Anyone played Masks of Nyarlathotep?

[TheSword]

I’m not @Retreater but I’ll give my answer. I run a lot of prewritten material. MoN was perfect in that it allowed for the players to choose where they wanted to go and what leads to pursue. For a prewritten campaign that’s rare.

The NPCs were well done with appropriate prompts for playing them. The locations made sense and were different.

I’d really like to take it and push it into a 40k Dark Heresy/Imperium Maledictum Inquisotrial game.

That was my initial thought. However the detail of the historical locations - Kenya, China, England etc sounds like one of the highlights so I felt I’d be losing out on all that historical context by adapting for 40k. Even though it would fit world hopping for a Inquisition campaign perfectly.

 

[eyeheartawk]

That was my initial thought. However the detail of the historical locations - Kenya, China, England etc sounds like one of the highlights so I felt I’d be losing out on all that historical context by adapting for 40k. Even though it would fit world hopping for a Inquisition campaign perfectly.

If you're looking for 40K inquisitorial campaigns there's been a few published for Dark Heresy 1 and 2E. You might want to give them a look.

 

[TheSword]

If you're looking for 40K inquisitorial campaigns there's been a few published for Dark Heresy 1 and 2E. You might want to give them a look.

Yes I have all of them. The campaigns are 3 star products to be honest, mainly due to extreme linearity and some pretty crazy elements. Cool ideas but not well implemented. The individual adventures are much better but lack cohesiveness between them. Useful add ins but not a great structure for a grand campaign.

 

[billd91]

Do you think that the new Peru section could be used as a one shot to get people used to it with an option to bring new characters or play a survivor of that experience.

I'm not sure I'd call the Peru section a one-shot since it's a bit more involved than that. I'm not entirely a fan of that section, but it does serve as a way to give the PCs a shared background before Chapter 1 of Masks really starts.

 

[thullgrim]

I'm not sure I'd call the Peru section a one-shot since it's a bit more involved than that. I'm not entirely a fan of that section, but it does serve as a way to give the PCs a shared background before Chapter 1 of Masks really starts.

I think if I were doing it again I’d run Peru and then maybe a couple more short adventures in the intervening years. Maybe with some contact and news about Elias, and then jump into New York.

 

[Committed Hero]

I’d really like to take it and push it into a 40k Dark Heresy/Imperium Maledictum Inquisotrial game.

My dream is to port Masks to 1968.

 

[kenada]

I think this is my biggest concern with switching to any system. I’m not sure the best way to overcome it if you play a modern D&D experience.

We’d played Call of Cthluhu before too, but those games tended to be smaller scale and focused on a particular situation. We mostly played it smart in Masks, but there were a couple of moments where it seemed like people forgot how dangerous things can be.

 

[Joshua Randall]

As a player - build up is way too slow. Please drop me into Egypt in medias res and give me any required background info via flashback.

 

[Autumnal]

The overwhelmingly correct solution to almost everything is overwhelming firepower.

This is what turned me off, ultimately, from running it. I don’t fantasize about heroes saving the world via superior firepower. I’m willing enough to read and watch stories where that happens, but roleplaying and GMing require more effort for me to feel satisfied and it’s just not very rewarding for me.

Save yourself some frustration and buy "Two Headed Serpent" instead, which is everything the "Masks" campaign should be but isn't.

I’ll bet you can see my question coming here. To the best of my knowledge, there are no big CoC campaigns that would work for low/no-violence play. (Maybe Children of Fear, which I own but haven’t read yet.) Is Two-Headed Serpent actually an exception?

 

[Celebrim]

This is what turned me off, ultimately, from running it. I don’t fantasize about heroes saving the world via superior firepower.

I'm OK with it provided that the set pieces are good, it fits the genre, and the setting isn't fighting against that as hard as it can. It's not a fun story if Indiana Jones goes to Cairo and is arrested by customs as a foreigner carrying a revolver into the local jurisdiction.

The story set up by "Masks" seems to demand as a rational response a military response. The team is better off as commandos or foreign agents not as detectives, antiquarians and archeologists.

Is Two-Headed Serpent actually an exception?

No, but the set pieces are just a ton better and the mix of investigation and pulp action works better for me and the narrative twists are just so much better. For example, one of the first set pieces occurs in the middle of a warzone with heavy weaponry scattered over the remains of a battlefield, and at the same time features a Cthulhu monster that you can't just take down by pumping bullets into it. To me "Two Headed Serpent" is everything that Masks should have been, but unfortunately if you want a non-pulp globe hopping campaign for antiquarians, detectives, and archaeologists solving problems that can't be solved by gunplay and martial arts then then it is not the campaign you are looking for.

To be honest, I am generally unhappy with most Coc scenarios. They don't deal with the sort of horror that I would want CoC to deal with, which is cosmic and philosophical, and with few exceptions have the PCs as assassins rather than scholars. Indeed, quite a few CoC scenarios feel like they would be better run as D&D and seem to expect a sort of Monte Haul campaign were players abuse published spells with low SAN loss and have a lot of optimized firepower like 10-gauge shotguns and Tommy Guns and just sort of wade through the monsters like a D&D party of murder hobos. What I really want to avoid is game that feel like the later books of Charles Stross's "Laundry" series, where the alien is made into not only the familiar, but the vehicle for ego tripping about gaining super-powers. The best "Laundry" stories remain the early ones, such as when we're viewpoint character racing across a dead landscape to close a door before we let in monsters that will eat our entire universe with literally no hope of resisting except to close the dang door.

However, while this is true I acknowledge that I have a hard time inventing the sort of scenarios that I want to have.