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Review Summary: The biggest, most engaging, most elaborate Call of Cthulhu campaign ever devised, at production values that break every existing record!
Blurb from the publisher: 'The new edition of Masks of Nyarlathotep is a complete revision and updating of this epic multi-part campaign set in 1925, in which steadfast investigators must unravel secrets and battle the minions of darkness in an attempt to stop world-shattering events from destroying humanity.
Masks of Nyarlathotep has been comprehensively revised and updated for use with Call of Cthulhu 7th Edition, but may also be run with the Pulp Cthulhu supplement.
- Global campaign covering seven countries in five continents!
- Packed with encounters, side-track adventures, detailed adversaries, geographical information, and more!
- Presented in full color, with new artwork, maps and floor plans, and ready-to-use player handouts.
- Appendices collect spells, tomes, artifacts, and travel advice.
- Ultimate edition, packed full of advice and tips.
The original six-chapter campaign featuring adventures in America, England, Egypt, Kenya, Australia, and China have been developed and updated by Mike Mason, Lynne Hardy, Paul Fricker, and Scott Dorward, and feature enhanced and new encounters, sub-plots, and on-point guidance for the Keeper.
The Introduction chapter features a new foreword by Mask's creator, Larry DiTillio, and goes on to provide an overview of the campaign, its key players and their goals and differing agendas, and the important locations the investigators will travel to while they seek to understand the mystery unfolding before them. Additional material looks at the dark god Nyarlathotep, his cults, and his role in the campaign. Guidance is also provided on running the campaign, including considerations of historical depictions, pulp or standard play styles, and lethality level (just how much danger should the investigators' face). Rounding things out is plenty of advice on creating investigators for the campaign, replacement characters, and ten ready-to-play investigators for those wishing to dive straight into the adventure.
Set in Peru, this new scenario takes place in 1921 and provides an exciting introductory prologue to the campaign, where the investigators meet Jackson Elias, the industrious and charming author, whose researches lead into the globe-spanning mystery. Embarking on an expedition to find a lost South American pyramid, the investigators come face to face with ancient horrors that foreshadow the task ahead.
And for an added bonus, a Grand Conclusion chapter helps the Keeper to determine just how successful the players have been in tackling the dark schemes of Nyarlathotep's cults, as well as discussing ways to extend the campaign in a variety of ways.
Each chapter has been tirelessly crossed-referenced to help those running the campaign to keep track of the many locations, characters, player handouts, and items thrown up by the players' investigation. With new appendices collecting spells, tomes, and artifacts, running the campaign is easiest it has ever been.
Running Masks of Nyarlathotep has never been easier thanks to these extensive appendices:
- Travel - detailing travel times across the world, means of transport, rest and recuperation for traveling investigators, travel events, and also guidance for investigators wishing to learn new skills and improve existing ones.
- Spells - collects campaign-important spells together for handy reference, with over 30 spells detailed. Including Call the Black Sphinx, the Seal of Nephren-Ka, and the Ward of Anubis, to name but a few.
- Tomes - during their investigations the investigators may come across a wide range of Mythos tomes, each bulging with forgotten and dark wisdom. This appendix gathers all of the tomes encountered in the campaign, with over 20 detailed listings, each providing background the tome, the lore within, and relevance to the campaign's plot, be it the dreaded Necronomicon or the abhorred Black Tome.
- Artifacts - just as there are numerous tomes to be discovered, there are also plenty of strange artifacts to be found (some useful, some deadly). Here, fifteen artifacts are gathered, from the Mask of Hayama to the Headdress of Eyes, from the Adornments of Nitocris to the very strange Device of Rods, Wheels, and Mirrors.
This Slipcase Set Includes:
- The Masks of Nyarlathotep Campaign in two volumes. 666 pages of adventure!
- A three part Keeper Screen designed for the campaign.
- A tuckbox set with every player handout.
- 11" x 17" world map.
- Individual maps for every campaign location.
- 10 Pre-Generated Characters with Character and Background Sheets.
What are you waiting for? Go save the world!'
What you get: Your EUR 115,34 or USD 129,99 or GBP 101,51 will buy you both the full-colour Masks of Nyarlathotep Slipcase Set, the reissued mega-campaign for the Call of Cthulhu 7th edition gameline, as well as its pdf edition. Both books in the slipcase set feature a red cloth bookmark, and add their pages consecutively up until the unholy culmination of page 666.
There is no need for me to repeat the contents of the Slipcase Set, the publisher's blurb has taken care of that. It is reminded that Masks of Nyarlathotep was first published in the distant 1984, and has seen multiple editions since then. I am very pleased to hold a copy of the 1996 third edition in my library, allowing me to compare the game's present iteration to its glorious past. This is not your average playtest.
