[OSSR][Call of Cthulhu]Secrets of Morocco

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Ancient History
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[OSSR][Call of Cthulhu]Secrets of Morocco

Post by Ancient History »

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No.

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There we go.

Call of Cthulhu didn't used to do sourcebooks devoted to entire countries. Back in the 80s and 90s, this was sort of understandable. You either had gazetteers that would cover entire continents, or single cities - which is why you got sourcebooks like Chicago by Night and Bug City. The thing is, CoC...doesn't actually experiment much. They don't have to. The game is so threadbare, they just wait until players get excited enough to write and publish their own material, and see how it does.

That is essentially what happened here. Mysteries of Morocco was a fan-production released as part of the Miskatonic University monograph scam program, where fans could do all the writing, layout, and art, and Chaosium would print off a few copies and sell them and keep most of the money. MoM was actually so successful, that Chaosium re-worked it (slightly) with the aid of some desktop publishing software and re-released it as an even-more-official book for your 1920s Call of Cthulhu game. All of which Chaosium freely admits:
Welcome to the Secrets of Morocco! This book is designed to provide players with a civil, geographical, cultural, political, and a Mythos tour of Morocco during the 1920s and 1930s. It has a previous incarnation as the Chaosium monograph, Mysteries of Morocco. Those familiar with the monograph most likely know that it was one of the first works to explore an entire country. Prior to this, Chaosium supplements tended to focus upon specific cities--not countries. Mysteries of Morocco was an experiment made possible by the monograph program. Indeed, truly capturing the essence of a city or a country within a few hundred pages is an impossible task. Instead, the goal of Mysteries of Morocco was to provide the reader with the distilled essence for the region, its history and culture, creating a foundation to build upon. That is still the intent of Secrets of Morocco. Much new material has been added, as well as another complete scenario. Yet, the book is most valuable when combined with the reader's imagination. Even the optional skills and rules provided here are guidelines to be used, ignored, or expanded upon.
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Guess who the mascot for this review is going to be?

Okay, basics: the mindcaulk is in play heavily in this book. Like, moreso than other CoC books, and CoC is basically built on mindcaulk. Players are less familiar with the western side of North Africa, which mostly begins and ends with the film Casablanca. People vaguely know that there's a part of North Africa that isn't Egypt and that there are brown people there, and that's about as far as it goes.

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So William Jones (who is the sole writer, although he lists 13 playtesters, some of whom are related to each other, which leads me to think he GMs multiple groups) basically has carte blanche. This has extended to including statistics and rules for Pulp Cthulhu.

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Pulp Cthulhu book was first announced in...2001 or so, and intended to be published in 2008 (the same year as Secrets of Morocco), but didn't actually come out until...this year.

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Oh my.

So. It's a resurrection of an ancient monograph that includes references to rules that won't be published for another eight years. Welcome to Chaosium, folks!
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Post by RelentlessImp »

Oh. Oh dear. This is going to be hilarious, isn't it.
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Chapter One: The Making of Morocco
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Morocco for some Call of Cthulhu players will seem like an alien world, with its cultural differences and its customs being foreign to many Westerners of the 1920s.
You could use this as the opening line for basically any location outside of the United States and Great Britain in Chaosium's Call of Cthulhu line, but this book actually does it!

Anyway, chapter one is seven pages and dedicated to a thumbnail history of Morocco. Well, not it isn't. If you take out the illustrations (including the full-page map), the half-page of white space at the end, you're actually looking at 3.5 pages. I haven't seen info density this low since Frank and I tackled a White Wolf product.

The thing is, you do kinda care more about history in Call of Cthulhu supplements than you do in any other RPG setting. You don't care about how it came to pass in fucking Tir Tairngire, you only care about how it is now. But in CoC, you're usually dealing with ancient horrors, which means at least a passing familiarity with the ancient history is useful.

