[OSSR][Call of Cthulhu]Secrets of Kenya

[Ancient History]

This is going to be the last Call of Cthulhu OSSR for a while. I promise. It's just that this is the last of their major Africa-related books, and it's a doozy. Secrets of Kenya came out in 2007, same year as Secrets of Japan, and clocks in at a substantial 248 pages. That's a lot for a Call of Cthulhu product, and by default this is sort of Call of Cthulhu's Africa book, because the Cairo Guidebook is long out of print, Secrets of Morocco barely counts, and Secrets of the Congo is a Miskatonic Monograph.

The whole thing was written by David Conyers, an Australian writer who has worked on CoC for years on a fan and semi-pro basis (I'm pretty sure he did the "lost" Australian episode for Masks of Nyarlathotep) and is maybe best well known for his Australian-centered Mythos stories, especially his Delta Green series starring Harrison Peel.



Weirdly, he also seems to be pulling triple threat by providing the maps and some of the interior illustrations for this book, which might be why...well...it looks the way it does. Honestly, I'm not entirely sure how far away this is from a bloated monograph. There's three dudes credited with "Editorial and Layout," but one of those is Charlie Krank.

Anyway, before we get to the book proper, let's hit the elephant in the room: why Kenya?


Not many elephants left in Kenya at this point, so let's enjoy this while we can.

Why Kenya? None of Lovecraft's stories are set in Kenya. None of any of the stories by his Mythos contemporaries is set in Kenya, insofar as they're set in any identifiable part of Africa. The 1920s and 30s was a time of appallingly poor knowledge of the African continent, and it was really the case that people had very terrible conceptions of the whole thing and they could get away with very vague pronouncements about geography and native peoples. They knew there was a sandy bit at the top and jungle down south, and brown people everywhere, and that was about it. You don't normally ask kids to find Kenya on a map anywhere - it's on the east coast, son.



So why Kenya? Well, the simple and stupid answer is that Kenya was one of the staging grounds of the Masks of Nyarlathotep campaign, one of those big campaigns that has, weirdly, survived and thrived in ways the designers clearly could not have imagined back when they hashed it out. It is in fact so popular that it earned a companion (the Masks of Nyarlathotep Companion), which was announced as a monograph back in 2007 when this book came out, but wasn't actually close to reality until 2015 after a third-party kickstarter campaign - and last I heard, that's sitting at something like 572 pages and still fiddling with the layout. And Conyer's contributions to that include a bunch of stuff on Kenya.

So really, you could make a good argument that this book probably started out as David Conyer's personal Keeper notes for the Kenya section of the Masks campaign.

Why does Masks have a Kenya stage? I can't say absolutely. Part of it is geography: the writers wanted a nice triangle that would lead to a great gate being opened over the Indian Ocean, and the other two sites are Shanghai and the city of the Great Race in Australia. But part of it might be that in 1920 Kenya became a British colony, which made it one of the more...accessible parts of Africa. At least, for English-speaking investigators. Again, that's supposition. It's not like Africa wasn't carved up by European powers at that point.

Which is, I guess, as good a place as anywhere to remind folks that while this book was written in the 2000s and set in the 1920s, a lot of the ideas that inform is are from the 1890s or earlier. Africa has a timeless quality in roleplaying games not because it doesn't change, but because people still think of Africa as a sandy desert full of fanatics and camels up top and jungles full of brown people dressed in leaves and feathers and shit and armed with spears below. These are images that persisted in the popular culture well into...well, today, really.


I'd like to say we've come a long way, but this isn't far from how fucking Wakanda was depicted until about 20 years ago.

Anyway, there's ten chapters and three appendices for this thing, so I'm going to see if I can clear through it by the end of the week.

[Ancient History]

Introduction

Africa has long been known as the Dark Continent. That term invokes many images centered on fear - savage tribes, fierce animals, impenetrable jungles, vast deserts, lost civilizations, slave traders, contagious diseases - and the unknown. Few people from other parts of the world knew much about this continent, and those who lived there knew little beyond their own settlements and hunting grounds. Africa was "dark" because it was a mystery.

Also, black people. But this is a good example of what I mean about lots of holdover preconceptions. This could have been a description of Africa in 1807 or 1907 or 2007 to a lot of people, sadly. But it gets a little better.

At three times the size of the United States and with a ratio of four Africans to every American alive during this era, it would be impossible to cover this continent in a single book. Africa is too vast and too varied. [...] Because of the vastness of the Kenya Colony, not every town could be covered in detail. Instead, this book focuses on Nairobi, exploring this city in detail. Additional maps of the towns Mambasa, Kisumu, and Lamu with descriptions of prominent locations are included, along with character templates, optional skills and rules, and numerous keeper-controlled characters with which to bring Kenya of this era to life

Yes, thank you. Someone gets it. Anyway, enough on this bullshit. On to the book proper.

Happy hunting in the wilds of Darkest Africa!

God dammit.

Prelude: As Above, So Below
This is seven-pages of intro fiction. We're not even at Chapter 1 yet. It's not bad fiction, as far as that goes...it treads the difficult ground of writing period fiction without using period terms like "negro" or "[EDITED]". That said, the protagonist is designed to be a bastard; he splits the eye of a black kid acting as his assistant during a big game hunt on the first page and on the last page...

Strangely, now that the fighting was over, the women relaxed. They turned their backs on him, displaying their buttocks in a sign of submission, just as an animal would. Caulfield felt his sexual member swell.

Not typical fare for a CoC book, and there's some weird racial and sexual dynamics at play here - probably the first CoC Africa book to really even touch on that particular tricky subject.

I would like to comment for a moment on the "art." Chapter titles are in an angular faux-tribal font - you can see an example of this here:

Most of the interior art is...well, rubbish, really. I don't know what happened but it's the type of thing where the resolution on all the old-timey photos and scans is bad and ends up looking faded and fuzzy, while the interior artwork is all amateur-hour, probably because Conyers was doing it himself. Nice maps, though.

Chapter 1: The Making of Kenya
Basically a history chapter, starting out with a quotation from Out of Africa and continuing on to cover a thumbnail sketch of Arabic and European settlement. In keeping with longstanding practice, this is all wikipedia-bait these days, but Conyers at least openly addresses the racism and inequality of the British colony.

