Behind the Masks of Nyarlathotep: Larry DiTillio

Larry DiTillio designed Masks of Nyarlathotep.

That single financial statement is all the introduction DiTillio needs, at any rate for fans of Chaosium's classic Call of Cthulhu horror tabletop roleplaying game. First published in 1984, Masks of Nyarlathotep (written with Chaosium developer Lynn Willis) is the RPG field's Dune, its Birth of a Nation – a trailblazing epic that pushed its field to a dramatic scale previously unimagined.

In Masks, a routine murder investigation in 1925 New York uncovers a larger mystery, the disappearance of an African expedition and a conspiracy to unleash the Outward Gods' shifty messenger, Nyarlathotep. The sprawling, world-spanning take chances includes modules kick in John Griffith Chaney, Cairo, Kenya, Impress and the Australian Outback. Through the campaign's pioneering open-ended "sandbox" design, the hardy (and likely short-lived) player characters can investigate these in any range, until recurrent encounters with Lovecraftian nightmares snap their minds like garter belts.

After more than 25 geezerhood, Masks of Nyarlathotep still enjoys unsurpassed look upon verging on adulation. In RPG.net's comprehensive Game Index, Masks currently ranks #27 out of 13,671 products; among adventures, it's #1 by a mile. Amazon's user reviews speak for themselves. Bloggers still post loving recollections ("afterwards, all opposite CoC adventure seemed drab, colorless and somewhat mundane"), months-long actual-play forum threads and impressive campaign websites. A roleplaying group named the Bradford Players released a DVD, Lovecraftian Tales from the Shelve, featuring an audio playthrough of Masks that lasts 75 hours.

Can Tynes, whose company Pagan Publishing produced many dandy CoC supplements, says, "The Masks of Nyarlathotep hunting expedition was never equaled in Call of Cthulhu for spectacle and flair. It was the pulpiest of them all, with fun villains, exotic locations and very challenging puzzles and threats. While standards of scenario and cause design evolved and improved in the years after Masks, it remains a steep-water mark for thrilling adventure."

This landmark work happened almost by accident. As Larry DiTillio put it, "I missed my Sanity roll badly."

In early on 1981 DiTillio had upright finished a stave chore at Flaring Buffalo in Phoenix, where He wrote a large Tunnels &A; Trolls keep, Isle of Darksmoke, and prepacked the first CityBook generic wine roleplaying supplement. Moving to Los Angeles, he wrote several scripts for a children's TV show named Against the Odds, which profiled famous historical figures. And so Chaosium's Steve Perrin invited him to pitch a scenario for their new crippled.

"To tell you the the true, I was reluctant," DiTillio recalls. "I wasn't that bad a fan of Lovecraft's writing style and felt other authors had done better shape with the Cthulhu Mythos. However, the pass included a free copy of CoC and, American Samoa you know, gamers simply cannot resist discharge gourmandize."

CoC's groundbreaking approach shot strung-out DiTillio. Atomic number 2 had retributory researched the life of Kenyan solon Jomo Kenyatta for a TV script, "so this idea suddenly clicked in my brain – what could be many different than a CoC tale set in Africa? I called it 'The Carlyle Expedition' and made it a tale of an bedrid-fated set of explorers who had disappeared in Kenya.

"I swear on a stack of D&adenosine monophosphate;D manuals that my only intention at the time was to write this narrative and be done with IT."

DiTillio's full account of how, as he puts it, "I stepped into hell" is beyond the scope of this article. Some highlights:

? "How the hell are a bunch of CoC investigators going to wind in Africa in the first place? I began to research exactly how the overseas trip might work. First stop would probably be making their way [from Unaccustomed York] to England …
? "An Egyptian story [by Lovecraft] got me mad about adding Egypt to the trip and working in the Black Pharaoh personal identity – and hell, it was happening the way to Kenya, yes?
? "I was also fascinated by the City of the Great Ones [in Lovecraft's The Shadow Out of Time], and that prompted ME to hyperkinetic syndrome Australia …
? "Ah, what the perdition, let's Doctor of Osteopathy some investigating in PRC, in order to turn in the Unhealthy Woman incarnation of Nyarlathotep."

It took DiTillio eight months to write the 400-pageboy Masks manuscript, "each happening an IBM selectric typewriter, which of course blew up the first meter I typed the name of Hastur the Unspeakable. I took this as a cautionary, got the machine fixed and over it, ne'er, e'er again mentioning Hastur. -Oh damn, the screen just went dead!"

