“Evil-Eye Fleegle is th’ name, an’ th’ ‘whammy’ is my game. Mudder Nature endowed me wit’ eyes which can putrefy citizens t’ th’ spot!. There is th’ ‘single whammy’! That, friend, is th’ full, pure power o’ one o’ my evil eyes! It’s dynamite, friend, an’ I do not t’row it around lightly!” Quoted from Lil’ Abner, July 1951 In speaking with some MoN players deep into their campaigns, we have heard that despite how much they love the experience, a sense of rote tedium emerges through the almost mechanical process of collecting clues and interviewing NPCs. You may hear this yourself, particularly when playing a deeply investigative version of MoN.  This does not reflect

Read on…The Whammy

On April 19th, 1919, The Carlyle Expedition departed London for Cairo. On Friday, March 18, 1921, the Investigators first met daring author Jackson Elias. By December 16, 1924, Jackson wired Jonah Kensington from London before returning the following day to New York. Finally, on Thursday, January 15, 1925, your Investigators took that one small step into Jackson’s Chelsea Hotel room and a giant leap forward into a dizzying world of clues and conspiracy.  Your players’ foray into the main campaign happens nearly six years after the ill-fated Carlyle Expedition formally gets underway. And the dates listed above? Just a small sample of those in the MoN timeline. To effectively guide our players through the intricacies

Read on…Campaign Time Keeping & Tracking

Prospective MoN Keepers scouring the Internet for advice on how to run their first campaign will come upon extensive praise for the Masks of Nyarlathotep Companion. This richly detailed, fan-produced 763-page guide drew from the extensive collective experience of Yog-Sothoth.com (YSDC) members and deserves all the accolades and recommendations you will find across forums and social media; however, the physical book arrived in 2017, just a year before the release of MoN 5th edition, as well as CoC 7th edition. The authors of this latest MoN edition revised and expanded a good deal of the content published for the campaign. Due to their attentive and detailed work, the 5th edition team supplanted some of the

Read on…Should I Be Using the Masks Companion?

Now, if you saw my desk right now at the Prospero offices you would immediately discount any opinion I might hold on the topic of organization, but I beseech you for a bit of leeway here. Maybe I should just put it this way: if I can organize and run MoN amid these piles of papers, typewriter ribbons, and ink stains, so can you.  After your initial pass through the campaign books, you can begin your preparation in earnest, which will naturally include reviewing and preparing the first chapter or scenario you will be running for the campaign. Playing TTRPGs in our digital age offers a wide variety of tools to facilitate organization. While Keepers

Read on…Getting Organized – Suggested Keeper Tools

Conventional wisdom among Keepers for years about Masks of Nyarlathotep, as well as any grand scope TTRPG campaign, strongly suggests (sometimes demands) that prospective Keepers read the entire campaign from cover to cover once, if not several times, before getting players to the table. We won’t argue that more familiarity with and mastery of the material will increase your comfort level before you jump into the campaign; however, many of us may not have the time or patience to plow through the current edition’s 666 pages before getting things underway. We take the position that the latest version of MoN provides you with a user-friendly layout and focused material to cut a more direct path

Read on…Reading the Whole Campaign Before Starting – Do I Have To?

You can’t make the shots you don’t take. And you can’t land the crits you don’t roll. Keepers will hear this all the time, “my [fill in the blank skill] is only 5%, I’m not going to bother.” But wait, why not? Aren’t players supposed to love rolling dice? Sure, it’s unlikely to succeed, but when it does your entire table may remember it as a resounding success and a fun campaign moment. Trust me, even those clutch extreme Accounting rolls. You can facilitate this fun in several ways and might be something you want to bring up during Session Zero and remind your players about during your sessions. Instead of overtly asking your players

Read on…Of Hail Marys & Full-Court Shots