That being said, Morocco is a bit of an odd choice for a Cthulhu supplement - not because there's anything wrong with the region, but just because pretty much none of the primary or secondary Mythos tales are set there or mention it at all. It's terra incognita. Which can be a good thing - no preconceptions to deal with, plenty of room to get creative! But then we get sidebars like this:
Morocco in Call of Cthulhu
Given the geographic location of Morocco, there are countless options for the keeper to include a variety of cthulhuloid threats. Both the Atlantic coast and the Mediterranean coast provide ample opportunity for explorations of Deep One scenarios. The inner mountainous regions are perfect hiding places for secret cults, or fearsome creatures. Additionally, with the social and political turmoil, investigators can be kept on their toes simply by the threat of being kidnapped or killed by members of the Moroccan resistance. See Chapter Eight for more details on cults and underground organizations in Morocco.
...

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Okay, of all the low-energy, half-assed efforts to cram the Mythos in anywhere, noticing that Morocco has a bit of a coastline and saying "Aha, Deep Ones!" is got to be the laziest fucking thing anyone has ever done. Until, of course, we get to the secret cults in the mountains. Jesus wept, Bill. Dig a little deeper.

I should also add that the "history" section of this chapterette is only 2.25 pages, followed by brief sections on geography, climate, government, transportation, currency (French franc and Moroccan dirham), local customs (which includes a sidebar for optional skill Etiquette (culture) ), clothing...and, oddly "Mosques and Homes."
If the keeper is using the optional skill Etiquette, then a roll should be made in any situation in which an investigator is about to breach a local custom. Examples are the entering or taking pictures inside mosques.
I should add that the default rating for Etiquette (culture) is 20% for your own culture, which means an awful lot of local Moroccans will be neglecting to remove their footwear before entering the local mosque.

A word on art: this comes in five varieties. Most prevalent are badly cropped black-and-white period photographs, such as this one:

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Then, we have badly-pixelated versions of the same which someone has run through a photoshop filter. Then we have the maps - hand drawn things by one Eric Smith, which aren't bad, really; I'd say they're the best art in the book. Much better than the rest of the incidental artwork, which starts at "third tier World of Darkness" product and descends from there into "Fuck, I could do better than that, and my drawings look like a leprous chimp doodling hieroglyphs." Finally, there are some random symbols squibbled into the white space at the end of chapters, and I'm at a loss as to what they are, since it's not Arabic or anything else I recognize.

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Next up: Chapter 2: Rabat
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Post by Ancient History »

Chapter 2: Rabat
Rabat is the capital of Morocco. If all you know about Morocco is Casablanca, this might come as a slight shock.
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Also, taxidermy is fucking horrifying.
It's...weird. I mean, there's a photo of some snake charmers, and it's labeled "Snake Charmers." There's a photo of a group of dudes chilling at a tea house and it's labeled "Amin's Teahouse." I don't want to say it's racist to just throw up random shots of snake charmers in an Islamic setting, but it stabs a couple of the stereotype buttons, especially when the sidebar on the next page over has the stats for "Typical Pickpocket":
Typical Pickpocket
STR 11 CON 12 SIZ 11 INT 11 POW 9
DEX 10 APP 10 EDU 7 SAN 45 HP 12

Damage Bonus: none.
Skills: Hide 48%, Legerdemains 56%, Listen 33%, Sneak 51%
From this, we learn that Jones can't spell "legerdemain," and Moroccan pickpockets suck and have less SAN than a Great War veteran.

As is quasi-typical for Chaosium products, rules references are right in the middle of the text, with no effort at maintaining suspension of disbelief, so all the players know they need at least three successful Persuade rolls to earn the trust of Amin so that they can get information on Rick Connor, the American gunrunner that for some reason likes to frequent this hole in the wall. Oh, and Amin only has French 58% and no other languages listed, so good luck with that.

Beneath the Kasbah in Rbat are caverns...with a really bad, heavily pixelated "map" of them. In the caverns are some ghouls, including Inek. Apparently you can bargain with Inek, who knows the secrets of the Tablets of Ur-Nansha and the location of the graven map to the Lost City. That sounds kind of cool, even though we don't know what the fuck those are yet because we won't see them for like five more chapters. Inek knows the spells Shrivelling, Steal Life, and Summon/Bind Fire Vampires, which is kind of random, and has no skills listed at all, so presumably he speaks Arabic? Maybe?

