Answering the Call...of Cthulhu!

Last weekend we finally got started on a role-playing game campaign that has been in the works for literal years: The Masks of Nyarlathotep, a legendary campaign for the venerable Call of Cthulhu system.

By venerable, I mean the gaming system for pitting hapless mortal investigators against the machinations of H.P. Lovecraft's other-worldly horrors has been around almost as long as Dungeons & Dragons itself, and is currently in its 7th edition.

I remember my friend Dave dismissing the appeal of the game when we were in high school: "Oh yeah, you and your elbow-patched academics in the middle of Prohibition, grabbing a tommy-gun to fight off Yog-Sothoth or whatever? Hard pass!" And for years, I shared that opinion - my love of a fair fight precluded my interest in such a paradigm, and I only had a middling interest in Lovecraft's works anyhow.

But while visiting my friend Jim in Calgary - three years ago I think - he described how the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society had commissioned a radio play based on one of Chaosium's most popular adventures, the aforementioned Masks, and gave me an MP3 so I could listen to it on my drive home to Edmonton.

I had three of the eight one-hour episodes under my belt by the time I got home and listened to the rest in very short order, and felt myself really drawn into this tale of a largely random group of people drawn into battle with a global cult trying to destroy the world. The fact that this audio adaptation had great voice acting with period-appropriate musical cues and tremendously produced commercials ("the only toothpaste with radium) only added to my enjoyment.

This of course piqued my interest in perhaps running this campaign myself, once we wrapped up The Tyranny of Dragons, anyways. Everything I read about Masks of Nyarlathotep suggested an enormous and challenging (for both the player and game master) story with a scale incomparable to almost anything else. Almost every list of best adventures published for any system includes Masks somewhere in the top five, and there have been five different editions of it published since the first one in 1986; like I said: venerable.

Call of Cthulhu is a horror RPG, and maintaining the necessary atmosphere in an online game seemed impossibly difficult to me. Besides, the game makes extensive use of marvelously produced player handouts - posters, letters, newspaper clippings and book pages - so I asked the local G&Geeks what they thought, and they were keen on the idea. So much so, in fact, that they split the cost with me for the deluxe slipcase edition of Masks, with 666 pages of adventure, plus a special Keeper's screen and 97 handouts for the players! 

Then I came across the Gamer Prop Set for the campaign by the HPLHS, the same people who produced the radio drama; clippings and full broadsheets printed on actual newsprint! Torn out notebook pages! Period maps, cardstock flyers and a physical matchbox! I mentioned it to the players more as a point of interest, but their ultimate response was "why the heck wouldn't we split the cost on this as well?"

And so we jumped in with both feet, and the box came in June, more than two years after I floated the idea to the group, which was a year after a chance encounter with a fake radio drama. And last weekend we finally got to play!

We had gotten together over the summer to play a few one-shots with pre-made characters, then spent a couple of evenings this fall getting everyone a proper player character (and a back-up character - Call of Cthulhu is legendarily fatal!) so we could get stuck right in to it.

In the first evening of play, we unraveled a bit of the story, and I got to show the players a few of the props I had been provided:

The clipping which drew several of the players to Peru

The telegram welcoming them to the expedition

A gorgeous map of Peru

The coins (bought separately) used as tokens to reward good role-playing

We are still getting our feet wet, and scheduling remains the greatest challenge to any type of consistent group gaming, but I feel we are off to a great start. My fears about the unlevel playing field have given way to the real potential for dramatic storytelling and heroism within a system both incredibly asymmetric and unbelievably unforgiving. It is not a system or adventure I would have really been ready to enjoy before I was probably in my mid-thirties. And so far everyone is keen and intrigued, even without a single combat roll in 4-5 hours of play!

Which is good, because the amount of material (and the experience of those who have completed it) suggests that playing twice a month or so will likely see our Masks campaign wrap up in 2025!