Last night, I think my Masks of Nyarlathotep campaign wrapped up. I’m not entirely sure, though, so I’m going to talk it out. Obviously, I’m going to be open about the campaign’s secrets, so if you’re playing Masks, or thinking about playing Masks, don’t be a knucklehead: stop reading.

This is the third time I’ve run Masks, but the first time using the revised seventh edition, which I think contributed to some unusual decisions from my players. I’m going to run those down, then lay out my thinking about Nyarlathotep’s motives and then explain how the game ended. I am sure this isn’t going to bring me any clarity, but what the heck, worth a shot. Maybe it will help future Keepers figure some of this stuff out.

After a stage-setting prologue in Peru, the campaign begins in earnest with the murder of Jackson Elias, who is a friend of the player characters. The immediate motivation is to bring his murderer to justice, but once that is accomplished, it’s clear a larger conspiracy is afoot. The next stop is almost always going to be England, if for no other reason then to find the person who ordered the killing of Elias. This also follows the path of the “doomed” Carlyle Expedition, which Elias was investigating and whose activities have big repercussions for the entire campaign. Though the game is designed as a sandbox, the way the clues thread together typically means players go to Cairo after England, then Kenya, then wrap things up in suitably pulpy fashion in Shanghai (the Australia chapter, cut from the original release for space, was and remains an awkward addendum to the main arc).

My group didn’t follow this path. Material new to England in the seventh edition (Henderson manufacturing and its weird fossilized machine parts) made Shanghai a priority. There, they met Jack Brady, the last living and sane member of the Carlyle expedition, who is full of information and is determined to violently dismantle the work of his former colleagues. He’s great for driving players to an explosive campaign climax, but meeting him in the middle kind of changed the vibe of subsequent chapters from investigation to assassination. From Shanghai, they went to Australia fully intending to find and kill Dr. Huston, and when they went to Cairo after that, they knew how to operate without alerting the cult.

I should stress that this wasn’t a walk in the park. The difference between victory and a full party wipe in England came down to a single die roll. The entire group did technically die in the explosion/volcanic eruption at the end of Shanghai, and only half the investigators stuck in the time loop in Australia survived (I have no idea at this point whether the time loop is a canon option or a Stu Horvath Special™, but I am not stopping to look it up).

This path also had the consequence of eliminating all of the European and American cult leaders. I have always seen the Carlyle group as interlopers effectively colonizing indigenous groups as a means to their own ends. There are implied tensions between the new Westerners and the old guard high priests in the original text, but this is made explicit in the seventh edition, particularly in England, where open conflict between Edward Gavigan and Zahra Shafik is all but inevitable. In my game, Zahra offered to help the players kill Gavigan and used explicitly anti-imperialist language to convince them to partner up. These sorts of colonial tensions then loomed over events in Shanghai and Australia, and were bound to crop up in Cairo shortly, if things had gone differently.

As I said, those tensions are, depending on the edition, either explicit or highly implicit in the text. Which begs the question: what on earth is Nyarlathotep even doing?

Of all the unknowable cosmic deities Lovecraft came up with, Nyarlathotep is…kind of knowable. He’s the most human, has human guises, delights in fucking with us. He has a thousand forms and has cults all over the world. He’s a trickster god, ostensibly working to open the way to his less sane brethren, but I am not convinced. I personally think Nyarlathotep is terribly bored and the idea of a cosmos with out humanity to mess with is the thing he wants least. He’s clearly beyond good and evil, but that doesn’t stop him from being chaotic. Chaos is the only way to explain why he elevated the Carlyle group to positions of power and then allows the players to systematically purge them when they are on the verge of shaking up the cosmic order. He schemes for the sake of scheming, and doesn’t really care if the schemes work, and probably doesn’t want them to.

This is an entity that has allowed one of his greatest servants, Queen Nitocris, lay in a tomb for centuries only to start the byzantine process of her resurrection now that a group of people who are ideally equipped to stop the process are snooping around. Check this out; these are the facts of the campaign as written. The magic items necessary for Nitocris’ ritual resurrection are left in the Great Chamber of Nyarlathotep, in a secret tunnel system under the great pyramids. This is left largely unguarded most of the time, because the complex is secret and scary. But Nyarlathotep has directed the Clive Expedition to a previously unknown burial chamber in one of the pyramids, where Nitocris’ body was interred. This causes a public stir, which increases when the cult magically transports the sarcophagus to the Great Chamber below, to the consternation of the antiquities authorities. Conveniently, there is a secret door to the tunnels nearby. All of this is a big flashing neon sign for the investigators to investigate. Nyarlathotep knew where she was buried! He could have moved that coffin whenever he wanted without making headlines! But he didn’t.

