Say what you will about Brendan Fraser—Lord knows everyone
else has—but the Mummy franchise
completely reshuffled how we think of mummies on the power scale. When I was a kid, they were the joke of the
monster world: a fourth-stringer, a Halloween costume made out of toilet
paper. Now we expect our mummies to not
just deliver the mummy rot, but also whip up a sandstorm, explode into a swarm
of beetles, summon elementals out of stone, and generally wreak havoc. Which is hella RPG fodder right there.
So when you want recreate that cinematic feel at the table, adding
class levels to the base mummy isn’t good enough. Nor is defaulting to the lich
template—there’s just not enough flavor in the lich’s special ability list. Besides, when your PCs finally kill the
mummy, you want them grabbing all the treasure they can and running for the
exit as the mummy’s pyramid falls apart around them, not setting up an
archaeological dig to hunt for a phylactery for the next three play sessions. Liches are symbols of eternity, but they can
slow play down. Mummies are also symbols
of eternity, but once you crack open their tomb, they hit with the fury of a sudden
sandstorm.
That’s why we have the mummy lord template. He’s everything you want in a caster, able to
command undead and spit superheated sand, and if you don’t kill him right he’ll
return for the sequel. Sounds like the
perfect post-1999 mummy to me.
Assuming you weren’t reading this blog in 2013, here’s the original “Mummy” entry. And since I’m pretty
sure you know how to deploy the mummy lord in a desert setting, here are some
seeds that try to get beyond the usual Pyramids & Pharaohs shtick.
Elves have spirits
rather than souls—when they die, they return to the earth, only sometimes
to be born again. When a matriarch of a
destroyed elven kingdom perishes while her fugitive nation is crossing the
desert, rather than surrender her spirit to the unfriendly terrain, her
indomitable will causes her to rise as a mummy lord. The result is a part-elf, part-sand
creature. No longer tethered to the
forests of her birth, she begins to build a new kingdom of terror right there
in the desert.
A cardinal believed
he could not die if his heart was removed.
In a sense, he was right, because the ritual he used turned him into a
mummy lord. Years later, adventurers
investigating the illegal trade in saints’ preserved body parts comes across
the canopic jar in which the cardinal’s liver is stored (it was stolen without
the prelate’s knowledge and placed on the black market). While they are tracking down the mysterious
jar’s provenance, the cardinal (who now secretly rules a principality with an
iron fist) assumes they are the original thieves and sets about having them
killed.
Private school isn’t
easy. Especially a private school
founded on the site of a mass grave. Led
by their debate teacher, who has quietly taught them thaumaturgy on the side, along
with a helpful dose of fencing lessons from one of the phys. ed. staff, a
ragtag group of students has managed to thwart an invasion of shambling
corpses, escaped a book that tried to trap them in a demiplane, and driven off
an immature color out of space. Now
corpses begin piling up, each one drained of blood. The students suspect a vampire, but it is
actually their dean, a mummy lord wrapped in layers of illusion, who is the
culprit—courtesy of a blood-drinking kukri.
—Pathfinder Adventure
Path #84 84–85 & Pathfinder
Bestiary 5 176–177
Having medical-professional parents, my mummy costumes at
least featured real bandages.
#whitecoatprivilege
BTW, I actually like Brendan Fraser a lot. I think he needs to strangle his agent,
though. Also I love Universal Studios’
Revenge of the Mummy ride, even if mechanical and operator errors did force us
to go through it three times in a row once.
(Or was it four? It was a lot.)
Speaking of which, what are we feeling about the Tom Cruise Mummy reboot? It looked like a standard B.B.N. (???) F.
film to me, so I skipped it. (Speaking
of which, I’ve taking to calling these crappy 2000s franchise movies film bleu, in a nod to the great film noir genre, because among other
similarities they are color-graded to filth.
And because they tend to blow. Who’s
with me?)
Hey, here’s last night's radio show. We played melancholic songs about the end of
summer and defiant songs with Charlottesville in mind, including the new
benefit song from Wilco. Stream/download now through Monday, 08/21/17, at midnight.
(PS: No show next week; we’re down for station maintenance.)
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