That basically sets the tone, really. It's a tourist's guide with NPC stats and random insertion of what rolls you need to make to seduce Luisa Aznar the librarian and whatnot. All Mythos information or substantial optional rules are relegated to sidebars. So for example, there's a new optional character temple "Office of Naval Intelligence Military Officer" (this presumes that your character is American, which is the exact opposite of Guide to North Africa). We're told the local cults in Rabat (who aren't named) are descended from old Roman cults to Cthugha, and the cults outside the city (also not named, but including Casablanca) are dedicated to Shub-Niggurath.
Keepers are free to embellish upon the cults or invent conflicts between the cults.
God dammit Jones that was your job. If I wanted to randomly generate my own cults, there's probably a series of tables in some early CoC product I could dig up and it would still represent more effort put into this product than you, you fuck.

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Deep breaths.

One of the big adventure seeds in this chapter are that the excavations of Sala Colonia uncover the Tablets of Ur-Nansha. Which is okay. That is a decent plot seed. I would have liked more, however. Instead, we get a sidebar on the Rabat Skull.

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At the time, anthropologists were unable to classify the skull, causing speculation that there was a human fossil group that indicated an separate evolution of humans from those of Europeans.
I'm not against the accurate portrayal of old-timey racism. Sortof. I just wish there was more to this. As it is, it's just a factoid.

Next up: Chapter 3: Casablanca
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Post by Ancient History »

Chapter 3: Casablanca
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The economic capital of Morocco, Casablanca (so named for the number of white buildings) is where things get serious! Sort of. It starts off with extensive 3/4 page sidebars (does count as a sidebar if it's over half the page?) dedicated to Haggling (involving opposed Bargain rolls and optional Fast Talk rolls... the burning tire fire of BRP skill mechanics outside of actual combat) and a new "Optional Supernatural Skill" - Second Sight. By my count this is at least the third attempt to add Second Sight to CoC - it was previously included as an "innate" Spell that you rolled for and a psychic power you could fellate the Keeper for - and is one of a number of efforts to provide "supernatural" skills to the game, with others including Exorcism and that kind of thing.

It never ends well. Avoiding the "magic" system is good, but using the skill system is not a step forwards, it's a step sideways into quicksand. There's just not enough skill percentiles to go around even for useful skills, much less optional occult extras. It doesn't help that all the actual mechanics for Second Sight - it talks about SAN losses for certain visions and bonuses to Psychology, Persuade, Bargain, and Fast Talk rolls - none of which have actual mechanics provided, except that the first time always results in 1d6 SAN Loss.

The Second Sight sidebar even spells over onto the next page, where we have our first Pulp Cthulhu stats! All I know is that it involves d10s, skill points, and Traits.

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Also, you can possibly kick-start your Second Sight by taking drugs special tea in Casablanca. It's useless, because you start off at 1%, but whatever floats your boat.

Instead of having substantial plot hooks, there's an extended section on an antique dealer with an ornate chest that contains "the summoned essence of a powerful demon." I don't know why people keep getting their D&D all over a nominal Cthulhu product, but there you have it. The chest comes with a completely useless fucking book that gives you Occult +3% and Anthropology +3% after twelve weeks of study. I guess that's fine if you break both your legs and need a little light reading while your character is laid up.

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Because no fucks are given, Bogart's character from Casablanca appears basically as he does in the movie as an NPC. His skills include Art(Drinking) 44% - presumably this means he misses his mouth 56% of the time.

The rest of Casablanca is just normal city stuff. No Mythos hooks whatsoever. Bah, humfuck.

Chapter 4: Marrakech
The Jewel of Morocco, and the only other city you might be able to pick out on a television gameshow question.

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Care to phone a friend?

I'm not against descriptions of major cities. It's a necessity when you're describing a country. I kind of wish for more adventure hooks for players, especially Mythos specific ones - and less random rules bullshit. For example, in Marrakech is the PLace Jemma el-Fna, which was formerly used for public executions.
However, because of the thousands of deaths, the psychic fabric of the area is stained with the ethereal energies of those being executed. Investigators with Cthulhu Mythos or Occult skills with 20 percentiles or higher must make a POW X6 roll when entering the square. A successful roll causes the investigators to spontaneously experience the beheading of one of the countless dead. If desired, the keeper can roll secretly.
...which is followed by a couple paragraphs about what kind of vision you have and how many SAN points it costs. It's not that this is unflavorful...just, y'know, not really supported by anything in Call of Cthulhu. Now, you could make an argument for it to be a thing in Cthulhu Mythos fiction, which the game doesn't support, but the rules here aren't in any way really exportable into a generic "terrible vision of the past tied to a geographic area" sense. So it's just annoying. We also get a sidebar for Pulp Cthulhu saying if you already have Second Sight you don't need to roll. Well, thanks.

