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#thegreatpicture


MOB

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  • 2 weeks later...

the great picture contains terrors unimaginable...

"One man dropped dead within moments, and people fled. Wells didn’t even remember what the photos were of."

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Edited by MOB
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  • 2 weeks later...

Hrm. OK, so I've just seen the blog post on Chaosium.com and I see that this process was a teaser for the new Masks of Nyarlathotep cover art reveal. Which is, admittedly, a really cool bit of art... but I feel like I have to gripe a little.

I got really into #thegreatpicture and was very excited about it because all of the teasers were set in the modern day, and I greatly prefer the modern day as a setting for CoC - to my mind the sort of emotional separation and distance you get when playing a distant time period is exactly what you don't want in a horror game. Precisely because all the teasers were modern-day stuff, I was all excited for some sort of interesting modern-day product being announced, so discovering that it's a reprinted 1920s campaign feels really deflating.

Possibly the fault is mine - I did, after all, jump to conclusions. But I'd argue that it was an entirely fair conclusion to jump to given the format of the teasers - an entirely logical conclusion from the information given. (It's possible that I could have picked up more hints from the teasers to suggest that this was Masks, but it's been long enough since I ran it that I don't remember a lot of the fine details.)

So I guess I have a little request: please, Chaosium, the next time you do one of these teaser campaigns, try to present them in a way appropriate to the milieu of the product they're teasing - it helps with managing expectations and stopping people getting keen for something which isn't actually getting delivered.

(Caveat: I'm probably part of the minority that really doesn't like Masks of Nyarlathotep as a campaign - I dislike globetrotting campaigns generally because I don't think they are true to much of the source material short of Derleth's Trail of Cthulhu, a novel I profoundly dislike, and I feel like Masks steers slightly too hard into a "heroic Westerners save the world from evil foreigners" mode which sits especially uncomfortably with the 1920s late Colonialism setting. It is possible that some of my grump comes from disappointment there. But still.)

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On the other hand, I really liked this little Easter Egg hunt, and seeing cover art for the new MoN was just icing on the cake.  Having it era-specific may have been better, but it was intriguing in any case. As far as the flavour for MoN, I really like the whole rollicking adventure investigation flavour it has going, I think it will work well if especially tailored for the Pulp Cthulhu rules. Horses for courses I guess :)

Edited by Mankcam
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" Sure it's fun, but it is also well known that a D20 roll and an AC is no match against a hefty swing of a D100% and a D20 Hit Location Table!"

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Yeah, Pulp Cthulhu isn't my personal jam, but I can 100% see how it would fit the style of Mask perfectly, and if the new version includes suitable support for using it with Pulp Cthulhu then that makes it decidedly worth the update for those who like Masks and/or Pulp. I don't resent the existence of the product and think it's a sensible move, I'm just disappointed that Cate and Pete's story got me set up for something that it wasn't about.

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1 hour ago, Warthur said:

Yeah, Pulp Cthulhu isn't my personal jam, but I can 100% see how it would fit the style of Mask perfectly, and if the new version includes suitable support for using it with Pulp Cthulhu then that makes it decidedly worth the update for those who like Masks and/or Pulp. I don't resent the existence of the product and think it's a sensible move, I'm just disappointed that Cate and Pete's story got me set up for something that it wasn't about.

Warthur

Understand your feedback - many thanks for sharing this. It does, of course, illustrate the dire need for a great modern-day campaign - something we will have to fix!

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