Remember yesterday when I said that Masks of Nyarlathotep requires a lot of support work from the Keeper? A lot of that comes from the fact that the original didn’t have space to flesh out encounters and NPCs in a way that would support the person running the game. A lot of sections are also  left open-ended or lead outside of the campaign, which can be daunting.

Because of this, and the never ending enthusiasm for the campaign (I am not alone!), some folks on Yog-Sothoth.com, a forum devoted to all things Lovecraftian roleplaying, set about collecting material to fill in the blanks and generally help the Keeper run the damn thing. The result was the Masks of Nyarlathotep Companion, which went through a series of expansions before a successful Kickstarter. This is the hardcover “Sandbat” edition, printed by Sixty-Stone Press in a run of 150 copies for Chaosium (there are other editions, but I am unclear on the differences). It runs an astounding 763 pages – that’s more than 500 pages more than the complete campaign!

I have never heard of a RPG campaign that inspired a project like this. It is massive and exhaustive and exhausting and there is so much love and deep thought on display here I find it staggering. There are extra scenarios, NPCs, tons of historical info, detailed fleshing out of every book and artifact found in the course of the game, top down reappraisals of each chapter and more. It is a complete deconstruction and reconfiguring of the source material. And it still manages to leave some questions.

They were on to something. Chaosium used some of the ideas in the Companion – a prelude chapter in Peru, a funeral and a seance – in the 2018 edition of the campaign to great effect.