There's a sidebar on "The African Cthulhu Mythos", which is mostly "Donald Wandrei's "The Tree-Men of M'Bwa" (not set in Kenya), Lovecraft's "Winged Death" (South Africa) and "Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family" (the Congo), Clark Ashton Smith's "The Venus of Azombeii" (not Mythos, Nigeria), Lin Carter's "The Fishers from Outside" (Zimbabwe)... basically, everywhere that is not Kenya. They also include a section on Africa in Cthulhu gaming, which manages to leave out Mysteries of Morocco, The Cairo Guidebook, and basically everything else except Masks of Nyarlathotep, a scenario in The Black Seal #3, and for some bizarre reason Secrets of San Francisco, which Conyers avers "also provides further background on things African and Cthulhuloid."



They also plug Dark Continent from New Breed, which I hadn't heard of but is described as "the best African gaming sourcebook around."

It's rare to see a company pimp another company's product, so I assume Conyers is friends with the writers.

After the history, we get geography (and, bizarrely, a table to adjust Credit Rating based on your class, social standing, and skin color. Jesus fuck. +30% if you're titled British, -80% if you're African.) This is largely more wikipedia-bait, though it covers all the important basics like population demographics, temperature range, legal system (including the British system of enforced segregation), etc. I think this actually counts as one of the few CoC products to actually address systemic segregation and discrimination.

We also get a full-age sidebar with the optional temple "King's African Rifles Officer" (and "King's African Rifles Soldier," though they managed to drop the title on that one), and a New Skill: Interrogation. At the point when this was released, there was some playing with character occupation to be...not quite more like actual character classes, but to give more explicit benefits than skill offerings and income, so in this case they get a modest stat boost (+2 CON for officers, and +2 STR for soldiers) and an immunity to San loss from witnessing dead bodies ("unless particularly horrific") and killing people.

Interrogation rules are included because...uh...people think extended fiddly rolls are a good idea? Oh look, they include rules for torture too. At least these are brief and end with:

A victim who goes temporarily or permanently insane during a torture will confess to anything, including confessions that are totally untrue. In this case further torture will not produce anything worthwhile; that is if obtaining useful information was the objective in the first place.

We end this chapter with a sidebar on Zebras and the .256 Mauser Rifle, explaining:

From the early 1920's the colonial government began handing out the .256 Mauser rifles, plus ten rounds, for free to any white man who wanted one. After that each zebra tail turned in earned an extra two rounds. Investigators strapped for cash and in need of a weapon would do well to join this scheme. It was so successful that in the space of a few years, tens of thousands of zebra were slaughtered. Because of the flood of zebra skins on the international market, the selling price of their hide quickly devalued. In the meantime someone discovered that fences were a far more effective means of keeping the zebras out [...]

I guess this could be worse.

The final section is about news services, and ends with:

White investigators who are seen reading any African newspaper are likely to lose points off their Credit Rating, because it's just not done!

One, that's horrible. Two, that's racist. THREE, that's not how Credit Rating works. In Call of Cthulhu, which doesn't like to handle fiddly economics like Shadowrun or D&D, Credit Rating is a skill to see if you can afford shit. Which means you can fail to have enough change on hand to buy a newspaper but succeed in buying a yacht on credit within five minutes. Random points deductions are a dick move, because skills are hard to raise in CoC.

Chapter 2: The African People
Africa is an incredibly huge continent with a massive and diverse population with many many languages and cultural groups. Conyers acknowledges this. He also acknowledges that this is way too complicated, and he's basically just going to describe the largest Kenyan tribes and can't squeeze all 100+ languages and dialects into a convenient table. It's an acceptable solution to a real problem, though the key points are sometimes boiled down to hilariousness or what might be uncomfortable racial stereotypes. So for example, the Luo description includes:

They are the only tribal group in Kenya that does not practice male or female circumcision as an initiation into adulthood. Instead they extract four to six teeth from the bottom jaw, which can be just as painful.

And for the Maasai:

All Maasai believe that they are the rightful owners of all the cattle in the world and will do anything to steal the cattle of other tribes.

After this, there's a description of "Tribal Villages," home life, diet, clothing, and religion - which includes a sidebar on "Witchcraft, Sorcery, and Zombies" (mostly from a purely thematic viewpoint, although they point out that CoC has stats for zombies, because of course it has like six spells for raising the dead) and "Justice, African Style" (emphasizing reimbursement over causation). African superstition merits a mention of course, but most of the love is saved for "African Weapons", which has a long table and many stats and rules, because of course CoC combat wasn't complicated enough and you need to know the diference between an African Bow and African Club from a regular CoC Bow or Club, and a Wooden Dagger from an Iron-Blade Knife.

Unusually, there is also an extended section on Creating African Investigators, with helpful occupations that include Farmer, Fisher, Hunter, Gatherer, Pastoralist, Warrior, and Medicine Man/Woman. These all have various special bonuses - usually a modest attribute boost - although the Medicine Man/woman "with a POW of 15 or more knows 1D4 African tribal spells" - these are included under the heading "African Tribal Magic," and basically makes one of the infrequent attempts to make a usable PC spellcaster. I mean, not a good one, and you're not given any actual way to advance your abilities, but better than nothing, I guess?

There is also a section on new and extended skills, like Desert Survival (fine, the Serengeti is in Kenya) and Jungle Survival (fine, there's Jungle in...wait, why not just have a Survival skill? Isn't that already a skill? I think it is!) I have great difficulty with why the fuck you'd want a Craft skill in CoC to begin with, but some of these baffle me:

With a low skill roll, a craftsman might make an exceptionally fine item. With a failing roll, the item might break on its first use, fail to fit into some larger whole, or have awkward balance or design. A successful Craft roll might provide information about a third-party item, such as where or when it might have been made, reveal some point of history or technique concerning ir, or name who might have made it. At Craft 60% or more, the craftsman makes a comfortable living from his or her trade.

This is the level of mindcaulk that goes into the CoC skill system. What the fuck qualifies as a "low roll"? How the fuck does failing still make an item? What does it mean to make a comfortable living when you're failing 40% of the time?



