Impossible Landscapes (2021). What a hammer blow to the skull.

So, I like the King in Yellow, but not in the same way I enjoy the Cthulhu Mythos. I really enjoy Chambers’ original stories but wind up liking the idea of a broader Yellow King mythology rather than the execution, particularly in fiction and especially since the King has been incorporated into the larger Cthulhu Mythos. It just…never seems as good or as weird as the original stories.

And then there is Impossible Landscapes. Holy crap. OK, so, the core of the campaign draws from several King in Yellow-themed shorts stories by John Tynes (the original Pagan Publishing EIC and one of the key originators of Delta Green). I’ve never read those stories, but man, the campaign they build. It is so good. It is one of the best campaigns I’ve ever read, a total head trip for the reader, a mind fuck for the players, a recursive nightmare for occult conspiracy theorists that perpetually winds and unwinds. I was dying to run it as soon as I read the first page. A tour de force. A real humdinger.  

It is massive. It provides endless ways to mess with your players, either all at once, or broken up with other scenarios. It is chock full of unsettling art. And the layout is out of this world, filled with annotations from NPCs in the game, words scratched out, every time the words “the Yellow Sign” appear in the printed text, it looks like it is staining the page. The whole thing feels corrosive, like its breaking down reality as you read it.

For real, if you are a fairly experienced GM looking for a new campaign, pick this up and run it. If you’re a player, beg your GM to grab it. This thing needs to infect everyone’s brain.