"When playboy Roger Carlyle met the African Woman, he took a turn for the worse. Every morning he related strange recurring dreams full of Egyptian symbols and mystic beckonings. Though never before interested in Egypt's history or archaeology, Carlyle suddenly organized an archaeological expedition to that ancient land. His friends were puzzled, and the newspaper gossip columns were fascinated. No one ever imagined that the expedition would meet such a terrible fate a few months later..."
Contents: 'What's in this box?' content sheet, introduction sheet, Chapter One: New York, Chapter Two: London, Chapter Three: Cairo, Chapter Four: Kenya, Chapter Five: Shanghai, Handouts 1, Handouts 2.
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5.0 out of 5 stars
A Classic From The Early Years,
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This review is from: Masks of Nyarlathotep, 1st Edition (Call of Cthulhu) [BOX SET] (Hardcover)
This review is for the boxed first edition of "Masks of Nyarlathotep".
As there is a current edition (4th at time of writing) available for under $40 it should go without saying that the boxed set is really a collector's item and collector asking prices will prevail. The boxed set was produced while Call of Cthulhu Second Edition was in print. It will play without modification with any edition of the Call of Cthulhu rules from 1st to 4th. Minor changes will be needed in order to bring it into spec for 5th and 6th edition rules. These involve such petty issues as Oratory and Debate being combined as "Persuade" and possibly needing to adjust for a higher skill allocation under the later rules. The tome reading rules will get in the way with this campaign if you run under edition 2+ rules, so you will have to hand-wave in places anyway. This is true of all the versions of Masks of Nyarlathotep, as is the need to read ahead extensively as a GM. The upside is that the reading is fun as the campaign is extremely well-conceived and written. I bought this item years ago, in the mid 80s, new. If you are buying it today you should be aware that the box contained many components, and that it is entirely possible for some of these to be missing in a secondhand set. From recent memory, the box contents should include: 2 business cards & 1 matchbox kit on glossy card sheet 1 booklet of handouts 1 New York booklet (blue cover) 1 London booklet (maroon cover) 1 Cairo booklet (yellow cover) 1 Nairobi booklet (brown cover) 1 Shanghai booklet (green cover) (and sundry sheets of advertising matter) The third and fourth editions (bound as books) contain a sixth chapter set in Australia which was edited out of this version and the second edition, but you will find most of that material in the sourcebook "Terror Australis" if you can find a copy. This is a world-spanning campaign that sets the players on the trail of a missing playboy, The action starts in New York, but after that the players drive the direction of their investigations depending on which clues they choose to follow and in what order they follow them. The object is, of course, to avert world disaster. We are, after all, talking about Call of Cthulhu. The quality of the materials in this boxed set was very high. The separate handout booklet makes photocopying a dream (not so with a perfectly bound paperback, the binding of choice for Chaosium these days, but the handouts for the 4th edition can be downloaded as a pdf file from the Chaosium website) so one can preserve the handouts for repeat play. The handouts are also double sided, so if you can reproduce that you can have newspaper clippings with realistic obverse sides and so forth. The campaign itself suffers from an element of Time Crunch, and the GM may find him/herself having to introduce elements to push the investigation forward at a quicker pace on occasions. It is also very, very deadly. Even careful players will stand a very good chance of having characters killed from under them as the menace involves very active, very violent cults. Looking back on some notes I took on a run-through of this in the late 80s, I see that every player had a reserve character waiting in the wings and that some players lost both of them in a single session (some people never learn to tread softly of course). Even so, players from that period (sadly the group no longer meets due to real-life getting in the way) often reminisce at get-togethers about various scenes and adventures they had in the course of Masks of Nyarlathotep, and I can't think of a better recommendation for the campaign than that. And just look at that wonderful box art.
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