Next up: Chapter 3: Guide to Nairobi.

[Username17]

You know what Lovecraft Mythos story is all about the Mythos connections of Eastern Africa? Medusa's Coil. Wonder why they don't mention that one.



-Username17

[Mistborn]

You know what Lovecraft Mythos story is all about the Mythos connections of Eastern Africa? Medusa's Coil. Wonder why they don't mention that one

That's the one where the big horror reveal is that some woman is part African isn't it?

[Username17]

You know what Lovecraft Mythos story is all about the Mythos connections of Eastern Africa? Medusa's Coil. Wonder why they don't mention that one

That's the one where the big horror reveal is that some woman is part African isn't it?

Yes. People like to not talk about that one much because it's racist on a level that is hard to overlook.

“‘Iä! Iä! Shub-Niggurath! Ya-R’lyeh! N’gagi n’bulu bwana n’lolo! Ya, yo, pore Missy Tanit, pore Missy Isis! Marse Clooloo, come up outen de water an’ git yo chile—she done daid! She done daid! De hair ain’ got no missus no mo’, Marse Clooloo. Ol’ Sophy, she know! Ol’ Sophy, she done got de black stone outen Big Zimbabwe in ol’ Affriky! Ol’ Sophy, she done dance in de moonshine roun’ de crocodile-stone befo’ de N’bangus cotch her and sell her to de ship folks! No mo’ Tanit! No mo’ Isis! No mo’ witch-woman to keep de fire a-goin’ in de big stone place! Ya, yo! N’gagi n’bulu bwana n’lolo! Iä! Shub-Niggurath! She daid! Ol’ Sophy know!’

That's Lovecraft trying to write negro talk.

-Username17

[OgreBattle]

If I play as a Kenyan do I get a percentile bonus to running good

[Ancient History]

Hunter and Craftsmen have a DEX bonus, which gives a +4% to starting Dodge skill.

[momothefiddler]

You know what Lovecraft Mythos story is all about the Mythos connections of Eastern Africa? Medusa's Coil. Wonder why they don't mention that one

That's the one where the big horror reveal is that some woman is part African isn't it?

Yes. People like to not talk about that one much because it's racist on a level that is hard to overlook.

I didn't really care to read it, so I looked up the synopsis on Wikipedia, and apparently it ends "though in deceitfully slight proportion, Marceline was a negress." ...and Wikipedia tells me that

When August Derleth published the story in an anthology in 1944, he changed the final line to: "though in deceitfully slight proportion, Marceline was a loathsome, bestial thing, and her forebears had come from Africa."

How does that help anything? What is even the point?

---

More on topic, I am curious if the rules for torture indicate that they give you usable information while the victim is still sane?

And, like, I don't know much about CoC and I know it's often considered a tire fire around here, but... is "you might know four times as many spells as another character made exactly the same way, and this is a permanent boost because this is all the spells you ever know" just... a normal sort of thing? This is the level of awful and we just take that in stride?

[Ancient History]

More on topic, I am curious if the rules for torture indicate that they give you usable information while the victim is still sane?

It's not just effective, it's twice as fast!

And, like, I don't know much about CoC and I know it's often considered a tire fire around here, but... is "you might know four times as many spells as another character made exactly the same way, and this is a permanent boost because this is all the spells you ever know" just... a normal sort of thing? This is the level of awful and we just take that in stride?

Well, let's put it this way: the average character will start the game knowing zero spells and may never learn any. This occupation/template has the special ability that allows you to start the gaming knowing 1D4 spells (yes, completely random number of spells) from a select list. No idea if you get to pick them or if it's random, but given that you're already breathing the gamemaster's pubes at this point, it's all down to how skilled you are with the tongue. By comparison, in Call of Cathulhu if you pick the Familiar trick, you can buy spells for POW x 3 skill points (but then you have to roll learn them), and in The Golden Dawn you buy ranks and curriculum based on a combination of POW, INT, Credit Rating, Occult, and Cthulhu Mythos skill which generally means you're lucky to start out with one spell; I haven't crunched the numbers but I think qualifying for the Inner Order at char gen is unlikely. There are some other options floating around, but they're mainly rubbish, really, and players are sort of discouraged from putting them together.

So yes, starting out the game as a Kenyan witch-man/woman is probably the easiest route to magical power. Of course, you'll probably be outshone as soon as you hit an actual Mythos tome, but yes, that's just how Call of Cthulhu rolls. It's a bit like a 1st level wizard in D&D having 1D4 hit points. You rolls the dice, you takes your chances.

[Ancient History]

Chapter 3: Guide to Nairobi

Nairobi stands apart from most other cities in Africa in the 1920s, for it is a European oasis isolated in the middle of the African heartland.

Nairobi in the 1920s had a population of about 5,000 Europeans, 15,000 Indians, and 30,000 native Africans. This leads nicely to a three-tier caste system. The whole chapter is dedicated to a bird's eye view of Nairobi, with Conyers pointing out that he can't possibly cover everything, so don't assume that just because he only describes two mosques that there are only two mosques in Nairobi, etc. Most of this is standard stuff, so I'm just going to point out some stuff that strikes my eye.

For example: the official exchange rate given in a previous chapter is that the official currency is the British pound (£), and that 1 £ = US $ 4. Which is fine. But then Conyers appears to forget that there are 12 shillings to a pound, because he gives 5 s = $1 an 8 s = $1.50. That's a math fail.

The ballroom opens regularly for social functions attended by Nairobi's white elite, and Credit Rating skill rolls are required to obtain an invitation (whites only).

I know that the period was racist by default, but did we need mechanics to remind us of it?

There are some Mythos bits stuck in among the hotels, hospitals, trading posts, and big game hunters - just not much much. For example, the McMillan Library has two new Mythos tomes, which are detailed in a sidebar: Africa's Dark Sects and The Nyhargo Codex. Neither of these actually have much to do with anything Mythos-specific in Kenya (being more concerned with the Congo and Nigeria), and one apparently is imported from Secrets to San Francisco. They have some zombie-related spells, and the usually absolutely bugfuck uneven statistics.