There are few half-assed Mythos references tossed in (ghouls creeping in to the Saadian tombs to perform "strange rituals" - I'm imagining fraternity bats, spanking, etc.)

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The safeword is "fhtagn."

Then we get an extended set of optional rules on being immortal. Now, there are a couple of ways in existing Mythos magic to achieve pseudo-immortality - stealing organs, sacrificing children, pacts with Hastur, etc. - this one lets you age slowly (losing 1d8 SAN per century of life) with limited regeneration and requires you to be within 100 yards of a fetish - which, in the case of the sample immortal in Marrakech, is a Persian rug. Honestly, the Taoist Immortals have a better deal, but then they have to work harder. Of course, to learn the Becoming Immortal spell you need to make 17 successful KNOW rolls, so that can take most of an in-character year.

The sloppiness is pissing me off more than a little in this book. For example, in a description of one of the souks, they devote a paragraph and a stat block the Zaki ben Kali, "Luck Locksmith" - he's a locksmith who can produce "magical locks." This is bullshit since such things don't exist in CoC, no rules are provided for them, and Zaki only has Occult 25%. FFS, if you're going to drop "magical locks" in the book like a thing, give me a sidebar on that at least.

In another fucking sidebar, we get a brief description of a new tom: the Taznekt Tome, after its presumptive author Taznekt. It's about as generic a Mythos grimoire as you can get. Because this was originally written for...I don't kow, somebody's home game around 3rd edition probably...it uses the old style of mechanics where it gives you a Spell Multiplier where you roll for what spells it has, instead of giving a list. Considering that this was published in 2008 under nominal 6th edition rules, this should have been updated...but of course, it wasn't.

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Ah vant to try out ma new toy!

Yadda yadda yadda. I'm not talking much about the actual Marrakech here because, frankly, you don't care. I don't care. It's not that it's bad information, but it's been largely superseded by Wikipedia. The only thing people really care about are the old stuff that has to do with the Mythos and the new stuff that provided NPCs and services and adventure hooks and things for your investigators. And while they have those, the density is very, very low, and the utility even lower. I mean fuck, Shadowrun's Seattle Sourcebook was bursting with ideas compared to this.

Next up: Chapter 5: The Moroccan Interior
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Post by RelentlessImp »

...I have no words for what's been presented so far. I mean, okay, a lot of what you're describing would fit very well in Shadowrun (BGC) and as set pieces in like, Earthdawn (Horror-tainted space because executions), but isn't Cthulhu mythos supposed to be a little more... subtle? Especially when mixed with Pulp? I mean, yes, okay, Pulp is supposed to be campy and kind of over the top, but pulp horror is a thing and it is legitimately creepy and atmospheric. Combining a subtle, existential kind of horror mythos with a very atmospheric horror should work, not be... whatever this in-your-face-supernatural thing is.

Also, loving the Secret Sqvirrel stuff.
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Post by Ancient History »

You have to remember: this was originally a super-amateurish fanboy product from back when Chaosium was on the skids...and standards in CoC products are abysmally low. Usually, you've got a lot of material that's wikipedia-bait by today's standard thrown out for the crowd that wants a 1920s/1930s simulation roleplay game, and the odd reference to the Mythos thrown in almost as an afterthought. There's no consistent worldbuilding, there's not effort at producing a location book that has lots of adventure hooks for Keepers to base their own adventures around. It's basically a reference book for <Location!> in the 1920s/30s, and all else is extra.

