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Kalko posted:
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Jul 11, 2022 06:04
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Golden Bee posted:Gives me a bit of a headache. Between this and the Customizable mechanic yeah it seems like every new keyword in this campaign is a headache
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Jul 11, 2022 06:07
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Whoever played the card chooses the pile, I assume. There isn't anything to indicate otherwise.
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Jul 11, 2022 06:48
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I don’t think this would impress a Norman player very much
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Jul 11, 2022 07:41
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So, the perfect storm is you get this card into the discard without triggering it, with Short Supply, then you play it with Resourceful when you know everyone's about to draw a weakness or two at the same time, so that they all end up in the same pile and you don't lose too many useful cards. I can see it working only as a solo card, kinda.
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Jul 11, 2022 09:06
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Technically, right now there is no rule which explains what happens when you draw a non-weakness, non-treachery Revelation card. It's safe to assume it would go off with Resourceful, though, and I expect there will be an update in the manual about it (though it's weird it wasn't included in the manual snippet the fansite was given).
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Jul 11, 2022 10:33
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Kalko posted:Whoever played the card chooses the pile, I assume. There isn't anything to indicate otherwise. It's a Revelation effect and the card has no cost. Does it still count as playing at that point? So anyway, as a class of cards these are interesting for mulligans. If you take 1 Dilemma in your deck, you can guarantee not getting it into your opening hand by forfeiting your mulligan if you do not start with it in hand, or mulliganing it if you do. Forfeiting the mulligan is a rather steep cost though. If you take more than 1 Dilemma in your deck and you draw one of them in your opening hand, you can not guarantee not mulliganing into another. These cards are fully dead if you get them in your hand, which is also a steep cost if it happens in your opening hand. Other than the 2nd copy of a Tarot card and Emergency Cache when you don't need money, we haven't had cards that could be fully dead yet have we? So this type of card has the potential to be "pay 2xp, reduce your starting hand size by 1" or "pay 2xp, you may no longer mulligan". Which doesn't feel like it is worth the benefit of the best case scenario of Heed the Dream. Orange Devil fucked around with this message at 13:56 on Jul 11, 2022 |
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Jul 11, 2022 13:40
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The knife has dropped:  Kinda looks like a worse Ice Pick to me, but I guess having a free +2 to your fight/evades/investigate tests every turn is good. Heck, just having a free +2 to any treachery test is great tbh. I can see a combo of the final upgrade and Granny Orne to reverse multiple failed tests a turn. Nephthys fucked around with this message at 21:55 on Jul 11, 2022 |
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Jul 11, 2022 21:52
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So Spring-Loaded actually undermines any abilities that want you to succeed by X or more, right?
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Jul 11, 2022 21:59
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No, it's not a forced reaction. E: Wait, I see what you mean now. I guess it does, but Survivor usually cares more about how much they fail by. Besides, I don't see why you'd even play this card if you are going for big success margins. Tevery Best fucked around with this message at 22:04 on Jul 11, 2022 |
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Jul 11, 2022 22:02
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CitizenKeen posted:So Spring-Loaded actually undermines any abilities that want you to succeed by X or more, right? Most survivors don't need to succeed by X. Not having to exhaust the tool until you actually need it is really powerful. On hard difficulty some of the bad tokens are so awful on a failure that you can't risk them even if you have okish odds. This turns into a once per round lucky so you can repeat iffy checks with a safety net. Edit: It looks better than ice pick for non-scavenging builds to me. You get a bigger bonus once it is upgraded and you can use it on a wider range of tests. Scavenger + Ice Pick 3 is extremely fun and good though. Not sure if there'll be any combo pieces for this new card to let it shine as bright as the pick with Minh. KPC_Mammon fucked around with this message at 22:12 on Jul 11, 2022 |
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Jul 11, 2022 22:06
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Orange Devil posted:So anyway, as a class of cards these are interesting for mulligans. If you take 1 Dilemma in your deck, you can guarantee not getting it into your opening hand by forfeiting your mulligan if you do not start with it in hand, or mulliganing it if you do. Forfeiting the mulligan is a rather steep cost though. If you take more than 1 Dilemma in your deck and you draw one of them in your opening hand, you can not guarantee not mulliganing into another. These cards are fully dead if you get them in your hand, which is also a steep cost if it happens in your opening hand. I am confused - why are we giving up our mulligan just to stop this from being in our opening hand? Do we have some reason to think that Revelation doesn't trigger in opening hands?
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Jul 11, 2022 22:35
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I think it would trigger while drawing your opening hand, giving you an even more powerful mulligan.
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Jul 11, 2022 22:51
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Jul 11, 2022 23:00
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It'll either be that, or dilemmas will be treated like weaknesses during your mulligan. I like the pocket knife, and putting multiple upgrades onto it is a bit more affordable than for the other classes since Survivors generally have XP to spare.
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Jul 11, 2022 23:03
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My fun with dilemma cards will not be stopped by a measly rulebook.
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Jul 11, 2022 23:23
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The swiss knife is the first card in a very long time that helps Rita with a static evasion boost. It’s pricey, but having two of these out means that you’re going to be able to touch anything anywhere, or even pass weird checks once a round. (Willpower test on a location? With lucky in hand, very doable!)
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Jul 11, 2022 23:47
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Golden Bee posted:The swiss knife is the first card in a very long time that helps Rita with a static evasion boost. It’s pricey, but having two of these out means that you’re going to be able to touch anything anywhere, or even pass weird checks once a round. (Willpower test on a location? With lucky in hand, very doable!) You can only have 1 out at a time. I'm thinking this might be good for a 2xQuick Learner Stella deck I was thinking of making. Get +2 on a treachery, fail the first action of your turn and get +2 to another test when it un-exhausts.
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Jul 11, 2022 23:55
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Kalko posted:It'll either be that, or dilemmas will be treated like weaknesses during your mulligan. Yeah pocket knife looks powerful, especially the spring-loaded variant. Also was assuming revelation in hand wouldn’t work based on the exception they outlined.
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Jul 12, 2022 00:32
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Orange Devil posted:Other than the 2nd copy of a Tarot card and Emergency Cache when you don't need money, we haven't had cards that could be fully dead yet have we? Astounding Revelation in a non-stick-to-the-plan deck works this way, if you draw it before you get your tutoring engine online It's rare, but it happens Edit: I guess it's fair to say even a drawn revelation is worth at least one intellect icon, so not completely dead in hand postmodifier fucked around with this message at 01:17 on Jul 12, 2022 |
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Jul 12, 2022 01:08
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Does astounding have a book icon?
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Jul 12, 2022 01:14
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Golden Bee posted:Does astounding have a book icon? It does, it's not completely dead. Golden Bee posted:The swiss knife is the first card in a very long time that helps Rita with a static evasion boost. It’s pricey, but having two of these out means that you’re going to be able to touch anything anywhere, or even pass weird checks once a round. (Willpower test on a location? With lucky in hand, very doable!) fyi it's limit 1 per investigator. Orange Devil fucked around with this message at 11:35 on Jul 12, 2022 |
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Jul 12, 2022 11:31
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Amazon has the Edge of the Earth investigator box on sale for $28 for prime day: https://www.amazon.com/Investigator-Cooperative-Fantasy-Flight-Games/dp/B096146GCM?ref_=Oct_DLandingS_D_d121d01c_267&smid=ATVPDKIKX0DER
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Jul 12, 2022 18:22
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Vidmaster posted:Amazon has the Edge of the Earth investigator box on sale for $28 for prime day: https://www.amazon.com/Investigator-Cooperative-Fantasy-Flight-Games/dp/B096146GCM?ref_=Oct_DLandingS_D_d121d01c_267&smid=ATVPDKIKX0DER That's an amazing deal. There's so much good stuff in that box.
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Jul 12, 2022 18:58
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Awesome, I actually just wishlisted that earlier this week. What’s the deal with the EOTE characters? Seems like they start as one class and grow into another? Seems challenging.
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Jul 12, 2022 19:00
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Orange Devil posted:It does, it's not completely dead. Cornered to the rescue once again! Anonymous Robot posted:What’s the deal with the EOTE characters? Seems like they start as one class and grow into another? Seems challenging. That's the basic trick to them. And because it is a little bit challenging every single one of them has incredibly optimized stats and very powerful effects to get around some of the strangeness of their deck profiles. At the same time it's also worth remembering that Edge of the Earth brings in multiclass cards with a vengeance, and there are a number of extremely strong options in both 1 and 2+ colors that "just so happen" to line up perfectly with how the characters level up. Shoutout's Astronomical Atlas, Norman's 3XP signature card.
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Jul 12, 2022 20:35
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Bob is the only one whose deckbuilding confuses me, because I always start theorycrafting around some higher-level Survivor item that would make sense for him mechanically and thematically, yet he can't take.
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Jul 12, 2022 20:37
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Joey the Rat is Bob’s best friend.
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Jul 12, 2022 23:09
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LifeLynx posted:Bob is the only one whose deckbuilding confuses me, because I always start theorycrafting around some higher-level Survivor item that would make sense for him mechanically and thematically, yet he can't take. Joey the Rat, Scavenging, and Eon Charts let him do some completely insane poo poo.
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Jul 12, 2022 23:36
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Vidmaster posted:Amazon has the Edge of the Earth investigator box on sale for $28 for prime day: https://www.amazon.com/Investigator-Cooperative-Fantasy-Flight-Games/dp/B096146GCM?ref_=Oct_DLandingS_D_d121d01c_267&smid=ATVPDKIKX0DER Hesitated to just grab this earlier and now it's not showing up as on sale.
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Jul 12, 2022 23:54
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Batterypowered7 posted:Hesitated to just grab this earlier and now it's not showing up as on sale. Yeah, Amazon sold out. You’re now seeing other vendors.