There's actually quite a lot of magic tucked into sidebars in this chapter, which his rare. Normally...well, I tell a lie, there's no "normally" with CoC products, but from general RPG products you would expect all the spells and tomes to be grouped together in an easy-to-find section, maybe somewhere in the rear where the keeper would find it. But of course not! The only thing I can give credit for is that there's a couple of good spells for dealing with zombies - I would say that's not normally an issue for CoC investigators and is only included for bad references to voodoo, but the undead are surprisingly prevalent in a lot of CoC adventures, so these could potentially be useful. If you can obtain them.

There's also a couple Mythos-relics in the Coryndon Museum: the Idol of the Three-Legged God (this is Nyarlathotep, and relates to the Cult of the Bloody Tongue from Masks of Nyarlathotep, which is actually set in Kenya, so fair enough).

(The three-legged form is actually Nyarlathotep's most famous form in CoC and related art, being more iconic even than the Black Pharaoh.)

There's also a White Ape Fetish (Congo), uncovered by Wade Jermyn of the "Facts in the Case of the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family" fame, and a fetch stick from Azombeii (referencing "The Venus of Azombeii," but also another fucking tie-in to Secrets of San Francisco ... I know I normally bitch about CoC books not referring to each other, so I'm not complaining about that, but I'm curious who the fuck dropped a bunch of African stuff in San Francisco, and why).

Then there's Nariobi's Spiritualist Group for Women, a female-centric cult built around a tome called The Gate of All Lost Stars (another sidebar) which deals with the brand new Great Old One Ammutseba. I actually really like this, because each cultist makes her own magical amulet, which provides some tangible benefits but also gives them terminal cancer if they wear it long enough, and the head cultist is basically stringing a bunch of women along with a bullshit empowerment line waiting for the stars to be right so she can summon her GOO before they all drop dead. I don't think it's got an MRA anti-feminist stance as such, although you could play it that way.



I should mention that all the NPCs in this chapter are headered in the following format:

Tandoor Singh (Brown), age 45, Tea-Seller and Agent of the Bloody Tongue

That "(Brown)"? That's not part of his name. All the NPCs are specified to be White, Brown, or Black. Yes, that is terrible and unnecessary. Singh is another holdover from Masks of Nyarlathotep, and has the bodies of fifteen street kids and prostitutes buried under his floors. NOT A NICE MAN.

There's a disfigured beggar named Obiajulu who lives in "Somali Town" (a rapidly-developing slum in greater Nairobi) who is an agent for the Ghouls of Nairobi, who are apparently better-organized than elsewhere. This was addressed more in the intro fiction, but apparently instead of munching on well-aged corpses, they kidnap people and keep them in an underground "Feeding Chamber" where they're bred as livestock, a bit "Rats in the Walls"-ish.

Head racist is Lord Delamere, "Leader of the White Settlers," who wants to turn Kenya into the next New Zealand and openly admires apartheid. I guess I'm glad that Conyers is aware of how racist the era and area was, and wants to drive it home with a hammer, but then you get passages like this:

Since whites brought in heavy equipment such as tractors, mills, harvesters, and guns for protection, serious accidents on farms have grown to be commonplace. Most Africans have no grown up with a sense of respect for the danger posed by heavy machinery and, from a lack of proper training, they are more likely to injure themselves.

I can't tell if that's kinda-racist or the equivalent of city kids going to Alaska and trying to ride the moose.

Neville Jermyn, of "Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family" is in town, complete with an (incredibly weak) Mythos tome, Observations on the Several Parts of Africa. So is Karen Blixen, who wrote Out of Africa.


"While the Great War was being fought locally in neighboring Tanganyika she contracted syphilis, possibly from [her husband Baron Bror von Blixen-Finecke], and had to spend much of her time in Denmark undergoing treatment.

Chapter 4: The Kenyan Interior
A rough guide to the interior and going on Safari, which is what bored white people did in Africa, when they weren't farming or oppressing the locals. This gives Conyers the excuse to introduce the Great White Hunter character template, and various difficulties including rules for dehydration, altitude sickness, heatstroke, quicksand, and various tropic diseases (diarrhea, fever, dysentery, fungal infection, worm infection, bilharzias, hepatitis, malaria, tropical ulcers, sleeping sickness, and smallpox.)

I made a special effort to compare the diarrhea rules from Secrets of the Congo, and heat stroke rules are identical to those given in Secrets of Morocco. For a normal game you might take that as a given, but I'm impressed by the consistency. That's rare for a CoC product. Gold star!



Then we go on to a quick overview of various regions and points of interest, including Mombasa (major port), Lamu (smaller town which has connections with the Dreamlands, a roaming Cat Square, and a Jamal Alhazred who carries the Mythos tome The Masked Messenger, which is related to the Necronomicon). Mt. Kilimanjaro, the M'Gong Trading Post (which ties in to Lovecraft's "Winged Death," even though it's supposed to be set in South Africa), Endicott's Safari Park (another Masks of Nyarlathotep hangover), Mount Kenya, the Aberdare Forest, the Mountain of the Black Wind (fictional Mythos site connected to cults of Nyarlathotep, which requires three more random spells), the Well of the Chakota (loosely based on Lovecraft's poem "The Outpost," which was actually about Great Zimbabwe - this involves a new spell and a new Lesser Servitor Race), the Serengeti, Lake Victoria, Kisumu (a railway town on Lake Victoria), the Shaba Territory (which has the kidnapping ghouls and the Oracle Child (who has an 11-year old ghoul as a friend), Lake Rudolf (which contains the Screaming Crawler, a servant of the Spiraling Worm, and another of Conyers' contributions to the Mythos).

Criticisms: Conyers tries to cram in any vaguely African Mythos reference he plausibly (and implausibly) can, and ignores any of the real mysteries and archaeological sites in Kenya, like Ruins of Gedi (which Frank asked me to look for). The Mythos stuff also tends to be a bit hamfisted, and...I don't know how to put this...less accessible to the native Africans, because of CoC's reliance on tomes and lack of written languages, so any tome is pretty much an import or written by Europeans or Arabs by default.