And my players took the bait, found their way to the Great Chamber in the middle of a Tuesday, pocketed the resurrection items and were about to leave when things started to get dicey. After some fighting with Children of the Sphinx, they retreated to the weird black hole in the wall at the back of the chamber and stood there a while before they thought about Nyarlathotep and were magically transported to his throne room, 20 miles to the south, in the upper room of the Bent Pyramid.

I knew they were going to wind up there because the idea of fighting their way out of the tunnels was just not something this group was keen on. The meeting between Nyarlathotep and the players is outlined in the book and is kind of a fulcrum point in a typical run of Masks. It’s also…really fucking hard. The Keeper has to sell Nyarlathotep as terrifying and cool and majestic, all of which is naturally undercut in the fiction by his willingness to even show up and talk to these rubes (mitigated somewhat by the fact that it is likely that one of the players has sat on his throne and is possessed by the god, who speaks through them). And undercut further by the fact that if I’m talking for Nyarlathotep, he seems to be from New Jersey.

The seventh edition gives some guidance. It suggests having Nyarlathotep offer the players their hearts desires. I think this comes from a position of bribery in the text, and you’re meant to monkey’s paw these deals, should the players take them. I kind of saw it differently. In this game, I thought Nyarlathotep was making a genuine offer. He isn’t trying to protect his other schemes. He doesn’t really care about them, and has hundreds more besides that the players don’t know about. They’ve thoroughly dismantled all the Carlyle group plans as well as Omar Shakti’s move to resurrect Nitocris, and it is arguable the Nyarlathotep wants it that way. They’ve been entertaining. So, he offers. A magic door opens. All you need to do is walk through and what you want will be yours.

Except, neither me, nor Nyarlathotep said anything, and I think that is part of why what happened, happened. In order to not have Nyarlathotep be from New Jersey, and since we were playing online, I got a little creative. I put a cool picture of Nyarlathotep on the board – an N. J. Culbard portrait overlaid on the original illustration of the throne room, used here as the header image – and had my pal Connor whip up some horrible sound effects (thank you Connor!). The idea was that when Nyarlathotep speaks, you feel it in your chest, like vibrating bass, but you hear a cacophony of horns, static, screams, modem connections and similar. His words appear in your mind. So, I didn’t talk them, I typed them onto the screen. This eliminated any vocal cues and clues, and let the words linger far longer than they would in the air. I expected this to awe the group somewhat, and convey a sense of imminence and grandeur. I think it did? But I did not expect it to do so to the extent that every player decided to take the offered bargain.

Truly, I expected them to turn Nyarlathotep down. He’d get petulant. He’d threaten them, tell them to go home, to await the coming end. I had this whole argument laid out where Nyarlathotep positions himself as a liberator, enticing the players with the idea that in his New World he’d hand the whip to the oppressed to use on their former oppressors (a la Ring Shout). Maybe it would build to a fight. Maybe they’d all die. I really did think that there was a chance of an ending coming out of this, but I didn’t expect this one. Every character took the offer (except poor Geraldine, who sat in the chair and was the conduit and burned to ash after the others went through to their rewards) and narrated their heart’s desires, even though they were all convinced the other shoe was going to drop.

But it didn’t drop. Two weeks later, Nyarlathotep appears in their dreams and tells them the world is safe for five generations, that the players, and their descendants, get to sleep in peace. For a while. But that Chaos will come eventually, because it is inevitable.

And I think that’s it. I think Nyarlathotep neutralized all these foes by giving them what they wanted, and by accepting it, they sullied their purest dreams. I think horror RPGs are hard to pull off, because when we’re at the table, we want to have fun, but somehow, we delivered a solid Feels Bad ending that surprised everyone? That I am still struggling to process? That is heavy with so much thematic weight that I think I will be mulling it for a long time?

What a strange hobby this is.