Part of what that means is, as we've seen before, the writers go off the reservation pretty frequently. That's because they're barely on the reservation to begin with; despite the massive size of the CoC rulebook, there's lots of shit that people want in there just isn't. If this were GURPS, they would address this in a methodical fashion in a series of well-planned, well-researched books with screwy but generic mechanics; but CoC opts for the 1st ed. D&D approach where every solution is a unique solution whipped up on the fly. It is a large part of the reason that there is little to no progress in the CoC ruleset over various editions. The Mi-Go might have a certain technology in one rulebook but not another. You might have Deep Ones fighting crocodile-people in Egypt and Deep Ones that live on top of mountains in Tibet despite the lack of an ocean...and those are nominally the same setting, but the twain will never meet! Indeed, it is entirely possible that the next group of assholes writing will include an entirely separate deep-sea fish race which are not connected with the Deep Ones at all - we know this, because it happened in Secrets of Japan!

It's incredibly frustrating. There's a massive amount of material produced for CoC, and various affiliate games that use kinda-sorta-the-same system. But it's more pick-and-mix than GURPS, and none of it really goes together. Nobody learns shit from what goes before. Nobody even tries to no-prize it together. Even the wikis for the game are half-assed.
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Chapter 5: The Moroccan Interior
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This chapter covers the rest of Morocco which isn't one of the major cities, including the Rif (a mountain chain), the cities of Chefchaoeun (triple word score!) and Agadir, the village of Zagora, the Atlas Mountains, and the Sahara Desert. Which is all fine and concise. It's all the crap it's wrapped up in.

The trouble starts with a sidebar on "Tourist Madness."
Failing the roll compels the investigator to stop his journey and gaze at the spectacular scenery, or take photographs, if he has a camera. Such an investigator is insistent and persistent. If he is armed with a camera, he does his best to usher other members of the group into poses for photographs with magnificent backdrops. This activity continues until another character makes a successful opposed POW roll on the Resistance Table, or 1D20 minutes have passed.
Compulsive manias are shitty mental afflictions to put on any character, as it removes player agency or, worse, leads to fishmalking. If this happened during one of my games, the players would slit the afflicted's throat mid-photograph and then dice for his boots.

It kinda goes down from there. There's an impromptu "encounter" where the PCs are caught in a blood rain (normal thunderstorm + red sand), which conceals the approach of a Dark Young of Shub-Niggurath.

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Sure, because these fuckers just wander around, playing in the blood rain.

There is a sidebar on "Villages in the High Atlas." It is a list of three villages. I don't know why that deserves a sidebar.

A lot of effort is given to navigating the Sahara, including talk about the fauna, trails, a list of average temperatures by month (in Fahrenheit, for us Americans), the number of Mechanical Repair rolls to keep an automobile running, a quite lengthy and an elaborate "sidebar" (it takes up half a page, and the other half of a page is a photo of the Atlas Mountains) to heat stroke (which involves such shenanigans as "a successful Medicine roll at normal ability, or a First Aid roll at one-half normal ability"). Note that according to the temperature table on the opposite page, this bit of the Sahara never gets into heat-stroke category as the "Daily High" tops out at 101 F in June, but I think we can all trust that's bullshit.

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Morocco Mole brings the heat!

Aside from the Dark Young, the only other actual Mythos reference in this section is at the very end, where is suggests that PCs have a 10% chance each night to run afoul of a pack of Sand Dwellers. You'd think the tourist board would mention that.

The Tablets of Ur-Nansha
In keeping with the tradition with Call of Cthulhu location products, in place of giving adventure hooks and ideas and Mythos references to Keepers and players, they provide a scenario or three featuring the locations in the book. Really, the location books are often little more than expanded background material for running the scenarios. Kinda like the Hawai'ian sourcebook in Shadowrun's Paradise Lost. This is such a scenario.

The gist of the scenario: a sorcerer named Kasim ben Harb has a small cult of misguided Moroccan rebels, and plans to summon the lord of fire vampires, Cthugha, to destroy the French and raze the capital city of Rabat. (Not bad!) To do this, he needs the Tables of Ur-Nansha (okay) and has been practicing by summoning fire vampires and aiming them at tourists (what?). The tablets are broken into pieces, and he has most of them (okay), and the PCs...get involved. The Keeper is given some options for this, but it mainly depends on what the occupations of the PCs are; you really have to admire the straightforwardness with which D&D gives out quests and Shadowrun gives out shadowruns. Smooths the intro to the adventures nicely.

Blah blah blah getting to Morocco; investigation, legwork, and rumors; find the missing fragments; optional rules for Art (Drinking) and optional rules for a drinking contest ("Shots"), which makes me think the writer was doing a few or else was writing this during college...

