[OSSR]The Golden Dawn (Call of Cthulhu)
Posted: Tue Mar 27, 2018 11:03 pm
I still can't get back into Space Madness! I've got too much to do, so...OSSR!
The basics...this book is labeled as "A Sourcebook of Victorian Occult Intrigue for Call of Cthulhu(TM) from Pagan Publishing." Pagan Pub was a third-party publisher...very much the normal CoC equivalent to the Delta Green guys, it was fans that were so dedicated to the game that they started producing material which was actually better than what Chaosium was able or willing to produce, and they asked and were granted permission to basically produce products which were...as close to canon third-party products as you can get. Seriously, these are so much better produced books than anything Chaosium was shitting out in their certified fanfiction line of Miskatonic Monographs and shit...hell, it's better than official turdblossoms like Secrets of Japan...
...and it contains maybe the best effort at a magic system for CoC intended to allow PCs to be wizards. So it has that going for it. I won't say it's perfect, because it's designed to plug into the CoC system, but it can plug into the CoC system, so it's...something?
Couple things before we get started.
The cover, you might have noticed, have a bunch of knights in full plate armor fighting bloodily. You might wonder what the fuck that has to do with "Victorian occult intrigue" and in all honesty that is a very good question. The fact is that one of the scenarios buried in the back of the book (it's a CoC product, of fucking course it has scenarios) has to do with the Holy (?) Grail, hence the cover. I guess so they didn't slap a generic London by Gaslight cover on it.
Second, one of the editors is "Alan Smithee." This is a well-known pseudonym used by directors that don't want their actual name on a film. I've heard it was an in-joke, I've heard there were creative differences...I don't know the why. It's just there. A mystery.
Three: The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn was an actual occult organization. Back in the mid-late 1800s, Freemasonry was expanding and getting exotic; any lodge that was getting too far removed from the basics was deemed irregular and their members were not accepted by other lodges. In a more class-centric society where joining such societies was an important means of networking, this led to some really weird shit. It was also the dawn of a great awakening in spirituality, the time of Theosophy and table-rapping and the bare beginnings of "psychical research." A few Freemasons with interest in medieval occultism got together and conceived an organization which embodied how they wanted ceremonial magic to be...taking the basic organization of graded initiation from Freemasonry and marrying it to the medieval occultism they had been studying.
People bought it. It was popular, and influential. Aleister Crowley was a member, as was Dion Fortune, Algernon Blackwood, Arthur Machen, and a bunch of other writers you may or may not have heard of. Bits of Golden Dawn lore found their way into Wicca when Gerald Gardner founded it in the 1940s/50s, and the Black and White Lodges in Twin Peaks ultimately trace back to the Golden Dawn. When Shadowrun created Hermetic Mages in its first edition, the archetype for those guys - and for initiation in general - was based on the system of ceremonial magic created by the Golden Dawn.
So the idea of introducing the Golden Dawn to Call of Cthulhu has legs. Indeed, it's sortof been tried repeatedly. I mentioned that the Miskatonic University book had an "Option: Hermetic Magic" - that is a pale, flickering shadow of the basic conceit of this book. Too, in the Shadows of Yog-Sothoth campaign, the company created a Mythos-based expy called The Hermetic Order of the Silver Twilight - completely different stats, and ultimately they wanted to invite Nyarlathotep into the world to eat our brains or something, but that was an idea with enough legs to make into a fairly major faction of Arkham Horror.
And really, that's the sort of thing that in a properly-designed Call of Cthulhu RPG you should want. If occult organizations exist in the 1890s, it might be better from a simulationist angle for them to all be kooks and deluded incompetents and conmen, but it works much better if behind those assholes are a group that knows "real magic" - and behind those assholes are a group that knows "real magic" is just simplified hypergeometry funneling forces from alien dimensions. You want the onion-skin, and you want to be able to play CoC games at different levels.
So that's the kind of thing we're going to talk about.