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Jul 13, 2022 02:46
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When Return to The Path to Carcosa was released I played it true solo, on Hard, with Tommy Muldoon. I made it all the way to the end but I wasn't able to defeat Hastur because I ended up getting the one version of him that you couldn't simply walk up and shoot. At the time I didn't really appreciate how the campaign's Conviction/Doubt mechanic worked or I would've lined up one of the bullet sponge versions instead, but in fact I never actually beat the original The Path to Carcosa either; I remember making several attempts to get past the asylum scenario with true solo Agnes Baker and getting driven insane every time. So it would be fair to say that Hastur and I had some unfinished business. The game has grown a lot since my last fateful encounter with the realm of Carcosa, and I've definitely grown as a player, too, so I figured now would be a good time to revisit the one campaign I never managed to complete. It would also be good to refresh my memory of a campaign which is still widely regarded as one of the game's best, in particular to see how it stacks up against Edge of the Earth. Nowadays I like to play two-handed solo, on Hard, developing a pair of decks which I think have a good chance of completing an ironman run. I've made a few multi-post campaign reports like this one, the most recent being my Edge of the Earth report. This one will be a bit shorter, consisting of this post which introduces the investigators and their decks, then three for the campaign itself (one of which is dedicated to the side scenario I added) and one final debrief post to reflect on what worked and what didn't. ==================== Return to The Path to Carcosa Part One: The Investigators  Our lead investigator is Rex Murphy. He has a reputation for being the single best cluever in the game even with his "once per round" Taboo errata, but even knowing that going in the strength of his ability really took me by surprise. I settled on most of the contents of his deck pretty early on, with the main iterations being to actually remove action compression because it simply wasn't needed. His ability interacts well with effects that replace an Investigate action or that let you investigate other locations, but I didn't really take advantage of any of those for the final version of his deck. His stats are fairly unremarkable, with a three in Willpower being strictly average and kind of a liability in a campaign which throws as much horror at you as this one, but having nine SP is excellent and goes a long way towards making up for it (and if I had to guess I'd say the bonus point of sanity or health the Dunwich investigators get over the typical amounts went here). His four in Intellect is good but we'll be relying on a few passive stat boosts and a bunch of skill cards and events to ensure we can trigger his reaction once per round. His two in Combat is almost irrelevant ("almost" because sometimes you just gotta punch a whole Swarm of Rats) and his three in Agility is average, but there aren't many treacheries or other encounter cards which test it so it's not much of an issue. And finally, his six HP is on the low side but, again, there aren't a lot of damage dealing treacheries in this campaign so it was fine most of the time. His Elder Sign ability is one of the best in the game and it's one of the few that offer you an interesting choice, because drawing three cards is quite often a much better option than passing a single test. Not always, though, so sometimes it will make you think long and hard about which option to take. The full deck list can be found further down, but I'm going to pull out a bunch of cards first, starting with his two signature cards:  Search for the Truth: This is just a really strong card which is very easy to get value from, whether it's from the draw itself or from committing it for its excellent icons. Its relative power might be diminished somewhat simply because it's attached to an investigator from the class which has the best card draw in the game, but if this was actually a Seeker card you'd still put it into every deck. There were times when I had a full hand for multiple turns in a row due to the other card draw in the deck, which is usually when I would commit it, but if I had to write up a general rule for that use case I'd say just consider how much longer the game will last and whether or not you'd be better served by passing the test right in front of you, as opposed to potentially drawing a few more cards later on. Rex's Curse: I believe Rex is cursed in every Arkham Horror Files game he appears in (he has a hilariously powerful interaction with a certain ally in Eldritch Horror) and in this game his curse is a real burden because it's impossible to remove on your own terms. You can't bait it out by attempting to succeed just a little bit at a test, but if you can cover the worst possible modifier in the bag then you're pretty safe. Across all of my games it would usually stay on the table for multiple turns and only get shuffled back once per game, and the general air of uncertainty it fostered was truly insidious. It also felt really bad to shuffle it back into a very small deck, which happened more than a few times late in a game due to all of the other card draw in the deck. And the last thing I'll say about it is that it has a neat (and thematic) interaction with his Elder Sign ability, where if you reroll to it you can choose whether or not to rid yourself of the curse (and if you choose to ditch it you always draw the three cards before shuffling it back into your deck). Being one of the investigators from The Dunwich Legacy, Rex's deck building rules allow him to take up to five level zero cards from other classes. This allows you to gain some capabilities you wouldn't normally find in your regular class pool, but for this deck I actually chose cards which mostly enhance what Rex is already trying to do. Here they are:  Read the Signs: For almost all of my testing I actually had Delve Too Deep here because coming off the back of Edge of the Earth and The Innsmouth Conspiracy I was surprised at how low the XP rewards were from some of the Carcosa scenarios (particularly the third one). I like taking Delve when I play a Mystic, where I usually drop it after the first scenario or two, but taking it as an off-class card here felt bad because replacing it felt like I was losing some really valuable flexibility that the off-class cards can provide, and also having Delve in your deck is just a liability in general. You need to play it on the final turn of the game (playing it sooner has an extraordinary effect on the outcome of the game) which means that not only is it a dead draw when it shows up, but both copies have to sit in your hand for the entire game doing nothing at all. It's especially bad in this campaign, too, since a bunch of scenarios have Hidden treacheries which also take up space in your hand. Given the way it warps your play style you could argue that taking a different card which actually progresses the game would allow you to leverage an equal amount of (or possibly more) VP from a scenario than you might get from what two copies of Delve could provide, and I think that's probably true for some scenarios. Others are smooth enough for it to be an easy net gain, but trying to accommodate two copies of Delve for an entire campaign just doesn't feel good, or correct. Read the Signs is a great alternative which provides clue compression, protection from nasty Forced location triggers, and a skill boost which helps enable Rex's reaction. I mentioned earlier that I removed a fair amount of action compression as I iterated on this deck, but I still included a few cards like this one because they synergize so well with the rest of the deck. There aren't a lot of locations in this campaign that have more than two clues (with one scenario providing a notable exception) but being able to grab 3-4 with a single action was still situationally very good. Breaking and Entering: Similarly to RTS, this card provides a boost to help enable Rex's reaction, but it also allows him to evade an enemy using Intellect, his only good stat. Rabbit's Foot: I went back and forth between this and Lucky Cigarette Case, eventually settling on the Rabbit's Foot because its condition was easier to meet so it provided more consistent draw. It's true that the deck is focused around succeeding by at least two to activate Rex's ability, but that does require committing resources, and with the Hard token bag it isn't something you can be sure of triggering every turn. It's also one resource cheaper and its Wild icon makes it easier to commit to a test, if you need to.  Archaic Glyphs: And this is our Research objective for the first scenario. It took several attempts at the second and third scenarios before I realized Rex needed some more enemy management tech (his partner is not a Guardian) and this option felt like a natural fit. As with Breaking and Entering, it allows him to use his best stat to Evade, and Rex is perfectly comfortable performing basic Investigate actions. It also doesn't take up a hand slot so it won't prevent him from dual wielding Magnifying Glasses.  In the Thick of It: I spoke about this card at length in my Edge of the Earth report but, suffice to say, it's one of my favourites and it's a staple in all of my decks. Well, except maybe for Mystics that take Arcane Research. In any case, Rex will take on one point of physical trauma and one point of mental trauma. I initially started out with two points of physical trauma but the first scenario just proved to be too tight for that to work consistently, and it probably wouldn't have worked beyond the fifth scenario anyway. Pathfinder: I'll go over the other options I tried in the debrief post at the end, but I ended up with Pathfinder because it took up a single slot (I was hard-pressed to find room for more cards after settling on the rest of the deck) and because it synergizes really well with Breaking and Entering and Archaic Glyphs (3). And it's just a really strong card in general. Oh, and the Taboo version of it costs 3XP.  Logical Reasoning: So, Return to Curtain Call is a very difficult scenario. I'll talk about it more when I introduce our second investigator but for now let me just say that I thought I wouldn't need Logical Reasoning because one of the replacement sets for Return removes Frozen in Fear, and while it does add two new Terror treacheries which sit in your threat area, Painful Reflection and Melancholy, they weren't nearly as punishing (and trying to remove Painful Reflection with LR was a bit of a crapshoot anyway). So I had LR for my first few attempts and then took it out for the next dozen or so, but I eventually realized that it was extremely valuable for its ability to heal two horror. The reason for that is because the token bag for The Path to Carcosa is unique in that it has three Skull tokens (the other campaigns mostly begin with two) and no other symbol tokens, and in the first scenario its value is equal to the amount of horror on your investigator. This essentially means that the difficulty of the scenario scales very tightly with how much horror you have on you, so being able to take the edge off the Skull token turned out to be a real lifesaver. Here's the full deck list: Rex Murphy in Return to Carcosa (Hard) - 3XP Assets 2 x Magnifying Glass (Core Set) 2 x Dr. Milan Christopher (Core Set) 1 x Rabbit's Foot (Core Set) 1 x Pathfinder (The Miskatonic Museum) 2 x Fine Clothes (Where Doom Awaits) 2 x Archaic Glyphs (The Path to Carcosa) 1 x In the Thick of It (Edge of the Earth Investigator Expansion) Events 1 x Search for the Truth (The Dunwich Legacy) 2 x Shortcut (The Dunwich Legacy) 2 x Preposterous Sketches (Blood on the Altar) 2 x Logical Reasoning (A Phantom of Truth) 2 x Crack the Case (The Secret Name) 2 x Read the Signs (The Search for Kadath) 2 x Practice Makes Perfect (Dark Side of the Moon) 2 x Breaking and Entering (In Too Deep) Skills 2 x Deduction (Core Set) 2 x Perception (Core Set) 2 x Inquiring Mind (Undimensioned and Unseen) Treacheries 1 x Rex's Curse (The Dunwich Legacy) 1 x Indebted (The Dunwich Legacy) 2 x Dr. Milan Christopher, 2 x Crack the Case: These are our only economy cards, with Dr Milan Christopher also providing a passive Intellect boost. The deck has a pretty low curve and it was fine on all of my test runs, but for the proper run I pulled a basic weakness that put a lot of strain on it. 2 x Magnifying Glass: Our other passive Intellect booster. Cheap and effective. 