2. Masks Of Nyarlathotep (1984)
In the 80s, Dungeons & Dragons had a reputation for dark doings and witchcraft and a bunch of other nonsense that was persistent enough that it even made my own pretty permissive parents pause (for a moment, anyway). I never heard anyone complain about Call Of Cthulhu, the RPG based on H.P. Lovecraft’s cold, uncaring universe of horror. My first exposure to it was a book plucked randomly off the shelf at the Waldenbooks at Willowbrook Mall in Wayne, New Jersey, circa 1989. The title was an unpronounceable tangle of letters: Masks Of Nyarlathotep (nye-are-lat-ho-tep, maybe?). It’s a longform campaign that sees players unravelling a world-spanning occult conspiracy: one part the pulp of Indiana Jones mixed with several parts of mind-rending tentacled horror. There’s a vast, murderous cult, human sacrifices, sex rites; the back cover features a sinister obelisk with iron rings set in the stone that you just know player investigators are going to find themselves tied to. Not for the faint of heart, to read, or to play.
Masks has a reputation for being one of the best RPG campaigns ever created, a sandbox of terror, and I tend to agree. I’m in the middle of running it for a third time, at the personal cost of, God, I don’t even want to speculate about how many hundreds of hours. There is something about the intricacy of the plot (folks are only half kidding when they say you need a cork board and a lot of red string to keep all the clues straight), the tone of the story, the way it sits open like a bear trap for players to poke around in to the eventual sorrow of their characters. It lights up my brain. I’ll probably run it again and again, given the opportunity.
