(warning: very mild spoilers for Masks of Nyarlathotep; if however you want to play Masks with me as Keeper, you shouldn't really read this)
Few published RPG campaigns can compare themselves with Masks of Nyarlathotep, the Call of Cthulhu campaign, in scope, structure, length and historical relevance.
In my long and fruitful career as a GM, I cannot really say I ran anything with such a large scope and length, except for Eternal Lies, which borrows openly and freely from it.
There is very little that anyone can write at this point about Masks that will sound completely new, because countless articles, forum posts, and campaign diaries have been written since 1984, the year in which it was first published. Nonetheless, I have quite some experience with the campaign, having run it three times, and with game-mastering in general, so I can imagine some people may be interested in my take.
When I started playing RPGs, in the beginning of the 90s, Masks was already a myth. After I had run my first two or three scenarios of Call of Cthulhu, and having read about Masks in an article in the French magazine Casus Belli, one of the few “eyes” I had into the world of RPGs at large from my small town in northern Portugal, I started dreaming about running what I knew to be a world-encompassing campaign with steadfast investigators fighting the horrible designs of Nyarlathotep.
Not knowing anything else about it, and not having either the money or a nearby shop where I could buy it, I eventually decided to make up my own Masks. I strung together a number of scenarios, combining those published in Casus Belli with others I made up myself. My story diverged immensely from Masks as I later came to know it. It was a story of seven cults of Nyarlathotep, each of which had buried a “live mummy” that would resurrect when the stars were right to open the way for Nyarlathotep. Yup, a pretty different campaign, I know. But such was the mystique of Masks that, simply by allusion, it inspired me to write my own globe-trotting campaign.
In any case, the university years came, and I started playing less and less Call of Cthulhu. A bit of Shadowrun and AD&D, and a massive dosage of Vampire: The Masquerade and Vampire: The Dark Ages got me through those years. It was also during that period that I came into contact with Lovecraft’s stories, which became a crucial inspiration for me. I read Lovecraft, wrote under Lovecraft’s influence, debated Lovecraft, and recommended Lovecraft to others.
Then I got my first job and moved to the Netherlands, and for some time stopped playing RPGs altogether, because I was uncomfortable playing in English, let alone Dutch. Nonetheless, I think it was in my first six months of working in the Netherlands, in 2000, that I found a copy of Masks of Nyarlathotep in a comic shop in the centre of Eindhoven.
By then I had enough money to buy as many books as I wanted, and I bought it on the spot, even knowing I didn’t have a group with whom to play. I started reading it with trepidation… and after some time, I started feeling underwhelmed.
As mentioned before, over the years I had become quite a fan of H. P. Lovecraft’s fiction (which was itself another adventure to gain access to), and I had become quite a purist cosmicist. I liked my Lovecraft as devoid of the concept of good and evil as possible: alien gods as truly alien, abstract, impossible to fathom, and impossible to reduce to a human scale or interpret within a human moral framework.
With all its structural sophistication and ambition (which I didn’t immediately recognize), Masks didn’t deliver any of that. Masks was pulpy, much more clearly about brave investigators fighting a losing battle against cults that were most definitely evil. Nyarlathotep, instead of an unknowable alien, was portrayed more like a blood-thirsty, moustache-twirling, petulant, super-powerful but oddly limited villain.
To come to terms with Masks, I needed to reconcile cosmic horror with this Nyarlathotep and, ultimately, accept why a long term campaign works better by introducing pulp elements.
Reconciling Nyarlathotep the Pulp Villain with Nyarlathotep the Cosmic Entity
At first sight, this portrayal of Nyarlathotep seems irreconcilable with the cosmic horror I valued so highly in Lovecraft’s fiction. The Crawling Chaos, after all, is not supposed to be a villain in any human sense. He is not driven by hatred, ambition, or even desire. He is an emissary, a force, a principle; an intelligence that interacts with humanity without sharing its values, scale, or moral coordinates.
And yet, over time, both as a reader and later as a GM, I came to see that this apparent contradiction can be resolved, provided one stops reading Nyarlathotep psychologically and starts reading him theatrically.
Nyarlathotep in Masks does not need to be understood as a god who is a moustache-twirling villain. He can instead be understood as a god who is intentionally playing a 1920s moustache-twirling villain.
Seen this way, his pettiness, cruelty, and theatrical excess are not limitations or humanizations, but part of the mask itself.
