(This article contains relatively minor spoilers for Masks of Nyarlathotep. If you intend to play the campaign with me as a GM, you should probably stop reading here.)
In a previous article, I explored why Masks of Nyarlathotep works as a long-form campaign despite the tension between cosmic horror and pulp adventure. This piece is the practical counterpart to that reflection.
I first managed to run the campaign around 2014, once I had a stable group of experienced players in Eindhoven and the time to commit to proper preparation. Since then, I have run Masks three times. Each run lasted roughly two years of weekly sessions, amounting to well over 600 hours of play in total.
Across those runs, certain patterns became clear: what keeps a group engaged over years rather than months, what tends to derail campaigns of this scale, and which choices, both in preparation and at the table, make the difference between a campaign that endures and one that collapses.
So, without further ado, here are my most hard-earned tips on how to run Masks of Nyarlathotep.
Commitment
Masks is really long; both GM and players need to be ready to play for about two years. This is why you should generally avoid creating groups of random players to run Masks, you really need long-term commitment.
Survivability
Characters shouldn’t come and go through a revolving door. Cthulhu characters are very vulnerable (aka squishy) if you play strictly by the rules, so I give them something like an “extra life”, in a way inspired by the Pulp Cthulhu rules.
Once during the campaign, I allow characters to spend all their Luck (minimum 30 points) to escape certain death. Moreover, I allow each character to take two Pulp powers, and Luck recovery is handled as in Pulp Cthulhu. Characters still die but you get a much more stable cast.
Be generous on how you allow characters to recover sanity. In particular, I discovered that recovery of sanity lost to a monster type by killing of a monster of that type works very well.
Also, allow extra sanity recovery during travel.
Vary the Tone Deliberately
As mentioned in my previous article about Masks, desperate cosmic bleakness cannot sustain player engagement over 200+ hours of play. A campaign of this length must vary in tone.
My main inspiration here is Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. Alternate moments of bleak darkness with hopeful and heroic adventure, as well as mystery. Masks actively supports this approach, because each chapter carries a distinct tonal identity, and you can and should lean into that.
Moreover, as the players accumulate knowledge about how the cult, its sorcerers, and its monsters operate, and as the characters themselves become more capable, through improved skills, learned spells, and the acquisition of magical artifacts (something made more likely if you follow my advice on survivability), the tone will naturally shift. Mystery and horror gradually give way to action and adventure. Lean into this progression.
Each chapter also has a markedly unique flavour, and, in my experience, players do choose an order of exploration that allows a natural progression (the order is also conditioned by distance: if London is the first location, Egypt and Kenya follow naturally as they are natural stops on the way by ship to China and Australia).
- England/London is paranoid and mysterious, full of shadows, half-answers, and unseen threats, but under a veil of social convention and propriety;
- Egypt remains paranoid, but violence becomes more overt, and the supernatural harder to ignore;
- Kenya escalates further: violence is brutal and barely concealed. The cult operates almost freely in some ares;
- Australia is wide, wild, and lonely, before suddenly turning into an archaeology of Earth’s pre-human past, with a distinct dungeon-crawl feel.
- China often feels like a gangster war that evolves into a military operation, whether stealthy or overt depending entirely on the players’ approach.
In every chapter, there is a moment where the cosmic horror breaks through. But for long stretches, the campaign is about investigation, exploration, and bursts of action. The relations between the investigators (again thanks to increased survivability), and between investigators and allied NPCs, will also introduce a much needed human relational element.
This tonal evolutions are not a flaw or a betrayal of cosmic horror. They are what allows the campaign to breathe, escalate, and remain playable over years of real time.
Accurate historical setting
The setting is very rich, and as a GM you should dive into it. I watched collections of videos from the period for each location in the campaign, and I tried to read both fiction written at the time and place, as well as non-fiction about that time and place. You don’t need to be 100% accurate in your depiction, 50% would already be great, but if you try, something of it will come through and make your campaign feel far more immersive. Not to mention that you may even learn a thing or two.
Lean into your players’ emotions toward NPCs
Some NPCs became recurring villains simply because of the sheer hatred players developed for them. In the same way, some NPCs, some of them invented on the spot to fill a function, became long-term supporting cast. A surviving cult leader from one chapter can always appear in another chapters to seek revenge on the player characters.
In two out of three of my runs, a head cultist in England was clearly particularly hated by the players because of his arrogance and sense of superiority. They tried to kill him a couple of times but failed to. They eventually decided to leave England without defeating him. He became a recurring villain, appearing in two other chapters as a "visiting" cultist. By the end of the campaigns, I got the impression some players were more invested in killing him than in saving the world.
Allow players to switch characters creatively
A wounded or temporarily insane character can be an opportunity for a player to temporarily play another character, a guide, an assistant, or a friend of the group while the main character recovers from wound and traume. This allows for cast variety while preserving cast stability.