That said, it's different from a lot of the books we covered in actually making an effort to showcase the Mythos in a particular region, and it is reasonably consistent with the cults and background (i.e. Cult of the Bloody Tongue/Nyarlathotep predominates), and while I skipped a lot of it, there's a bunch of peripheral references to the Egyptian Mythos - not, y'know, any of the stuff in The Cairo Guidebook or any other CoC book with an Egyptian Mythos tome, but y'know, vague connections that provide at least a couple of hooks. It also actually strives to create a sortof cohesive and self-referential world - which is good! - but reproduces a lot from Masks of Nyarlathotep - which is unnecessary.

Anyway, geography lesson over, next chapter is the Bestiary.

[Ancient History]

Chapter 5: Bestiary
Having confirmed the diarrhea and heat stroke rules, I went back and re-checked a few things. It turns out that about 3/4 of the tomes and spells covered so far are actually reprinted from other sources (and, partially, reprinted in Secrets of the Congo). This is sadly kind of typical for Call of Cthulhu: while there is a vast amount of material that is out there, created especially for the game, they also tend to be extremely conservative. Which is why something like half of all these entries refer back to the Masks of Nyarlathotep campaign. So there's less original material in this book than some of your latter-day oWoD splatbooks, mechanically speaking.

Bestiary is...bunch of mundane animals. I'm not well-up on the exact range of every critter native to Africa, but it feels like they've focused on the iconic critters from all over the continent. Lions, camels, hippopotamus, gorillas, oh my!


I feel that the Driver Ants entry misses the possibility of giant, telepathic ants.

Chapter 6: Secret Societies
This chapter starts off rather immediately with the section "African Cthulhu Cults." It skips over any attempt to actually represent native religion as such - dodging a bullet there, I guess. It doesn't actually help to explain what these cults do besides worship strange idols and sacrifice the occasional person, or what they believe - CoC typically is a bit light on the liturgy.

After that, they begin to go into the already-existing cults mentioned throughout this book: the Cult of the Bloody Tongue (Nyarlathotep, from the Masks campaign), the Cult of the Spiraling Worm (Nyarlathotep, from Conyers' book), a brief sidebar on other African cults of Nyarlathotep (the Brotherhood of the Black Pharaoh and the Cult of the Floating Horror, which are mentioned/detailed in other CoC products); Ghoul cults get a couple paragraphs; the Leopard Men - this is a real cult in western Africa and the Cong, and for some reason is illustrated by a half-page etching of "A Meeting of the Royal Geographic Society" - and includes rules for were-leopards, if that's your thing; then we have the Sisterhood of the Masked Messenger (Nyarlathotep again, based in Morocco, actually; which is weird because of course they aren't mentioned at all in Secrets of Morocco); "The Faceless Watchers" - these are two of Conyers' personal creations - and of course the White Apes, who don't live in Kenya but in the Grey City in the Congo. Not that Secrets of the Congo felt the need to go into much detail about them either.

I won't say these are boilerplate chapters. I mean, the cult descriptions are okay. They're just not very original. Most Call of Cthulhu cults aren't. It reminds me a bit of the Satanists in Good Omens, the ones that grew up in it and are about as evil as your average parishioner is good. Even failing that, cults are hard to keep going without charismatic leaders, some kind of liturgy, theology, cosmology...something. Most of these are also fairly rural affairs; I would have liked a more long and involved history with the Arabic, Indian, and Portuguese traders that had been hanging around the Swahili Coast for centuries. But this is just...eh, a little boring. All blood sacrifice and waiting for the stars to be right, not even a Shub-Niggurath orgy to liven things up a bit. Bah.

It's hard for me to think that people didn't know that this was boring. I mean, if you do a cult in any game you're usually supposed to give them...something. A purpose, an enemy, special powers, a secret history that ties into stuff, ways for the PCs to interact with them on different levels. I dunno, I always felt cults in CoC represent a fundamental lack of effort, for all that they're a bit iconic to the setting.

Next up: Chapter Seven, the first of the mandatory scenarios.

[Ancient History]

Chapter 7: The Madness of the Ancestors

A skull, recently discovered at the base of Mount Kilimanjaro, challenges the world's scientific beliefs regarding humanity's evolutionary ancestry. The truth lies much deeper, in a vast network of underground tunnels stretching across Africa.

I actually like the premise for this one. It's realistic. It's not your traditional Mythos adventure, involving strange relatives and inheritances. It is specific to Kenya, and not unreasonably so. It uses the material in the book. So far, so good.

Nominally, this is set in 1931 and involves the PCs being called up by Prof. Curtis Mathieson of Miskatonic University. Who showed up previously in Trail of Tsathoggua and Miskatonic University, so all well done there. Then there's the preliminary research/legwork/Library Use rolls. Anyway, the hominid skull found is actually a ghoul skull. A successful Cthulhu Mythos roll reveals this, but if the PCs are that far along the road to madness and still go to Africa, I feel the results are on them.

So, on to Kenya - the Misk. U. eggheads figure that the ancient hominids lived in caves, and want to investigate the tunnels they'd heard about in Kenya. The PCs show up in Mombasa and replay the second act of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade as the professor isn't there, and have to take a train to Tsavo and then drive on to the dig site, which has already seen some mysterious deaths among the diggers. The expedition members are a Poirot Mystery worth of dubious personalities, including a married woman having an affair, an agent of the ghouls, unnamed graduate students, and did I mention how fucking tedious and tiresome it is that every single NPC is identified by race in addition to everything else?

They reprint the stats for The Masked Messenger - that's a Mythos tome you might recall from Secrets of Morocco, and also Jamal Alhazred's entry from earlier in this book. Seriously, the stats are identical, they just reprint the sidebars twice in the same book. The only difference in the second one is that they add the English translation.

There's some extended archaeology terms, tools, tables, etc. I haven't seen archaeology rules this involved since a Dragon Magazine article over a decade ago.



There's a timeline which actually goes on for 12 days. That seems excessive. I can't get PCs to fill an afternoon reliably. If this was a computer RPG, they would have clicked on every pixel. Anyway, the longer they stay there the more people disappear, and eventually the dig site breaks through into the Cavern of the Ghoul Kings.


Farewell, Sanity! It was nice knowing you.