2 x Deduction, 2 x Perception, 2 x Inquiring Mind: A standard Seeker skills package. We'll upgrade Perception pretty early on, but not Deduction, because Rex doesn't need it and as I mentioned earlier, most of the locations in the campaign don't have more than two clues. It did offer some value in being able to pick up multiple clues from two different locations in the same turn, but with the way you have to commit more heavily on Hard it doesn't do enough over the base version to justify the XP purely for that use case. 2 x Practice Makes Perfect: And this helps us get more value out of Perception and Deduction (and a certain other Practiced event we'll add later). Getting two uses out of Perception (2) is pretty great! 2 x Preposterous Sketches: Solid card draw to dig for our important tools and stock our hand with stuff to commit to tests. 2 x Fine Clothes: A campaign-specific addition which will make short work of the second scenario. If we can draw it...  1 x Indebted: And here's the basic weakness I drew. I thought it wouldn't be too bad because I don't have a lot of expensive cards but in reality your opening turns have a huge impact on the outcome of the game, and being resource starved is something you'll feel on each and every turn until you're able to recover. Or I should say if you're able to recover, because if I didn't get a Milan in my opening hand I would spend my resources on other things, and then when he finally did show up I was rarely able to actually play him due to the opportunity cost of spending actions to gain resources, along with the fact that most of the scenarios have treacheries which hit those same resources. When it came to choosing between playing Milan and maintaining tempo I usually chose tempo, and I'm not sure if I got that right every time. It can be a pretty difficult weakness to deal with. And that's it for our lead investigator, which means it's now time to introduce the second member of our theatre investigation squad. It is none other than Winifred Habbamock!  When I play two-handed solo games I typically like to have one of my decks focus on gathering clues and the other focus on enemy management and running interference for the cluever, which in this case means that Winifred Habbamock is going to be dealing with all of the cultists and monsters that stand in our way. She doesn't seem particularly well-suited for this role, but then she doesn't seem to have been designed with any well-defined role in mind, so you might be wondering why I chose her for this campaign. Well, I wanted to take this opportunity to explore the Rogue class in a way I wasn't able to do with my Preston Fairmont run, since the subset of Rogue cards he generally values is pretty different to what the rest of them take. I was also curious about whether an oversuccess archetype could be effective on Hard (and Rex relies on oversuccess, too, so I was committing to a theme) and I was really interested to find out exactly what I could do with Winifred because ability-wise she's a blank slate, and on paper she's definitely not favoured for this campaign. That was fine, though, because taking an investigator through some difficult content is the best way to find out exactly what they are and aren't good at. Before embarking upon this project my understanding of the Rogue class was that it could reliably discover one clue or deal with one enemy per turn, and that they could do either without much setup, but scaling up would require a lot of work. In some ways they're the opposite of the Mystic class, which can do everything efficiently but takes time to get going. Building this deck turned out to be a real trial by fire as a lot of my initial assumptions about what would work for Curtain Call (I'll drop the "Return to" bit from now on) completely and utterly failed. I'll get to that soon, but first let's take a look at her stats and abilities. So, a one in Willpower is obviously terrible and it means she'll be taking the worst possible result from just about every treachery in the campaign. An Intellect and Combat of three is pretty average, but these stats gain more value with the Rogue card pool because there are a lot of cards which let you combine your Agility with them to perform an action. And a base Agility of five is excellent, so we'll be trying to leverage it as much as possible throughout the campaign. Her ability to draw a card after committing two to a test makes her the ideal candidate for an oversuccess deck, and it allows her to cycle through her deck quickly as long as she can afford to keep committing cards. Her Elder Sign ability feels great when it triggers (note that it's not optional) and getting a bunch of resources you committed to a test back is always valuable. A lot of Winifred builds tend to be skill-heavy to take advantage of these abilities, and I tried that early on, but again, it completely fell flat in Curtain Call. The main issue is that Winifred is great at evading enemies but to deal damage to them by performing tests she needs to repeatedly and consistently boost her Combat by a lot, and that just isn't viable on Hard. Consequently, our level zero deck for Winifred contains 17 events and deals the majority of its damage without performing tests. This deck went through a huge number of iterations before I finally found something that worked, and in the process I really scraped the bottom of the barrel (or rather the back of the card box). No card was deemed unworthy until I had put it in the deck and tried it out in an actual game, which is how I discovered the highly dubious but great for this scenario Coup de Grâce. I'll go over the various earlier versions of the deck in the debrief post but it's important to mention here that this deck is hyper-focused on beating Curtain Call and nothing else. In practice, that meant considering the HP and evade values of the following enemies:   And these are our damage-dealing cards:  Backstab: This is our heavy-hitter, generally saved for the Emissary or the Agent, but also used on the Comtesse if she showed up. Cheap Shot: When you absolutely, positively must evade your target but you don't have enough boosts to cover the worst modifier, Cheap Shot is your answer. It was rarely used purely for damage but it stayed in the deck for the entire campaign because later on it became one of our two main oversuccess enablers. Sneak Attack: Sneak Attack is generally not very efficient, being two actions for two damage, but it only requires Winifred to pass an Evade test, which is something she rarely fails. And Rex has some evade tech in his deck, too, so it was occasionally a better value proposition.  Small Favor: Expensive if you need to deal two damage, but better to have the option than not. Coup de Grâce: I thought I would never put this card into a deck but it's a testament to this game's depth that it does actually make sense in some situations. It actually wasn't difficult to get value from it by playing it as the last action of a turn to kill something, and while both it and Small Favor kill the Swarm of Rats outright I would generally commit them to a Fight test against them instead if it made sense to do so (in other words, if it had a 70% or higher chance of success).  Delilah O'Rourke: Providing reliable and repeatable testless damage plus two relevant stat boosts, this is the card that makes the rest of the deck work. I tried a lot of other XP cards before Delilah O'Rourke but there's simply no substitute for the value she offers. We'll purchase a second copy as soon as possible and she will be one of our top two mulligan targets for the entire campaign. As for In the Thick of It, Winifred will take on two physical trauma because sanity is a very precious resource in this campaign and she has health to spare.  Hatchet Man: And, finally, to augment all of our damage dealing effects to meet specific HP breakpoints we have Hatchet Man.  "Let God sort them out...": This deck is extremely XP-hungry and this card is surprisingly easy to play with Delilah in the mix providing a fast source of damage to finish something off. In Curtain Call we also have a very predictable target for it so it was almost always possible to play the one copy of it in the deck. And that covers our damage suite, but before I get to the full deck list I want to pull out her two signature cards:  Anything You Can Do, Better: This is basically a free pass for any test (sometimes even Willpower tests). It's fun to play and great for triggering a big oversuccess value, and as with all of the starter investigators it's actually a class card, which I think at the moment is only relevant for Daredevil (which looks for Rogue skills to add to a test). I never let it sit in my hand for very long because its ability to near-guarantee a success was a lot more important than extracting the maximum amount of value from it. Arrogance: Arrogance is about as mild as signature weaknesses come. It's simple to drop it with a single action by simply investigating your location (and getting to drop it for free from a Willpower treachery is a nice consolation prize) but it does sometimes stick around for a while if you can't afford to spare that action. Here's the full deck list: Winifred Habbamock in Return to The Path to Carcosa (Hard) - 3XP Assets 2 x Lucky Cigarette Case (Threads of Fate) 1 x Delilah O'Rourke (Where the Gods Dwell) 1 x In the Thick of It (Edge of the Earth Investigator Expansion) Events 2 x Sneak By (Winifred Habbamock) 2 x Backstab (Core Set) 2 x Sneak Attack (Core Set) 2 x Cheap Shot (A Phantom of Truth) 2 x "You handle this one!" (The Forgotten Age) 2 x Coup de Grâce (The Depths of Yoth) 2 x Small Favor (In the Clutches of Chaos) 1 x "Let God sort them out..." (A Thousand Shapes of Horror) 2 x Faustian Bargain (The Innsmouth Conspiracy) Skills 1 x Anything You Can Do, Better (Winifred Habbamock) 1 x Arrogance (Winifred Habbamock) 2 x Manual Dexterity (Core Set) 2 x Unexpected Courage (Core Set) 2 x Quick Thinking (Undimensioned and Unseen) 2 x "Watch this!" (The Pallid Mask) 2 x Hatchet Man (The Boundary Beyond) Treachery 1 x Psychosis (Core Set) 2 x Faustian Bargain, 2 x Sneak By, 2 x "Watch this!": You might have noticed that our damage-dealing cards are a bit on the expensive side, especially with Delilah draining 2-3 resources on average for each use. I found it really hard to build an economy package that could support this deck because no matter how many resources I fed it, it could always use more. It was also difficult to add XP options like Hot Streak (2) because I needed cards which could be used at zero resources since the deck spent most of its time running on empty. Faustian Bargain and Sneak By can both be played with an empty resource pool, and in the case of Sneak By its resources can immediately be doubled with "Watch this!". I found "Watch this!" to be really solid for the entire campaign, and while Faustian Bargain's downside is somewhat mitigated by decks which are aiming for oversuccess (at least in the sense that you won't outright fail a test as often) I was never really happy with it and yet at the same time I couldn't replace it. This deck was also sometimes able to take advantage of Crack the Case, and while this package was good enough for the whole campaign it was just barely so, as there were definitely some painful dry patches during a few scenarios. 2 x Lucky Cigarette Case: I put this card into an early version of the deck and then took it out for most of the subsequent iterations because of all the testless damage cards, but I eventually added it back in because Winifred really needs more card draw and she did perform at least one Evade test every turn when there was an enemy up, so it wasn't hard to trigger it. 2 x "You handle this one!": This was mostly here for Curtain Call to ensure she could pass Melancholy and Painful Reflection to Rex. It generally wasn't very useful to pass him any standard Willpower treacheries, though, because he didn't have much chance of passing them either, so this card actually gets replaced pretty soon after the first scenario. 2 x Manual Dexterity, 2 x Quick Thinking, 2 x Unexpected Courage: Manual Dexterity is a staple, and Quick Thinking provided a lot of useful utility for things like Sneak Attack or "Let God sort them out..." while Unexpected Courage was one of the last additions to the deck and it proved to be generally more useful than the other options I tried.  1 x Psychosis: And the basic weakness I pulled for Winifred turned out to be an easy one. I don't think I actually bothered removing it more than once or twice across all of my test runs because her health was rarely an issue, especially with the soak from Delilah. And that's it for the investigators and their decks. Kalko fucked around with this message at 13:35 on Jul 15, 2022 |
