Continuing to prep that 1969 Tatters of the King rework, and one thing I've noticed is that there are a couple of places where the investigators can get hold of the carved bone "byakhee whistles" that various cultists carry around with them. The intended purpose of these artifacts is to assist in the Summon Byahkee spell, and I am considering ways the investigators could learn that spell and thereby use a whistle they find. I am also thinking that the whistle can be used to jog the character Alex Roby's memory and allow the investigators to learn more about how his family died.

However, since there's three or four whistles the investigators could possibly get hold of, what I'd really like is for having multiple of these things, to confer some additional benefit- but I am quite stuck on what that might be. The whistles don't really seem like a disposable artifact, so it's not like having multiple of them gives the investigators an additional opportunity to use them... any suggestions?

With the "tell us about your game" threads operating somewhat intermittently, I thought I might post more detailed accounts of the games I've been running as a Keeper.

My current game is No Place of Honour, a Gaslight-era tale of mystery, tragedy, science, time, and Victorian hubris that I myself wrote; set deep in the Australian Outback in 1888.

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I've got two players, playing two characters each for a party of four:

Dr. Giles Edwin Hooke, excitable and brilliant gentleman physician with aspirations of a great scientific career. Darwin fanboy.

Nellie Sharpe, labor organizer for the Barrier Miners' Association and the first woman to receive a degree in mining engineering from the University of Adelaide.

\"Crazy Jack\" Yuranigh: surveyor, prospector, and all-around outdoorsman. Had an encounter with something out in the desert made of jagged metal and impossible angles, that left him with a hole in his memory.

Lady Elizabeth May Dulles: Turned away from a promising career as a photographer to study nursing and become a philanthropist; worked with Nightengale in Crimea.

All four were brave, desperate, or stupid enough to volunteer when a newspaper advertisement called for qualified staff for a medical aid mission to a remote mining camp deep in the Outback, suffering from a mysterious plague:

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All met at the Dagunna Copper Company head offices in Adelaide, and went over their travel plan: a railroad could get them as far as the town of Broken Hill, and then they'll be spending four days on camelback along with a group of experienced caravaneers. Not far from Dagunna, the caravan will stop and unload its supplies, and everyone other than the aid mission members will head back the other way. The four volunteers will then head into the quarantine zone and alert the townspeople, who will bring in the supplies.

Looking at the map, Jack gets the first indication that all in Dagunna is not as it seems, identifying a strange regular feature on the topographical maps that forms an almost straight line due North up to the location of the town. He also recognized that the name "Dagunna" probably came from the Wiradjuri word for "Gravesite", but Nellie then recalled some previous experience with the area- she intervened in a dispute involving some workers who were performing excavations nearby. There didn't used to be any water to be found in Dagunna, and the Company financed projects to redirect some streams further North; to change the water table and allow wells to be dug, saving the expense of shipping water via regular caravans like the aid mission is taking. The work hit a lot of snags when they encountered unexpectedly denser rock formations in each worksite, but eventually with enough dynamite and elbow grease, it was finally completed.

And so, four days of hard travel began:

>It is the middle of the antipodean summer in the middle of the desert: temperatures climb above a hundred degrees Fahrenheit in the afternoon, and then plunge into the forties at night. The environment, already arid to begin with, becomes increasingly desolate as you progress. No water flows here, nor is there even a shred of plantlife, and the sand whipped off the tops of the dunes is the only thing that ever moves. Every day is the same, bare rock and dunes baking silently under a cloudless blue sky; at night, the Moon bleaches everything grayish-white and you might as well be camped on its surface. A single elevated telegraph line, and the frail suggestion of roadway underfoot, are the only signs other humans have ever passed this way before.

Dr. Hooke did some initial hunting for biological specimens, riding loops arouns the rest of the caravan, but only confirmed how intensely dry and desolate the terrain around Dagunna truly is. Some dingoes might've passed this way, weeks or months ago, possibly surviving off the scraps left behind by another caravan, but there's nothing alive out here now. Otherwise, the trip out from Broken Hill passed uneventfully.

The caravan arrived in Dagunna around 4 PM, and left the aid mission to continue on its own. Rounding a final bend in the road, everyone got their first look at the mining camp and the valley that surrounded it:

The sun never sets on the British Empire...

This certainly gave the players pause, and their characters possibly even moreso since they had no idea what that strange structure up on the ridge could possibly be.

Of more immediate concern were the columns of smoke they spotted rising up from the town proper, and the two men with repeating rifles standing guard at the road entrance. They were happy enough to see the aid mission, though, and waved them through to talk to the general manager, Mr. Whitby, in the town square. The guards explain that they usually work as clerks in the administration building up near the mine; Whitby's posted them to keep up quarantine after a disturbance last night where some of the miners burned the early plague victims' houses.

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After that, they interrupted an argument between Whitby and the mine's chief engineer, Mr. Royce, in front of a very large black stone obelisk in the middle of town. After arranging with Whitby for a crew to pick up the medical supplies, he told them that the town's Anglican vicar, Reverend Cleave, was looking into the obelisk and the structures on the valley rim.

While Nurse Dulles and Dr. Hooke went up to the hospital up near the mine, Jack and Nellie talked to some of the miners and the Reverend. They were able to confirm that one of the miners, Klaus van der Linde, took a sledgehammer to the strange writing that had been on the front of the obelisk after having a bit too much to drink on New Years' Eve. Fortunately, Cleave had managed to take a rubbing of the symbols before they were destroyed- he and Royce had been trying to decipher them, but hadn't made much headway.

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Jack even went out and did a bit of amateur digging around the base of the obelisk- confirming that it went down to bedrock and rested on a more-or-less flat base, but otherwise finding nothing of interest.

The medical professionals at the hospital met with Company physician Dr. Townsend, and went over Townsend's efforts to eliminate obvious possibilities like airborne and waterborne contamination. He'd ordered the other residents to boil their water and wear carbolic-acid-soaked cloth masks, but neither measure seemed to have much of any effect on the transmission or mortality of the disease. They examined the longest surviving patient, Ismael Saint-John, who was delirious and in a bad state, repeating the words "The light... the door..." over and over again. Reviewing the medical records, they observed that patients were developing odd skin lesions and rashes, and many were losing their hair. Many also demonstrated aggressive, highly localized necrosis of their peripheral tissues- the closest correspondence would be snakebite, but there's no sign of puncture wounds.

