The Sutra of Pale Leaves: Twin Sons Rising, a Call of Cthulhu review

The Prince of the Pale Leaves is a brilliant new mythos but…

Summary review  (spoiler free)

The Sutra of the Pale Leaves: Twin Suns Rising introduces a bold and original interpretation of the King in Yellow mythos. The book combines a rich thematic foundation, touching on identity, agency, and perception, with a Japanese 1980s setting. While its conceptual ambition is impressive, the scenarios provided struggle to deliver on that promise, and the setting often feels underused. Still, the core ideas are more than worth engaging with, especially for GMs interested in existential horror and philosophical play.

Pros (spoiler free)

• A fresh, thought-provoking, even brilliant,  take on the King in Yellow mythos
  
  
• Explores major themes like agency, identity, and shared reality
  
  
• Cult is morally  ambivalent, not just another doomsday faction
  
  
• Offers conceptual tools for powerful psychological horror scenarios
  
  
• Synthesizes Lovecraftian materialism with Chambers-style idealism in a coherent way
  
  

Cons (spoiler free)

• The included scenarios don’t creatively explore the book’s strongest ideas
  
  
• Some unnecessary incoherent fantastical elements distract from the core mythos
  
  
• The Japanese setting feels superficial
  
  
• NPCs are thinly sketched, missing the emotional depth the themes call for
  
  
• Visual presentation is inconsistent, both the art and the layout
  
  
• New mechanics are functional but uninspired, offering little narrative flavor
  
  

(Spoilers start here)

The Prince of the Pale Leaves, Full review

It’s not really like any previous interpretation of the King in Yellow.

Yes, it gestures toward the familiar—masks, yellow vests, mentions of Carcosa and Aldebaran—but what we’re facing here feels more like a new Mythos: one that borrows (brilliantly) from earlier Kings, but ultimately does its own thing.

The book—The Sutra of the Pale Leaves: Twin Suns Rising—is not a scenario. It’s a setting book, introducing the idea of the Prince of the Pale Leaves as a memetic god, transmitted through a cursed text known as the Sutra of the Pale Leaves. It provides light background on the setting—Japan in 1986–1987—including some notes on technology and society, and mechanics for characters progressively corrupted by the Prince. The central concept is that infection by the Sutra results in either possession or shared consciousness: either way, you become part of the Prince’s collective mind, and the Prince, a mimetic entity, becomes resident in you.

This is a great idea—entirely distinct from the usual “surreal horror” of Arc Dream Publishing or Pelgrane Press, or from the more grounded but idealistic metaphysics of Chaosium’s Tatters of the King. Instead, we get a concept rooted in contagion of identity, erosion of agency, and the possibility of a maybe even benevolent tyrant god.

In case you haven’t noticed: I’m a huge fan of the King in Yellow mythos. The first Call of Cthulhu plot I ever wrote—more than 30 years ago—was a King in Yellow story. Practically every version I’ve read since has been compelling, even when wildly different. But this one?

This one is not subtly different. It’s a full reimagining.

The Cult of the Prince — and Its Shadow

This new take builds on an idea hinted at in Tatters of the King: that domination by the King might protect humanity from its worst instincts—and even from the Mythos—but at the cost of freedom. Tatters only gestures toward this. In my own remix, I tried to bring that theme to the forefront. Here, it’s not a suggestion—it’s the core.

The cult of the Prince can even be seen from a  sympathetic point of view. They want to build a better and safer world under a god they can see and speak to. They don’t usually resort to violence. 

They are dangerous because they want to install an inescapable dictatorship. They can be extremely tough opponents  because they can act in a perfectly synchronized manner: they all share knowledge with each other instantly and they have absolute unity of purpose. This is not your standard apocalyptic death cult—it is something more chilling: the devoted followers of a (maybe even benevolent) tyrant god, who are, at the same time, all of them avatars of the god itself. 

And here’s what’s especially interesting: this version manages to articulate a consistent synthesis of two seemingly incompatible traditions. On the one hand, it draws from the extreme materialism of Lovecraft’s cosmic horror, where minds are just matter and meaning is irrelevant. On the other, it incorporates the idealism of Chambers’ King in Yellow, where madness and perception shape reality. But instead of treating this as a contradiction, the Prince is imagined as a memetic infection that alters material minds in order to prime consciousness for a different reading of the world. It’s not that the world itself changes, it’s that the infected see it differently, and act differently, which in turn transforms their reality.

