a Mummy and 5 Werewolves walk into a bar...

[sellswrd]

stop me if you've heard this one...


Seriously, though, I'd love some advice from you Mummy players/ST's. I am running a WtF campaign and want to throw a little challenge at my troupe. My players are all experienced gamers (though their characters are relatively young) so I thought giving them a adversary that they can sink their teeth into might be fun. I am intrigued by MtC, and own the core book, but I've never played in or run a story for that genre.
My question(s) is...what kind of power level should I be looking at for a Mummy NPC going up against a Pack of relatively young Werewolves. The scenario will be something of this sort:

There is a Masonic Temple in Washington DC, and in the basement, the Mummy has her tomb (of course). The players need to infiltrate the Temple and recover a book (i.e. Relic? Vessel?) that contains some ancient necromancy rites (not to bore you with the details but they will be charged with this task by a Moros Mage in return for certain "favors"..good times!). The characters will not know that they will be encountering a Mummy, at least at first(and the players themselves have no expertise with MtC).

So...what can I / should I throw at them? I assume a few Cult members will be a good warm up...what else? I know that 5 Werewolves in Garou form, even young ones, are pretty formidable so I don't want poor Miss Mummy getting shredded in the first round.
I appreciate any suggestions, advice and help you can send my way...thanks so much!!!

[Ben Quo]

Uhh
Well.
First: you should settle on if you want to use the Mummy Raw, or one of the 2e Fan-Updates on the forum (I also have my own update, which is not on the forum. Updating Mummy is the cool thing to do).
I say this because I don't honestly think a RAW Mummy is going to be totally competent against a 2e Werewolf.
That said, any of the myriad updates for Mummies brings them in-line with 2e stuff.

Second: Mummies are scary. The scenario you described sounds like the pack wakes the Mummy via tomb-robbing; that means it's a bunch of Primal Urge 1 to 3 characters going against a being who has the equivalent trait at 10.
I could go through all the ways a Mummy could one-shot a pack of 5 Werewolves in Garou form, but I don't think it would be helpful. Note that they are all available at character creation.

What's important about a Mummy is that since they wake up at Sekhem 10, and that Trait slowly goes down over the course of their descent, they work really well as recurring antagonists; sure, the werewolves may get the book, but the Mummy is going to want that back, and keep trying until they've spent all their power doing so.

Have you read the whole of the core book?

[atamajakki]

If you don't want to slaughter the entire pack, your best bet would be to build one using Hunter: Mortal Remains.

Mummies are nigh-unkillable murder machines.

[sellswrd]

Thanks for the info so far, folks. A few things..

I will be using the 1st Editions of both WtF and MtC for this campaign (if that makes any difference)

I am currently reading through MtC in preparation for the chapter I described so I have a little time to get up to speed.

I do like the idea of a reoccurring antagonist (i.e pissed off Mummy) so that could work.

[Ben Quo]

Oh.
If you're using both in 1e, then yes, the pack is going to get shredded. Badly.
A lot of what makes a given Arisen powerful isn't just the "I am a Mummy" Template; sure, that lets them soak up a ton of damage and come back even if you somehow manage to kill them, and raise their stats to a ludicrous level, and have basically unfailing radar towards a relic they want.
What's really scary, to me, is their Utterances. They can start Earthquakes. They can become a pillar of light that blinds, damages, and burns all onlookers. Every Utterance is three distinct powers they have access to; there's a lot of bang in there.

Even their lesser powers - Affinities - are nothing to scoff at. Unarmed attacks are Lethal if your Strength is 5+ (this is trivially easy to achieve). +2 to your Unarmed attacks. Can't hurt yourself when you strike something unarmed.
That's 1 Affinity. They're all like that.
I don't know about you, but that's terrifying to me.

Direct confrontation is going to end poorly. Especially since, as Mummies get weaker, they start to remember more about who they are and what they want.
The Arisen is going to wake up and be, mostly, "CURSE! BOOK! GIVE!"
Wait a month, and he'll be closer to "Pardon me, my good sir, it has been a humbling revelation that the particular volume which you stole may have sparked some bad faith between our two distinct factions and I, in a show of good intent, would like to perhaps propose some fair trade in which I may once again obtain said volume, as the indescribable horrors which it was holding back are evidently slinking closer to this frail yet beautiful mortal world."