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Jul 14, 2022 19:31
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For each scenario in the campaign I'll begin with a brief description of what it's about, then I'll mention the strategy I came up with for it followed by how my actual run went. Along the way I'll mention some of the plays I made based upon my notes and then I'll go over the upgrades and other resolution bits and pieces. ==================== Return to The Path to Carcosa Part Two: The Campaign Our game begins at the Ward Theatre in Arkham. A production called The King in Yellow has arrived from Paris and is showing for one night only, but we're not attending simply to patronize the arts. It turns out that wherever this play is performed strange deaths and cases of people being driven mad follow in its wake, so we're here to find out why. Now, after sitting through the first act the only thing we've discovered is that the play is actually dull as poo poo, and we can't help but nod off. When we come to, we notice that the theatre looks a lot more dilapidated than it used to and there are only a few people left in the audience. Getting up, we ask the nearest person if they know what's going on, but it turns out they're a corpse! You and me, both, buddy. You and me, both. ------------------------------ Scenario One: Return to Curtain Call   We begin at the Theatre and our first objective is to collect six clues to advance the act. When we reveal the Lobby or the Backstage we put two unrevealed Lobby Door or Backstage Door locations into play out of a pool of four each. These are the possible side rooms for the Lobby and Backstage, respectively:   Once we've advanced the first act another side room is put into play at random from the pool of all remaining set-aside locations, and the Man in the Pallid Mask is spawned at that location. Our objective is then to defeat him, which advances the second act and causes all hell to break loose. The Man moves to the Lobby and horror tokens are placed onto various different locations (there are six different act cards) to indicate that you need to perform tests when moving into or out of those locations, with a variety of accompanying failure effects which can cause your move to be canceled and/or deal you damage and/or horror. The horror tokens spread to connecting locations at the end of the round, so movement between any locations very quickly becomes a high-risk endeavour. Our final objective is to defeat The Man again, at which point the Lobby turns into a location we can Resign at.  While we deal with all of that, when the first agenda advances (after its six doom threshold is met) it drops this ugly blob of flesh and tentacles at the Theatre:  When we defeat it the first agenda is returned to play with three doom on it and after it advances again the Royal Emissary is returned to play. Each time it returns it gains 2HP, so we can realistically only defeat it twice before it becomes unkillable. Strategy: So we have two conflicting goals here: 1) collect all of the VP we possibly can, and 2) don't die. I know that's kind of the case for any scenario, but we really should underline "don't die" a few times because in this one it's very easy to get in over your head without realizing it. The best case scenario here is 9VP from six locations and two enemies but I don't think I ever achieved that across what must have been 30-40 attempts. I was satisfied with 6VP plus a "Let God sort them out..." for Winifred, and that was a very achievable result most of the time. The general plan here is to hit the ground running and try to accomplish as much as we can before the Skull token becomes unmanageable. To illustrate my point earlier about horror being very closely correlated with difficulty here, take a look at this plot:  When we advance to the third act two -5 tokens get added to the bag, so we want to complete all of our outstanding tasks like VP farming and Royal Emissary slaying before we defeat The Man and then rush to the Lobby to defeat him again and Resign. I generally stuck to the same opening each time, which is that if Winifred doesn't get Delilah after hard mulliganning for her she moves to the Lobby and uses its draw action (and then generally repeats that action on subsequent turns until she either draws her or is needed somewhere else). If she does get Delilah she will play her and then end her turn at the Lobby anyway, and if Rex is able to move to the Balcony and collect both of its clues on the first turn (by having a good boost in hand) then he will do that, otherwise he'll end his turn at he Lobby as well.  The reason we stay at the Lobby on that first turn is because of the Fanatic (there are three in the deck):  If no other locations have been revealed then a Fanatic will always spawn at the Lobby and Winifred can handle it, but if Rex is sitting at one of the side locations with two clues on it then the Fanatic will have to spawn there and it will take more actions to deal with it. We can use the Fanatic to our advantage, too, by revealing a side room with two clues and then immediately leaving. If we do this early then there's a good chance by the time the scenario ends we'll have been able to spawn two Fanatics there and we won't have to worry about actually clearing it ourselves to get the VP. It's also fine if we only grab one clue from a side room (say, because we didn't succeed enough to trigger Rex's reaction) because we can do the Fanatic gambit just as easily with one clue most of the time. After that first turn the branching paths become too numerous to stick to any sort of rigid plan, so I'll just list off a few other points about what can go wrong or how I handled various things:
How it went: Ah, Curtain Call. The things I've seen... Right, anyway, so Rex's opening hand contained Pathfinder and an Archaic Glyphs. He played both of them (so that he wouldn't lose the Glyphs to an early Twisted to His Will) and then fast-moved to the Lobby and gained a resource. Winifred's opening hand very fortunately contained Delilah, which she played and then moved straight into a Lobby Door (having covered Move and Play for Visions) to reveal the Lighting Box.  Over the next few turns, Rex grabbed the clues from the Balcony and then we dealt with a Fanatic, double Rats, and double Poltergeist. The first Poltergeist was costly, taking three of Rex's actions to deal with (and a Practice Makes Perfect and two Perception commits) but he had his threads out for the second and it disappeared with the standard two actions. On the fourth Mythos phase we pulled a Spires of Carcosa and lost a turn each to it (it wasn't worth trying to clear) and Rex removed the Melancholy Winifred drew with Logical Reasoning. The agenda advanced on the following turn, with Winifred waiting for the Royal Emissary at the Theatre. She evaded it then put two damage onto it with Delilah, then got rid of a Spirit's Torment on the Theatre by placing her one clue there. I didn't mention it earlier, but we only cleared this treachery if it landed in a place we'd have to move through more than once (so basically anything except a side room).  Rex needed that clue to make six to advance the act, so he moved to the Theatre. Winifred killed the Emissary on the following turn then opened one of the Backstage Doors to reveal the Prop Shop. On the following turn (4/6 with the Emissary in the victory display) we drew the Agent of the King and a Swarm of Rats. Winifred killed the Rats then moved twice back to the Theatre to help Rex evade the Agent with a Manual Dexterity commit (plus his spare Fine Clothes). He successfully evaded it (Delilah hitting it for two) then grabbed the Theatre clue and advanced the act, placing The Man in the Pallid Mask at one of the Backstage Doors. On the following turn something bizarre happened: we pulled a Fanatic, which landed at the Prop Shop, and then we pulled The King's Edict thus clearing the Prop Shop of both of its clues. In all of my attempts I don't think I ever saw an Edict actually trigger that effect instead of surging. Sometimes things can go very right instead of very wrong.  On this same turn, Rex fast-moved into The Man's location, revealing the Dressing Room. Shame about it not being one of the VP locations, but I decided to do something here I'd never done before (this game was full of firsts). I used its three-action horror heal to get Rex's Skull token back to -1 since he would have to succeed at a 6-point Investigate to advance the act, he didn't have much of a hand, and his curse was in play. On the next turn, Rex played Dr Milan Christopher and attempted an Investigate at +2, pulling a 0 which his curse promptly turned into a -5. Sigh. Also on this turn, the Royal Emissary returned to the Theatre and Winfred put five damage onto it with an Evade plus Delilah followed by Backstab (committing AYCDB) then she moved to the Backstage because she was clearly going to have to do Rex's job for him. And to make matters worse, Rex's Curse returned right away during Upkeep. On the following turn, Rex's Curse disappeared again after hitting a Black Stars Rise. Winifred moved into the Dressing Room, engaged The Man, hit him with a Cheap Shot, and then Delilah finished him off. Then, a mass of viscous ooze started seeping out of the spot he left.  Yeah, this was a pretty bad one. Damage and horror from an Agility-4 test? Rex was in for a world of hurt, though Winifred would be fine. During the next Mythos phase, the Comtesse appeared at the Balcony and Winifred pulled a Twisted to his Will, which she promptly passed to Rex with YHTO because she had LGSTO in her hand. We then began executing our exit strategy, which consisted of Winifred going first into the Backstage (after taking a Resource action) to finish off the Emissary with a 1-point hit from Delilah, after which she played LGSTO. Rex failed to escape from the ooze as he moved to the Backstage, activating his Rabbit's Foot in the process and drawing his curse again. It's pretty awful when it keeps getting shuffled into a small deck size, but at this stage there was no more efficient card draw to hasten the deck reshuffle. He took another hit moving to the Theatre when the curse turned an Elder Sign into a -4, then he fast-moved into the Lobby and defeated The Man with a +3 Investigate test. On the following turn, Winifred moved in and engaged the Comtesse so that Rex could activate his Archaic Glyphs three times, then on the turn after that we resigned. Resolution 1. We tried to warn the police. Conviction + 1 -> 1 total. Throughout this campaign various scenario effects and resolution choices will grant you an amount of Doubt or Conviction. Later on, this will impact the configuration of some scenarios depending upon our total amount of Doubt and Conviction combined, and also which one of them we have more of. We're going to try to focus on Conviction for this run, because it means that in the final scenario we get one of the Hastur enemies we can shoot in the face. The Stranger is onto us. The Man in the Pallid Mask was added to Rex's deck. Chasing the Stranger +2 -> 2 total. The Man will now appear in each other scenario either by being drawn from Rex's deck or being tutored out by an encounter card, or in a couple of cases during Setup. Each time we defeat him we add one tally mark to our total for Chasing the Stranger, and then in the final scenario we'll receive a bonus based on how many marks we've accumulated. 