Mummy (WOD)

Mummies, also called the Undying or Reborn, are immortals whose bodies have been ritualistically preserved and granted the power of self-resurrection. The most well-known mummies in the The World of Darkness are the mummies of Egyptian origin, which were created by the Spell of Life. Their original population was divided into four known Dynasties: the Shemsu-heru, the Cabiri, the Children of Apophis (also called Bane Mummies), and the Ishmaelites. And it remained as such until the creation of the Amenti in the wake of the Sixth Great Maelstrom.

While most of these mummies were created to serve the forces of balance (Ma'at) or to enact the will of their divine patrons, the eldest of these, the Imkhu, were once the followers of Isis and Horus in ancient Egypt. A select 42 devotees of the latter are a nominally zealous part of Horus's formal war against Set and Apophis and are referred to as the Shemsu-heru, the followers of Horus, and supposedly adherents to the so-called Code of Horus. Not all mummies, however, were or are descended from the Egyptian Undying, nor do they all serve the region's cause or that of Horus himself; those like the Capacocha, which originated in South America, and the Wu T'ian, which originated in China, are deeply engaged in their own machinations.

Known and Suspected Mummies

Shemsu-heru

Suspected Independent Mummies

  • Gregory Wildham (See: Isle of the Mighty, p. 69)
  • Inauhaten (See: Dirty Secrets of the Black Hand, p. 120)
  • Ishmael the Banished (See: Mummy 2nd Edition, p. 5, p. 25)
  • Kharis the Ishmaelite (See: Mummy 2nd Edition, p. 5-7, p. 15-31)
  • Mestha the Ancient (See: Mummy 1st Edition, p. 58-63, Mummy: 2nd Edition, p. 16-21)
  • Nian Shun (See: World of Darkness: Hong Kong, p. 121-122}

Amenti

  • Deacon Jack (See: Mummy Players Guide, p. 218)
  • Nicholas Sforza (See: The Year of the Scarab Trilogy Novels)
  • Sakura Ab-Neferu (See: Mummy Players Guide, p. 219)

Cabiri

Capacocha

Wu T'ian

  • Chiang Mei (See: Mummy Players Guide, p. 221)
  • Kun Li (See: Mummy Players Guide, p. 219)

Xibalba

  • Malinche (See: Werewolf: The Wild West's Tales from the Trails: Mexico, p. 91-93)
  • Mictlan (See: Werewolf: The Wild West's Tales from the Trails: Mexico, p. 93-94)

Known Children of Apophis - The Bane Mummies[1]

Background Information

Mummy became its own distinct game line with the release of Mummy: The Resurrection in 2001 as part of the Year of the Scarab campaign push. Prior to its development and release, however, the concept of Mummy and various system iterations had gone through two previous editions. The first of these editions ostensibly was also the first new game in the World of Darkness developed and released by White Wolf Games after their first edition of Vampire the Masquerade (1991), as A World of Darkness: Mummy (1992) by Stephan Wieck was published and released prior to Werewolf: The Apocalypse (1992) later that same year. A new revised version of the game authored by Graeme Davis and James Estes was released as Mummy: Second Edition (1997), still lacking broader long-term game support. That kind of support for a full line didn't emerge until the re-release of the game in its third iteration in 2001.

Under Mummy: The Resurrection and later concurrent publications, the scope and notion of what Mummies are and can be had much matured beyond the othering of non-Egyptian mummies as "others" and the Orientalist tropes found in typical pop cultural fetishism with ancient Egyptian Mythos. The historical reality of mummification as a practice and a cultural mythology around the concepts of reincarnation, resurrection, and the undying as global phenomena necessitated a re-imagining of mummies themselves. To be a Mummy had to be multinational, multicultural, and multiracial in parity to them having vastly divergent histories and origins that didn't have anything to do with nor were they directly related to the timeless triangle of struggle between the Antediluvian Sutekh (Set), the ghostly Osiris, or his vengeful undying son Horus as postulated in the original iterations of the game. That story was but one Mummy's story for the storyteller to tell, not the only one. It is partially as a result of this thematic incoherence that the Mummy line of RPGs sold poorly and was ultimately abandoned.

References

  1. ↑ VTM/WOD: Mummy: Second Edition, p. 28-29, 34-35, 136-37
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