Pyramid Pick from the Past
Dark Continent: Adventure & Exploration in Darkest Africa [2001]
Published by New Breed (UK)
Written by David Salisbury with Mandy Smith
Cover by Andy Hepworth
Illustrated by Katherine Lee & Jon Hodgson
Boxed set with three books and two maps; £24.99 (approximately $41.75)
Darkest Africa holds a certain allure in the Western cultural mind: the mysteries of the interior, the impenetrable jungle, the immorality of the Arabs of the East Coast, the majesty of the beasts abroad the Serengeti, the deadly diseases of the rivers and swamps, and the exoticism (not to say eroticism) of the natives and their tribal practices. Of course, Hollywood has promulgated such myths so that the image of the Great White Hunter paddling up Africa's long rivers beset by hungry crocodiles and barrages of spears and arrows from head-hunting, cannibalistic natives is one to set our sense of adventure racing! Africa in general, is almost, but not quite ill served by the RPG industry. African-set adventures (seen in Fragments of Fear and Masks of Nyarlathotep for Call of Cthulhu, Heart of Darkness for GDW's Dark Conspiracy RPG, and most recently in the Feng Shui scenario anthology, In Your Face Again) and supplements (Rifts World Book 4: Africa from Palladium, Magic & Mysticism: The Dark Continent for West End Games' Indiana Jones RPG, GURPS Voodoo, and even Jungle of Chult and The Ivory Triangle for Advanced Dungeons & Dragons) are not uncommon, but even despite the recent release of . . .
This article originally appeared in the second volume of Pyramid. See the current Pyramid website for more information.
Article publication date: October 24, 2003
Copyright © 2003 by Steve Jackson Games. All rights reserved. Pyramid subscribers are permitted to read this article online, or download it and print out a single hardcopy for personal use. Copying this text to any other online system or BBS, or making more than one hardcopy, is strictly prohibited. So please don't. And if you encounter copies of this article elsewhere on the web, please report it to webmaster@sjgames.com.