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

Nothing satisfies like an extreme success, right? Players certainly get a thrill from that extra piercing damage pinning the looming cultist to the wall, but if you ask me, die for die, nothing gets everyone at the table roleplay mileage like a glorious failure.  Let me explain. We tabletop gamers often view our dice as binary win/loss generators. Sometimes they grace us with extra big wins. But when they “fail” us we tend to look at it as an emotional disappointment. We threaten to throw them away, grind them into dust or replace them with a new set. Alternatively, Keepers can encourage our players away from this mindset. A dice “failure” needn’t necessarily be a

Read on…Failure is Fun!

So, back to those players. Your first organizational task will be assembling your team of intrepid investigators. These folks need to be aware this isn’t a casual campaign. It’s a time commitment…that is if they intend to see it to completion. Due to the length of the campaign, it is not uncommon for players to drift in and out, which can work well with the range of international settings (we’ll discuss this in future content). When enlisting my current round of Investigators, we were upfront about the time commitment and depth of MoN. We made it clear they would not be held hostage by the campaign, and if they ever lost interest they were free

Read on…Assembling the Team