Mummy fatigue

Another session of Mummy went down reasonably successfully. The players interrogated the evil sorcerer they captured last time and gave me a chance to try to roleplay a Nephandus. It’s not an easy thing, because Nephandi are supposed to be inherently and irredeemably bad, but they’re not supposed to be cartoonish about it; they genuinely believe that the absolute best thing they can do with their lives is try to damn the entire world. I did my best to express a philosophy along the lines of, “existence is a cruel lie, and that means cruelty and lies are what everything is all about, and therefore the only thing a person of integrity can do is be as cruel and deceitful as possible.” Which… feels sort of apropos for the teenage angst-fest that is the World of Darkness, to be honest.

I don’t know, though, I keep pounding my head against the nature of the Underworld. It just feels like you can’t be true to the stated rules of the setting without running a boring game. Everything about the Underworld is meant to make you feel helpless and like you can’t make a difference, but roleplaying is all about making meaningful choices. I’ve tried to come up with a solution, but honestly, I’m starting to think that there isn’t one – that what I really should do is just write my own game that tries to do what Mummy tries to do, but to do it properly.

So all right, then. Perhaps I should call this port finished, at least in the sense of “it ain’t gonna get any better than this.” I should start looking at my original games again anyway…