Finished running the campaign last night - 66 sessions. Your tips are all absolutely spot on. Our group kept reporting progress back to Carlton in NYC so knowledge continuity was retained 'at HQ' when characters died and then replaced.
Congratulations on finishing this epic campaign, I'm excited to hear that you thought my tips were useful. Great idea to have your group report back and use NYC as an HQ!
Just want to say this has been an incredibly helpful video. I've gone and watched the whole thing 2-3 times to keep myself on track and come back to reference it for ideas all the time. Thank you taking the time to make these!
Thank you! I set out to make the videos I would have wanted when planning the campaign. It's such a huge undertaking, but so worth it. So anything to get more people to be able to experience the story is a win! Thanks for watching.
Weird to keep the original handouts untouched? Count me guilty - everything is mint, all the way back to the original Tomb of Horrors module for me. Lol. Great information as always. :)
Thanks a lot for this video. I´m going to run this campaign in september, and i fell little overwhelmed 😅😅😅😅 I´m from Spain and have the book in pdf. We are going to play online, so i think it would be enough. Thank you so much
Thank You for everything you do. I appreciate it as a person who played D&D in the 80’s and then never played again until 2017. Now I’m beginning to GM different games and all advice is appreciated P.s. this is a beast of a campaign
On the subject of the Companion Book, I'm actually a little dubious about it and wouldn't recommend it. Being from Hong Kong I was excited when I heard it would have a section on the city as not only is it a potential stop off point for MoN investigators trying to find Carlyle, I just fancied having a good reference for my hometown to use in future games. Unfortunately, while they made a big song and dance in their marketing about its accuracy, when I read the short HK section it was full of errors and omissions. They even include info and a map location for a theme park that didn't exist in Hong Kong until 1977! A bit shocked, I looked through the other sections and saw some pretty iffy research there too. I would recommend just sticking to Chaosium's MoN books, conducting any additional research independently, and forget hunting down a copy of the companion. Its not worth it.
Looking to run via Roll20 and eventually in person. I bought the HPHLS prop set while at GenCon - 100% worth it! The handouts are improved and worth copying over. Wanted to say thanks for the video! Lots of terrific ideas!
One day. One day I'll finally run this campaign. Speaking of expanding things, there's a scenario in the first issue of Bayt al Azif that I'm contemplating adding in. It's set in the middle ages, but I think it could tie in as a cool "flashback"/prequel. Not sure where I'd drop it in.
Oh! I have a great idea of where this could fit. In England, the side track adventure is called the Chelsea Serpent. There is a character that is creating some pretty weird art. There is a chance that players could get sucked into one of the paintings hidden in the attic closet. You can always adjust to make sure all your players are sucked into the painting (and the past) and inside they have to solve the mystery your adventure to get out. I think that would be a ton of fun.
We need one of these for someone for Impossible Landscapes. The trouble is, Impossible Landscapes works best when you have someone who is familiar with Delta Green and how most campaigns go.
@@colinflanigan9153 some are tiny reasons, like rhe lack of color in the book. The main reason it is requires a lot more effort compared to Masks. It has many more side track screanios so lot more do I keep this in or not. You pretty much need to run it as pulp for how deadly it is. The opening hook is not at strong compared to masks. I think it just needs a full retool for 7e to adjust classic and pulp for it. Its not a bad book just needs a good once over. Also my Tuesday group I was running it for is awful at taking notes but that is on them. I will run it again in the future just have other things in queue before I get that far. Also might run masks again for how much fun I had.
Oooooh yeah the HPLHS PRO SET FOR MON IS AWESOME! Includes, passports,maps. News articles clipped from actual news papers created fir thecampaign. And,much more
@@XPLovecat I actually ran it when the compilation book first came out. Not the complete masks in her with the tip the one before that. Almost had a total party kill in the Chelsea right at the beginning. So we decided to put it off until the characters were beefed up a little bit. I've run it all the way through once I think. We got a good ways into it a couple of years ago and got distracted into something else and never came back to it. But now all of the players have some well-established characters at the very happy with in terms of skill levels and personality and motivations and such, not to mention some. Cthulhu Mythos knowledge and experience. And.. I'm running it as a pulp campaign LOL we had our first 100% luck Point casualty a couple of weeks ago when a night got snatch somebody out of a cab. Of course he was leaning out of the cab practically sitting outside the window trying to see what was flying around up there LOL the recklessness of the curious
SPOILER: Hey, thanks for the Video! We start in about 1-2 months and I am just wondering: When did your players get the hint that they actually race time regarding the Grand Conclusion?
