africa is ejecting the alien presence of the Spawn of Cthulhu. That doesn't work, asshole! Fuck, the Congo didn't seem to give a shit that there was a Flying Polyp nestled down in a lost flying city for a couple goddamn centuries, why should a Spawn of Cthulhu be killed by a bunch of fucking tuskers in five minutes? This is the most bullshit and annoying end to this series of adventures I could have ever imagined. God dammit.

Well, at least a sufficiently experienced crew of Investigators can maybe get away with the Evolution spell. Take some consolation in their newly-enlarged craniums and extra 1d3 Int.



Further Adventures in the Congo
Finally, we have a collection of adventure-seeds for further investigations in the Congo. This includes the mokole-mbembe, which most people think is a surviving dinosaur but which might be a lloigor; the mulilo, which is a critter with poisonous breath; the White Apes of the Grey City from Lovecraft's "Facts Concerning Arthur Jermyn and His Family" - which is actually supposed to be in the Congo, was mentioned in Secrets of Kenya, so the writers are good enough to reproduce the White Apes stats from that book and Sir Wade Jermyn's book on the subject; the Canyon of Ituri-kendi which has the remains of an Azathoth-cult; the Cult of the Spiraling Worm and the Screaming Crawler...


This is actually a reference to this Delta Green-esque anthology. Although it isn't strictly DG, because Chaosium published it. But it's basically that.

...the Ruins of Nyhargo (Yet Another Lost City, with its own book, the Nyargo Codex), and the Valley of the Gods (shrines to Cthulhu, Cthugha, Hastur, and an unknown Great Old One built by the Great Race of Yith), which ties in to a previously-published Chaosium scenario.

All told, this is a lot more cross-referencing effort than Chaosium ever goes into in its own books, so well done, if a bit sparse. I actually would have liked less bullshit with van Damme and more bullshit adventure seeds, tomes, and other stuff to get up to in the Congo.

Keeper's Notes & Statistics
These are recommendations of things to do if the adventure goes off the rails (choo choo!) and a chunk of NPC stats, followed by player handouts.

And that is the book.



This book could have been better. Honestly, the adventure was shit. Most Call of Cthulhu adventures are. They're not your typical dungeon-crawl, but they're not really full-blown sandboxes either. PCs are expected to follow the script and the Keeper is expected to mindcaulk the rules so that everything is flowing and fun...because once the dice start to roll, fun rapidly diminishes in a CoC game. There really aren't any good solutions to the problems the PCs encounter in any of these scenarios: they lack the tools, occult or explosive, to really deal effectively with any of the threats they face, and even if they had the academic resources to know what's going on that doesn't actually help because no options are given for that. The PCs are supposed to be pulp heroes that kill and get captured easily throughout the adventure, but not actually do anything important.

The material on the Congo isn't bad - von Essen did his research. But it's research involving a lot of not-actually-Mythos fiction, and leans more toward his own personal version of the Belgian Congo than Lovecraft or his contemporaries had. That's not entirely bad - yeah, there's some wince-worthy moments, but nothing quite as terrible as I was expecting, except maybe the completely superfluous half-serpent people cannibals. But you don't get...much else. There's not enough material to run other games in the Congo here, not really. Not enough geography, or history; not enough tribes are names, no talk about the influence of the Mythos or native cults beyond a few brief references, and those mainly to crap from Secrets of Kenya.

It's a Keeper's notes for a campaign typed up and submitted to Chaosium for publication. So I guess that means if I really want to see how terribly racist Call of Cthulhu African products can get, I should next crack open Secrets of Kenya...