The pdf version alone costs EUR 52,72 or USD 59,99 or GBP 45,28. This price however buys you four different pdfs (the books, the handouts, the Keeper Reference Booklet and the NPC portraits) as well as three zip flies (the cover art, the Keeper Screen, and the Character Sheets and Backgrounds). That is almost 235 MB of material!
Those with an even deeper wallet can opt for the Leatherette Slipcase Set to the tune of EUR 266,18 or USD 299,99 or GBP 234,26.
Spoiler warning: even though I will not reveal the campaign's plot, I will discuss some of its strong and less strong points. If you wish to participate in these adventures as a player, stop reading now.
Contents: Masks of Nyarlathotep takes place in seven distinct parts and spans the whole globe. Even though the order of every chapter is not fixed, characters will start of from Peru (44 pages), America (77 pages), and continue their way adventuring through England (118 pages), Egypt (89 pages), Kenya (64 pages), Australia (69 pages), and China (100 pages).
Following the campaign in the main books are four appendices relating to travel, spells, tomes and artifacts. The campaign closes with an 11-page (!) index.
The Keeper Screen Pack contains every single handout in loose, one-side pages (96 all in all) as well as all the maps of the campaign. The screen itself comes in landscape mode at a size of almost 28 x 22 cm per panel. Its first panel covers the Carlyle Expedition Members and their whereabouts, Learning skills, Investigator Development, and Travel Times in Days to and from the campaign's six major locations (Peru excluded). The other two panels list the Key Non-Player Characters alphabetically, with a one-line description of each. I am counting some 109 (!) listings in these two panels, Nyarlathotep himself included.
The strong points: Masks of Nyarlathotep has been, since 1984, one of the campaigns that any card-carrying cultist must play, if he is to justify his love for the Mythos. That is one thing.
The current edition of Masks however, is by far the biggest, the meanest, the most elaborate, the most thoughtful, the most engrossing, the most detailed, the most captivating of any previous edition. If it weren't for all the quality qualifiers (and they are all fully on target), the simplest of math would have proven it with easy: the third edition on my library is only 224 pages long, and that includes all the handouts! The material has been more than tripled (I repeat: tripled!), and that doesn't include the handouts and the campaign-dedicated screen.
The campaign is fully aware of what it tries to achieve and helps the Keeper at practically every step. I was cheering loudly when I opened the Screen and fell upon the exhaustive list of important NPCs for the full campaign. Or when I first realized that all NPCs have a personal portrait that you can show to your players so that basic human psychology does the rest. There are multiple bold references per page, along with page number, sending you wherever you should be in case you have forgotten (or don't know yet) what the subject matter actually is. Very few products do that; Masks took it to eleven.
The plot is more grandiose than ever. The Peru scenario is a clever prelude taking place a few years before the horror begins. That allows you to run it, follow it by a number of irrelevant Mythos adventures, and if the characters survive, have everything come full circle with the start of the campaign. All the other six scenarios have been heavily revisited and their ambit has been expanded. In Masks one will encounter everything, and I literally mean everything, Call of Cthulhu has to offer. There in investigation, globetrotting, action, fighting, plots, conspiracies upon conspiracies, petty grudges and grandiose schemes, unexpected reversals, characters from all over the Earth, and a healthy serving of the supernatural, be it small fry or some of the Great Old Ones themselves. The stakes are not just high; succeeding means saving the planet, and if that is not adequate for you, the new edition has devised the means to judge how well you did. Things are never really black and white, are they? Fun fact: The campaign purposefully offers openings for the Keeper to create and insert even more material and additional side treks. That kind of design confidence is crazy, and to be honest, totally merited. One can run half a dozen other Mythos scenarios within the context of Masks without his players being any wiser. It will all feel like this limitless, singular adventure. For some this might be maddening (and it requires really, really hard work by the Keeper), it is also however breathtaking as a concept.
The rewriting of the campaign took care of the impossible lethality (translating it to more standard Mythos lethality, which can be even further mitigated when one uses Pulp Cthulhu rules), while thoroughly expanding the subject matter. It also fixed some awkward, if not outright cringe-worthy assertions of the previous editions, at least by current standards, when it comes to national backgrounds, typecast personas depending on their origins or skin colour etc. The ethnic backgrounds of the protagonists, be them friends or foes, are more diverse than ever before. The most prominent example would be Jackson Elias, the hook for the campaign. He is now a man of colour himself.