Obsidian is better than One Note. Give it a swing, I have the Arkham book mapped out in Obsidian, it's cool because it makes a graph of connections so as you set it up you know how everyone and everything is linked together.
I'm currently running Peru as a homebrew D&D adventure to see if my group would enjoy this kind of campaign. They just faced off with Mendoza in the museum and so far things are going well. I'm still on the fence about adapting the full campaign, but it's good to know it's got solid bones for adding extra content in case I need to pulp it up with extra threats and side adventures.
Oh interesting! Honestly if your group enjoys the combat/action more than investigation, I think giving Pulp Call of Cthulhu a shot might work. It would save you the work of adapting, and I think there is plenty of room to mix up the campaign to fit your group. If you do decide to stay within D&D, the sidetrack adventures will be gold for you.
@@XPLovecat The funny thing is I think most of them would absolutely love Pulp Cthulhu and clearly dig the investigating they've done so far, but are just unwilling to leave their D&D comfort zone. While it wouldn't have been my first choice, adapting it so far hasn't been too bad. I'm comfortable enough with both systems that the mechanics have been pretty easy to wing. The hard part has been porting story content written for 1920s Earth to the D&D Eberron setting. But it's also been a fun thought experiment and a good way to become familiar with the module. The content in both sources are too rich to just say "Peru is here on this map and Jackson is a dwarf now". I'm having to learn what makes MoN characters and places special, find appropriate D&D analogues, then consider the impact of that D&D stuff back onto the source material and deal with that butterfly effect too. Like, a quick "Speak with Dead" or "Revivify" spell could have huge implications for this plot. It's been fun to think about. And videos about the campaign are good food for thought, so I'll definitely be watching anything else you might have coming to fuel my inspiration!
I’m also running masks as a dnd campaign, but I’m converting the whole campaign into my dnd 1920s fantasy setting. While I have not run the whole complete campaign, my players that have played it do enjoy it.
I love OneNote. It's the most useful program Microsoft ever created. And I'm looking forward to this series. I'm curious, did any PC make it all the way from beginning to end?
No PC made it the entire way through the campaign. The long-hauler was a combat oriented Great War Vet that lasted 5 locations (out of 7). The PC was starting to go crazy and his stats had taken some hits due to an unfortunate spell in China. So although technically the character was still playable after 5, my player decided he wanted to play a different investigator for the last 2 locations.
Hi Josh! Great question. I'm editing Peru as we speak and will be posting this week. From there, I'm aiming to post 1 video per month on Masks until the series is complete. I hope your group is enjoying the campaign so far!
Regular Call of Cthulhu. I think if you have a group who prefers more action and having fun talents, it could easily be converted to Pulp. But in general the tone of the campaign felt like a closer fit to regular.
If you dont mind, I have a question about your One Note prep. Do you have just bullet points about the Locations (like shown briefly in the video) or are there sections that are more detailed? Would love to know the whole process :)
Great question! The screenshot you see in the video are my actual notes from when I ran the campaign so I kept it as bullet points. This was the stuff that I found the most important to remember. I would use OneNote during play as the main source to make sure I was on the right track and if I needed more details, I went to the books. I have a setting section that details important aspects like weather, travel, and gun laws. The important locations are all the possible spots players would go to and the most important things to happen at those locations, and then NPCs which is also a bullet point list with who the NPCs were and why they were important to the story/what clues they each would lead the players too. In session notes are things I need to write down quickly during play as to not forget (and how each session ended). And the reminders section is anything random that I didn't feel like fit into the other categories like extra spells, details about the investigators my players were using, etc. I hope this helps!
@@XPLovecat Thanks a lot! Sorry for the late reply didn't have notifications turned on ^^ I also used your "template" to create my masks notes. For NPCs i basically just summarized the information in the Dramatis Personae section of each chapter and also added a photo of the NPC to quickly notice them. How exactly did your NPC notes look? Would help my process a lot if you could show me a screenshot of a given chapter ^^. I always tend to overprep so anything that can reduce the workload is appreciated! Did you use the book at all? Like reading sections from it during play and so on. I don't think my `minimal` onenote notes will be enough to run the session so I will probably still use the book to know what to say during play, especially in scenes where a lot is happening. Thanks for the help!
I've finally given up on Masks. The lack of narrative cohesiveness makes it almost unplayable. The prologue is fantastic, everything else... not at all.
Thanks for sharing. I started with using OneNote for campaign notes but moved over to Notion. Just so much more you can do with it. Check out SlyFlourish's D&D campaign template. ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-8AfbMNAsyr4.html
Great video!!!. I was thinking of tackling this as my first Campaign and found the video very helpful. I will be running mine online hopefully in our Discord Group using Roll 20, so going to be a challenge