Come on, this is pretty awesome. 

On top of that, they came up with the concept of flawed hosts—people who receive the Prince’s imprint imperfectly. These individuals gain some of the divine-like powers and awareness of the Pale Prince but are not part of the shared hive mind or, in some case, even can create their own, separate hive mind.  They’re unpredictable, detached, and often more dangerous than the main cult itself.

You can see how much paranoia, existential dread, and identity-horror this opens up. There’s so much narrative room to explore questions of agency, selfhood, and what it means to remain “you.”

So… This Book Is Amazing, Right?

Well… no.

Because after laying out all these brilliant ideas, the book follows up with three scenarios—and unfortunately, they fall short of the promise.

The First Scenario

It focuses on a calligrapher who has been taken over by the Prince and is reproducing the Sutra. He’s haunted by guilt for killing a child in a car accident. A dream-eating creature is devouring the dreams of his neighbors instead of his, seemingly due to the Prince protecting his dreams from the dream-eater. While this could evoke surreal dread and moral ambiguity, the scenario ends up feeling thin. The dream creature—borrowed from Japanese folklore—has no real explanation for how it fits into the cosmology, and the emotional arc never quite lands.

The Second Scenario

A manga author creates a manga version of the Sutra, but someone else makes a fanfic version of the manga, full of sex and violence, and this turns the fanfic creator into an imperfect Prince. The PCs must stop this imperfect Prince (subtly aided by the cult) and then they can confront the original creator of the manga. In the meanwhile she has created a magical pen that can literally redraw reality, and intends to use it to reshape the world to the liking of the Prince. While the concept is flimsy, and badly developed, there’s a moment of real philosophical potential: you can try to argue with her, convincing her that trapping people in the world of the Prince might protect them from suffering—but at the too high cost of destroying their creativity and freedom. 

That’s a great theme (I explored it in my own Carcosa scenario and in my own mix of Tatters), but here it feels like an afterthought, not an integral part of the scenario’s design.

The Third Scenario

A patient in a psychiatric hospital believes himself to be the King after reading the manga version of the Sutra. He gains control over the asylum, turning both staff and patients into “Faceless Ones” through tattoos he carves on their backs. Eventually, the hospital morphs into his vision of Carcosa. The scenario ends in combat. It’s not clear why or how Carcosa manifests here—just that it does. Again, a potentially interesting theme—reality shaped by madness—gets drowned in arbitrary weirdness and an unearned climax.

The Real Problem

None of these scenarios is particularly compelling. They fail to explore the rich philosophical terrain the book itself opens up: the tension between reality and perception, freedom and safety, individual will and collective mind. They engage with the Japanese setting only perfunctorily, name-dropping otaku and manga, for instance, without doing the work of actually inhabiting 1980s Japan. The era offers rich ideological and cultural material, but what we get here is surface dressing.

You could run all three scenarios in a different setting—modern France or the UK—with almost no changes. That’s a sign the setting is underused.

It doesn’t help that most NPCs are rather unappealing. The manga creator in the second scenario is still perhaps the one that receives the most detailed characterization, but even she is not particularly interesting. Besides the “always dreamt to be an artist”, being friendly, “having to fight for it because she was a girl”, and being absolutely amazing and unique and incomparable with other artists (of all of this sounds like a stereotype that is because it is one), there is not much to here. No real character. Even her opinion about Disney animation is a stereotypical one. 

Aesthetic and Structural Notes

The presentation doesn’t help much. The art is okay—most of it manga-style—but the inconsistency is grating. Each chapter uses different layouts, fonts, and portrait styles, which makes the book feel scattered rather than cohesive.

The mechanics for Prince possession are functional but uninspired. That’s not a dealbreaker, but when paired with underbaked scenarios, the result is a book that feels more like a pitch deck than a finished work.

Final Thoughts

This book contains one of the most compelling reinterpretations of the King in Yellow I’ve seen in decades. The idea of the Prince as a memetic god who offers both salvation and erasure is brilliant. It opens the door to horror that is not only psychological but philosophical, the kind of horror that lingers.

But the book doesn’t make use of what it has. It gives us a goldmine of ideas, and then hands us a plastic shovel.

Still, I don’t regret reading it. I’ll likely use many of its concepts for my own campaigns. I just wish the book itself had done more with the brilliance it briefly reveals.