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This is a real product. Take a drink.

...Kasim sends some fire vampires to reclaim the fragment (dude, you have a bunch of Moroccan freedom fighters, just have some asshole break into their rooms and steal it)...if he succeeds (as the text presume he does), he starts to summon Cthugha, so the PCs have to go save the world, or at least the part of it where their shit is. We get a sprawling "sidebar" which covers the entirety of two pages on the Tablets of Ur-Nansha (which, by the way, are of Sumerian origin and what the fuck are they doing in a Roman ruin several thousands of years and miles away?) - amazingly, the cheap out on the spell list (no spell multiplier here!) in exchange for a variant Summon Cthugha spell and variant stats for Cthugha. Y'know, in case any idiot decides to take a stab at the Lord of Flame.
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If you succeed you get some SAN and Cthulhu Mythos percentiles and maybe a point of POW. Pretty by-the-numbers, really. I'm amazed they couldn't summarize this in 2-3 pages.

Next up: Chapter 7: Ocean of Sand
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Post by Red_Rob »

I am 100% sure I get more from reading Ancient's reviews of Cthulhu products than I would from reading the books themselves. Plus there's pictures of Morocco Mole! Win-win as far as I'm concerned.
Simplified Tome Armor.

Tome item system and expanded Wish Economy rules.

Try our fantasy card game Clash of Nations! Available via Print on Demand.

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I've asked my friend and collaborator Hamza to take a gander at this thread and see if he has any juicy native Moroccan comments.
Omegonthesane wrote:a glass armonica which causes a target city to have horrific nightmares that prevent sleep
JigokuBosatsu wrote:so a regular glass armonica?
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Chapter 7: The Ocean of Sand
This is scenario #2. I'm more pissed about this one, but not because of the scenario itself, but because I looked through Dark Ages Cthulhu yesterday.

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In honor of Morocco Mole, and the Rule 34 of him I've accidentally run across in the course of searching for images for this thread which has scarred my brain, I am going to finish this review while wearing my official Cthulhu Fez, which is a real product I paid real money for.

The Ocean of Sand concerns the lost Atlantean city of Katuris, which is somewhere in the sands of the Sahara which are disputed between Algeria and Morocco. You might recall this as essentially the subject of the ultimate scenario in Secrets of the Congo, but in all fairness Africa is a very large continent, and it is allowed to have more than one or two lost cities of ancient civilizations. That said, I'm like 95% sure this is the first reference to either Atlantis or Algeria in this book, and I would have thought a disputed border or remnants of ancient Atlantis might have come up before. Damn sight more interesting that immortals with their Persian binkies.

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Finding lost cities in the desert isn't a particularly un-pulpish or un-Lovecraftian premise for a story. It worked for the first Mummy movie, and it worked for Lovecraft's The Nameless City. But there's a couple issues.

First up, the designers of this scenario thinks that the PCs need a certain amount of challenge crossing the desert.
Any investigators who have not studied the environment of the Sahara, who are to knowledgeable of the various storms and dangers, should suffer a X2 skill penalty for all physical, and some mental activities while in the desert. The final choice of skills and penalties is left to the keeper. But for the inexperienced, the desert most commonly holds the promise of death.
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This is basically a FUCK YOU to anyone that didn't read the first half of the book, with all the purposefully-fiddly rules for crossing the desert. It's the pop quiz that dickish Keepers pull on players who haven't done their assigned reading. Fuck that noise.

Anyway, the lost city of Katuris is, surprise surprise, still chock full of Atlanteans despite being quite literally buried up to its highest minarets in sand. So assuming you get to the lost, buried city, you have to deal with guardian Atlanteans, right? Nope! Despite the fact that this place is supposed to be occupied, there are no actual Atlanteans in any of this scenario, just some villagers who are hinted at being descended from Atlanteans. So I have no idea why they fucking bothered.

Anyway, like most adventures, this one begins in the library. No, seriously, you're supposed to hear rumors of the Lost City and then head off to the library to research things. In later games like Bookhounds of London, you'd just spend a resource point and coincidentally have a book on the legends of the Lost City in stock, possibly with a map, and then you could go straight into working out how to get there, but the legwork section of this scenario involves repeated Library Use rolls, with optional Bargain, Photography, Cartography, or Art (Drawing) rolls to copy maps and shit.