7VP (two enemies, four locations) = 7XP for Rex 8XP for Winifred (LGSTO) Upgrades Rex:  2 x Archaic Glyphs -> 2 x Archaic Glyphs (3): With one of these in play Rex can venture away from Winifred and gather clues in relative safety, and the fact that it evades enemies means it synergizes with most of her damage suite, too. It will be very useful in the next scenario, which is positively overflowing with enemies.  1 x Logical Reasoning -> 1 x Ancient Stone (1): One thing I learned during my test runs is that Winifred needs some backup damage to make our enemy handling in the mid-to-late scenarios more consistent, especially with regards to bosses. One copy of the laser version of Ancient Stone proved sufficient because Rex has very good card draw and most of the boss enemies Winifred needs help with only appear late into the game, so it would always be on the table and ready to fire. Upgrading it during the next scenario is of the utmost importance, too, because we need it for our side adventure. I swapped out one copy of Logical Reasoning here because it had limited utility until the final scenario, and while its horror heal was still useful I knew from experience we could get by without it. 7XP spent, 0XP left. Winifred:  1 x Lucky Cigarette Case -> 1 x Lucky Cigarette Case (3): This is the big reward for building an oversuccess deck. It's incredibly strong, granting access to pretty much your entire deck over the course of a scenario. Along with Delilah this is our top mulligan target, and getting one of these into play early has a huge positive effect on the outcome of the game. It might as well be Winifred's second signature card.  1 x Coup de Grace -> Lockpicks (1): Along with Cheap Shot, this will be our primary means of generating really deep LCC (3) searches. It also represents the only XP we'll spend on clue gathering. 1 x Coup de Grace -> 1 x Delilah O'Rourke: Our second copy of Delilah. 1 x Adaptable: Adaptable is one of my favourite cards, allowing you to dynamically adjust your deck according to your progress (or lack thereof) while also rewarding knowledge of the scenario at hand repeatedly throughout the campaign. It's also one of the reasons we could afford to play so many, uh, specialized cards for Curtain Call. 8XP spent, 0XP left. Adaptable  2 x Small Favor -> 2 x Pilfer: The next scenario has a lot of Elite enemies, so we won't get as much value out of Small Favor. It also begins without any clues on any of its main locations, but during its mid-to-late stages it's highly likely that up to three clues will be placed on one or more of its locations, and when that happens we'll be on a pretty tight clock, so having an efficient way to grab that many clues should prove useful. Well, we went to the police and told them that monsters were running rampant at the local theatre, but for some reason they didn't believe us. Returning to the scene to see if we could find some hard evidence to back up our story, we find a note on the wall advertising The King in Yellow's cast party at the home of one Constance Dumaine, at 8pm tonight. Well, well, well. Time to strap on our party-crashing boots and see if we can't find some answers. ------------------------------ Scenario Two: Return to The Last King  Going forward, there will always be two non-Skull symbol tokens in the bag, and they may change during each scenario's resolution. We were lucky to have avoided getting any Cultist tokens in the bag during the first scenario because they're the most annoying ones to deal with here. We currently have two Tablet tokens, which are about as good or bad as the Elder Thing tokens for this scenario. This is our current bag:   Our starting location here is the Foyer, and each of the other five locations has a Bystander character holding three clues. Here's the layout for our run:  If we manage to acquire all of the clues on a Bystander we flip their card over and read a short story, and then we record that we've successfully interviewed them. Each interview will grant us a small beneficial effect for a future scenario, but our main objective is to simply get as many clues as we can because for every two clues we obtain we earn 1XP for the team (it has to be divided up evenly at the end). Once we're satisfied we've done all we can, we return to the Foyer and resign.  When the first agenda advances (after three doom) Diane Devine arrives and possibly stymies our attempt to question the Bystanders. Also, Shocking Display is shuffled into the encounter deck. Each Bystander has an associated Sickening Reality card, all of which are randomly placed beneath the scenario reference card during setup. These cards have a story on their back and an enemy side on their front, and each time the second agenda would advance (also after three doom) instead you replace one of the Bystanders with their enemy version and place any clues they were holding on their location. Strategy: The most important thing here is for Rex to find his Fine Clothes since they trivialize the Parley tests, giving two of them a difficulty of zero (which means the only way to fail them is to actually draw the autofail token). If Rex doesn't get the Fine Clothes in his opening hand it's not really worth digging for them, but depending upon the layout of the party it might be possible to have him move to the Living Room to use its draw action for a bit of compression. Without the Fine Clothes we'll end up with less XP at the end and fewer interviews, but there's a lot of variance with regards to how the night unfolds so it's by no means a lost cause. We want to start mingling as soon as possible to try to grab as many clues as we can before Diane arrives, so we'll head straight in and leave the two clues on the Foyer until we're ready to resign. The encounter deck is quite small here so it's pretty likely we'll end up drawing multiple enemies from it, and for that reason we also want to avoid the Courtyard even though it does provide the fastest path from one end of the mansion to the other. We'll try to completely clear a Bystander of clues before moving to the next one, and on the turn before Diane arrives we'll try to ensure we can choose exactly where she spawns (if any of the Bystanders have an equal number of clues we can choose between them). Winifred isn't very useful during this first stage, so she'll usually try to grab a couple of clues from Ashleigh, which requires spending actions only. Once the Bystanders begin turning we'll try to evade them and grab any clues they dropped, but it really depends who we're dealing with. Killing them is not much of an option as Winifred can only deal with Constance and Sebastien in any kind of efficient manner (and unfortunately killing Diane Devine's enemy version for the 1VP is completely out of the question). Once we're starting to get overrun by enemies it's time to leave, so we'll grab the last two clues from the Foyer and resign. How it went: Rex didn't get the Fine Clothes in his opening hand, but he did get a Preposterous Sketches, so he played it and then moved into the Living Room to talk to Ishimaru, drawing a card afterwards with the location's reaction (this wasn't the greatest idea but I was kind of at a loss to come up with a better move at the time). Winifred played Delilah and then moved to the Gallery so that she could talk to Ashleigh on the next turn. It was kind of unfortunate that Ashleigh ended up at the Gallery because it meant that all of the clues Winifred grabbed would end up on it, but she could still complete the interview and then grab all three clues with a Pilfer. During the first Mythos phase, Rex pulled a Maggot Swarm and Winifred pulled a Bleeding Walls (losing one action to it) so Ashleigh would have to wait.  Winifred moved to the Living Room and engaged the maggots, and Rex tried to talk to Ishimaru again. He was getting nowhere, though, so he moved to the Courtyard to talk to Constance (where he could at least commit cards) and a Maniac showed up. During the next Mythos phase a Young Psychopath also showed up at the Courtyard; Rex was the centre of attention! Winifred evaded the maggots (killing them with Delilah) then moved to the Courtyard (discarding a Tough Crowd) then she hit the Psychopath with a Cheap Shot. On Rex's turn she helped him evade the Maniac with a Manual Dexterity commit, and he grabbed two clues from Constance.  Diane appeared on the next turn, at the Courtyard, so that was our cue to leave. But first, Winifred had to deal with another Young Psychopath. Who the hell invited these guys? Rex engaged the Maniac (putting it to 1HP) then evaded it and moved to the Ballroom. Winifred evaded both of the Psychopaths and moved to the Ballroom (having drawn an autofail on one attempt but luckily having an extra action up her sleeve from a Quick Thinking commit on the first one) leaving all three enemies at the Courtyard. On the next turn, Rex was able to get one clue from three actions spent talking to Sebastien (plus two resources from the location reaction), then Winifred played a Faustian Bargain, handing him two resources so that he'd be able to move to the Dining Room to speak with Jordan on the next turn. She then spent her remaining two actions drawing cards, and on that turn's upkeep Rex's Fine Clothes finally appeared. Rex found a quiet spot to get changed then headed to the Dining Room, and on the following turn we heard a commotion coming from the Gallery.  Earlier this turn Rex had pulled a Dance of the Yellow King which finished off the Maniac, which is something I'd planned for.  Now, time for a quick status check: Rex was at 1HP/8SP with no ally in play, and Winifred was at 5HP/1SP with one horror on Delilah (she had played a fresh copy earlier). And so it was that over the next few turns, Rex was able to interview Jordan and then tank Ashleigh while he chatted with Sebastien, who turned into a monster right in front of him. Archaic Glyphs helped him to disengage from them, and he met Winifred in the Foyer. Jordan turned during the following Mythos phase, and Rex played the Ancient Stone (1) and committed the remaining cards in his hand to successfully research it (Shroud-5), after which he defeated The Man by pulling a 0 on a +1 attempt. On the following turn, Shocking Display hit Ishimaru at the Living Room, dumping her three clues there. I decided to risk it by having Winifred move in to evade her and grab the clues with Pilfer, which worked. On that same turn, Rex was unable to shake a Maniac that had appeared at the Foyer with him (killing Milan) so he resigned, and on the final turn of the game (turn eleven) with monster-form Sebastien, Ashleigh, and Jordan all crowded into the Courtyard, Winifred evaded Ishimaru and returned to the Foyer to resign.  Resolution 1. Conviction - 1. Chasing the Stranger +1 -> 3. Interviews: Jordan Perry. 3XP each (13 clues gathered). Upgrades Rex:  1 x Ancient Stone (1) -> 1 x Ancient Stone (3): As mentioned, this helps pick up any slack when it comes to killing enemies. 