- Levi, a Freshman who never spoke much and I never saw outside of the group. He was always needing to be coaxed into the game, but when he got started he was and still is one of the best roleplayers I've seen in some time. He's maybe the most normal of our group.
- Rob, someone I had bumped into before in line at the C-store on campus, but didn't know - he's an IT guy working for the college. He was always into the mystery and adventure of a good CoC game, and liked to be able to confront different monsters. He also eventually became a Keeper himself, and his games tend towards a Twin Peaks or Stranger Things vibe, with a dash of True Detective thrown in for good measure.
- Kat, a college graduate and Lovecraft fan diagnosed with what at the time was known as Asperger's Syndrome. She was looking for a new group of people to play with after her D&D group dissolved. She was and still is an excellent roleplayer, known for her ability to just naturally spawn new characters out of nowhere, with the tenacity and multitude of a rabbit in heat, and they are all always very interesting people...
When I first announced this campaign to them, my group was excited. Rob especially was super hyped to play - "We're doing MoN, mon?!" he exclaimed over Facebook, with a smiling emoji tagged on. Seeing my players so excited was exciting for me, too, and I was more than ready to get back into the ever-changing skin of one of my favorite Mythos deities, Nyarlathotep. I've said it before on this blog, and will probably say it again many times, but playing Nyarlathotep is so damn addicting as a Keeper. It's a power rush, and unlike many Mythos entities, Nyarlathotep has enough intellect to snark back at, manipulate, and con players. It's the Think One Step Ahead maxim for Keepers taken to its logical extreme, and if you get really good at it, you can even get players to work against each other with little to no effort. It's probably one of the more rewarding, and fun, ways to sow dread in the game, too.
But I digress. I am a kindly Chaos God, and thus I gave my players an ultimatum. I made no bones about the fact that MoN is a long game and a killer of a campaign - I even nicknamed it "Mountains of Corpses" to prove my point. I told them to make adventurers, explorers, pulp heroes, people who would be involved in a cross-national investigation - and I told them to make several of them as backup, at least one for every country we visited. That total came to about five each, though a few made less and decided to make characters as they were needed, and Levi, ever the over-achiever, decided to make an entire folder of them. There were seriously so many characters he made that there was no way all of them would end up used. In fact, I still have leftovers of his from this game, at the very end, even after all the death and destruction and maiming and insanity.
Characters made and the date in January 2017 set for the game, we gathered in one of the meeting rooms of the Student Center on campus, dice ready for a hell of an adventure. The players loved the material I made up for the game - personalized binders and all - and were excited to start. But before I launched them into the campaign proper, I had a little adventure ready to get their characters known to each other and introduce Jackson Elias - an adventure I culled from the Companion called The God of Mitnal.
Now, if you're familiar with or own the Companion for MoN, you know what this little prologue campaign is. For others, it's essentially a Scooby-Doo mystery set in the jungles of Campeche, Mexico. The Investigators are contacted via Telegram by their good friend of many years, Jackson Elias, to help him out with a story he's researching down in Central America. Supposedly, there is some sort of owl-demon of death called Ah Puch that haunts the jungles, and Elias wants to get to the bottom of it. That, and he wants to meet up with his friends after being away from them for so long. Unfortunately, Elias ends up running into trouble - a gang of thieves and smugglers run by one Walter Kimble has kidnapped him for snooping, and now Elias needs the Investigators' help. Enter the players, who have no idea of Elias' fate, and are more than ready to help their friend.
This particular scenario, I ran as a one-shot. I knew I wouldn't need more than one night to tell it, so I embellished only enough to set the scene. The way people got there was of no concern to me, but I did set it in 1925 - which as most of you should know, is when MoN is originally set. This was done as a nod to the original setup of the game, and to give an excuse for Elias to go missing for a good couple years until 1928. It also made sense to put the rest of the game in 1928, because it made it appear that the cults had been playing the long game - setting up the means for the Great Gate and dealing with the Carlyle Expedition long before the players or even Elias had, and ultimately pointing to a grand machination of Nyarlathotep's design once all the pieces fell into place. As it just so happens, there was a total solar eclipse in 1929 in the same location as was in 1926 - over the Indian Ocean - making it work all the better. It also, as stated before, coincided with many horrific events like the rise of fascism in Germany, unrest in the Middle East and Africa, and the Stock Market Crash of 1929 - the infamous Black Tuesday and the start of the Great Depression. Was this Nyarlathotep's plan the whole time? Who knows? For now, however, the calm before the storm was here, and the story was chipper.