However, they were more interested in analyzing and correlating patterns in the admissions, and noticed that a large number of the early cases came from "Work Detail Six". In doing so, they also noticed that one of the patients was listed first as "deceased" and then subsequently as "recovered", something that all three rounds of my actual playtesters, had missed.

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They also talked to the head nurse (who happens to be Reverend Cleave's wife), who was having a bit of a dispute with Dr. Townsend about some of the hospital beds. He insists that there's nothing wrong with the beds and need to be used for patients; according to her, the poor ventilation nearby is causing bad air to accumulate in the area- any patients put there, immediately got worse! They did a cursory examination of the area but, without any clear idea of what they were looking for, they didn't roll nearly high enough on their Spot Hidden checks to find anything in particular.

Coming back from the hospital, Hooke saw some kind of animal looking down at them from the valley rim, and heard a strange high whistling noise coming from somewhere up to the north. Then they retired for the evening, to rest up after the trip.

Afterwards, both players agreed that the symptoms they encountered in the hospital sounded a lot like radiation poisoning- one specifically mentioned having watched a documentary about the Goiania radiological accident, and concluding that there might be some kind of radioactive contamination in the area. They concluded by resolving to check around the valley rim once it was light again, and follow up with the nurse who had treated Mr Saint-Ives. They also wanted the residences of every single person on the patient list so they could follow up and see if they could trace their contacts.

Both of these players are complete randoms who responded to LFG posts on two completely different Discords two weeks before this, and I already love them to death.

No Place of Honour can be downloaded for free on Google Drive here.

After completing a story arc, usually a long full-scale campaign but generally anything where a specific group of characters could be said to likely be done, I like to conclude by kind of fast-forwarding and going over what ended up happening to the characters in their post-story lives: "Professor Willington went into a quiet retirement, exchanging letters with a young biology student named H. G. Wells, and died peacefully in his home at the age of 82", "Larry and Neil put together a concept album loosely based off of their experiences, which became a beloved cult classic in the nascent goth subculture and saw them briefly detained by Delta Green", "Sam never fully got over his obsession with the symbols. He started drinking heavily and experimenting with LSD, and died in an auto accident two years later", etc. etc.

I was wondering if anyone had resources for doing this kind of thing more procedurally, combining what the players themselves suggest with factors like their remaining Sanity and Luck.

I'm about halfway through this book, and I thought I'd mention it as very much worth picking up, particularly for anyone doing games in the Vietnam War era or running a big cult more broadly. It's a very in-depth dissection of how cults and their leaders operate, rise, and eventually fall; as well as the wider social and cultural milieu of the US in the late 60s and early 70s that hosted so many weird religious movements- and more than a few serial killers.

I'm interested in researching the topic more, and I was wondering if anyone else had recommendations for further reading.

I'm about halfway through this book, and I thought I'd mention it as very much worth picking up, particularly for anyone doing games in the Vietnam War era or running a big cult more broadly. It's a very in-depth dissection of how cults and their leaders operate, rise, and eventually fall; as well as the wider social and cultural milieu of the US in the late 60s and early 70s that hosted so many weird religious movements- and more than a few serial killers.

I'm interested in researching the topic more, and I was wondering if anyone else had recommendations for further reading.

I think the framework is pretty much all there. Local and federal authorities are mobilized following the apparent kidnapping of the CEO of a prominent biotech firm by a couple of neighborhood conspiracy nuts, who are convinced she is something malign and unearthly... and, as the manhunt goes on, it starts to become apparent that the neighborhood conspiracy nuts might be onto something...

The only issue I am currently struggling with, is how to get the Agents to know about Don and Teddy's side of the story- in a way that won't just give away the fact that they are the kidnappers and result in an immediate crashing of their party by the authorities. Perhaps it becomes rapidly pretty clear that they are responsible (maybe, unlike the movie, they slipped up during the actual raid and left either DNA evidence or a good camera shot of their faces); but they have decamped to some remote location only they know about, possibly one of personal significance to Teddy. This would encourage the Agents to dig into the family's history and previous interactions with the company, as well as exactly what their grievances are (I refuse to believe that Teddy does not have a Youtube channel or whatnot sharing his views, for instance). I suppose the other option is that Don and Teddy are communicating with the authorities and the public, trying to Expose The Truth, but in a way that keeps their actual identities concealed... but this would be very difficult to pull off.

As the title implies, this is going to be a bit more summarial than my previous "dissecting" posts, which often required a point-by-point and scene-by-scene... dissection of older, extremely convoluted campaign books just to make any sense of them at all. And, of course, there be heavy spoilers below for a book you really should just buy and play.

The ancient post covering Volume 1 can be found here. Ironically enough, Reddit's maximum post wordcount limit has forced me to also split the Volume 2 post itself into two sections. This is the second one, and the first can be found here.

=========================================================

The Bridge Maiden - Part 2

The climax of The Sutra of Pale Leaves builds on some of the incidental plot elements introduced in Part 1 of The Bridge Maiden, explaining some of the loose ends introduced there. The focus here is on the sister of Part 1's missing mutant Umezono Minoru, fashion designer Umezono Kaho. She (and to a lesser degree, her brother) are especially genetically susceptible to the Pale Prince's influence- a distant ancestor of theirs, the (dubiously IRL-historical) samurai Lady Gozen, attempted to physically manifest Carcosa by channeling the mythological "Bridge Maiden" Hashihime, but was defeated back in the late 12th Century. The APL has kidnapped Kaho, and is controlling her with a magical charm in her hat that replaces her personality with an amalgam of Hashihime and Gozen's. As is fitting for the climactic scenario, exactly what they are planning to do with her (and how the investigators can stop them) is quite involved:

The chapter opens with some information about the mandala discovered at the end of Part 1, the history of the Sutra of Pale Leaves, and background on Gozen and her plan. It's all quite intriguing and cohesive, and you should really just go and read it in the actual book. I guess I can complain about the placement of this information here when it seems like stuff the investigators would follow up on immediately after Part 1... but it's not a huge deal because the information is still aggregated in one section and not spread all over the place, so it would be pretty easy to flip through it.

Also, some of the phrasing in this account is a little weird. We usually think of samurai going into battle wearing very elaborate helmets, not \"hats\". Then again, this is translated from Heian-period Japanese, so some weird phrasing would not be unexpected...

I do think that the bit with the hat is just a little silly, although it does make for a good objective the investigators can work to remove.