3XP spent, 0XP left. Winifred: 1 x Lucky Cigarette Case -> 1 x Lucky Cigarette Case (3): Both are now upgraded. Adaptable 1 x "Let God sort them out...", 1 x Pilfer -> 2 x Small Favor: Small Favor returns since in the next scenario we'll be dealing with the Dark Cult set, and we have no use for LGSTO. One copy of Pilfer could still come in handy for the final location, which has six clues on it. ------------------------------ Interlude One: Lunacy's Reward #3 : Standing in the front yard, we contemplate the recent turn of events that led us here to this mansion full of madness. It seemed like the party was going pretty well, at least until those psychopaths showed up. Things kind of went downhill from there and it got really weird really quickly. I suppose we should probably burn down the house with all of them inside, just in case they really were monsters. We slayed the monsters at the dinner party. Conviction +1 -> 2. Token bag: -2 x Tablet, +2 x Cultist. We left the mansion with only one decent lead, which was that apparently this play had been performed in Arkham before and it had been directed by a man named Nigel Engram. If there were any records concerning a previous showing of the play in this town then they might be found in the Historical Society building over in Southside, so that was to be our next destination. ------------------------------ Scenario Three: Return to Echoes of the Past  Our token bag is more or less the same as before, but here it is anyway with two values for the Skull token (0 and -5):   The Historical Society has three floors (plus a Basement level added in the Return box) and we begin in the Entry Hall. I'll refer to the locations off the central column as East or West (or simply E or W) with a number denoting their level. In most of my runs I found this scenario pretty breezy so I didn't practice it much, but then on my final test run it went completely off the rails and plummeted into the gorge right from the first Mythos phase, so in the end I did put a bit more thought into planning for it. Since we're playing on Hard, one Seeker of Carcosa is spawned on the third floor during setup. I placed it at 3W, a location with two clues (whenever an enemy is spawned at an unrevealed location, you must reveal that location). During this scenario doom is not placed onto the agenda during the Mythos phase; instead, it builds up on all of the cultists in play, but it can still be added to the agenda by treacheries like Led Astray or The Cult's Search.  When the first agenda advances the discard pile is shuffled into the encounter deck, and when the second agenda advances this guy appears at the Entry Hall:  Defeating him is one way to resolve the scenario, but the preferable way for us will be to clear the Hidden Library. Accessing it requires us to advance to the third act, at which point we gain control of Mr Peabody, who we can then use to create a connection between a Historical Society location with the Passageway trait and the library itself.  We then need to spend six clues while at the Hidden Library to advance the third and final act. However, when we advance the first and second acts, a Keeper of the Oath appears somewhere in the building, so we need to plan for that or we'll lose some of our clues.  It's a fairly straightforward scenario which mostly involves keeping the cultist enemies under control, but a perfect storm of bad treacheries can turn a leisurely stroll through the aisles into a frantic rush for the exit within the space of a couple of turns. Strategy: Nothing too fancy here. Wini will immediately head up to L3 to deal with the Seeker of Carcosa while Rex pops into the ground floor side rooms to start collecting clues. We'll avoid the Basement locations because they all suck, and we'll put the two Keeper of the Oaths down there when they appear so that they'll be as far away from us as possible (hopefully neither of their locations has the Passageway trait, though it's not a huge problem if they do). We need four clues to advance each of the first two acts, and we'll try to save up eight so that we can advance both at the same time, but if the first agenda advances then we'll advance the first act in tandem because it means the Keeper of the Oath won't gain hunter, and it will make things slightly easier for us because advancing the act adds clues to our cleared locations. Floating clues is slightly risky because the encounter deck can steal them, but it's still better than having the two Keepers running around the whole time because Winifred will probably have her hands full chasing cultists all over the building. How it went: Winifred played a Faustian Bargain, giving Rex one resource so that he could play Milan, then she headed straight up to Quiet Halls L3 (or QH3). Rex played Milan then moved into 1W and grabbed its two clues. During the first Mythos phase we spawned a second Seeker of Carcosa at 3E, which was kind of bad because Winifred didn't yet have Delilah and her only real damage dealing card was a Cheap Shot. On her turn she played a LCC then moved into 3W and drew a card, while Rex continued into 1E to gather more clues (though an autofail slowed him down on this turn, then his curse appeared during its Upkeep phase). On the following turn we drew the Wizard of the Order and Mysterious Chanting so at the end of the Mythos phase there was seven doom on the table, which was a bit concerning.  Winifred engaged the Seeker then played Cheap Shot with a 3-point "Watch this!" and Unexpected Courage, drawing a 0 token for a 9-point LCC search. She didn't find Delilah, but she did find a Small Favor to finish off the Seeker, removing four doom from play. Downstairs, Rex played a Read the Signs at +4, which his curse promptly interrupted with a -5 pull. Over the next few turns the agenda advanced so we advanced the act with it, putting a Keeper of the Oath into BW (non-Passageway), and then when Rex had gathered another four clues I decided to wait a turn to advance and dash into the Hidden Library because Winifred wasn't at a Passageway location. On the seventh turn we advanced to the third act, with Mr Peabody replacing Dr Milan Christopher under Rex's control; unfortunately he takes up an ally slot, and while I could have replaced Delilah it was possible that we'd still need to fight one of the Keepers of the Oath or the Agent of the King if it appeared. Rex activated Mr Peabody and fast-moved into the Hidden Library, grabbing three of its clues with his remaining two actions. Winifred simply took three move actions to meet him in the library. On the following turn there was only three doom in play at the end of the Mythos phase (Winifred had been able to clean the place up pretty efficiently) so we could have waited around for a few turns to see if the Agent and its 1VP would show up, but it was pretty risky because the encounter deck can steal your clues so we'd have to venture out of the library to find more and then return to advance the final act. So Rex simply grabbed the last three clues and we ended it right away. Resolution 1. Digging through the Hidden Library, we discovered that the earlier production of The King in Yellow in Arkham was performed by a French acting troupe, and that it was also accompanied by some strange events. Hidden within a bunch of newspaper clippings we also discovered an onyx clasp with an alien inscription, which we decided to take. We took the onyx clasp. Conviction +1 -> 3.  The Clasp of Black Onyx was added to Rex's deck. Rex didn't really need another weakness that hit his resources but I thought it would still hinder him less than Winifred. Chasing the Stranger - 3. Token bag: -2 x Cultist, +2 x Cultist (so, no change). 2VP (one location) = 2XP Upgrades No upgrades this time, we're spending 2XP each to embark upon a side scenario. Adaptable 1 x Pilfer -> 1 x "Let God sort them out...": Where we're going, we're gonna want this.  1 x Small Favor -> 1 x .25 Automatic: In the next scenario we'll likely run into several weak enemies so this will provide us with a way to deal with them a bit more efficiently than with Delilah. Out of the available level zero Rogue guns this one is the best fit since its bonus condition of targeting an exhausted enemy is something both Rex and Winifred's decks are designed to meet. Back at Rex's place we go over the last piece of information we found in the library, which was a psychiatric evaluation of one Daniel Chesterfield, who was a stagehand on the former production. Turns out he was admitted to Arkham Asylum several years ago after the performance, and with any luck he's still there and we'll be able to question him. As we're heading out the front door, however, we notice a letter below the mail slot we somehow missed on the way in. Picking it up, we can't help but notice its unusual postmark. Who do we know in Egypt? So, I'm going to put our side scenario, The Eternal Slumber, into its own post so that you can skip it if you don't want to be spoiled (even though I know it's pretty old). If you want to go straight to the fourth campaign scenario it begins here. Kalko fucked around with this message at 07:52 on Jul 15, 2022 |
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Jul 14, 2022 19:32
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Side Scenario - The Eternal Slumber Our old friend, Jessie Burke, has asked us for help in solving a medical mystery that has been afflicting the citizens of Cairo, including her husband, John. So we put our own investigation on hold and travelled half-way across the world to meet her here. After all, what are friends for? It turns out that a few weeks ago people from all walks of life here went to sleep and fell into a deep coma, and lately it's been happening more often. Our job is to find out what's causing this strange condition and, hopefully, to find a cure.  Our search begins at the Streets of Cairo.  The Eternal Slumber and its companion scenario, The Night's Usurper, have a reputation for being the most difficult standalone scenarios in the game, so why are we here? And with our 13XP decks, no less. Well, for three main reasons: 1) We have a few advantages here. The most significant one is that by doing this as a side scenario instead of a standalone we get to bring our campaign token bag with us. Here's a plot comparing our Carcosa token bag (in black) to the standalone bag (in red):  The two Cultist tokens are exactly what we want here. I've tested this scenario with the double Tablet token bag you can end up with at the end of Echoes of the Past and it's noticeably more difficult. So much so, in fact, that I modeled the Tablet in the plot as an extra autofail, because that's basically what it is on Hard. Another advantage we have is that I decided to use the exploration rules from Return to The Forgotten Age (because they're just better) so that makes the second stage a bit easier, at least to begin with. And we have one final advantage here, but I'll get to it when the time comes. 2) One of the two reward cards will be very useful to us for the remainder of our campaign. If we can defeat the final boss... 3) And finally, I decided to add a side scenario when I removed Delve Too Deep from Rex's deck so that I could still get some bonus VP for this campaign, and The Eternal Slumber is a veritable VP smorgasbord. Let's take a look at the menu:   Before the first act advances (after seven doom) we can spend two clues as an action to randomly spawn one of these five enemies (note that none of them are elite). During testing I was able to spawn at least four of them consistently, so we have a good chance of hitting Nassor for Winifred to make use of LGSTO. I was also pretty much always able to defeat three of them, so that's an easy 3VP right there, though of course we spent 2XP to come here so we want to make it out with more than that.  There are two of these treacheries in the deck and it was pretty common to hit both of them if we lasted until the end. The "Strength of the Abyss" begins at two, and it will go up or down (mostly up) depending upon our actions or the results of certain encounter cards. Its most significant effect is that it makes the Skull token more difficult to deal with, but it generally doesn't get out of control until the end of the game. And, if at any point things are getting out of hand and we're staring down the barrel of a double defeat, we can safely hop the train out of town and get away with however much VP we've gathered by visiting the Outskirts of Cairo:  Strategy: This scenario is basically divided into two parts: before and after the first agenda advances. Before it advances we need to scoop up as many clues as possible as fast as we can so that we can spawn the enemies we can deal with, which is pretty much all of them except for Dr Wentworth Moore (oh, how I wish Winifred could take "Get over here!"). After the first agenda advances we lose the ability to spawn those enemies and any left in play are removed, then the exploration deck comes into play and we proceed to the Expedition Camp to head out into the desert.  