Nyarlathotep is the one Outer God who engages directly with humanity; who speaks, plots, deceives, and stages conflicts. His dramatic performance of villainy should be read diegetically: a cosmic entity deliberately adopting an intelligible role in order to manipulate and provoke humanity, and to amuse himself. The fact that this role looks exaggerated or pulpy from a human perspective does not make it less alien; it may, in fact, underline the gulf between human expectations of motive and whatever passes for intent at that scale.
From this perspective, the apparent moral framing of Masks, evil cultists, a scheming god, heroic resistance, does not fully domesticate cosmic horror. It overlays it. Beneath the pulp structure, Nyarlathotep’s goals remain opaque, his ultimate stakes unreadable, and the investigators’ victories are at best local and temporary. The god is not defeated; he is inconvenienced, diverted, or delayed and, at another level, entertained.
The way I play it as a GM is that Nyarlathotep uses the player characters to test the faith of his worshippers and, at the same time, to study the human capacity for abnegation, self-sacrifice, and striving against impossible odds. My Nyarlathotep can make a Bond-villain speech in the Chamber of Nyarlathotep in one moment, and later even create the conditions for the investigators to survive, simply to egg them on and see what happens next in the drama he has staged, with them as protagonists.
This reading allowed me to reconcile the Nyarlathotep of Masks with the Nyarlathotep of Lovecraft: not by denying the pulpy surface, but by treating it as a deliberate interface, a role adopted by something fundamentally unconcerned with human categories of good and evil.
The Indiana Jones Connection
Masks was also clearly influenced by Indiana Jones, with all the travelling and exotic locations. This is not surprising in a campaign that came out in 1984—the first Indiana Jones film is from 1981.
To be honest, that was much to my liking when I first read it: Temple of Doom is one of my favourite movies ever, and its darker tone seemed a perfect fit with Masks.
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom is also a great inspiration for the palette of emotions and tones that Masks as a campaign should elicit: pulp at times, silly and even childish at times, heroic and hopeful at others—but punctuated by moments of core, frightening darkness, where one glimpses the horrible pits of despair in which humanity is nothing but prey to what moves in the dark.
An uninterrupted experience of bleak cosmic horror cannot sustain a long-running RPG campaign—nobody can endure 200 hours of uninterrupted bleakness.But this multi-coloured tonal palette can, especially when powered by an interpretation of Nyarlathotep as a theatrical cosmic entity rather than a purely abstract one.
In any case, I read through the campaign and started to appreciate its neat, clean, and ambitious structure as a “sandbox of sandboxes,” as well as the degree of freedom it gave players by allowing them to choose the order in which to tackle cult chapters. I was initially confused by the lack of an actual plot in the various chapters. During the 90s, we grew accustomed to scenarios and campaigns with predefined, linear plots. Masks offers nothing like this. Each chapter details what investigating each local clue triggers. Otherwise, each chapter presents a number of NPCs (with agendas) and locations. It is up to the players to decide how to navigate these NPCs and locations.
Here and there, there is an NPC who will drive a certain amount of plot—i.e., trigger sequences of events. But overall, the campaign still gives an impressive amount of freedom to players and GM alike to move around at their own volition. That the locations and NPCs are, in themselves, captivating and unforgettable seals the deal.
I only managed to finally run Masks around 2014 or so. This was because my group in Eindhoven (which I started, I think, in 2010) consisted mostly of experienced players who had all but one already played Masks, and because I knew that preparation would take a long time.
At the time of writing (January 2026) I have run Masks three times. Each run took about two years of weekly sessions, which probably amounts to more than 600 hours of play in total. Each run was unique and unforgettable. There are moments in those campaigns that will stay with me forever.
For players, the campaign creates a wide range of situations in which characters must make life-or-death decisions, and it allows for many different approaches to tackling mysteries and adversities. Each chapter feels unique and has an almost mythical quality to it. As a GM, what I love about it is how much it does for me while still allowing me to improvise a large number of situations. Moreover, having to “move the pieces”, that is, to develop the agendas of the villains, is both challenging and fun. The way most NPCs and chapters are designed makes it easy for player characters to become organically invested in personal stakes related to the campaign.
Is Masks the ultimate RPG campaign? It is certainly one of the best, especially if you are looking for mysteries, heroic adventure, drama, and horror all bundled together. The closest I know to it is the excellent Eternal Lies for Trail of Cthulhu, which is no surprise, as Eternal Lies was designed to follow the general structure of Masks.
As this article was becoming too long, I separated it in two. The next one will be my take on how to run Masks successfully.
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