The tragedy is that once he goes down for good, he's going to wake up just like he started.



Part of the key to having the Mummy come back is that he's a walking engine of destruction when he gets up, but slowly descends down the super-human spectrum to "sickly, and only conditionally superior to a human."

I'd recommend something along the lines of
1. Pack gets to and steals the book
2. Chase/escape scene with Mummy and cultists. "Chase" here may boil down to "run away before the Mummy catches us because it's punching through steel walls like so much rice paper."
3. Harried by cultists and this terrifying unstopping undead monstrosity for a few sessions. It looks like a dried-out corpse at this point.
(Aside: said terrifying unstopping undead monstrosity stands a good chance of being able to, say, start an earthquake centered on the pack locus or drop a meteor on them)
4. Mummy slowly starts to try and communicate. Perhaps pack keeps fighting it, perhaps not. They are still outclassed. It looks as it did in the last 10 years of life at this point; alive, but clearly "out of it."
5. Eventually, it becomes weak enough to kill - this takes time, or actually learning how to trigger its Descent (the time part is kind of a while, and triggering the Descent would be largely for the mystic/scientist of the group to figure out). It looks like its in the prime of life at this point.
6. If they kill it, it comes back! It still wants to talk. You can literally rinse and repeat this as much as you want. In Mummy, there's a bottom line to how many times you can "come back" during a given Descent, but you're running Werewolf - feel free to have this sickly, wane fellow (still in the prime of life, just - not looking so hot; tired, run down) come back again and again saying "I need you to listen, seriously."
7. The book let out a monster. The Mummy, exhausted from chasing down the pack and destroying everything they know and love, needs their help to murder it.

Point 7 is a little tongue-in-cheek, but not really; a Mummy can kill a mortal, then ensure it becomes a ghost, then re-write that ghosts psyche to be devoted to the Mummy above everything else. They can also say to the ghost "ok you're the Crow now, except you serve me" and the ghost has basically no choice but to say "seems legit."
Imagine what this does to a werewolf's mortal pack/family.

They can also have a legion of hungry infections zombies! They are very hard to kill.

Of course, atamajakki already pointed out that Mortal Remains is a thing. That would be more manageable.
Sorry for the long post.

[sellswrd]

No need to apologize for the long post...I REALLY appreciate the information.

So the bottom line here is that Mummies are wickedly powerful people who don't like having their stuff messed with...got it.

Dumb question (and probably answered somewhere in the MtC) but...a Mummy that has been "awake" for a while is less powerful than one fresh out of it's Tomb, yes?

[Ben Quo]

Every "arising" has a "descent."
It's basically a clock; the Arisen has X time to get stuff done.
At certain intervals, they have to roll Sekhem, if they fail, they get to keep the level of Sekhem they're at; if they succeed, then they lose a dot of Sekhem.
As Sekhem goes down, their overall potency goes down: how many Pillars (think Essence) they can spend per turn, how many dots of Attributes they get per Pillar spent; the levels of Utterances they can use (Utterances at tiered either 1/2/4 or 1/3/5; if their Sekhem is lower than the level, they can't speak that dread verse).
Their Affinities are unaffected, and they can still do the whole "I shall retuuuuurn" schtick if they have more than 1 Sekhem left, but overall, yes; longer time awake means weaker Mummy.

The descent intervals get further apart the lower their Sekhem goes; at Sekhem 10 (just woke up, all bandages and bad moods), they have 1 scene before they have to roll. At 3, they have something like 60 days before they have to check for further descent.

Instead of Morality/Integrity/Harmony, they have "Memory;" it starts at 3. They have a special XP track they use to raise it; they get said XP by basically acting like a person and remembering stuff about themselves. Hence, if they wake up with Memory 3, it's entirely likely that - once they've slunk all the way down to Sekhem 2 - they have Memory 5+ and probably even know why that book was bad news.
They may even remember personally meeting the jackass who wrote it.

So the bottom line here is that Mummies are wickedly powerful people who don't like having their stuff messed with...got it.

Yes, but, I wanted to enunciate. Mummy is a very nuanced game. Their powers are similarly nuanced, and every one could be a story seed (something which is very important, to me).
Rank 6+ Spirits are beyond the scope of the game-system to portray, is the tagline in Werewolf, but if I wanted to portray them anyway I'd probably start with Mummy.