The actual start of Part 2 involves the investigators following up on Kaho, who has also been reported missing (and it is logical that they would follow up with this when the news comes out, seeing as they'd previously gotten involved with the disappearance of her brother). This leads them to her new APL-backed fashion brand, Petal, which is producing Sutra-influenced clothing. They can visit the apartment that serves as her office and get involved in (or possibly defuse) a Sutra-enabled riot in a trendy nightclub strip. This is another place where Sutra (the TTRPG)'s themes of capitalism, hedonism, and the madness of crowds bubble just under the surface, and it's really cool. I also had to make a Sanity roll myself, when the book decided that "boom box" was an archaic term worthy of explanation in parentheses... The actual lead here is an invitation to a giant APL-backed fashion opening party for a more mass-market clothing line. The Petal employees are willing to pass on a ticket to the investigators- Kaho herself is nowhere to be found. Here, there is also mention of Kaho's new collaborator in the fashion world, known only as "Prince". This is obviously the Prince of Pale Leaves, since it's not like there was another man going solely by "Prince" with eccentric fashion sense who was a household name in the late 80s or anything... Actually, it's possible the PCs are supposed to confuse the two, and the book just couldn't mention the IRL Prince for likeness/IP reasons?

The next section covers the Association of Pale Leaves HQ. In keeping with the cult's "hiding in plain sight" nature, it's a tasteful office suite with some expensive antiques available for visitors to look at, which I think would make for a very interesting place for the typical CoCs to try to navigate. This is an optional area; so it is rich on contextual information about the APL and the Sutra, but light on direct leads about the fashion launch (although the investigators can pick up an invitation to the launch there if they impress the cultists as People Worth Networking With). It is also somewhat poor on leads that can get the investigators directly to it, assuming they don't try to seek the APL out on their own initiative (although they can meet the cult's leader, Ohira Kimitaka, at Petal and get an invitation to HQ if they impress him as People Worth Networking With). I am now seriously wondering if it would have been better to put this section, and the background-on-the-Sutra section, in another "Front Matter" chapter at the very beginning, possibly replacing the duplicated "intro to Japan and the Sutra mechanics*"* section. I also do wonder about making this section as optional as it is, as that implies the investigators can just go through the story without meeting Ohira- then, when he shows up in the actual climax in a paragraph or so, investigators are going to be like "who is this guy?!".

Also, the Association of Pale Leaves seems to have quietly been transformed from a Perfectly Legitimate Buddhist Sect, to a Perfectly Legitimate Business Networking Group, in between Volume 1 and Volume 2; at least according to the terms used in the book to describe it.

Ohira himself is a slick businessman with an expensive watch, a nice suit, and perfect hair...

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... although the character art missed out on the opportunity to have little Yellow Signs in the pattern of his necktie- maybe patterned ties were just not a thing in Bubble Economy business culture, IDK.

That's not exactly a novel thing for a cult leader to be, but here it actually makes sense in context as opposed to having a slick businessman randomly commanding the hillbillies from Deliverance or something. The fact that The Sutra of Pale Leaves actually deals with themes of capitalism and exploitation and so on in a serious, emotionally impactful way also helps him fit in more than a lot of Rich Asshole Cult Leaders. That, and he's not mustache-twirling evil- he's polite, articulate, and persuasive, and the book provides some decently detailed guidance on what the Keeper can have him talk about. I do kind of wish he had the chance to appear earlier in the campaign and set himself up as some kind of inside source "helping" the investigators (since many of the chapters can indeed end up with the investigators unwittingly advancing the APL's agenda if they make the wrong decision). I suppose there's nothing preventing him from doing so, just that he doesn't book-as-written. My one real issue with him, is that he's supposed to be unable to merge fully with the Prince of Leaves due to neurological damage he suffered during the Chinese Civil War, but the book never indicates he has any kind of actual impairment as a result. Not only does this make it highly unlikely the investigators will ever learn about this plot point (since there is nothing they can notice indicating it is present), but I also worry that if they did learn about it, they might think there's some kind of surgery they can perform to become more resistant to the Prince themselves, without any kind of negative side effects. (Note to self- if I run this, as I very well might, explore this concept a little bit- stat out a possible neurosurgical procedure that can reduce Sutra Exposure, but make sure it does have serious side effects.)

Finally, we come to the actual fashion launch, at the under-construction Tokyo Bay Bridge. The investigators can hobnob with some fashion-industry insiders for a while, accumulating Exposure Points the whole time. Then it's time to follow a bunch of somnambulent Petal fashion fans outside, where Kaho and Ohira are waiting to meet the Prince as he stretches another, luminous bridge out from Carcosa. The Prince appears in human form, although I think his vaguely "sexy gangster"ish appearance is a bit of a departure from how I would imagine an inhabitant of Carcosa would actually look like.

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This might just be personal preference on my part, though, and of course a completely fake human can look however the hell he wants. Similarly, I thought his arriving on Earth in a gold off-brand Cadillac was a bit of a clash with the seriousness of the rest of the book, although I might just be contaminated by the "Mister Big" scene at the end of The Apple.

Other than that, however, the Prince's arrival is an excellent example of just how powerful and strange a Great Old One from a technologically-advanced alien planet could actually be. The very first thing he does is release a small golden card that replicates exponentially until it's an entire dome over the harbor, broadcasting images from the Sutra to Expose everyone in the area. There's also this bit when, at the end of the confrontation, Ohira begs the Prince to take him back along to Carcosa:

>In response the Prince casually reaches toward Ohira, and in defiance of all sense of perspective and physics, picks him up, folds him into the size of a business card, and puts him into his suit pocket.

A lot of time Great Old Ones are just portrayed essentially like the dumber class of kaiju, big and physically destructive but that's about it. That's not the case here. The Prince not only does impossible, incredible things, but makes them look effortless.

The main threat to the investigators here is Sanity loss through Sutra exposure, although the Prince's humanoid minions and the sword-wielding Lady Gozen in Kaho's body are not exactly physically harmless. Their actual objective is to either kill Kaho or separate her from her mind-controlling hat. The Prince is unable to advance any further along the bridge than Kaho (serving her ritual role as the Bridge Maiden) is, although it would have been nice if something like an Occult or INT roll was included to help the investigators in realizing this. The book goes into pretty extensive breadth on different methods the investigators can employ: ranging from appealing to Gozen's sense of samurai honor and challenging her to a duel, to using spells from the Sutra, to commandeering a helicopter and crashing it into all parties. All of these sound like things investigators might actually try, so this guidance is really helpful. There's a lot of entranced civilians on the bridge as well, and the book even includes fairly heavy Sanity costs for anything that causes collateral damage- I appreciate this, as many scenarios overlook it.