Do I really need to discuss how impossibly high the production values are? The slipcase looks glorious on my library, and creates an impression as soon as one makes visual contact. Two full-colour hardbacks, both of them carrying a much-needed cloth bookmark; Only when you start using the bookmarks you realise how useful they are. The art is unsurpassable. Masks hosts the work of many artists, at no point however does it look unfocused or disparate. On the contrary, it is tight, imposing, and frightening. The Bloated Woman on page 28 will give you nightmares. The Black Pharaoh on his throne in the Bent Pyramid could have adorned a fantasy RPG... yet he comes out as powerful and horrific in a pulp way. Even the black and white imagery which is reminiscent of simpler styles and which sees people falling through paintings or nostrils of fog entering people through their facial cavities add to the feeling of the campaign. If anything, Chaosium knows how to create and market luxury products.
The pdf is the definition of perfection, and like the rest of the product, breaks the actual grading scale. The bookmarks go two levels deep. Both the table of contents as well as the index have live links. So far, so good. Yet what is really, really impressive throughout the whole pdf, is that every other word is linked to what it refers. Did you forget who Queen Nitocris is? No worries, just click on the live link. What was the Black Cat again? Click. This is by far the easiest campaign I have playtested in my life, and it owes a lot to the impeccably created pdf. If Chaosium keeps on marketing pdfs like this, nobody will ever dethrone it from the top spot it currently occupies.
The handouts are extremely well done. Like everything else in this book, they cannot be compared to anything from previous editions. They are light years ahead when it comes to quality and production. I would have preferred a single handout or map per page, this however would have been impossible. Most of them are single after all, so that is not a biggie.
The price is objectively high for those of us who are on a more shallow budget. On the other hand, the amount of material one gets for it is insane, and will provide hundreds of man/hours of entertainment. Under no circumstances does this product qualify as expensive. Having the option of purchasing such high quality products is a good thing, not a bad one.
The product is extremely well-supported. We visited together the even more luxurious (yes, that is possible) handouts of the fully licensed Masks of Nyarlathotep: Gamer Prop Set. Visit Chaosium's website for even more support.
The weak points: Masks always was a very big campaign. In its current iteration I am afraid it might push some away, seeing how enormous it has become. There is no sugar-coating it about the crazy preparation the Keeper needs to put into this, or the number of sessions you will need in order to acceptably progress and start tasting the real deal. I don't recommend going for the pdf only and not print it; one needs both the pdf and a printed version at his table. One also probably needs more than one screens at his table, taking into account how voluminous these tomes are, as well as good juggling hands and impeccable organization lest he gives out the wrong handouts at the wrong time. Not every Keeper and group has the time for something as big as this, and I respect it fully. The only thing I can say is that the campaign is worth it, even if one needs to set other gaming projects aside. There will be many, many deaths, there will be madness, and the characters you start with are unlikely to reach the very end. Yet one owes it to himself to keep on trying until the culmination of the campaign, irrespective of whether it is a success or a failure. I repeat: not only this is an iconic campaign irrespective of genre, its present luxurious edition has elevated it to heights never seen before.
As a globetrotting campaign Masks is better suited for Pulp Cthulhu as opposed to the more standard CoC. That is not a bad thing in itself, even though the most purist amongst us will always smirk with the ease that cultists use paranormal abilities and magical powers. This slightly different focus however can be observed on the writing. The emphasis is mostly on the plot, of what is happening and how the investigators should interact with it, not on the setting and its uncountable details. I would have liked to see more about framing the scenes in order to make 1920s Australia different from 1920s America or England. It is not easy to describe Kenya at that time and age, even though the internet can be your friend. As a Keeper, and for a campaign of such scope, I would have liked a semi-automated way of composing narratives on the fly in order for my players to properly get into the right mind set. Of course, I realize that such inclusions would have made this campaign even longer...
All the characters and adversaries the Investigators will encounter are referenced at the end of the relevant chapter. This is extremely unfortunate, and a regression from the previous editions. One needs to page-flip a lot anyway. With such a kind of layout, he will page-flip even more.
Conclusion: RPG.net's grading scale does not do justice to Masks of Nyarlathotep. Luxurious, majestic, imposing, well-thought of, immersive, it is going to satisfy every role-playing cultist out there and especially those who are oriented more towards pulp action instead of overbearing cosmic horror. With all the work that has been put on top of the widely renowned original and with production values that tick every luxury box in the market, the current edition of Masks is headed straight for the pantheon of iconic RPGs.
For more info on Masks of Nyarlathotep and Chaosium visit its website at https://www.chaosium.com.
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