Also, if in a particular situation it doesn't make sense for one or more characters to be present, please do allow them to play different characters. One such case is a military or police raid, where the players can take the role of a soldier or police officer instead of their usual characters.
Evolve revisited chapters
In the way the campaign is designed, chapters can be revisited, but you should make it such that locations have changed the second time around, to avoid repetition, and make the world feel lived. After interacting with hostile investigators, the cult would prepare itself.
This means that as the GM you will need to evolve those locations. For example, after the group fought the cult in Australia, they went to the China chapter and later returned to Australia to eradicate the cult. Not only it would be unrealistic for the cult not to change its defences after an incursion that killed several cultists, it would be, from a game perspective, very boring to raid the exact same locations again. Thus, by the time the investigators returned to Australia, the cult leader had moved to a different base and adopted a very different strategy to protect himself and the cult from meddlesome investigators (and specifically, those investigators).
Keep it short and focused
This may sound odd in the context of a 200+ hour campaign spanning five continents and six geographical regions, but I do mean it. I see the internet rife with GMs explaining how to add additional content to Masks and wonder why.
I, on the other hand, excised from the campaign side quests that didn’t contribute to the main storyline. Masks covers an immense amount of ground and requires strong motivation to keep characters and players engaged. From a motivational perspective, adding more existential threats can only make the fight feel more hopeless. Stopping Nyarlathotep is a lifetime endeavour, but it only makes sense if humanity is not simultaneously assailed by other apocalyptic forces.
And if you add threats that are not of the same magnitude of Nyarlathotep, then what is the point? I love me some video RPGs, but what always feels odd, be it in Baldur’s gate or Final Fantasy, is when you interrupt your quest to save the world to carry out some minor, pointless side quest. It weakens the premise of the campaign, it weakens the sense of urgency, and adds very little. By all means follow up any threats that grow within the fiction. In one of my campaigns, three of the head cultists joined forces in a pilgrimage of destruction through Africa that requires the investigator’s attention, but adding purely alien elements to it should be done extremely sparingly.
In the same vein, you have a certain tendency for players and Keepers alike to fixate on having "good" gods help them in their quest against Nyarlathotep. In the campaign as written, there is one Goddess at war with big N, and that is Bast. I however narrow her participation mostly to Egypt (although I let her priestess once become a player character which was both fun and slightly OP). Further than that, I avoid any participations of other Gods, either as allies or enemies of Nyarlathotep. Because the more of this you do, the less the story is the story of the investigators fighting a powerful cult against of odds, and the more it is about a metaplot of a war in heaven. It weakens cosmicism, makes the gods more readable and human.
Furthermore, the more elements you add to the campaign, the harder it becomes to present a consistent and plausible cosmogony. Which is really important if you do not want to break immersion.
Finally, given the length of the campaign, distractions can easily lead to its premature end. There is only so much time you can realistically keep a group of people together, focused on a goal, playing a game, and two years is already a lot. Many personal circumstances change in two years. People change jobs, get married, have children. They may no longer be available for a weekly game session.
So avoid sidequests and avoid divine escalation. Keep the campaign as long as it needs to be, but not longer.
Using Nyarlathotep
In the previous article, I explained how I had to reconcile Cosmic Nyarlathotep with Pulp Villain Nyarlathotep.
In Masks, most manifestations of Nyarlathotep should be as the pulp villain: theatrical, cruel, mocking, and openly antagonistic. This is the face the investigators come to recognise, tied to cult leaders, rituals, confrontations, and grand threats. Players need this version. It gives shape to the opposition and keeps the campaign moving.
However, from time to time, you can allow a different Nyarlathotep to surface, the cosmic entity, the one that is harder to read, harder to place, and deliberately ambiguous.
This Nyarlathotep does not gloat or threaten. He appears obliquely, a stranger with an ironic tone, a well-dressed man who knows too much, someone who warns the investigators of an ambush without explaining why.
The key is intent without confirmation.
The way I play this is that Nyarlathotep occasionally intervenes to rebalance the game. He is not helping the investigators out of mercy or preference. He is using them. The investigators are a tool to test his cults, to push them, to see whether they can overcome meaningful opposition. A cult that wins without resistance is uninteresting. A cult that survives pressure proves its worth.
From this perspective, success or failure only matters insofar as it reveals strength.
But this must be handled with extreme subtlety.
If the players become certain that their main foe is helping them, the spell is broken. Nyarlathotep should never confirm his role, never explain his motives, never acknowledge that he has intervened. His actions should always remain deniable, interpretable as coincidence, manipulation by other forces, or sheer bad luck for the cultists.
Used this way, Nyarlathotep remains both playable and cosmic, present enough to matter, alien enough to resist understanding, and dangerous precisely because his apparent interventions may serve goals no one at the table can fully see.
Moreover, you now have a diegetic pretext for dramatic twists and turns.
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