[Shock]

Oh.
If you're using both in 1e, then yes, the pack is going to get shredded. Badly.

Turn into Sand, Stuff as much sand into the pack's lungs, watch as the pack dies due to lack of oxygen.

Or hell, Just have the Mummy's cult seal the tomb with an air tight seal, and become the pillar of fire. As they fight the pillar, more and more oxygen gets consumed.

[atamajakki]

The Mummy can regenerate massive amounts of damage. He can come back from the dead several times. He has an entire Cult at his disposal. He can throw asteroids.

Your pack is very, very screwed unless you don't use the actual Mummy rules at all.

[Azahul]

Particularly notable is that, when first rising, the Mummy is Sekhem 10 and Memory 0.

That means that if, by some chance, the wolves do bring it down, it will return to life the moment they drop their guard and launch an immediate surprise attack (probably on whoever struck the killing blow). You know, in case bringing it down the first time wasn't hard enough.

[atamajakki]

Use the Dread Powers from Hunter to build this Mummy instead, unless you really want a TPK.

[Azahul]

Well, you don't need to optimise the Mummy. If you give it no combat skills to use in the first fight and no or minimal combat affinities/utterances, it's only going to have 15 health and a dice pool of 9 (plus the ability to fight for 9 rounds after dying or heal 1 lethal a round for the same period of time and the aforementioned "back from the dead" trick). That's formidable, not a TPK.

You can scale up from there to meet the kind of challenge you want the party to face. If they are clever PCs, they might even twig to the fact that they should probably run. If they are very, very clever, that may even happen before one of them dies.

[CatDoom]

As with any nigh-unstoppable foe, using a Mummy as an antagonist could work if you give the PCs the opportunity to do some research and develop a plan before actually entering the tomb. Like most splats in NWoD, Mummies have lots of enemies, and the pack might just be able to get in touch with them without the mummy's cult finding out what they're planning. Since many of Mummy's antagonists are not as obsessed with vessels as the Arisen themselves are, they may be willing to let the pack have the book in exchange for whatever information they have and backup against their foes. Some of them might even honor the agreement after the dust settles.

Werewolves might also be able to compel or persuade local spirits to back them up; fire does aggravated damage to mummies, so a fire spirit might be able to wreak havoc in a fight against one, especially if it were able to produce or intensify flames while remaining in twilight.

[sellswrd]

It seems like I've come to the right place! You folks are pros..exactly what I needed to know.
my players are GREAT players but don't always take the, well...smart option (i.e. Run away when they clearly should).
thank you all so much!!!!

[VoragoSolitude]

A straight up Mummy the Curse mummy, fresh out of his/her sarcophagus, is more like a force of nature, less like a person. He blows through tomb passages as a tornado of scarab beetles and poisonous blood, momentarily coalescing into the form of a seven-foot-tall gilded manbeast with the body of a loinclothed warrior and the head of a bull to hack thieves to death with a glittering magical bronze khopesh he called from the ether by reaching his hand out and chanting 'Ya-ham-ankatu-kheru!' A just-woke-up mummy is not something you fight, it's something you survive.

A mummy who's been awake a little longer likely has some of his faculties back, and is capable of subterfuge and strategy beyond glittering minotaur butchery. He has the full command of an arsenal of superhuman powers at his disposal, and can pump his physical stats to superhuman levels. Imagine trying to fight Thor or Wonder Woman if it's a direct fight, or Batman if it's indirect.

Arguably, some of the worst mummies to come into conflict with are the ones that have been awake for a while. They've lost most of their magical powers, yes, but now you're fighting an immortal sorcerer who has millenia of experience fighting monsters and other immortal sorcerers, and has forgotten more about asymmetric warfare and tactics than you'll ever learn. And in all likelihood, he has a cult of devoted followers who could be literally ANYONE, capable of going anywhere, or doing anything, simply because they're ordinary humans. Also, in all likelihood, he has a shitload of money at his disposal and can just use human societies' infrastructure to fuck with you.

And even if you bushwhack him and take him down, he'll be back, probably pretty quick, too.

If I was you, I'd make it about competing goals, rather than giving the PCs a new punching bag. But that's just me.