When developer Lynn Willis fleshed out DiTillio's manuscript with extensive background on the various countries – laws, travel information, currency, languages – Masks of Nyarlathotep grew too long for Chaosium to release intact. The prototypic published version omitted Australia – a "dagger to the heart," says DiTillio. But "it sold like wanshi pancakes, and complete the years it was reprinted several multiplication." The third version (1996) finally reinstated Australia.

Because of the scenario's duration, Chaosium has forever had trouble keeping it purchasable. At the moment, Masks is unfashionable of print, though the company still sells the .PDF version.

DiTillio says, "My proudest moment with Masks was when I gave it to Robert Bloch (author of Psycho). He had in reality corresponded with Lovecraft in his youth. I beamed As He said He had heard of it and was joyful to get a copy. Past came the out of the question. He asked me to autograph information technology. Robert Bloch, a true Grandmaster of Horror writing – Robert Bloch, who had written a slew of Mythos tales himself – was interrogatory for my John Hancock! Wowsers!"

Some gamers, including DiTillio himself, claim Masks isn't even off his second-best work. That honor normally goes to The Hoar Knight, a 1986 scenario for the initiatory edition of Chaosium's Male monarch Arthur Pendragon RPG. A marvelous evocation of Arthurian myth in the mode of St. Thomas Malory, The Grey Knight recasts the medieval poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight as a rescue foreign mission to find one of the Thirteen Treasures of Britain ready to spare Gawain's sprightliness, and Top executive Arthur's honor, from a mysterious wizard forecast.

"I included gobs of Arthurian characters and events, straight from my readings. The lynchpin of the scenario is the May Babies carnage, a bootleg set on Arthur's character that the player knights must prove false. Information technology's a task that tests virtually every aspect of the player characters and allows them to use many of the game's skills to succeed. I am a big fan of this approach. Yeah, fight monsters is fun, but there is a great deal more to roleplaying, and Pendragon was an excellent venue for that.

(Figure of speech by Larry DiTillio)

"The Southern Knight used one of my favorite game tactics – unvanquishable opponents. The Grey Dub himself is unkillable, and the Sluagh are non only unkillable but inescapable every bit well. Do I set this fair to be an evil GM? No. I eff to make players think beyond their weapons, recognize the futility of combat in resolving the situation and ferment to roleplaying to solve it.

"My early common manoeuvre is NPCs, a ton of them, most of them studied to create absorbing noncombat encounters that assume't involve a length of cold steel. In Grey Horse the players hobnob and gambol with almost whol the major characters from the Arthurian legends. This in turn provides standard atmosphere, another key constituent in roleplaying.

"The inalterable component I try to sneak in in a scenario is simple: piping stakes. If the players fail to attain the goal, King Arthur's reputation is ruined and all of Camelot is in peril. If you'Re loss to nominate players undertake a task, get in important. If they succeed, they'll be telling their own legends in years to total – and if they fail, well, they're still heroes for trying."

DiTillio's other major game wreak appeared in Demon Magic: The Second Stormbringer Companion, a 1985 supplement for Chaosium's fantasy RPG based on Michael Moorcock's Elric stories. "My contribution was 'The Velvet Circle,' the closedown scenario. The Soft Circle is a walled red-light dominion in Ilmar replete with inns, taverns, brothels, gaming parlors and even a cockfighting establishment. In short, a roleplayer's paradise! The player characters are drawn to it away strange dreams, always ending in the words 'Velvet Circle, Silvery Dawn.' Though each daydream ended the same, all of them were different, and for each one provided a actor with special clues to later happenings in the scenario. This is an excellent way to multi-task your handouts. Dreams are a facet of game innovation I use often." In this scenario DiTillio masters the Moorcockian atmosphere As completely equally his other work captures Lovecraft and Malory.

DiTillio said in a 2003 Comics Bulletin interview He would revision every one of his TV scripts if He could, but helium is quite satisfied with his RPG scenarios. "I didn't compose them just to sell them, I wrote them to play them. It's in the playing that game work comes to life, indeed I tend to commend more about my game scenarios than I sometimes DO with Idiot box scripts I've had produced." Different in television, "You Don't have a passel of corporate dodos overseeing your written material. You'ray more in control condition, then you coiffe what you like. [And] Chaosium and Running Bison bison both had excellent graphic masses to really spiff in the lead my piece of writing." Most important, he had plenty of time. "You need to end a TV script real quickly – one operating theatre fortnight at most and then you're happening to the next one. Game shape lacks that hotfoot factor."

High Adventure columnist King James Maliszewski, in a Grognardia web log entry praising Masks, said, "Larry's name is associated with some of the topper adventures ever produced for many biz lines. He's one and only of those rare designers who both understands what makes a good RPG adventure you said it to plant the seeds for creating memorable stories with those adventures. Scads of designers err to a fault much on one side of the equating Beaver State the other; information technology's a testament to Larry's skills that he got information technology right so often."

