Rip It & Run: "Masks of Nyarlathotep"

Di Tillio, Larry, & Lynn Willis, “Masks of Nyarlathotep – Adventures to Thwart the Dark God”, Chaosium, Oakland, CA, USA, 1996.

A lot of people talk about this campaign online and, especially, they ask how on earth does the average Keeper manage to usher any sort of group through all of its ramifications and peculiarities? I’m wary of getting stuck into this issue because it’s such a beloved touchstone of the Call of Cthulhu roleplaying game but, even though it gets trotted out in different formats and updated for special anniversary releases, it’s still a bugbear that can break any gaming group, no matter how experienced.

(Warning! If you’re a fan of this campaign, you should probably stop reading now: I’m about to tear it six ways from Sunday. Why? Because I like Call of Cthulhu and it bothers me that so many people come to the game via this debacle, perhaps never to play the game again. It’s not a good campaign; it’s what there is. And many newcomers are led into the false belief that this is some kind of gold standard. It absolutely is not; there are better things in Chaosium’s stable and they do themselves a terrible disservice by not promoting them more. Or coming up with something better.)

The first thing to be aware of in proposing to your team that they try on this adventure series, is that it is deadly. It’s like “Tomb of Horrors” deadly, and just like that old AD&D chestnut, it feels like it was designed simply for that purpose. It will be unlikely that any character that your players generate in anticipation will make it through to the end – the mantra here is “don’t get attached”. The best strategy would be to tell them to put their favourite Investigators on hiatus and generate new characters for this gig, preferably several each per player: this has the added benefit of allowing you as the Keeper to set up all of the hokey “old buddy” connexions that the module requires without anyone feeling too short-changed on their character input. With squeaky-clean characters to hand, all you need to do then is just arrange a rationale which explains how these individuals are all connected – are they related? Do they all work for the same investigative organisation? &c., &c. This way, when – not if – they die, there will be some reason for the next character to take over.

The second thing to be aware of as Keeper is those two words of warning printed on the front cover, sinister-enough runes to make the most callow referee give pause: The words “Lynn Willis”. Mr Willis styles himself as the chief editor on most of Chaosium’s projects and he uses this position to add extra material to other peoples’ contributions, thus giving himself a writer’s credit for any work he’s involved with. I have direct experience of this: two of my friends contributed to “Blood Brothers 2” and their original material, after Willis had added to it and made many inexplicable alterations, barely conveyed the writers’ original intentions. ‘Butchered’ is not too fine a point to put on it. Basically, Willis can’t help himself: he has to play with material that he’s given, adding elements often to its detriment. And it’s certainly true in the case of “Masks”.

The main problem with this campaign is that, by definition, it’s huge. That’s not necessarily a bad thing – if you’re going to write a world-spanning adventure, it’s going to be big: just look at all the background material required for “Beyond the Mountains of Madness” and reflect that that’s just (just!) a trip to the Antarctic in the 1930s. The difference in “Masks” is that every section of the adventure is overlain with so many red herrings and other extraneous plot material that the main story is quite lost beneath a morass of stuff that serves no purpose. Conversely, information that should be provided – background information on places such as Shanghai or Nairobi, travel details, access to equipment in foreign locales – is often blithely skipped over, leaving the Keeper hanging. There’s simply too much plot and not enough information.

Approaching such a behemoth, you would think that streamlining the tale would generate clarity and allow the Keeper to add whatever colour they desire. Instead, cluttering up the stage, there are werewolves, demon cats, shapeshifted Serpent People, mythological Outback entities and ghosts, which only serve to derange and distract your erstwhile party. Most of these added distractions I’m laying at Willis’s doorstep: such stuff is all very well for someone who writes roleplaying material for a living, but for a team of players who get together at most once a month, it’s just confusing. Your Investigators will burn out and give up before they’re even halfway through.

So, first instruction for potential Keepers: pull out a (metaphorical) scalpel and slice away all of the dross. Anything that seems like a sideline, or which is just there to distract or throw off your players – get rid of it. Your players give you their valuable time to experience your Keeping skills; they don’t want to be blocked, confused, made to fail and to miss the boat. Unless of course you really don’t want them to come back for more.

My assumption (giving them the benefit of the doubt) is that the writers (Lynn Willis’s peccadilloes aside) loaded up the adventure with extra material to accommodate groups who were able to devote plenty of time and energy to the game. I assume that they thought Keepers would automatically edit the material to conform to their time constraints, but the format and the Keeper directions don’t make this explicit. Less experienced referees tend to assume that everything on offer in the text is crucial to the Investigation’s unravelling and inevitably bite off more than they can comfortably choke down.