It's actually kind of nice to see ghouls have a civilization and organization of a sort - HPL was always light on the fine details - and for reasons I've yet to understand, one of Nyarlathotep's avatars is also wandering around in the dark. Try not to encounter her.



The "Ghoul Kings" themselves are dead ghouls, bedecked with jewelry, left in a cavern where they're slowly covered by stalactites. I don't know how that's supposed to work, exactly, since anything biological is going to disintegrate from the dripping before the stalactite grows down to merge with the corpse, but whatever. Call it poetic license.

I should mention that the SAN losses in this section are so fast and furious it's nuts. Even if you use the rule that after losing 6 SAN you're so used to ghouls that you can bum a cigarette off them without losing more, there's 1d6 SAN tests in every other fucking chamber - you could go temporarily insane before going a dozen steps into this cavern system.

Even if temporary insanity wasn't a major issue, being gang-rushed by up to a dozen ghouls at a time is. If this was D&D, you'd just call it a revolving door of death dungeon, but in CoC you don't normally take dynamite and a machine gun to an archaeology dig.

The caverns go on for...longer than expected. Over a dozen pages. How the hell are the PCs supposed to see all this shit? Well, they're not, obviously. Unless they get captured, stripped naked, and frog-marched through hell until they get dropped in the corral with the rest of the ghouls' human livestock (and hey, there's the assholes from the introductory fiction!) which seems to be the plot.

Unfortunately there is no way to create fire down here, so meat is eaten raw. If investigators decide to turn to cannibalism, it will take some getting use to. Provide a Sanity loss of 1/1D6 points the first time this is attempted and a CON x 1 roll. If the CON roll is failed the investigator is sick, losing 1D6 hit points from meat that disagrees with them. If at any point an investigator succeeds in a CON x1 roll, he finds that his digestion is now adjusted to eating raw human meat. Eating a sizable portion of human flesh takes no more than an hour to accomplish, and the consumer has no need to lick the blue slime for that day. This provides a measure of fee time to cannibals, a luxury other wall inhabitants do not have, though hunting other humans is a dangerous past time.

It then goes on to say that "Sexual intercourse and raising children are the only entertainments on the ledge" and we'll leave off that train of thought there. Don't get me wrong, it's edgelord as fuck to design a scenario where...uh...you descend into cannibalism and have some kids while plotting your escape from your ghoul overlords...

Anyway, the PCs aren't the only ones to be carried off by the ghouls: so have some of the other assholes from the camp. And they need your help.



Anyway, the "fourth act" is escaping from the ghouls' larder, which isn't made easier by any of the other assholes down there - maybe you can explain the prisoner's dilemma to them - and the options for escape are not promising. You either climb the unclimbable wall, bargain with the ghouls (working for the ghouls means they eat part of your face off. I mean, you live, but they eat part of your face off), "jump into the darkness" where there is an underground lake (which is surrounded by ghouls), and "magic." Motherfucker, if I had magic, would I have been captured by ghouls in the first place?

Conclusion
Turning up naked in Moshi after weeks, months, or years of absence might require a lot of explaining on the behalf of the investigators, but at least they are alive and well. Reward each surviving investigator with 2D6 sanity for their escape. If they managed to rescue Many, Capwell, Zaid, Shafika, or others from their wall imprisonment, investigators are rewarded with an additional Sanity point per person saved.

tl;dr: This combines the worst parts of Harlequin and the Tomb of Horrors. Prepare many character sheets.

Chapter 8: The Cats of Lamu

Before presenting this scenario, keepers should design an encounter in an earlier scenario whereby the investigators accidentally kill a cat or two. [...] This killing unfortunately has placed the investigators onto the hit list of the cats in the Dreamlands.

Okay, so this ties in with Lovecraft's "The Cats of Ulthar," the Kenyan town of Lama's connection with the Dreamlands, and an immortal Dreamlands monster called the Hag of Zais. The Dreamlands cats decide that the only way for the investigators to pay for their debts of killing cats is by dealing with the immortal sorceress, using as their recruiting agent Jamal Alhazred.


This could ALMOST easily be converted into a Call of Cathulhu adventure.

Jamal invites them for dinner (warning sign), where they can examine his occult library (uh oh), the PCs are drugged (well, of course), and the PCs dream of a talking cat who gives them a choice of undertaking a cat, or waking up in their hotel.



Taking the red pill means that the PCs are on the shitlist of all cats everywhere forever. Taking the blue pill means they're having fun in the Dreamlands. This basically gives Conyers an excuse to publish his Deserts of the Dreamlands fan supplement, which he does. The PCs meet the local Queen of Cats, who drops all the exposition on the Hag of Zais. The PCs can fight her, which is tricky because she can swallow investigators whole, or they can defeat her with the power of love by giving her a hug.

Investigators who hold back from attacking her and succeed in a Psychology skill roll realize that behind her hideous exterior (or seen i her reflection) that she appears sad.

Jesus, this was the plot of an Ernest movie.

This adventure was bullshit and left a bad taste in my mouth. Moving on.

Next up: Chapter 9: Savage Lands (yet another fucking adventure)

[Ancient History]

Chapter 9: Savage Land
Okay, we've had one adventure that's overly ambitious and one that's rubbish, and now we have...this.

A safari hunter loses his wife and two daughters in a savage attack by a wild animal. Clues left at the scene of death suggest the involvement of the sinister cult of African Leopard-Men.

This is actually a good premise. Realistically, if you're playing CoC, a certain amount of your "adventures" should be fucking with the players, with no real Mythos goings-on at all, to lure them into a false sense of security and give them a chance to build up and show off their other skills. That doesn't actually happen a lot, but then in CoC you're not actually expected to improve your character significantly.

Anyway, the backstory for this is adventure is that the leader of a local Leopard-Men cult became inducted into the dual-worship of Tsathoggua and Cthulhu (T&C is something of an African speciality, and I have no idea why, it just is, apparently). He's overstepped himself in attacking an English farm and taking two white women prisoner, so now the PCs are called in to investigate...


This is quite literally Great White Hunter: The Game

Unlike the other scenarios, this one actually has a hook for African characters (their tribes have been attacked by the Leopard-Men too).