(Double aside Larry DiTillio)

Larry DiTillio with his wife, Marjorie Goldman, at the 2009 WGA Awards observance in February 2009, where DiTillio received the Morgan Cox Accolade

For all this, DiTillio's Wikipedia entry barely mentions his gaming make. Even while Masks was redefining the roleplaying field's sense of the possible, he had already moved on to composition TV scripts filled-time.

"It was game work that started my animation career, via Michael Halperin, who did the show bible for the germinal He-Man and The Masters of the Universe. Michael was a friend of mine at the Writer's Guild, and his sons played D&D. One solar day he was browse their Dragon magazine and saw my refer connected a scenario." ["CHAGMAT," Dragon #63, July 1982.] He called me up and same 'Larry, I didn't know you wrote sword-and-black magic.' He same to call Arthur Nadel at Filmation and pitch him around stories. That led to a staff job and an all new career in writing. No Dragon magazine, no job at Filmation. And a good example – you want to be a author, induce published anyplace you can!

"I worked [at Filmation] a few years happening Helium-Man, She-Ra, Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids, and did treatments for new cartoon series. The most exciting was Dragonriders of Pern, the Anne McCaffrey series, and I had umpteen pleasant chats with her. We never did sell it, but she did consumption some of what I had created in her next Dragonriders novel and was nice enough to credit me for it."

DiTillio went on to write over 150 animation scripts. After written material 16 episodes of Macho-man and the Edgar Lee Masters of the Universe, he created the spinoff serial She-Atomic number 88: Princess of Power. Later he served as story editor for the first deuce seasons of J. Michael Straczynski's epic science fable serial Babylon 5, so (with Bob Forward) for Beast Wars: Transformers. He had a long skimp co-hosting the Los Angeles scientific discipline-fiction radio interview political platform Hour 25, wrote many Scripts columns for Writer's Tolerate and was active in the Writers Guild of USA West organization. In Feb 2009 the WGA West awarded DiTillio its Morgan Cox Award for his elongated work rising operative conditions for his fellow writers.

DiTillio still writes games for his own use, and would willingly return to the RPG field. "I'm a paid writer, who will listen to any offer of paid work. I did create my own system and world, Cerilon, and I'd know to get that promulgated. Nudge prod, trice wink."

He developed Cerilon, a percentile-founded fantasize RPG system derived from D&D and RuneQuest, when atomic number 2 tired of "constantly checking charts and tables for every damn move anyone made. Everything players needed to know nigh the system was right the character sheet. No longer checking rulebooks operating room tables, just act and roll. My notion of roleplaying is that it should exist cinematic. The more time fagged rules-lawyering, the more boring the game! Rate of flow is what you deficiency.

"[Cerilon] has a very diverse universe that mirrors our true world. I found virtually fantasy games to be excessively conventional, so I folded in black people, blue people, colorful, yellow, etc. Each race had its own acculturation and customs, culled from lots of reading on African, Asian and Native American mythologies. I did let in elves, dwarves and hobbits, though I did not adhere to the typical Tolkien paradigm of these kindred races. Typically for me, IT's a precise adult domain; Love-devising and Flirting are both hot skills. The adventures ranged from small forays to full scale wars, and I wrote a ton of them, Thomas More than enough to play for different years.

"I host a night of board and card games all Saturday, but no roleplay. Too busy with life. I roleplay at game cons, either playing in games or running them." DiTillio currently runs a comedic CoC campaign that may remind longtime fans of Chaosium's camp B-movie Blood Brothers scenario collections. DiTillio's "Abbott and Cthulhu" is a 1940s funfest starring Abbott and Costello, inspired past Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein ("In my estimation their best picture").

"It's normal Cthulhu rules, but all the characters are '40s movie stars. For example, SAM Marlowe, P.I., is Humphrey Bogart; his sidekick Joel Gaza Strip is Peter Laszlo Lowestein; Madame Gavoni is Mare Ouspenskaya (the genuine gypsy woman from the original Wolf down Man motion picture); and last year I added Larry Fox Talbot (played by Lon Chaney Junior.), the novel Wolf Man. Villains are played by people corresponding Sydney Greenstreet, Vincent Price, Boris Karloff, etc. You'd be amazed how great Cthulhu and humor unify. My hope is to one day run an complete-comics 'Abbott & Cthulhu,' adding the Marx Brothers, Bay wreath &adenosine monophosphate; Hardy and the Three Stooges to the mix. Cthulhu won't stand a chance…"

Writer and game designer Allen Varney has written over 70 articles for The Escapist.

(Picture by Robert DiTillio)

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