Once the connection is severed, the bridge disintegrates, and any surviving investigators end up in the harbor, where they are picked up by emergency crews to recover and consider the ramifications of all they have experienced. Oddly, however, there is no specific Sanity loss assessed for seeing all those innocent civilians also fall into the harbor, some of them no doubt dying on impact with the water or drowning before rescue crews can get to them, nor is there a Sanity check associated with the Prince picking up Ohira as he does earlier. There is also a single line mentioning that the White King from Wonderland also joins the fray (even if his human form was dispatched by the investigators in that chapter), but this is not touched on in Wonderland itself or anywhere else.

There is also no information given on how Tokyo and the Japanese government will react to this very large and visible and probably bloody supernatural event. I'd assume there would be some kind of coverup and mundane explanation offered, a terrorist attack at a concert and laser show, maybe; but some description from the book about it would have been appreciated.

Overall, I have just a little bit of doubt about this chapter. As an adventure, and as a conventional save-the-world campaign climax, it's very good- it's clever, and well-thought-out. It's clear what the players need to do while rewarding those who did their investigating well with a few less obvious easier options. There's a real sense of life-and-death stakes, and the Prince is powerful and creepy. All the things I pointed out as logical/mechanical issues are small oversights. But it's a bit of a departure from what Sutra of Pale Leaves does best, which is super-grounded, close, character-driven scenarios with emotional punch. Compared to something like the Moon ending of A Time To Harvest, this is of course much more impactful, but after having just read Wonderland and re-read Dream Eater, it does seem just a little action-movie-ish.

I guess the deciding factor for me is that I myself can't think of an outline for a better way to have the campaign end. There has to be some kind of climax for the story, with the Prince of Pale Leaves brought out into the open, and I feel like if a single character's pathos was the center of that, it would just come across as mawkish and cringe. So I still think we got close to the best of all possible worlds, here.

The Fixer

We finally come to an odd little chapter with an unconventional concept.

It is primarily set up to run like a sort of a coda or epilogue after the main campaign is resolved, only somewhat related to it- an idea I've toyed with myself on a few occasions, although never as involved as this. The book also mentions the possibility of running it within the main campaign, at any point where the investigators are at the lowest point of their personal trajectories, but I am in fact quite drawn to the epilogue idea. Having this be the actual ending, kind of helps temper the action-movie quality of Bridge Maiden 2; re-centering Sutra in its home field of personal pathos and humanist subtext. As I discussed in my Time to Harvest dissection, I don't have any problem at all with downer endings, so long as the ending still feels conclusive and supported by the rest of the work, as opposed to "Sub-Niggurath falls (and somehow makes cars stop running), everyone dies."

The mixing and matching of all the art styles used in previous chapters for different character portraits, is also really cool, and tells me this really is supposed to be the "true" ending of Sutra of Pale Leaves, with all the threads from previous chapters bound up into one.

The chapter is laden with references and shout-outs to one of Robert W. Chambers' original "King in Yellow" stories, The Repairer of Reputations, to the point where I'd even go so far as to call it a loose adaptation of that story (notice how "The Fixer" is actually a modernized version of the original title, for instance). It is set in 1990, just after the Bubble Economy has well and truly burned out. The original investigators have fallen on hard times and joined the ranks of the homeless. possibly due to their involvement in the crazy events of Bridge Maiden and the resulting toll on their sanity (or they could just be a new group of otherwise-homeless investigators). This is a wonderful bit of atmosphere and context, and it ties off Sutra's other thematic references to the Bubble Economy and its underlying issues very neatly. I also notice that both this, and the revised ending I came up with for A Time to Harvest, both conclude a historical campaign with a series of events that foreshadow the later course of the historical movement/event that underlies it- Harvest with the War On Terror giving way to American retreat amid future conflicts in the Middle East, and Sutra with the Bubble Economy presaging the Gig Economy and later boom-and-bust cycles. I'd be inclined to think that's just a coincidence, though, and not some kind of Jungian/Fraserian underlying One True Plot or whatever.

The investigators are recommended the services of the titular "Fixer", who closely resembles Chambers' titular "Repairer of Reputations"; although here he is willing to arrange for the investigators' elevation from poverty in exchange for a fairly involved set of "favors" that make up the majority of the actual "action" of the chapter. The investigators need to arrange for the downfall of five prominent figures in Japanese society: a CEO, a Shinto priest, a police detective, a(nother) Yakuza street boss, and a politician. Ostensibly this is because they've reneged on an agreement with the Fixer in some way or simply outlived their usefulness. However, their downfall is also part of a kind of sacrificial ritual that empowers the Fixer and his puppeteer, the Prince of Pale Leaves. As the investigators work through their target list, Tokyo starts to turn into Carcosa; and the Fixer himself seems to progress further into the future, gaining cybernetic prosthetics and at one point turning his office into a cat cafe (the first of which opened in Japan in 2005). Investigators can also gain "jobs in the Pale Prince's Court", which act sort of like insanity delusions and grant them special abilities.

This is a sandboxy chapter that is largely investigator-driven. The book presents a solid framework of options to ruin the targets, from which I feel like I would have an easy time extrapolating to accommodate investigators' own plans (outright murder is allowed, but not necessary and somewhat discouraged- I would even go so far as to rule that killing a target, in a way that makes them seem like a martyr or otherwise remembered positively by society, doesn't count as completing that job). The targets themselves are wonderfully awful people, probably giving the investigators (and their players) great satisfaction when they are taken down while still seeming realistic- there are even little insert cards scattered throughout the chapter suggesting backstory elements where the targets wronged the investigators personally, and might've been responsible for their ending up on the streets. There is nothing that explicitly tells the investigators that their actions are part of a ritual causing Carcosa to come into this world, but I' imagine most would be able to correlate their work to the escalating degree of weirdness in the city, and realize the solution is to dispatch the Fixer, regardless.