God of Mitnal was really rather simple to run - I started it with personalized telegrams to each Investigator, and then quickly rounded them all into the hotel in Campeche. They mingled, the characters got to know each other, and the scene was set to begin. Now, God of Mitnal is incredibly railroady - it just doesn't have much in the way of choice of actions for the players. The characters are a bit one-dimensional unless the Keeper fleshes them out. This of course makes it a good one-shot and an even better introductory story, but I just did not find it that impressive. Of course, it doesn't need to be. It just has to be a pulpy introduction to a much larger campaign, and in that sense it serves its purpose admirably.
The characters were mostly forgettable with the exception of Elias himself and the roguish criminal mastermind, Walter Kimble. I gave him a trademark scar on one cheek and his cowboy boots to make him identifiable when I used him later, then did my level best to make him fun, memorable, and a sort of lovable rogue and friendly rival to the players. I was astonished when this backfired, and the group instead decided to make him into a true rival. I was even more shocked at how fast Kimble became the players' personal enemy, particularly with Kat's character Ralph and Chance's character Ted. Those two really had it out for Kimble, and even the other players found him intolerably smug and wanted to give him a punch in the face, no matter how much I tried to make him a lovable if sneaky bastard. I went for an endearing and somewhat villainous Indiana Jones, and came out with someone the group loathed - or maybe, loved to hate. I don't know if that's a success or failure on my part, but he was still fun to use all the way to the end and made for a memorable character. He even made it into a few solo one-off adventures of my own creation, because I loved him that much.
My players made short work of the scenario and had little trouble saving Elias, thwarting Kimble, and being known as international heroes through Elias' book on the subject. Planning the scenario was not difficult, and executing it was not difficult either, allowing for a simple and breezy start to the game. Props were not difficult to make, either. If one word can describe God of Mitnal, it's "easy" - easy for players, easy for Keepers, and easy to set up and run through. It's your standard pulp tale with a Scooby-Doo twist, nothing that should ever pose any sort of challenge to anyone. This all, in this case, makes it a good start to MoN, but does it hold up outside of that? Um, well... no. No, it really does not. No offense to YSDC or the author of this scenario, but this is not a campaign that feels like CoC. It feels like Indiana Jones, and as much as I adore the dashing archeologist with a whip and iconic hat, that is just not a good fit outside of MoN or Pulp Cthulhu. Its stats in the book, as with all other stats in the Companion, are set for 6e in the PDF, meaning the Keeper has to convert everything over to 7e or wing it.
In fact, let's talk about that a second. Now, I don't own the published Companion or the revised PDF of it, so I have no idea if the stats in there are 7e-based, but in the one I do have - Version 0.9 - the stats definitely are 6e. This doesn't matter much when you're throwing goons or random people at the Investigators, but it is problematic when you want to use the pregenerated Investigators and NPCs in the Companion, or when you want to revise the stats or something from MoN to the Companion's stats. It's all just one more reason I'm glad that Chaosium has decided to re-release MoN with updated, 7e stats, so the Keeper has one less thing they have to do. This was a constant issue in my run of MoN when planning it, and if I hadn't done the stats conversion and consolidation work before, I would have been a nervous wreck while running the game. I don't know about you, but I have a job and a life I need to work around, and spending a year preparing a massive game solely because its stats need conversion is way too much extra hassle. You can imagine my relief when I heard that Chaosium was updating it, because I'd love to run MoN in the future and would rather not re-convert all the stats and everything, instead having them at a simple glance.
That all said, for what it is, God of Mitnal was a fun, easy, laid-back prologue to the game. My only regret was not involving Jackson Elias in more investigations sooner, or at least alluding to him sooner. I did make a one-off comment in the last game I ran where he was mentioned as the author of some newspaper guest column, but that was it. Elias deserved more than that, and I wish I would have used his full potential so his inevitable demise would have been more gut-wrenching for the players. As for God of Mitnal, I'd give it a solid 6.5/10 Ah Puch masks - great for a MoN prologue, not great for anything else. Find a better scenario to run if you need a one-off, or run this as an interlude when you have few players if you are running a long-term campaign with the same characters, and plan on throwing MoN at them later.
Of course, I don't blame God of Mitnal for having its thunder stolen by other scenarios, nor do I blame it for needing to piggyback on a strong campaign like MoN to get a foot in the door. It is pretty hard to top the death of a close friend and a massive global conspiracy, after all...