Rex's Fine Clothes will be useful here for defeating a couple of the named enemies, and also to stack the exploration deck at the Expedition Camp later on. Rex also needs to find the Ancient Stone (4) before the boss fight at the end, but there's plenty of time to do that so it should be fine. He'll have to play it as soon as he draws it, though, because there is a nasty discard treachery in the encounter deck. Our ability to lower the Strength of the Abyss will depend upon which named enemies we end up defeating, but it's likely that we'll also end up with one or two copies of Creature from the Abyss in play.  Ideally, Winifred will put two damage onto them and Evade them, leaving them in play so that we can finish them off later to easily lower the SotA (and also so that they don't get shuffled back into the encounter deck when the second agenda advances). The other two regular enemies in the deck are the Humble Supplicant and the Thing in the Sarcophagus.  Our plan for dealing with the Humble Supplicant is to leave them alone in the first part because the only named enemy we'll be dealing damage to is Nassor, then in the second part Winifred can sweep them up while Rex goes off into the desert. Our plan for dealing with the Thing in the Sarcophagus is, uh, to not draw any. Fingers crossed! How it went: Rex's opening hand contained Milan, the Stone, a Magnifying Glass, and Pathfinder (if only he wasn't Indebted...) Winifred's opening hand contained Delilah, Lockpicks, and an LCC, so she moved to the Cairo Bazaar and played both items.  Rex gained a resource then played Milan and investigated the Streets, but failed, then during the Upkeep phase he drew the Clasp of the Black Onyx. On turn five (4/7 doom) Winifred had a Dark Sacrifice in her threat area, and Rex had a Slumber so we really wanted a way to lower the SotA (though Rex's Pathfinder was helping offset the loss of an action each turn).  We were both at the Streets of Cairo when we began spawning enemies. Rex spawned Dr Layla El Masri and Farid. On Winifred's turn she grabbed one clue from the Streets then spawned Nassor, which is exactly what we needed since defeating him immediately lowers the SotA. She evaded him at +5 with Quick Thinking and Manual Dexterity (hitting a -5 so no bonus action) then Delilah put two damage onto him. On the next turn, Rex ended up pulling a Creature from the Abyss and Winifred autofailed a Sandstorm, which was fine. She evaded Nassor again, then hit him with a Sneak Attack and two more damage from Delilah (killing him and clearing our treacheries) then she played LGSTO. Rex evaded the Creature at +3 (pulling a -3 token) then used Shortcut on Winifred to send her to the Outskirts of Cairo. He fast-moved to the Temple Courtyard and played two copies of Preposterous Sketches.  The following turn (6/7 doom) Rex pulled a Thing in the Sarcophagus, which brought the game to a screeching halt as I pondered where to put it. I decided to dump it on Winifred, then she pulled our first copy of The Black Wind, which went straight into the victory display. Rex fast-moved to the Bazaar and performed Farid's Parley action at +6 to defeat him, and on Winifred's turn she evaded the Thing and then moved to the Expedition Camp and discarded AYCDB for Dr Layla El Masri's Parley action.  So that was three VP enemies defeated, which was my most common result. I don't think I ever scored only two, and I hit four maybe twice out of 10+ runs. The agenda advanced on the following turn, then Winifred returned to the Outskirts and killed the Thing with a Hatchet Man boosted Sneak Attack and Delilah combo (which was pretty costly considering the battle to come). Rex passed through the Museum of Egyptian Antiquities on his way to the Expedition Camp and managed to pass its test at +1 to lower the SotA, which was a nice win.  Since Winifred was right beside the Camp I had her perform the first exploration action, placing her at the Nile River where she grabbed one of its clues.  Rex performed his first exploration action without stacking the deck since there was only one encounter card in it, and he pulled a Humble Supplicant, which I placed at the Camp for Winifred to deal with. He later ended up at the Desert Oasis where he played a Logical Reasoning to clear his horror and then used its action to lower the SotA. Earlier that turn we pulled our second copy of The Black Wind, so now the SotA was back down to four (meaning the Skull token was -5). Rex then explored from the Oasis (we were at 3/6 doom on the second agenda and needed only one more location to grab clues from to advance the act, and it would've taken a full turn for him to return to the Camp to try to stack the deck) and ended up at the Faceless Sphinx.  On turn twelve (4/6 doom on the second agenda) Rex pulled the second Creature from the Abyss, which he evaded with Breaking and Entering, in the process collecting the last two clues needed to advance the act, which he immediately did. This spawned the boss cultist enemy Neith at the Streets of Cairo and added two damage tokens, representing dreamers, to each Cairo location.  There was now an action on the act card to perform a Willpower or Intellect test with difficulty equal to the SotA to remove a dreamer from your location and deal one damage to Neith, but realistically with the Skull token now at -5 and Rex's hand being almost empty at this stage it's pretty much impossible to pull off. Fortunately, though, we don't need it. I said earlier that we had one other advantage in this scenario, and it's the fact that between us we basically deal none of our damage from attacks, so Neith's ability to shield herself with dreamers is irrelevant. It was kind of funny how this part of the game played out almost exactly the same across all of my attempts: Winifred would always be able to deal exactly five damage with some combination of Delilah, Hatchet Man, and Sneak Attack, and then Rex would do the remaining five to finish her off with the Ancient Stone (4). Winifred could rarely muster up any more than that five damage, except for an extremely heroic effort one time that went right to the wire when I didn't have the Stone upgraded, but I played that one out just to see if I could and if it had been the proper run we would've bailed out way sooner. So yeah, this ending is pretty much impossible for us without the Ancient Stone (4), but quite manageable with it. And apart from Winifred's single Evade test to enable her damage-dealing cards we don't have to worry about the Skull token at all here, which is good because on some runs the SotA was approaching double digits. In this case, we waited a turn for Neith to move to the Outskirts (there was still a Creature at the Streets) then we moved in and began unloading on her. It took two turns, as usual, and on that final turn Rex had to drag a Humble Supplicant away (it had spawned during the Mythos phase) so Winifred ended up defeating her with a 1-point Delilah hit. Resolution 2. This wasn't some medical phenomenon after all, it was cultists all along! We knew it! Neith spills the beans, rising to her feet as some ominous-looking shadows bend and warp all around her. "Xzharah, huh? Yeah, sounds important but, you know, we have our own poo poo going on back in Arkham. Real weird poo poo, too, like you wouldn't believe." "..." "Well, maybe you would." We are aware of Xzharah's plans. Strength of the Abyss - 5. Winifred added the Ancient Ankh to her deck.  This is Winifred's new good luck charm, and our reason number two for coming here. For the remainder of the campaign, it will help mitigate the effects of these treacheries:   It doesn't exhaust to use its effect and it can also protect Rex if he's at Winifred's location, and of course having three extra SP goes a long way in this campaign. All in all, a very useful trinket. 6VP (four enemies, two treacheries) = 6XP for Rex 7XP for Winifred (LGSTO) Upgrades Rex:  2 x Perception -> 2 x Perception (2): A great upgrade considering we'll sometimes get double value from it with Practice Makes Perfect.  2 x Magnifying Glass -> 2 x Magnifying Glass (1): An economic upgrade which I usually grabbed before the end in my other runs, but I'm taking it a bit earlier here because of Indebted. Rex actually feels less XP-hungry than other Seekers I've played simply because his ability is so strong, so an upgrade like this is more affordable. 6XP spent, 0XP left. Winifred:  1 x Relic Hunter: The Ankh is good enough to justify 3XP here to be able to have it in play alongside a Lucky Cigarette Case (3). And, to be honest, being able to have both copies of LCC in play also justifies the cost of a Relic Hunter, though I wouldn't prioritize it over a bunch of other things.  1 x "You handle this one!" -> 1 x Sharpshooter: This is the point where we start changing up the deck to accommodate some guns (well, one gun in particular). It's a very powerful effect in the right deck, but 3XP is really a lot for a utility card that doesn't interact with more than a few other cards in the deck, so I never really felt entirely comfortable taking it. But I'll talk more about that at the end. 1 x "You handle this one!" -> 1 x Lockpicks (1): The second copy of our investigation tool and LCC generator. 7XP spent, 0XP left. Adaptable 1 x Small Favor -> 1 x .25 Automatic: Now that we have a copy of Sharpshooter in the deck we can actually fire a gun at a tough enemy without missing. And with that, we're on our way back to Arkham. Kalko fucked around with this message at 04:09 on Jul 16, 2022 |
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Jul 14, 2022 19:32
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Scenario Four: Return to The Unspeakable Oath Arriving at Arkham Asylum, we manage to convince the receptionist that we're on an important mission and we need to speak to Daniel Chesterfield. But it turns out he's in one of the secure patient wings and visitation rights are restricted to staff only. We argue with him for a while and he eventually relents, nodding to a couple of security guards to let us into the patient wing of the hospital. After the doors close behind us we can't shake the feeling that we're now somehow trapped, in an asylum, after we've been ranting about monsters and cultists at the local theatre. Perhaps we should have thought this one through a bit more...  We begin at the Asylum Halls, with each investigator choosing either the Eastern or Western Patient Wing. There are two set-aside piles of enemies here, one containing seven lunatics, and another containing seven monsters. When the first agenda advances (after two doom) the lunatics get shuffled into the encounter deck, and then during the second scenario various effects force you to choose one of the set-aside monster enemies and put it beside the act deck. When the second agenda advances (after seven doom) the monsters begin to get added to the encounter deck from that second pile. When the final agenda advances (after eight doom) each investigator is driven insane and we lose the campaign. Our goal, therefore, is to first find Daniel Chesterfield and then get the hell out of here any way we can. It takes six clues to advance the first act, at which point we need to pass an Agility, Combat, or Intellect test with a difficulty of four to get the keys off a nurse which will allow us to enter the Basement Hall along with a few other locked rooms.  Once we find Daniel we then need to escape, and the only way to do that is to perform at least four of the actions listed on Act 3a - Planning the Escape:  These actions can be found on the following locations:   If we manage to put our escape plan into motion we can then resign at the Garden, as long as there are no ready enemies there:  At the beginning of this scenario another -4 token was added to the token bag. Here's a plot of the new bag with a couple of values for the Cultist token (0 and -4):  Strategy: There are a few VP locations here which we want to clear, starting with the Mess Hall and the Infirmary.  