How Quest Portal Brought My Masks of Nyarlathotep Campaign to Life

From Lima’s twilight cafés to New York’s occult underbelly, here’s how one Keeper used Quest Portal to deepen the world of Masks of Nyarlathotep.

Running Masks with an Atmosphere That Breathes

When running Masks of Nyarlathotep, every Keeper (Game Master) dreams of making the world feel alive: a breathing, unpredictable place full of detail, culture, and mystery. A place where local color lingers, where cultures react, where you can taste the dust in the street and hear the prayers no one dares to say out loud.

This time around, I decided to lean into something new: using the Quest Portal Assistant to research and enhance my campaign. What happened next reshaped how I prep for Call of Cthulhu.

Breathing Life into Peru: From Guidebook to Ghost Story

If you're not familiar with Masks of Nyarlathotep, the campaign begins with a prelude in Peru. So my party's first stop was Lima, the City of Kings. My investigators (players) had a lot of questions that aren't addressed in Chaosium's book, and I'm no expert in Peruvian culture. To be clear, Larry DiTillio and the other authors did an incredible job building backstory and detail into Masks of Nyarlathotep, but it's impossible to cover everything.

So I turned Quest Portal's new Assistant to help me uncover local color we might have otherwise missed: authentic Peruvian menus, regional drinks, and snippets of cultural behavior. Suddenly, my investigators weren’t just sitting in another generic café; they were sipping chicha morada under fading colonial arches while the sound of street vendors echoed in the distance. It grounded the session in something tactile. Familiar, but uncanny.

The Quest Portal Assistant didn’t stop at the surface either. It helped me understand how locals might react to foreigners: curious, polite, but cautious. Lima became a tourist-friendly hub, a soft introduction before the investigators’ descent into the Andes (and into madness?).

As the players traveled deeper toward Puno, Quest Portal helped me capture a shift in tone. I started layering in notes about Andean superstition and subtle village rituals. Locals became more wary. Smiles faded. I even crafted a haunting local ritual using Quest Portal’s lore suggestions: The Candle Vigil, where candles are released across Lake Titicaca to free the souls of the dead. That moment, lit by hundreds of flickering flames drifting on black water, became the most haunting moment of the campaign so far.

Building New York: Noir, Smoke, and Shadow

Now my investigators have come to New York. If Peru was about myth and mourning, Manhattan is grit and momentum. Quest Portal became my design studio for atmosphere. I built out smoky speakeasies, secretive occult shops, and back-alley hideouts that felt pulled straight from a 1920s noir film. The Assistant even helped me storyboard a chase scene through cobblestone streets and moonlit rooftops, fully visualized and ready for play.

Each tool I used felt like another hand on the wheel, not taking over, but enhancing the creative process. The Quest Portal Assistant has become my research assistant, historian, and set designer all at once.

What’s Next: Cairo, Shanghai, and Beyond

The Masks campaign is only heating up. Soon we’ll be walking the spice-slicked alleys of Cairo and hunting clues through Shanghai’s backstreets. And with each new stop, Quest Portal is already helping me layer in nuance, build scenes, and anticipate how these places might feel to someone seeing them for the first time.

Stay tuned. The next leg of the journey promises to be even darker, stranger, and more alive than ever.

TL;DR

• Quest Portal helped turn my Masks of Nyarlathotep campaign from good to unforgettable.

• In Peru, it gave me cultural depth, ritual ideas, and scene texture I would’ve missed.

• In New York, it helped me design noir-inspired chases and occult spaces that felt lived-in.

• It’s now a permanent part of my Game Master toolkit for logistics and atmosphere.

Next Steps

• Running Masks? Try the Quest Portal Assistant to enhance your next location.

• Need player handouts and historical references? Import and annotate them in-scene.

• Want to create your own rituals or NPCs? Use the Assistant to co-design culturally grounded content.

FAQ

Q: Can Quest Portal help with other campaigns besides Masks?

A: Yes! From homebrew anything on our Marketplace, Quest Portal supports any campaign that values mood and modular prep.

Q: Do I need to know everything about the locations in advance?

A: No, but it does help. Quest Portal helps fill in gaps, suggesting customs, visuals, and behaviors that add realism without requiring a deep dive.