Ruminations on the eve of our first session

The gears are in motion, the date is set, and we are getting ready for our first gaming session. There are several things I have been mulling over in my head. I feel pretty confident I am over the initial jitters I had about running a game improvised to this extent. This, I believe, is mostly because I decided to go with two story-lines  the present day of the 1930s and the history of the mask in the flashbacks. The present day narrative is something more familiar I can lean on as it will be more traditionally structured and less improvised. Having said that, I will try to use parts of it to get player input to encourage and instruct them before we get to the first flashback.

Mister X

I need a way to bring the characters into the plot and in a good, old-fashioned Call of Cthulhu tradion I will use an NPC who is an old acquaintance of the PCs. This Mister X will serve as a starting point for the adventure, and as the investigators sort through clues and uncover the true nature of his esoteric reasearch they will be lead to the actual gist of the adventure - the Unnamed Mask.

However, to make this Mister X more mysterious and multifaceted each PC knows him from different circumstances and is familiar to a different aspect of him. The goal here is to give the players an image of a man who has many different sides to him and has only revealed one aspect of him to any given person. This will give him an aura of mystery and emphasize the fact that he is a man of many secrets.