r/callofcthulhu • u/27-Staples • 7h ago
First Impressions - The Sutra Of Pale Leaves Volume 2: Carcosa Manifest (Part 2)
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.
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...
... 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.
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.