The Carcosa stuff is good, but not quite as good. There's no one "theme" to the manifestations, which jives well with the Delta Green concept of Carcosa as a "parasite dimension" that connects different incongruous times and places, but they alternate between vaguely Gothic, and futuristic (with one mostly just altering the layout of Tokyo and introducing Carcosa's twin suns - I liked that one). There's five example manifestations of Carcosa listed, and I would have liked to see a completely different concept for each one- maybe what Tokyo looks like in Chambers' alternate timeline (see below) for instance, or thousands of years ago before there was any human settlement there. Similarly, I would have liked to see the "Fixer's office extending into the future" thing done with a bit more granularity, with more recognizable elements from the 2000s and into the 2020s before everything goes straight into cyberpunk (for instance, in line with the above, Tokyo during COVID would be an interesting, vaguely dystopian-looking scene for the investigators to wander into- complete with masks!). That's probably just a personal preference of mine, though, and I said previously that Sutra is at its best when its themes are under the surface and not out in the open, so maybe that isn't such a good idea after all. The additional player insanities are also, in my opinion, a bit undercooked. The first one is a detailed adaptation of Chambers' narrator's "Lost Heir to the throne of the United States" delusion, to the historical and political context of the Japan. The others, though, are just a few sentences without that kind of context. Some of the abilities are also a little vaguely-defined or not necessarily that useful, like the Scribe's ability to replicate the Sutra of Pale Leaves- very, very slowly.

There is also an odd bit near the beginning of the chapter where the investigators can go past an ultranationalist loudspeaker van outside the Fixer's building. It sticks out as an important detail but it never really shows up again; the book suggests maybe tying the politician target to the ultranationalists as part of his downfall, but gives no details. A note explains this is a reference to the original Chambers story (written in 1895); which portrays the United States at some point post 1920 as a jingoist hellscape with a massive but horribly outdated military, claiming to have eliminated poverty while the narrator is constantly accosted by homeless beggars. (It also includes government-funded walk-in unaliving booths, and might have some kind of hereditary monarchy- although I always thought that was just a delusion of the narrator's, since an ordinary President is also mentioned.) I thought Chambers devoted an odd amount of detail to this stuff in his story (even if a lot of it seems to hit much closer to home than I was expecting, rereading the thing in 2026), but it does get mentioned at least a little bit later as The Repairer of Reputations goes on- the ultranationalists don't even manage that, so they come across as very odd. Their speech also ends with the line "make Japan glorious again", which... well. Maybe this is an actual ultranationalist slogan. Or maybe it's another of the chapter's "call-forward"s to future events, although if so it seems oddly out of "sequence", both in terms of the sense of moving "forward" into the future, and the escalation of weirdness not really having started yet. Otherwise, it just comes across as self-indulgent grandstanding, once again shouting something that had more impact as a murmur.

So, overall, this is another case where I love what this chapter is trying to do, but I think it needs a little bit of tweaking to really attain its full potential. It, among all the others in the two books, also really seems rushed or like it was added later.

Conclusion

The Sutra of Pale Leaves is possibly the best first-party CoC campaign I have ever encountered. It is definitely the one I, personally, liked the most, and absolutely the best out of anything I have made a detailed "Dissection" post about (although since I specifically seek out weird old stuff of dubious quality to make those posts, that isn't exactly surprising). It certainly has flaws, sometimes substantial ones that I am not sure how to resolve, but it also has some truly exceptional writing that I have not seen in a first-party work before- particularly in its use of pathos and underlying themes. All of this is at a time when longer first-party titles seemed to be in a bit of a creative slump for a while, from Time to Harvest on into Order of the Stone. It is, perhaps most tellingly, the first such campaign I've examined that I might actually be inclined to run mostly as-written, without massively rearranging its internals and making it something completely different from what it was.

Good work.

Let's see if y'all can keep it up.

<=== PREVIOUS POST

Welp.

This took a lot longer to assemble than it had any right to, both because of IRL concerns (I have a PhD now and I didn't before) and because I managed to misplace my copy of this book for a long time and only recently found it again.

As the title implies, this is going to be a bit more summarial than my previous "dissecting" posts, which often required a point-by-point and scene-by-scene... dissection of older, extremely convoluted campaign books just to make any sense of them at all. And, of course, there be heavy spoilers below for a book you really should just buy and play.

The ancient post covering Volume 1 can be found here. Ironically enough, Reddit's maximum post wordcount limit has forced me to also split the Volume 2 post itself into two sections. This is the first one, and the second can be found here.

=========================================================

Layout and Organization

Nearly everything I said in the Volume 1 post about the general improvement of the layout and clarity versus other first-party Chaosium titles, continues to hold. I do, however, have a few amendments:

• I continue to think that the numbered endings (supposedly common practice from Japanese-language scenarios) are a little bit redundant, especially when considering the number of times each scenario repeats the same information about a total party wipe- although perhaps not as redundant as I was originally claiming, since each party wipe section also includes scenario-specific information on how to continue the campaign with new investigators afterwards.
• I'd praised the previous volume's inclusion of graphical flow charts to organize the scenarios. The ones in Volume 2 are sometimes a bit of a step down, in that they tend to be a bit more... impressionistic and thus a bit harder to read. This also becomes relevant when the scenarios become either more linear or more sandboxy, and thus less of a traditional investigation with well-defined clues; the flowcharts are also less useful for these. Nonetheless, I still prefer them immensely to the cumbersome bullet points of Regency Cthulhu or the nothing at all I was given in the Dissecting-post campaigns.
• I'd also earlier praised the style of illustrations compared to other 7e offerings- they tend to be minimalistic, and intermingle late-20th-century graphic design with traditional Japanese art, to very great effect. For the most part Volume 2 keeps up the trend (and I can also now say that I really like the "mirrored" composition of the two covers, which are more traditionally drawn). However, a few of the illustrations scattered throughout the book appear to be just filtered and lightly-amended photographs, particularly towards the end. Sometimes this makes them surreal and creepy... but mostly it just makes them look a little bit low-effort. These would have been fine, great even, for a Miskatonic Repository fanwork, and I think I still do prefer them on a compositional level to the other 7e art, but they're still a noticeable step down. Then, there's the scenario Wonderland, which has a quite distinctive visual/layout style all its own and really merits discussion in its own section, which we'll get to later on.
• Another area where 7e has really struggled is with handouts, and these are, unfortunately, no exception, often betraying their origin as a font and a stock photo and nothing more after a little inspection:

https://preview.redd.it/iufvyzl7vp4h1.png?width=1733&format=png&auto=webp&s=813f1de103023327dbb46d2c8751be2010a73b22

Compare this to the handouts in random free MR works like The Missing Rabbi of Berezin, or for that matter Tatters of the King (from all the way back in 2006!), and there's really no contest, although I suppose I can also say that Sutra of Pale Leaves is not behind the current standard.

