r/callofcthulhu • u/27-Staples • 8h ago
First Impressions - The Sutra Of Pale Leaves Volume 2: Carcosa Manifest Part 1
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:
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.
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.
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.
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u/DM_Fitz 5h ago
This is a wonderful and thorough write-up that I plan to keep coming back to while I prep this campaign.
Congratulations on the PhD, by the way!