The Unspeakable Oath - Issue 14/15

Call of Cthulhu RPG

by John Tynes

Genres: Role Playing Games

128 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1997

Reviews

[Benjamin]

Whereas 16/17 was from 2001, Issue 14/15 is from 1997, and maybe it's just that this is literally from the '90s, but there'a few things here that feel real '90s to me.

But first: holy shit, this issue has a bunch of Michael Cisco before he got famous in horror circles with 1999's The Divinity Student. Interesting to see one of the most critically-respected horror writers here in RPG writing.

But first: this issue has all of the usual stuff:
* a letter from the editor and letters from the readers;
* reviews (with a lot of reviews for Chaosium fiction titles and a negative review of the great In the Mouth of Madness);
* mysterious manuscripts (stand out here is... well, maybe the Charles Fort X and Y books);
* tales of terror (my favorite is a Cisco piece about a weird couple with a big variety of possibilities);
* some few essays (one on not using sanity rules anymore, the other on racism in Lovecraft, which I'll want to return to);
* feature articles (everything from non-fiction articles on Charles Fort, the Knights Templar, the history of the tommy gun to Cthulhu articles on occult-tinged zines, which was (a) so '90s and (b) really good);
* and three adventures I need to spoil.

a) "Fuel of the Gods" is by Cisco and really good, about some corrupted oil that's transforming some test subjects, from the light use case (a paranoid), to the medium (a vehicular homicidal maniac), to the heavy case (a guy who can control cars). Honestly, I wanted this to get a little more body-car-horror, but still a great setup.
b) "Unhealthy Occupation" is by Adam Gauntlett, who usually sticks to English stuff and is here doing a riff on racism in America that... doesn't quite work, but there's some fun things here: a half-demon child who can only learn by eating the brains of people and needs someone to read this book so he can eat their brain and free his father; and a disinherited person who is hiding out in the mansion too.
c) "Call of Duty" is a 1920s adventures by Dennis Detweiller that feels like a run-up to Delta Green: the PCs are agents investigating a bootlegger who is actually staging an apocalypse. Several fun complications here, like the French-Canadian cultists doing the distilling, the free-range shoggoth in the marsh, and all the people in the small town who have their own ideas.

So, some good stuff.

Now that I've got those firsts out of the way, let's talk about the late-90s of it all, by which I mean: the weird references to people being overly politically correct. Like, if you were updating this for today, you'd have the person complain about "the woke mob" or something. In his review of some fiction, C.L. Werner complains about an editor being "a politically correct pod-person"; and in the essay on facing Lovecraft's racism, Jason Thompson refers to "the threat of Political Correctness, whether real or overhyped." It's just kind of a weird artifact of its time, I think, that this right-wing talking point got so mainstreamed that it ended up here, in a magazine that is mostly run by people who are -- as far as I know -- a little lefty.

Anyway, about that article on racism in Lovecraft: I was not in RPG forums back in '97, so I don't know how much this article represents that 90s, but it feels pretty current: Yes, Lovecraft was racist, the author notes, and that racism is in the work that is the basis for the game we're playing -- so how do we deal with that? The author gives a few ideas, but the through-line and argument of this piece is that we should think about race, which feels like a good place to start.