Cue various rolls - Library Use won't help you much here, but it isn't useless - and there's a funeral held for the missing white women (with empty coffins). Some of the sources suggested for the Leopard-Men cult include Tarzan and the eopard Men and TinTin au Congo.



Eventually, the PCs should get enough clues to go on safari for the source of the attacks/the missing white women, and meet some friendly Maasai, who fill them in on some of the details that weren't in the newspaper archives and comic books in Nairobi (this involves a sidequest to buy some land for the Maasai to live on, which of course no-one will sell the PCs if they advertise that they're just going to give it to some black people. I know this is correct for the period, but it is still very tiresome.)

Eventually the PCs go on another safari to find the source of the Leopard-Men, and their car breaks down (next time, take camels), their camp is sacked while they're away, and the PCs start getting stalked across the savannah by hyenas, jackals, and lions.



If the PCs survive, they eventually stumble across the Leopard Men Village, which is in the valley of the crescent...no, fucking seriously...along with the twin shrine of Clulu and Tsadogwa. At this point, the game takes a turn. They PCs should either rescue the girls or genocide the village - both if they have the firepower - or else call in the King's rifles. Instead, PCs are presumed to have been captured, and are hung up while the head Leopard-Man priest decides to try and turn them to the worship of the Great Old Ones. Anyone that agrees gets to be subject to the spell "Awaken the Beast," which turns them into an African animal.


Seriously, this is your sales pitch.

If you can't rescue the girls by the full moon, people get sacrificed, turned into animals, engage in a cannibalistic feast, a formless spawn of the Great Old Ones appears, and you have to wait 1d20 hours for the next train. Other than that it's gravy.

Chapter 10: Wooden Death

The Fungi from Yuggoth discover a strange alien site in the back-country of Kenya Proving too difficult to investigate on their own, they summon help through trickery, deceit, and an odd surgical procedure.

This is loosely based on/inspired by Donald Wandrei's "The Tree-Men of M'bwa." Which isn't exactly the most obscure classic Mythos story, but it's getting up there. Also, these aren't the same African tree-spirits that show up in Green and Pleasant Land because...um...presumably Chaosium forgot about them or didn't think they had the rights, probably.

The Mi-Go are a weird part of Cthulhu Mythos lore. They only really show up in one late Lovecraft story - "The Whisperer in Darkness" - and later writers add their own takes on them. Chaosium likes to use them as a dumping ground for when you want a sufficiently advanced alien civilization doing weird shit, so their goals, motivations, methods, and overall technology level are wildly inconsistent between products, except when Chaosium decides to keep their wondrous gear as minimal as possible. Does that make sense? Like, individual authors tend to make up crap for the Mi-Go, and Chaosium seems allergic to extrapolate from this or to explore any of the implications of any of it, so you've got a relatively small amount of material that gets reprinted a lot and doesn't make a lot of sense.

I guess the equivalent is how in D&D you can just throw a mindflayer into any old adventure, and in one adventure they have this wondrous piece of gear which is never ever mentioned in any other adventure or anything ever again until it's reprinted, verbatim, with no extra material on how it fits into their culture or anything, in some splatbook that collects all the mindflayer shit. And that should lead to something like the Illithiad or Lords of Madness but...doesn't. Because Chaosium never wants to just do a Mi-Go book to keep their setting consistent.

Anyway, beyond the Mountains of the Moon (which are actually in Uganda, but whatever) is a crater where the Great Old One called the Red Flux crash-landed in a metal space ship. It's zombie servant M'bwa captures wandering humans (and, apparently, Mi-Go) and turns them into tree-men. Like ya do.



The Mi-Go started out by stealing cattle and using them to experiment with bypassing M'bwa, but that didn't work. So they've moved on to humans. Normally, this is the point in Shadowrun where Mr. Johnson would hire some mercs out of Nairobi, but this is CoC, so instead the investigators get a letter from Mr. Cloud, promising money to investigate, accompanied by a living wooden hand with roots - presumably, this is enough to get the PCs to bite.

Blah blah Library Use, journey to the trading post, through a dying village (with reports of UFO sightings!) to another trading post, where they meet Mr. Cloud - who tells them more of the story and shows them some more evidence of weird wooden body parts, and tries to get them to go investigate the crater. Option B is to kill McCloud and loot his corpse.

If investigators do overpower Mr. Cloud or kill him and check his body, a Spot Hidden identifies hairline scars on the back of his skull. If Mr. Cloud's skull is cut open and examined (costing 0/1D3 Sanity to perform this bloody task(, they find an odd structure at the back of his brain, a band of pliable grey-orange substance covered with odd lines and grooves. It joins to the spinal cord. Seeing this costs 0/1D3 Sanity points. The item is a form of neural implant control placed there by the mi-go, but investigators in the 1920's or 1930's would have no idea what this device could do since humans have not invented computers yet, the closest human analogy to the device in the skull.

Wouldn't it be great if the Mi-Go used this implant before? Or...later? Ever? With any other agent? 'cause they don't. Bah, humfuck.



Investigators may well be captured by the Mi-Go if they oppose Mr. White (this is getting repetitive; every single fucking adventure so far is a railroad.) The Mi-Go put them back together (literally: if your body is too damaged, the Mi-Go just pop your brain into somebody else's body.) The Mi-Go then get the PCs to investigate basically by blackmailing them: they remove the character's stomachs (replacing them with an implant, the Mi-Go Detachable Stomach. Which, unknown to them, and as a special fuck-you to the players, will eventually kill their characters in the long run. But of course there is no "long run" in CoC), holding them for ransom. Nothing like an incentive!



Anyway, they reprint some Mi-Go tech rules and spells (Contact Human is a useful one, pity humans can't learn it). Mr. Cloud, if he didn't survive the PCs, gets his brain put into a Ashanti man's body to tag along and help out. Then it's CHOO-CHOO and into the Valley of the Red Flux.

I should pout out that M'bwa is described as "Zombie Lesser Servant of the God of the Red Flux," which despite his impressive stats (Str 27, Con 33, HP 22, no damage from impaling weapons and all others do half damage) means that he should be vulnerable to anti-zombie spells, some of which are actually described in this book. None of them actually appear in this adventure, however, so there's a good chance the investigators might be SOL.

