The Stars Are Right! Investigation time again!

Ye Olde Cthulhu Bookes!

Change of plans.

I had originally planned to run the new D&D 5e Curse of Strahd set in Ravenloft next, but after some thinking and discussion with my players I’ve decided to postpone 5e in favor of some Call of Cthulhu goodness!

So, next up after we wrap up our adventures in the Lost Lands from Frog God Games, will be the mega-classic world spanning Masks of Nyarlahotep (MoN).

This is something that I have been looking forward to since the early 1990s. Back then, a gamer buddy had recommended MoN as one of the best Call of Cthulhu adventures he had ever played and I was on the hunt for a new CoC campaign as my group had recently finished Spawn of Azathoth and I was now running shorter adventures in Lovecraft Country.

Sadly I couldn’t find the elusive box set anywhere. It was very out of print and back then there was no internet, no ebay and certainly no PDF versions of old game books. I scoured the game shops in the area but to no avail. However, my favourite FLGS had a copy of the then brand new mega-campaign Horror on the Orient Express which I purchased instead and which we played in various constellations for about one and a half year before our group split up due to life. By then we had managed to get as far as to the beginning of the Sofia chapter. In 2011, I decided to reboot the campaign and we finished it after a 17-year hiatus thanks to the slightly deranged in-character notes of one of my players in the guise of Dr. Franz N Schwein, parapsychologist (I wrote a post about it here).

Also, back in 2010-11 I finally got hold of the limited edition reprint of the Complete Masks of Nyarlahotep and it has been sitting there on my game shelf begging for attention since then.

Well, now the Stars Are Right and I have started preparations for the game. I also have the MoN Companion draft that was released for free some years ago and will probably pad out the already massive campaign with some side adventures from other sources.

I will run this adventure in a pulpy style, much reminescent of Indiana Jones and The Mummy, which is the style my group prefers. And by the way, one of my players is a bona fide archaeologist who’s specialized in egyptology. How cool is that when they reach Cairo?

There’s also lots of cool extra MoN stuff to be found on the internets: movies, game trailers, beautiful handouts, maps and good advice on running this classic, which I will cover in a later post. And play session reports/recaps will be posted over at our group’s WordPress site. When we played Horror on the Orient Express I used Obsidian Portal, but I have since switched over to WordPress in combination with file sharing via DropBox. Much cheaper and works equally well.

And finally, I will stick to my beloved 6th edition rules. They can pry my old CoC books from my SAN 0 hands…;) Refuse! Resist!

(Yeah, I know – I will probably succumb and get the new pretty 7th ed rules at some point, but not now…)