We will now call out a moment of stupidity:
There were many city-states in the empire. Each governed their own province on different continents, and sometimes there were several city-states on a single continent. While the historical records have many names for these places, often they are located by the use of the root "Atla." Different cultures complicate names for this with different spellings. In Morrocco, the most obvious location for one of these cities is likely to be near the Atlas Mountains.
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This is not why they are caused the Atlas Mountains. You fuckhead.

Anyway, if you get the right clues out of the slot machine, you're off to Mahgish, which is not one of any of the locations addressed previously. If the PCs enter murder hobo role and go after the village elder - well, they're in for a bad time, since he knows the spells Flesh Ward and Withering, and is quick with a scorpion, but in his house is a Mythos tome whose metal pages are inscribed in Atlantean (the author of the scenario should have used "Senzar", as that is the official Lovecraftian name for the Atlantean language, but that would be too much outer-god-damned trouble, apparently. It's like a 3e product that had Kobolds that could speak "Dragon" instead of "Draconic." Little details, y'know.)

You'd be forgiven for ending the adventure right there, since the book is better than anything you're getting out of the lost city and nobody can read Atlantean anyway. Including any of the villagers, apparently.

Anyway, presuming that the PCs keep the party going and head off into the desert, they need "3 successful weeks of Navigation rolls." Then the Keeper is instructed to have a simoom hit them, for fun, and so they can find the "Wailing Tower" (the only part of the city above the sand). You then have to muscle open the entrance in the middle of a raging sandstorm. I would suggest playing Darude at maximum volume for effect.

Not much of the city is accessible, but you can hit a couple "psychic events", puzzle over Atlantean technology you're not allowed to figure out how it works, look at the Atlanteans that decided to upload their memories and personalities into metal rectangles (great plan! Sortof. By fiat, they can't actually communicate meaningfully with the PCs in any way); a Temple of Tsathoggua with a surviving Formless Spawn; the "Chamber of History," which is covered in writing (despite this being an Atlantean city, the chamber's writing is Hyperborean. FFS, can you not keep your ancient lost civilizations straight within a single scenario!?); "The Forgotten Chamber" - which has an ancient power source called The Orb, which only apparently powers one thing, a gateway back to the village of Mahgish.

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To say this scenario is telegraphed and half-assed is pushing it a little. Their major challenges are their own skill rolls, there's nothing much in the Lost City accessible, nothing worth looting, and by writer fiat the PCs aren't allowed to do fucking anything with what they do find. That's a bit harsh, even by CoC scenario standards. It's like those NPC-only artifacts in Dungeon Magazine adventures.

Chapter 8: Societies, Cults, and Mysteries
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Look, I think we all needed this.

This starts off talking about Moroccan colonial politics, specifically the various Moroccan independence groups/movements, such as one secret society, the Zawiya. The writer feels it is important to mention these, but not to give any details of its organization or stats for its members.

Native-grown cults include the Cult of Cthugha (seen in the first scenario) and the Cult of Shub-Niggurath. These aren't in any real way Moroccan-specific cults, really, since they have nothing to do with Moroccan history or culture, as the generic-ass names should tell you. They also have nothing to do with any ancient culture that used to occupy the territory, lost Atlanteans, or fucking anything else, really.

Following these lame-ass cults we get Adventuring in Morocco - these are basically extended adventure seeds that can be used as the foundation of scenarios, involving a bunch of ideas that basically should have been give out earlier in the book, like a portal to the Dreamlands in the ghoul-occupied caverns beneath Oudaia Kasbah - which, and I want to point this out, the ghoul Inek is said to probably know how to read cuneiform. Why? HOW? The fucker has spent presumably centuries in Morocco. Was he originally Sumerian? Did he migrate for the weather? Does Bill Jones understand that the Sumerians didn't make their way to fucking Morocco? I don't know.

Other adventure ideas ideas: missing American child ($10,000 award - that's some cabbage!), ONI investigates gunrunning in Morocco, and encountering bandits on the road to Agadir - which immediately gives way to three fucking pages of "sidebars" on optional mounted chase rules, including the d10 "Trouble Table for Mounts."
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Rules are included for camels.

