Ferrinus fucked around with this message at 19:59 on May 23, 2016

• Mummies have an unusual template defined by their death cycle and its ties to their power stat, Sekhem. Sekhem doesn't increase with experience; instead, it begins each awakening briefly at ten dots and then descends like a quadratic arc, slowing down as it approaches a single dot. (And they have powers, of course, specifically designed to scale in effect with Sekhem, so that you don't start out slinging weak powers that just have a big dice pool.) Then you fall from the living world into the Duat and you don't come back until either cultists summon you with a ritual, your tomb is disturbed, or once approximately every 1500 years. Based on circumstances and whether you've inculcated a loyal cult, that could take anywhere from days to... uh, up to approximately 1500 years. Even assuming everybody has a cult they can depend on to summon them back quickly, it can get pretty lopsided even within a party of mummies, let alone a mixed group, if their death cycles fall out of step. The whole Sekhem thing is a pretty cool idea but it's not conducive to the typical Chronicles of Darkness play. This wouldn't be as big a deal if the game were designed to better incline towards troupe play, Ars Magica style, but it really isn't. The Storytelling chapter suggests "frameworks" that include troupe styles alongside the traditional party style, so at least there's trying there, but I felt it didn't give strong guidelines to make that kind of play intuitive and appealing.
  
• Mummy rules are super unnecessarily finicky. You know how the classic World of Darkness and Exalted have two separate chargen resources, your starting dots and your bonus points, and they aren't equivalent in value or efficiency, so if you build two different characters and then climb them towards picking up whatever the other character has that they don't with XP, one can often get there before the other? Mummy gives you your standard CofD chargen dots and then adds 20 XP, and instructs you that you have to exit chargen having spent both your resources in such a way that you meet certain minimums (rather than just giving them to you). This isn't presented like the usual sidebar about if you want to create advanced characters, why not add N XP, but is the standard. You start with nine dots to allocate among your five Pillar traits, but no Pillar can exceed your rating in your splat's primary Pillar, you can leave one Pillar at zero dots but you can only do this for one Pillar at most, and the fifth dot in a Pillar costs two dots instead of one, and you can't buy it even then if you have a Pillar at zero dots. These are not onerous requirements but they reflect a general design that doesn't concern itself with clarity or simplicity that continues through the book. The prevalence of effects that modify the target number of dice is just one manifestation of this trend, albeit glaring in its opacity. (Quick: what's more useful, four dice at target number eight, three dice at target number seven, or six dice at target number nine?) It also shows up in basic powers that are frequently packages of loosely related bullet points, big-bang powers that have three separate keyworded tiers of prerequisites each, and antagonist monsters who downgrade non-magical attacks to bashing damage, including those made by supernatural attackers but not if the supernatural attacker is a Mummy, and also specifically excluding nuclear weapons, which still don't kill the monster but do send it into Twilight.
  
• Mummy will not play straight with you. It introduces a conceit where the gameline divides its book content into player-facing and Storyteller-facing sections, so that relevant setting information can be discovered by the player alongside their amnesiac mummy character in play. That would be fair enough, it's not my style but I understand the conceit. In practice, though, it has another divide: supplement-facing material that is withheld from the Storyteller and drip-fed in successive releases. (This is why people sometimes confuse Mummy for having a metaplot. It doesn't, but it does have a series of successive reveals meant to recontextualize the setting significantly.) This is done differently from other Chronicles of Darkness games. I have nothing against the appeal of supplement books. I've bought my share. You buy the Mage corebook and there's an overview of who the Seers of the Throne are, what they do and why, and then you can buy the Seers of the Throne book if you want more details, like what are the individual Iron Seals, or what special magic and servitors are they afforded by their service to the Exarchs. But you knew the broad strokes before buying the supplement. Other books introduce new elements, and that's fine too. The Demon core has the material that's relevant to a typical game of Demon. Supplements don't contradict the basic pitch in the core, but there's a book about demon-blooded who are only vaguely mentioned in the core that can really flesh them out, and the Storyteller's Guide has stuff like imperatives that are angel-like but not quite angels. They don't transform the game, though. Mummy feels like this is what it sets out to do from the beginning. Major concepts, like the realm of the Duat that you go to every death cycle, the Judges of Death whose purposes and commands you carry out, and the nature of the ancient Nameless Empire where you once lived before becoming a mummy and which has since vanished from the world mysteriously, are intentionally obfuscated in the corebook, dropping only enough details to communicate that a plan is in place for supplements, but not enough to really know how to play out those elements' roles in the game without those supplements. Again, this could be made vague if the point of the game was that they didn't really matter, what are you going to do with your life now as a mummy in these changing times, but the writing and focus of the book really don't communicate that. Individual Mummy games can be about finding yourself and growing as a person and a leader of your own, but Mummy itself is about the titular Curse that set this eternal tragedy into motion – a Curse whose nature and motivation the book never explicitly tells you, even in the Storyteller's section.