You, Me, and The King in Yellow
A spoiler-free anti-review of Impossible Landscapes.
Prologue
January 2025
I’m walking around the house when I look down and notice a dead pixel on my left toenail. It’s a perfect square, black and artificial — as if the screen of reality had been punctured, and I’m looking through to the other side. I reach down hesitantly to touch it, but it's not a portal — it is just a bruise. A perfectly square, uniformly black, tiny bruise. That’s normal, I think to myself, and move on.
December 2024
Over Discord, Quinns is explaining to me the best way to run Impossible Landscapes, the award-winning adventure for Delta Green, written and illustrated by Dennis Detwiller. It sounds like a lot of work, but I’m up for trying anything. I haven’t run a big hardcover adventure module since Descent into Avernus for Dungeons & Dragons 5e five years ago, so I’m nervous and excited. Will it be harder for me to GM than my usual games? Will it be too much of a railroad? And maybe the most painful question of all: will system matter?
January 2025
As I read Impossible Landscapes, I see my name on the page. I’m not kidding — there’s an NPC named Thomas Manuel. I don’t know what to do about this, so I just stare at it for a long time. I write it down in my notes app, like it’s a clue to something.
Later, I google ‘doppelganger’. Did you know the word initially meant the person who saw the double? It somehow became the word for the double itself through translation and drift. The fact that we use it the other way means that, in a sense, the double usurped the original word, taking its place. The double stole the name from the original, and we never really noticed.
May 2025
On YouTube, Quinns is explaining to me the best way to run Impossible Landscapes. I nod along and share the video. I’ve already followed his advice. I post on Bluesky, “I'll give everyone four weeks to watch this and then drop my review.” 28 days later, here it is.
March 2025
I start running the game. I realized that if the word ‘doppelganger’ initially meant the person who saw the double, then I am the doppelganger.
Act 1 - What is Impossible Landscapes about?
Impossible Landscapes is Detwiller’s homage to Robert Chambers' The King in Yellow. It’s not the first such homage, and it won’t be the last. The King in Yellow is one of the most influential collections of weird fiction in history. Influential critic (and one-time game designer) Lin Carter once described it as “an absolute masterpiece, probably the greatest single book of weird fantasy written in this country between the death of Poe and the rise of Lovecraft." Think of it as an anthology of stories about the worst stage play ever. You’ve probably seen some bad plays — you might’ve even been involved in some bad plays — but this one is much worse. This is a play so bad that it’s evil. It’ll destroy your mind. It’ll infect you and embroil you in the machinations of a cosmic evil.
The other major inspiration for Impossible Landscapes is probably the most famous non-D&D adventure ever made, Masks of Nyarlathotep, a Call of Cthulhu supplement. According to an essay by designer Lisa Padol in the New York Review of Science Fiction, Nyarlathotep “raised the bar for what an RPG campaign could be.” It’s so influential that its format has since become a template of sorts for horror adventure writers. Examples of this include the Eternal Lies campaign for Trail of Cthulhu or even the standalone The Yellow King RPG from Pelgrane Press. But Impossible Landscapes draws inspiration from the ambition of Nyarlathotep without aping its beats. It ditches the pulpy formula for a much more intricately layered and focused story.
Impossible Landscapes begins as a mundane investigation into the disappearance of a young woman named Abigail, and from there it spirals downward into darkness, like so much dirty water into a drain. Most of the adventure is a series of haunted houses in the broadest sense — strange locations filled with spooky discoveries that operate according to their own rules. This is where Impossible Landscapes shines. The characters move through these haunted houses, and the GM is provided a buffet of absurd and macabre imagery to be deployed at will. The characters investigate freely, and the module does its best to support as many avenues and methods as possible. The sections that connect these haunted houses? In the backstage space between set pieces, the players are less free, but we’ll get to that later.
As the Quinns Quest review captures so well, the characters start out as Delta Green agents in a police procedural. They will always begin by deploying the tools of rationality and logic to understand these haunted spaces. But soon enough, they realize that something is wrong with the world, and they, off their own accord, will start to think and act according to the alien logic of the Yellow King’s strange land, Carcosa. Over the course of the adventure, they will understand that the rational option is to accept the irrationality of what is happening — to embrace it.
Okay, but what’s Impossible Landscapes really about?