Provided they make it past M'bwa into the center of the valley, the "craft" turns out to be a gate to the world of the Red Flux, which the PCs get to investigate - y'know, if they're stupid or suicidal or if the Mi-Go are holding their stomachs hostage.

There are signs people have been here before - including a helpful sign in English "Do Not Gaze into the Pit Ahead!" - this is good, because looking at the pool is grounds for a 0/1 SAN test and then their bodies melt and they emerge from the pool rebuilt - which gets rid of the Mi-Go implant! - but which costs them 1d6/1d20 SAN and they need to pass a Luck roll to be remade without missing parts - and if they ever fumble a Luck roll in the future, they unravel again, this time permanently.

The mi-go will be most interested in obtaining samples of the black pool liquid to study.

Anyway, once they're done vacationing in an alien world, the PCs can go back to their own world, and submit a report to the Mi-Go, who trade the PCs back their stomachs in exchange for any objects of interest. The PCs aren't told how to hook their stomachs back up, they have to figure that out themselves. Given the SAN losses for this adventure, you'll be lucky if one PC doesn't grab all of them and go all Frinkenstein.



Appendix A: Timeline of British East Africa
What it says on the tin. Boring, no Mythos references.

Appendix B: Cthulhu Afrikus
Some other Mythos sites in Africa, based on various stories. The Broken Columns of Geph in Liberia, Cairo in Egypt (no, no mention of The Cairo Guidebook), Canyons of the Ituri-kendi in the Belgian Congo (not mentioned in Secrets of the Congo), the Cult of the Floating Horror in Nigeria (which spawned a Haitian voodoo cult, somehow), G'harne in Mali, the Grey City in the Belgian Congo ("Arthur Jermyn"), Great Zimbabwe in Southern Rhodesia...


Lovecraft subscribed to funny ideas about Great Zimbabwe being founded by white people, because that theory appealed to his prejudices.

...Jebel Barkal in the Sudan (even I haven't heard of that one), King Solomon's Mines in Angola (Allan Quartermain), Kish in Egypt, the Mountain of the Black Wind in Kenya (wait, this is the Kenya book - why didn't they go into more detail about it here? Because it would basically be a reprint of the material in Masks of Nyarlathotep), Nyargo in the Belgian Congo, the Pyramids and the catacombs and the Sphinx of Giza in Egypt...

...and so on and so forth. They even had a paragraph on the Valley of the Red Flux, and we just had an entire fucking adventure dedicated to that, which makes me wonder if this appendix was written for something else and just sort of fucking grafted on to this book like a hideous parasite.

Appendix C: Bibliography
I have most of the mythos sources, except for a bunch of Conyers' fan-articles which were printed in various Mythos magazines in the early 2000s, which explains a good bit. He even cites Mysteries of Morocco, which is impressive for how little the two books share in actual content. I mean, they do share content, but it's a one-way street as far as trying to build connections, William Jones wasn't trying to forge an "African Mythos" or ties to Kenya or anything, but Conyers borrowed a few things.

In place of an index, they did this thing called an Expanded Contents - it is what you might think, somebody went into a word document and had them list every heard, so you can get 3-6 entries for the same fucking page (it even includes all the illustrations). The back of the book is filled up with maps and player handouts and...that's the book.

---

How bad was this book? By Call of Cthulhu standards, you have to understand, even with the crappy artwork this could be considered an exceptional product. There are plenty of CoC books that make zero effort to connect to any other CoC product, plenty of CoC books that leave lots of stuff out or just ignore whatever came before (like Secrets of Tibet ignored Secrets of Japan and Mysteries of the Raj). It also addresses stuff that CoC is normally bad about: the rampant racism of a past era. Now, I don't particularly like how Conyers did that (Great White Hunter archetype? Really?), but he did it, and that's some progress compared to other Chaosium books. And Conyers emphasized the Mythos elements in Africa and in the region in general, which is something a lot of CoC writers tend to forget, focusing as they do on simulation rather than role-play potential.

Is it a good book? Well...I'm not even quite sure it's at the level of the Native American Nation books for Shadowrun. You've got a similar level of combination of kinda-uncomfortable race stuff and boring demographics and where-to-buy-such-and-such and really quite fucking annoying adventures. It is, without a doubt, as close as you're going to get to an Africa sourcebook for CoC...and I think Conyers recognized that...but Africa in the Mythos is such an afterthought, that the Mythos stuff doesn't really hang together very well. Which isn't entirely Conyers fault, since he was basing a lot of it on the Masks of Nyarlathotep campaign, and that is...well, I think it's rubbish, but fans of Call of Cthulhu might disagree.

Really, these aren't flaws restricted to Africa. They're symptomatic to basically any part of the Mythos not directly mentioned by Lovecraft and/or his contemporaries and followers. Mythos stories don't usually translate directly into good adventures for investigators, and the antagonists, clues, and challenges in those stories don't often translate over well. Kenya suffers a bit more than most in that like a lot of Africa, most of its history is unrecorded - and the Mythos really works best when there's a central text or two that can serve as a reference and key to various things. Lacking any actual African Mythos texts, you're down to what a bunch of non-African people wrote about the Mythos in Africa at some point. Which is okay, but it still has you approaching the continent from an outsider perspective, and it doesn't really mesh the Mythos with the local customs or religion at all.

I mean, when the Esoteric Order of Dagon set up shop in Innsmouth, they displaced the Freemasons, and then intimidated the churches out. How does that work in Africa? I have no idea. Africa is a big place. How does that work in Kenya? Even after reading this book, I have no idea. And that's a bit sad. It's not that you need Deep Ones in Kenya, but I'd like the option, maybe.

So it's...well, if you take it compared to a contemporary 2007 product, it looks like amateur-hour bullshit. This was one guy mostly working on his own, and it probably took him a year to research and write and cobble together from his fan-articles. But compared to Secrets of Morocco or Secrets of the Congo, it's a refined, intelligent, and even ballsy piece of work. But being the shiniest turd on the shitpile is not something to aspire to, and honestly this book left me bored a lot of the time. There's not even much to steal from it, because so much of it has been reproduced from somewhere else.