• The "intro to Japan in the 80s" front-matter section from the original book is reprinted in its entirety in the front of this one. The obvious idea here was that Keepers could thereby run Volume 2 without Volume 1 or vice-versa, and I am of two minds about this. With this inclusion, Volume 2 does indeed become possible to run as a stand-alone, perfectly functional (if short) campaign about the King in Yellow in 1980s Japan... but the same cannot be said for Volume 1. Without Volume 2, it doesn't really have a satisfactory ending and becomes, essentially, a collection of one-shots with a shared setting/theme. Isn't that a bit backwards? I'd've put the stub of a campaign in Volume 1, and then the "supplemental" material in Volume 2, and just come out and said that the second was not a functional product without the first, and not included the intro section twice. As it stands, the duplication of this material consumes valuable pagecount in a book that was obviously struggling with being squeezed for space. I will, however, give credit to the authors for putting in the effort to try to make the campaign actually modular, as opposed to so interdependent that buying one book basically requires buying the other.

Overall, while Sutra's construction is still far superior to other first-party offerings as of late, I am left with the distinct feeling that, especially towards the ending, the production of it was rushed. On one hand, the team behind it has my sympathies- especially since I am coming at this from the perspective of a super-underground hobbyist who isn't subject to these kinds of time and budget constraints, and can just spend an entire week working on one handout until it's absolutely perfect. But, on the other... "measure twice, cut once" is a good motto to keep in mind whatever you are doing.

Overplot

Now that I am able to see it in its entirety, it's a lot more clear exactly how The Sutra of Pale Leaves actually works as a campaign.

As discussed above, it is set up to be somewhat modular. There is no fixed, linear progression between chapters, and the book is clear that the dates given are just guidelines that the Keeper can change. (For this reason, the dates stay off of handouts and other hard-to-alter materials.) This sits the campaign closer (but not adjacent) to a player-selected episodic campaign like Masks of Nyarlathotep; than to a traditional linear one. However, since it is still the Keeper deciding what comes next, and chapters function as self-contained "episodes", I would not classify it as a pure sandbox. This is reasonable, because sandboxes get very complicated very quickly if the players can really go anywhere, and I shudder to think what would be required to manage a sandbox of Sutra's scope. There is no specific beginning chapter, although there is definitely an ending in the form of The Bridge Maiden Part 2 and The Fixer. Despite the book stressing that the Keeper decides what comes next, I as a Keeper probably would run the chapters in the order they originally appear in the book. There is a definite sense of escalation and a bit of an arc that way.

One probably unavoidable downside of this kind of structure is that the plot always comes to the investigators. It doesn't feel like they are proactively pursuing logical leads from one chapter to another, they are stuck in a reactive posture at the macro scale, as the world introduces unexpected things to them. One of my regular players in particular, I know would get a bit frustrated by this, and probably keep trying to extract additional information about where to go next from various sources with degrading levels of subtlety.

Related to the above, is that the campaign's events are spaced a good distance apart chronologically. As written, it runs from July of 1986 to October of 1988 (with an "epilogue" in 1990), or on average a little under four months between the main chapters. Once it becomes obvious that these happenings are not isolated incidents but an escalating and coordinated action by malicious forces, investigators might chafe at these long periods of enforced inactivity. This is by no means a problem unique to Sutra, however, as many other CoC works also assume events will take much, much longer to unfold than the rate at which PCs will actually try to pursue them.

The quest-giver system that existed in Volume 1 (the book calls them "confidants") persists here, although it has been expanded a good bit and made somewhat more organic, with people the investigators met in previous chapters providing additional leads as opposed to the same three every time. This is a good innovation and the system no longer bothers me nearly as much as it did in Volume 1 (and even in Volume 1 I thought it was fine under many circumstances). However, it does by its basic nature feed back into the "reactive, not proactive" issue I outlined previously.

One other somewhat unusual feature of Sutra, is that it offers options for entirely new groups of player characters to come in with each scenario. The scenario Wonderland, in particular, has a whole section dedicated to an alternate opening/hook for a bunch of high school teachers, and if those teachers are used as PCs they can access a lot of information more easily than outside investigators. This is not something I've seen before, and I wouldn't think it's because Sutra is so incredibly lethal (to Sanity or to hit points) that total party wipes will be occurring in every chapter. I kind of want to explore and playtest it further. It would be a challenge to avoid metagaming, and more work for the players, and might get a bit repetitive; but I kind of wonder what it would be like to play each chapter with de novo investigators encountering the Prince of Leaves for the first time, and then have the survivors all come together for the climax of the campaign.

One area where the campaign could significantly be improved is how it presents information on the yakuza. Quite a lot of scenarios involve them (to the point where I also start to worry they are being a bit overused- but just a bit). Every time, a new Yakuza guy in a different location is introduced as a primary point of contact. This also gets a little repetitive, and takes up a lot of space that could be used for other things. If all the Yakuza guys were connected to each other, and/or the same ones appeared in each scenario; they would feel more like a cohesive organization and also help the story feel like it is occurring in more of a connected, living world.

Unfortunately I must report that one of Sutra's finest achievements, the hiding-in-plain-sight actually-culty cult The Association Of Pale Leaves, doesn't quite fully get off the ground. They remain a peripheral presence until the second-to-last chapter. Although that chapter does then feature them heavily, I really think they needed quite a bit more narrative space to be properly established/explored. I think part of this might be another unavoidable consequence of the highly modular nature of the book, since that does make it harder to establish an escalation and gradual revelation of what the APL appears to be, and then what it actually is- hard, but not impossible, and I would have liked to see something in the introductory sections about additional APL activity/information, general enough to insert into any chapter. There is already a numerical system for tracking the cult's influence as it expands; but it lacks both crunch in terms of how to evaluate progression, and detailed storytelling guidance on how to communicate the effects.

On the positive side, all of the scenarios in Volume 2 have a kind of shared thematic focus touching on a variety of topics: the madness of crowds, corruption, what we moderns might call "hustle culture" and its various disappointments and degradations. This is a very good fit for the Bubble Economy setting, and (for the most part) done very subtly and through implication. It adds a weight to the events that CoC campaigns rarely if ever have, without being didactic or distracting. Very impressive.

I was also hoping to find some additional lore/exploration of what Carcosa is and what it and Hastur are all about, as such were hinted at in Volume 1, but very little actually materialized. My disappointment, however, is more from the perspective of a Keeper/author looking for new ideas to integrate into my own ongoing KIY-related campaign. From the perspective of actually playing/running this game; it is probably best that there are no massive loredumps that would either bore the players, or simply be wasted due to there being no way for the players to actually learn the information.