The other problem that rears its head with this campaign is the fact that there are literally hundreds of NPCs involved. Once you’ve excised the extraneous material – keeping just the bare bones and anything else that takes your fancy – you’ve still got a large bunch of bit parts to play around with. What tends to happen is that your players will hear a name and, even if they’ve heard it a dozen times before, ask “who is that again?” Most likely, they will turn the name into a pun and remember them that way, often to comic and atmosphere-busting effect. When I played this game, there was a Japanese officer in the Shanghai section we all called “soggy taro” and, if he was supposed to be a menace, as a result of this phenomenon he absolutely wasn’t. So change the names to things that sound better to you or which are easier to recall – you won’t completely banish this effect, but it might minimise it from happening. (Just remember to Google the name first though, before you change it: some characters in these stories are based on historical people!)

You might try wearing different hats, or affecting certain poses or speech inflections when voicing a particular NPC, in order to focus attention; seriously, I’ve seen this done and it can be very effective. If you’re technologically savvy, you might – as one Keeper I know did – give each of the main villains a theme tune to play whenever they appear in the narrative, thus letting the party know when they’re on track.

This is a game that is notorious for its handouts. Take some time to visit the many websites that manufacture quality versions of these for those Keepers who really want to ramp up the atmosphere – “Propnomicon” is probably the best of these, specialising in faux documents dedicated to the “Masks” scenarios. Whichever ones you decide to use, think about colour-coding them according to the section of the campaign in which they appear – yellow for England; blue for Kenya; green for Shanghai, &c., &c. This will keep your players’ bits of paper organised and help keep the action focussed.

For keeping the information on track, using something like Excel, or building a wiki might be of valuable assistance. Asking your players to keep journals or sketch the characters they meet, will also focus their attention on what’s taking place as well as helping them form an attachment to the material.

One of my main beefs with this series of adventures is that it is very, very fuzzy. The goals of the evil-doers at each turn are vague and nebulous and the results of their actions are never obvious, nor do they logically or intuitively feed in to each other. A murder in New York; an hideous birth in Kenya; a ritual in Cairo; a Great Race librarian hanging out in an Australian desert; the actions of a bunch of piratical types in Shanghai: none of it makes sense or even links up into any kind of investigative chain. It reads like a bunch of disconnected stories mashed together and, to underscore this perception, I’ve yet to meet anyone who’s played this thing who knew what was happening at any particular stage. It suggests that whatever Grand Plan is afoot, it’s extremely obtuse; or else – which I suspect to be the case - there is no Big Picture in the Big N’s scheme. The project feels like the cramming-together of several otherwise unconnected tales sewn up with some extremely tenuous plot.

As an alternative to playing this all the way through, an erstwhile Keeper might well break up the package into its discrete components and play them each as standalone adventures: without the creaky, overarching frame, they make much better sense individually. And those sub-plots and red herrings which were cut out previously, they can also be teased out into individual adventures in their own right - for the most part - or built up into larger stories. As a single narrative, this is a clunky mess; as a source for many disconnected stories, it’s a goldmine.

I have a strong personal dislike for this campaign, and it’s based on many inaccuracies of portrayal which smack of poor research. I’ve studied Chinese history extensively, especially during the Republican era when this is set, and the portrayal here is very poor – no accurate sense of the place or the tenor of the times is revealed. There’s nothing to conjure the spirit of the city – it may as well have been set in San Francisco’s (or anywhere else’s) Chinatown. And yet there are webs of pointless sub-plots all over the place taking up valuable page space, instead of being used to pass on worthwhile information to the Keeper.

But it’s the Australian section that makes me grind my teeth the most. The Aboriginal cultists here use clubs, studded with bat’s teeth and dipped in their ichor, which transfer rabies to those upon whom these weapons are used. Excuse me? Rabies? A ten minute Internet search will reveal that Australia is one of the few places on the planet – for all its size – where rabies does not exist. And the Mimi spirits that show up in the tale are just wrong. There are vampiric creatures of Aboriginal legend with funky teeth but they’re not Mimis. Aboriginal tribespeople also do not use hieroglyphs, or depict objects in their art the way Westerners do, so having them tattooed with symbols of the Sand Bat is equally meaningless. The portrayal, as in the Shanghai section, is lacklustre and loaded with wrong assumptions and stereotypes that ring awfully hollow.

This is just two parts in a multi-part sequence, but I can’t help thinking that, if the research for these bits is so poor, then the rest of it must fall to the same standard. The sections set in Cairo and Kenya must also be approached warily, although there is now both a Kenyan and Cairene source book to fill in many of the blanks. I did originally think that Chaosium would do the logical thing and produce rules books for each of the relevant sections in “Masks”, but no – that idea seems to have evaporated. With all of the Lovecraftian potential that China provides, were they quick to set the scene? No: along came a source book on Japan (of all places!) instead. Perhaps with the next release of the “Masks” campaign more tie-in splat books will appear but no – who am I kidding? Something shiny will no doubt appear to distract those at the wheel.

Am I being too harsh? Possibly. So let me offer one last piece of advice for Keepers who are thinking of pushing their players through this meatgrinder:

Play “Shadows of Yog-sothoth”. It’s a much better vehicle, far better written, and your players will actually like it.