After America, the investigators are expected to travel the world to all the places Jackson Elias noted he went to in search of the Carlyle Expedition. The most common route the investigators take is London to Cairo to Kenya to Shanghai, the path Roger Carlyle took. However, the groups are free to go to these locations in any order. Keepers should be aware of this and make sure they end their last session in America with the group deciding where in the world they’re going to next. If not, the Keeper will have to improvise from the 666-page Masks of Nyarlathotep campaign double book set. In that case, the Keeper will be the one making the sanity checks.
My group followed the prescribed course set out by Elias and journeyed to London. One of the first steps in London is the Penhew Foundation, run by Edward Gavigan. Gavigan is in charge of a cult in England, and will turn out to be the villain of this chapter. He and his followers abduct people who won’t be missed and people who get in his way and take them to a country house where they’re sacrificed during a horrific ritual.
More to the reason the investigators visit Gavigan is that he’s the known point of contact of the Carlyle Expedition in London. The Foundation arranged for the proper papers, hiring of laborers and gear for the archaeological dig in Egypt for the Carlyle Expedition. Most of what the investigators learn will help them navigate the plot threads and bureaucracy of contacting people involved in Egyptian archaeology.
Masks is a long
game campaign. Players need to learn things in one country that will not pay off dividends until a country or two later. This reinforces the need for there to be at least one experienced note taker to make it possible to make it through this campaign.
Some Keepers, myself included to a degree, may take on the attitude that the characters are more knowledgeable and perceptive about the events going on in their investigations than the players. The players should be reminded what their characters would automatically know.
Anyway, Gavigan may get suspicious of the investigators questioning him. If he gets too suspicious, such as if he catches the group tailing him, he can summon a creature that exists in a supernaturally-formed fog. This creature is very hard to hit and is one of the first direct threats the group may have to contend with.
One of the highlights of the England chapter is a side quest gained from a news article found in a London paper. It involves a talented up and coming artist who makes nightmarish paintings collectors pay a fortune for. The investigators should get around to paying this artist a visit and seeing if he’s connected to the main plot. At the door, the group is met by what seems to be the artist’s grandmother. She isn’t. She’s a snake person who consumed the grandmother and wears her skin as a disguise. Using her Cthulhu Mythos-enhanced mind, she guides the young artist into creating Mythos-inspired paintings.
The masterpiece-in-progress is a painting that works as a portal, showing a picture of the Permian Age. The swamp waters in the painting start to ripple. The serpents near the altar begin to writhe. Characters who fail a Hard Power roll are sucked into the painting into Earth’s ancient past and need to find a way back to the present, which would be an alternate campaign beyond the scope of the material presented in Masks. Then, the remaining characters need to deal with the unhinged artist and the man-eating grandmother.
Investigations lead to the Blue Pyramid Club, a lounge with an Egyptian theme. A belly dancer who works there, Yalesha, reaches out to the investigators for help. Her boyfriend, Badru, has recently gone missing. He was taken by Gavigan’s cult and sacrificed.
Gavigan wasn’t the original leader of the cult. His boss went off with the Carlyle Expedition and vanished. Gavigan was a lieutenant in the cult, along with a woman named Zahra Shafik, a practitioner in Mythos magic. Shafik can be met in the Blue Pyramid Club or during other paths the investigation may take. Depending on the actions of the group, she may try to kill them, or she might try to recruit them to take out Gavigan, with the motive of taking over the cult.
After Yalesha delivers a ton of exposition to the investigators, cult members attack. If things don’t go well, they abduct Yalesha and plan to sacrifice her in the next ritual at the country house.
Now there’s a race against time to discover the truth about the cult, Gavigan’s connections to it and the location of its base of operations. From there, it’s a dungeon crawl through the country house property, battling cultists and possibly taking sides with Shafik or Gavigan.
Since we played the game in Pulp mode, the investigators had plenty of hit points and some of them had high combat stats, so the attack on the country house wasn’t much of a threat. It made for a fun night’s gaming but didn’t offer the threat it would for standard mode investigators.
From there, after a lot of gathering clues in London that won’t pay off for months of game play to come, the team set out to see what can be learned in the deserts of Cairo. There, the group experienced death amongst their numbers and found a mighty cathedral built to honor the Elder God. In fact, they came face to face with Nyarlathotep.
But we’ll talk about that next time…