The Bridge Maiden - Part 1

This is a relatively short investigative chapter based around a missing-persons report. The person in question, a scummy businessman named Umezono Minoru, has been slowly transforming into an Unspeakable Possessor due to exposure to a mandala the APL placed in a phone booth. Investigators can interview his family, coworkers, and the local yakuza guy to whom he owed money; visit his apartment and observe the aftermath of his transformation and declining sanity; visit the phone booth where the mandala was; and finally delve into Tokyo's extensive drainage system to confront him. It's really about as straightforward as such a thing can get- there are also leads relating to Minoru's sister, who is the primary focus of The Bridge Maiden Part 2; but (by design) these probably won't seem significant to the investigation in Part 1. I think I like this straightforwardness- everything I write inevitably balloons to scores if not hundreds of pages (see also- these posts), so I've recently come to appreciate scenarios that are compact, personal, and not going out of their way to try to be too conventionally "epic". Dream Eater from the first book was another very good example of this.

Remember how in the Volume 1 post I said that one of the potential flaws in Sutra is that the Prince of Pale Leaves is not necessarily demonstrably bad? Well, I think that complaint has been resolved pretty definitively. There's a slightly more involved backstory about Minoru making the Unspeakable Promise and reporting his sister to the APL and them giving him money that I doubt most players will figure out; but he's placed the mandala in a central location in his sewer lair, and I imagine most players will be able to piece together the basic strokes of what happened: "The APL put this poster up for some sinister end, Minoru was particularly susceptible to it for some random reason internal to his physiology, and it caused him to turn into this horrible monster". There's no human intermediaries one could argue are perverting the Prince of Leaves' true intentions, no real secondary antagonist, just the APL thoughtlessly spamming surveillance sigils around public areas that cause hideous mutations in some tiny slice of the population. In fact, running the scenarios in the order presented, I like how it sows some doubt in the players' minds with those first few morally ambiguous ones, and only them hits them with this. Well played, Sutra of Pale Leaves. Well played!

Continuing to make comparisons to Dream Eater, this is another scenario with some genuine, unexpected emotional punch to it that I didn't notice until a few days after I had first read over it. All of the leads the investigators can pursue to try to figure out what happened to Minoru, also fill in more of who he was as a person. That person was a scuzzball and arguable sexual predator who, forty years later, would no doubt be trying to get the PCs in on his latest cryptocurrency scheme... but there's still a definite sense of horror and tragedy in observing how much he's degraded under the Unspeakable Promise's influence. The fact that he ran a small modeling/talent agency and creeped (crept?) on the young women he employed, while himself struggling to pay off his debts to the yakuza and make it big in the fashion industry, is also a good example of Sutra's periodically resurfacing themes of exploitation and The Grind.

I guess my real only serious criticism is that, once he's actually confronted, I don't think there is quite enough information provided on exactly what Minoru's remaining faculties are. He's started going around mauling women and taking shoes and handbags as trophies, and if he were left alone I have no doubt he'd eventually end up with a full-scale torture dungeon in his sewer lair; but the scenario provides no guidance on if he's capable of any kind of negotiation or would submit to any kind of psychiatric treatment (much less if anything the investigators attempt could actually stop him from acting out). The only options discussed are to flee (which, accurately in my opinion, is classified as a "not good" ending, although Minoru later dies by unknown means on his own) or to go ahead and kill him. Even if a Captain Picard ending is not possible, I would have liked to see a bit more guidance on what might happen if the investigators attempt it.

Also, is this really what phone booths looked like in 1987 in Japan? This looks more like an ATM in a dedicated room, to me. It's still a very surreal and creepy illustration, though, so, props for that.

Wonderland

Lots to say about this one. Most of it is positive, which makes me a bit concerned for my credentials as a nitpicky hardass. I was not expecting to like this chapter as much as I did, as in summary it seems to contain a lot of story beats that I tend to find rather cringe; but the quality of the writing impressed me and, for the most part, it manages to actually sell these concepts.

The chapter kind of consists of two interleaved "dimensions".

The first "dimension" is the titular Wonderland, an APL-backed online game (specifically, a multi-user dungeon, a text-based multiplayer format that in its day served many of the roles we would attribute to MMORPGs, text RP, online tabletop gaming engines, and "virtual playgrounds" like VRChat or Second Life); themed around Alice in Wonderland. This is one of those "so immersive it sucks you in and seems real" games, so... that's already two concepts I am inclined to view skeptically- the "so immersive it's real" bit because it tends to be rather trite and usually handled rather clumsily, and reveals how the authors' very limited knowledge of computers and video games; and the Alice in Wonderland stuff just because it is very tonally dissonant both from the "classical" Cthulhu Mythos or the overall themes and "vibe" of Sutra specifically.

The mechanics of the game itself, however, are explained in a much more grounded and reasonable way than most examples of that kind of story element. It kind of eases the players into the concept, in a way that's just a little bit confusing (to the players, it's clearly enough explained to the Keeper)- they don't necessarily know they are as integrated into the game as they are, until they consciously ask about it. From an outside perspective, the player just stays at their computer, typing (albeit insensate to most outside stimuli short of hit point damage) and doesn't get physically sucked into the screen or anything like that. I think I actually like how slightly vague and confusing the descriptions of the game are, like how people playing the same session in different rooms are just kind of aware of what the others are doing, without any concrete description of what the connection looks or feels like. It manages to communicate a genuinely incomprehensible experience, which is surprisingly rare in Call of Cthulhu writing. Dying in Wonderland doesn't kill you IRL or anything silly like that; you can just get right back up again minus a few Sanity points and plus some Sutra exposure. This, of course, makes the game tremendously addictive. I guess the one semi-serious deficiency I can point to, is that the book never explains what might happen if the investigators try to examine the game's code or its network traffic. It contains four floppy disks' worth of something, so it's not like it's just an ordinary terminal/chat application with all the Mythos goodness confined to a server somewhere.

I can't say that Alice in Wonderland is the theme I would have chosen for the game... but I'm not really sure what theme I would have chosen for the game, so I can't knock this choice too heavily. The harshest thing I can say about it is that it kind of relies on the quality of the rest of the writing to support it, as opposed to being a strong element on its own. Apparently Carroll's works are considered more serious and significant in Japan than they are in much of the Anglosphere, so that might have something to do with it.

The investigators are then brought into contact with the game, through the second "dimension" of actual events. A couple of high school students who happen to have decent Internet connections (remember, this is 1988-ish) start playing the game, become deranged by it, and start acting out. And, by "acting out", I mean that one student (Riki), who is already in a creepy manipulative big-brotherish entanglement with another student (Kenji); dresses up in Kenji's clothes, breaks a mirror in the school bathroom, and carves his own face off with one of the shards.