...and that is the chapter.

We do get an Appendix, which gives stats for Dromedary camels, Arabian horses, mustangs, and the North African scorpion; as well as some handy Arabic and French words and phrases ("Bad" "Mauvais"; "Big" "Grand"; etc.), a bunch of scenario handouts, and in place of an index a "Complete Contents," where someone dumped the Word Table of Contents for every single header.

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This book wasn't a hate crime. A hate crime would have cared more about its subject. It was just fucking boring, careless, and sloppy. We are left with more questions than answers. Why didn't the Atlantean city/references show up earlier? Why are the native cults so lame and characterless? Why is there a fucking Sumerian tablet with a Mythos text to Cthugha in a Roman ruin in Morocco, and why in the name of the Lord of Fire Vampires is their a ghoul that can read cuneiform in the tunnels? Why is Rick from Casablanca here, and why does he lose at shots 56% of the time?

I don't know. I do know, that in out "Call of Cthulhu looks at Africa" series, this entry has got to be the fucking blandest of the lot. I mean yes, it says "there are brown people here," but it doesn't actually pay much attention to them. Or the history of the region. Or the Mythos resources in the country. I don't know why you'd come here or what you would do once you got here. After two scenarios and a one-off adventure getting lost in the mountains, you'd have basically run out of any material in the country.

It didn't have to be this way. Morocco has the oldest library in Africa, and a genuine ancient history that goes back to Carthage - or, if you'd like, into prehistory with the Atlanteans, Hyperboreans, Serpent People, and Deep Ones (remember them? Referred to once when the writer remembered there was a coast, and then never again?)

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...not to mention colonial unrest, with genuine secret societies, Nazis in Casablanca, the whole bit. There's room for a great Mythos-influence Moroccan sourcebook. This ain't it.
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Post by RelentlessImp »

This book wasn't a hate crime.
I'm gonna call bull on that. It was clearly a hate crime against people who like Call of Cthulhu.
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Post by Ancient History »

Eh. They're used to it. I mean, there are better supplements - better supplements produced by Chaosium, even - but the average quality of CoC products is abysmal.
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Post by JigokuBosatsu »

Hamza wrote: Now that's some half assed work. At the time, Morocco was a mine for mythos, all kinds of cults. And that 20% on etiquette doesn't make any sense, customs meant the world for Moroccans back then, and I mean the world. More than even religion I would say, for people knew it only through their ancestors and rarely questioned or studied anything. The unknown was everywhere, a perfect lovecraftian setting.
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Post by JollyRogers »

Out of curiosity what supplements, both Chaosium and non-Chaosium, would you recommend for CoC?
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Post by Ancient History »

Depends in what you're looking for. There's not much from Chaosium itself I would actually recommend, except S. Petersen's Guide to Cthulhu Monsters and S. Petersen's Guide to Creatures of the Dreamlands. Starting with 5th/6th edition they tried to do some compilation work like Malleus Monstrorum and the Compendiums, but those are basically just big bags of crap from older adventures and sourcebooks - without any effort to actually tie it together, setting-wise. And, of course, the mechanics are universally crap.

Which the same for most of the third-party products. Stuff like The Mysteries of Mesoamerica and The Golden Dawn supplements are highly regarded because their production values and writing were far above Chaosium products, but they were still basically just third-party books using the same system.

Probably the best heartbreaker is The Laundry RPG, followed by Achtung! Cthulhu, and Delta Green. There are enough mechanical advances in those that if they were second edition books, you'd have hopes for third edition books - but they're really just branches off CoC 6th.

Ironically, the best supplemental material for Cthulhu by Gaslight (i.e. 1890s London setting) is the superb London Boxed Set for Cthulhu Britannica and Bookhounds of London/The Book of the Smoke for Trail of Cthulhu - which are pretty much complementary as far as fluff goes, though CB uses CoC 6th and Bookhounds uses a "lite" system.

The inability of Call of Cthulhu to correlate it's own contents is maddening. There's just...vast amounts of material produced for the game, but it's all basically independent of everything else, and pretty much none of it gets adopted or folded back in to the main game system at any point. It's a living fossil.
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