One of the complaints I have about 7e overall, which I have also heard echoed by others, is that it tends to pull its punches just a little bit when it comes to actual violence or for that matter any other kind of particularly heavy subject matter. That's emphatically not the case here. Sutra also avoids the opposite extreme some of the early-to-mid-5e materials ended up with, namely being super edgy and grimderp. As a result, the story has some more actual weight to it, where violent actions seem to have more real consequences. It's a simple thing, but I cannot overstate how much of a difference it makes in the storytelling.

Riki survives, but is in a medically unexplained coma (due to his consciousness now being permanently stuck in Wonderland). Since he doesn't have a face, and is wearing Kenji's clothes and has a matching blood type and build, the authorities initially assume he is Kenji and that Riki is now missing. The book does address the fact that DNA testing, while possible, was not a routine thing in 1988 and will only be used to identify Riki if the players ask about it. However, it neglects to consider fingerprints ( two random high-schoolers would be unlikely to have their prints on file, but could the investigators lift prints off their personal possessions?) or dental records.

So, the basic structure of the chapter is to investigate "Kenji"'s freakout, spend some time playing Wonderland and learning about its properties (assisted by another student named Kenichi, who is also slowly being consumed by the game but retains the presence of mind to help the investigators), and then confront the developer and the actual Kenji in an office park and prevent the game from getting out of beta. And that's just the summary, omitting a lot of details.

This is a lot of plot threads to manage at once, and unlike many other older works I have examined, Wonderland (the chapter) does a very good job of keeping them all relevant and making sure they all lead into each other properly. There's also some additional backstory going on with the game company being based out of an office park that was built over the ruins of a temple formerly inhabited by a predecessor to the APL, which is possible for the players to skip over entirely, and if they don't skip it outright it still doesn't produce a lot of concrete leads. However, if the players do skip over it, they aren't left with a bunch of events in the main plot that make no sense; and if they do explore it, it would probably integrate well as atmosphere and context.

There is a relatively large amount of material dedicated to the "students" plot and not necessarily interacting directly with Wonderland (the game), including profiles for several of the teachers at their school, informational boxes on school life in Japan, and a lot of support for using those teachers as investigator PCs. It's all very well-done, but I do wonder if that space could not have been better used building out more events within the game itself.

I also find the character of Kenji a little bit strange. He's supposed to be a sociopathic social climber, which is fine, but he seems a little bit "older" than he actually chronologically is; scheming with the Wonderland developers and threatening his mother with a knife like a hardened career criminal. Even complete sociopaths go through their teenage years, and devote their energies to stupid teenage shit, but Kenji seems to have largely skipped this step. The original "ritual" with Riki is something I could indeed see a powergaming bully actually doing, but beyond that his character starts to "diverge" a little and become too slick, goal-focused, and generally adult. I suppose it's possible the game helped him "grow up" like this, but nothing in the book mentions anything about that.

Throughout Wonderland (the chapter), there are also a lot of allusions or implications to future issues involving multiplayer games, youth, and the Internet. One of the things that supposedly makes Wonderland (the game) so addictive is that it allows players to, over time, change their ordinary appearance into a fantastical one, neglect their IRL responsibilities, and live in this fictional world as an idealized character: Kenji and Riki have both specifically evolved into "anthropomorphic wolf" avatars. There's even a direct mention of "grooming", albeit more in the context of Kenji and Riki's dynamic, not Wonderland specifically.

https://preview.redd.it/vlbys7f5up4h1.png?width=1789&format=png&auto=webp&s=c510a7c397ceeb3b77de2ff52ffcc11589099a82

There's also this box, the second-to-last sentence of which had me wondering why the authors would immediately jump to assuming the interior of Wonderland would involve Weird Sex Stuff. Given the themes I outlined above, however... yeah, that kind of tracks.

For most of the chapter, I was wondering if all of this was actually intentional or if I was just reading meaning into it that wasn't there- and it was really, really cool. Unfortunately, there's just one single bit of text at the end, where the game's lead developer (shortly before physically transforming into a 12-foot-tall skeleton chess piece to quite probably wreck the investigators' shit) tells them this:

>In 30 years... in 40... you will all be enslaved to your little screens, the little mirrors of your sickening ape narcissism. And I will be there, I will be right there, looking back at you, telling you what is real and what isn't...

I feel like the writing oversteps the mark, here. I liked the themes and implications of Wonderland (the chapter and the game) when they were themes and implications, not spelled out like this.

As mentioned previously, the chapter's graphical design and layout are particularly notable with respect to the rest of the book, and deserve some examination on their own. All of the illustrations are done in an ASCII-art style, which is certainly fitting, although it's done all on a white background. Dark-on-white display modes certainly did exist on computers of the period, but it just looks a bit odd, more like a printout than anything else. The character portraits are done in a more conventional pixel-art style that, well, looks very, very good. There are little Matrix-style Japanese characters arranged vertically behind them... I wonder what if anything they mean?

All of the insert boxes have a three-layer-thick black-and-white checkered border. I think the original idea was to have it represent a chessboard motif, in line with the "Alice in Wonderland" theme, but the first thing it reminded me of was the graphical style of the TV series Max Headroom, which is... also perfectly appropriate. Now, if they had just had it on the bottom and left edges of the boxes, it would also bring to mind the block graphics shadows that were put under popup windows in TUI applications of the period, but, two out of three is not bad at all. My only possible complaint is that they take up quite a lot of space on the page.

All of this is great, but it also drives home to me just how constrained by the underlying first-party design elements (the stuff I've called "Necronomicon-like" in the past, although it has backed off on the parts that most outwardly resemble that), the book still is. I would have liked to see the whole chapter done in this retro-gaming style, or possibly hybridize that with a universal "Tokyo" theme that underlays the whole book where the Necronomicon stuff is now.

Still, overall, Wonderland is probably Sutra's biggest and most ambitious scenario, and for the most part it succeeds. It's not my favorite scenario, but that has much more to do with the excellence of Dream Eater and Bridge Maiden 1 than anything else. I get what it's trying to do, and I really like what it's trying to do, and it's largely able to accomplish it. The most serious flaws I could find, also tend to hang on a particular paragraph or sentence, and are thus easy to adjust.

However, I can't quite shake the feeling that so much of its premise relies on the strength of the writing in the book that presents it- which is something the Keeper can see, but not necessarily the players. Without it, would some of the things I had to be "sold" on at the beginning, still be "sold"? I don't know, but I'd be more than willing to play this more or less as-written to find out.

NEXT POST ===>