If Winifred gets Lockpicks in her opening hand she will start at the Eastern Patient Wing so that she can duck straight into the Infirmary to clear it (as a general rule you draw your opening hand before Setup) otherwise she'll begin with Rex at the Western Patient Wing to cover for him when the lunatics start roaming around. And speaking of which, there are a lot of enemies in this scenario but most of them have low HP and aren't too difficult to deal with. In large numbers, though, we may have a problem. Rex will generally clear the Yard early while his horror is low, then clear the Mess Hall (hopefully with a Read the Signs). We want to enter the Basement Hall with a surplus of clues (with Winifred carrying 1-2) because it costs one clue to enter one of the patient cell locations (they each have one clue on them but it's generally smoother if we come prepared). Since we have more Conviction than Doubt, when we find Daniel's cell he will only say a few words to us before he gets devoured by the Host of Insanity.  Rex should have the Clasp of Black Onyx in play by this point so we can kill it fairly easily, and then we just need to complete four escape actions and we'll be good to go. We'll try to avoid the two Willpower ones but the one in the basement can be tackled with the right cards in hand and/or a low amount of horror on us. How it went: Rex got Milan, Pathfinder, and a Magnifying Glass in his opening hand but Winifred had nothing worth mentioning so she began at the Western Patient Wing with him. We made our way into the Basement Halls on turn seven, having dealt with four lunatic enemies as we took care of everything upstairs. At one point, Winifred ended up in a Straightjacket but it was fine because she wasn't using her hands anyway.  On turn nine Rex opened the first patient cell (he had to laser a Mad Patient at the Eastern Patient Halls to help Winifred) and it was Daniel's, which advanced the act. He used the Clasp to automatically evade it, then played Preposterous Sketches to hit it for three damage. Winifred then moved in and hit it with Delilah for another two, and on the next turn Rex ended up in a Straightjacket, which was pretty lucky because it reset his Ancient Stone (4). We now had eight turns left and we needed two escape actions from the cells. Rex entered the Familiar Cell, which had the Willpower test, so he played Logical Reasoning to lower his horror and then he was able to pass the test on the following turn at +2. He then entered the Dreary Cell and passed its Intellect test, so we were ready to leave (we would perform the Yard and Garden actions on the way out). While all of that was happening, Winifred was dealing with a couple more lunatics (one which made its way to her from Dance of the Yellow King) and then on turn 14 (3/8 doom on the final agenda) while we were both at the Basement Halls, the Beast of Aldebaran appeared, which is something I'd never seen on all of my test runs.  We had the resources to kill it since Rex's Stone had been reset, so Wini evaded it and put four damage into it with Delilah and a Sneak Attack, then Rex finished it off with a 4-point Search for the Truth. After that, we arrived at the Garden on turn sixteen (6/8 doom) and Winifred easily passed the Agility test to complete our escape plan. I had been caught out before when The Man in the Pallid Mask ended up here; him being Aloof and requiring a couple of actions to kill or evade prevented us from escaping a couple of times, but I was able to put him in the Kitchen this time so I didn't have to worry about that. Resolution 1. The investigators escaped the asylum. Conviction - 3. Chasing the Stranger - 3. Token bag: -2 x Cultist, +2 x Elder Thing. 5VP (two enemies, three locations) = 5XP for Rex 6XP for Winifred (LGSTO) ------------------------------ Interlude Two: Lost Soul Well, Daniel did not survive, and after the events at the asylum we decided to lay low while we pondered the meaning of his ramblings. He mentioned a name, "Hastur", and an Oath, and also that "they are opening the path to Carcosa." He warned us not to speak that name again, and we decided to heed that warning since we keep finding monsters everywhere we go. We heeded Daniel's warning. Conviction +2 -> 5. 1XP gained = 6XP for Rex 7XP for Winifred Upgrades Rex:  1 x Fine Clothes -> The Eye of Truth: Rex is always going on about the truth, and if he can find it with Practice Makes Perfect then he can get two uses out of it, at least on non-treacheries, which is in fact its main use in this deck. Its four wild icons will mostly be used on Investigate tests, where it will help to trigger his reaction. But if we're not going to make use of its treachery assistance ability are we really getting 5XP's worth of value from it? Well, what if I told you that Winifred can use it on treacheries? And not only that, but when she does, it gets put right back into Rex's deck so that he can use it again himself! 5XP spent, 1XP left. Winifred:  1 x Unexpected Courage -> 1 x Copycat: Rex has quite a few nice skills in his deck, including Perception, Deduction, Inquiring Mind, and now The Eye of Truth. Winifred can make use of them all (drawing a card from her ability when she does so because she controls the card that gets pulled) but Copycat's best interaction is with The Eye of Truth, where if she succeeds at a treachery that card gets put into the victory display and then the Eye gets pulled out and placed on the bottom of Rex's deck. She won't necessarily use it only on treacheries, though, because it's great for passing any important test and it works well with her oversuccess cards. 1 x "Let God sort them out..." -> 1 x Sharpshooter: Our second copy. 6XP spent, 1XP left. Adaptable  1 x Unexpected Courage -> 1 x .41 Derringer: Now that we have two copies of Sharpshooter it's a bit more viable to use one of these. We're running out of flexible level zero slots, though, so this is our only swap. ------------------------------ Scenario Five: Return to A Phantom of Truth  It had been weeks since our trip to the asylum and it seemed like our trail had gone cold. Then, one night, we had a particularly vivid dream... We were falling through the empty abyss of Hali...  Each investigator has earned the Lost Soul weakness. This weakness is a pretty good reason to not do a Conviction run with these two investigators because it basically reads "Revelation - take two damage" but there's not much we can do about it now. Winifred can afford to take the hit, but going forward Rex will have to be careful about taking damage when presented with a choice to do so. Smoke and embers float upwards into the starless night sky. The screams of burning definitely-not-human creatures from the party fill us with a horrid sense of accomplishment. Each investigator suffers one mental trauma. Well, that's the price we paid for not having to deal with each of the party guests individually throughout the rest of the campaign (one of them shows up during each of the scenarios following The Last King, but Winifred couldn't really handle them anyway so we made the right choice). Eventually, we awaken... It's Nigel Engram! The Director of The King in Yellow has the answers we seek. It's time to pack our bags and head to Paris!  This scenario has three agendas representing three nights wandering the streets of Paris in search of Nigel Engram's house. Since we have more Conviction than Doubt we want the agendas to advance as quickly as possible (doom on cards in play subtracts from the amount needed to advance the agenda during the Mythos phase) because The Organist is hot on our trail.  We can't escape him, but we can spend two clues as a fast action once per round to either add one doom to the agenda or automatically evade The Organist. As such, when he enters play after the first act advances we find ourselves *movie announcer voice* engaged in a deadly game of cat and mouse. Winifred's natural talent for evasion will come in handy here, but on the whole this scenario isn't too challenging. There are a bunch of Byakhee enemies in the deck which we can also simply evade if they appear late in the game, otherwise we'll have to spend some time and resources to kill them. We begin at Montparnasse instead of Gare d'Orsay because we interviewed Jordan Perry, and we also get to start the game with an extra three resources each (a very welcome bonus).  There are two different versions of most of the locations here, but most of them don't really affect the game except for one version of Le Marais which can slow you down (which we got in the proper run):  There's also a version of the Pere Lachaise Cemetery which can similarly trap you, but it only needs to be visited once to grab its clues for the VP and then it can be safely ignored. There are three other locations worth VP, but apart from clearing them our only goal is to simply survive until the final agenda advances. There are a few treacheries which will try to slow us down, like Twin Suns or Spires of Carcosa but again, it's not too difficult to deal with them. Here's a plot of our token bag with a couple of values for the Skull token (0 and -5):  Strategy: The first act automatically advances at the end of the round if there is three or more doom on the first agenda, and if that happens then The Organist spawns right on top of us and we each take two horror. But if we advance the act instead (by spending four clues) he spawns at the location farthest from us, so that's what we'll do during the fourth turn. Before that happens our goal will be to sweep the VP locations as quickly as possible so that we can spend the rest of the scenario moving around to avoid The Organist. We'll try to spend two clues each turn to hasten the doom clock, but if we need to evade him that will take priority. How it went: Rex's opening hand contained a Milan, and he was finally able to play him without having to gain a resource first! He also got a Magnifying Glass, so he played both then passed through Notre Dame and ended his turn at Le Marais, which turned out to be the version that hinders you. Winifred played Delilah and a LCC then moved to Notre Dame. She didn't get Lockpicks so she would shadow Rex with her eyes scanning the sky for any wayward Byakhees. On the next turn, Rex moved into the Cemetery and cleared its four clues with a single Read the Signs plus Deduction, then he moved back to Le Marais. Winifred moved into Le Marais and then drew two cards, finding her Lockpicks. During the next Mythos phase we scored our first Byakhee, and it was the Stealthy variety.  Winifred dispatched it, then at the end of the fourth turn we advanced the act and The Organist spawned at Gare d'Orsay. On the following turn, Rex pulled a Torturous Chords which came into play with three tokens (unfortunately Winifred didn't have her Ankh in play). That really messed his turn up, forcing him to spend two actions gaining resources so that he could play an Archaic Glyphs (3). Winifred pulled a Swift Byakhee on the same turn, which she evaded and let live (for now) since she had to intercept The Organist at Montmartre.  A few turns later it slipped my mind that I could use two clues to automatically evade The Organist, so Rex tanked him for a turn. Wini ended up pulling a Frozen in Fear which she was able to pass with Copycat and The Eye of Truth. For the last three turns of the game we couldn't stop pulling Byakhees from the encounter deck, but we handled them with a mix of evasion, tanking, and in one instance Winifred used the reaction on Canal Saint-Martin to push one of them away.  The final agenda advanced on turn twelve. Resolution 1. We ended up finding Nigel Engram's house, but he wasn't home. The place was a mess of notes, old books, and strange diagrams, and while it didn't look like anyone had lived here for years we couldn't help but notice the wet ink covering just about every square inch of the wallpaper. It said: "He is already here." Well, that's a bit alarming. We found Nigel's home. Conviction - 5. Chasing the Stranger - 3. Token bag: -2 x Elder Thing, +2 x Cultist. 4VP (four locations) = 5XP for Rex (1XP leftover) 5XP for Winifred (1XP leftover) Upgrades Rex: 1 x Fine Clothes -> 1 x The Eye of Truth: The second copy. Winifred:  1 x .41 Derringer -> 1 x Sawed-Off Shotgun: As a Guardian player at heart I just love big guns, and since we're geared up for oversuccess and we now have two copies of Sharpshooter, one copy of this makes sense. We're taking it now because in the next scenario there will be some big game for us to take down. Also, I can't let this particular interaction go by without comment. I love this:  Adaptable 1 x Backstab -> 1 x "Let God sort them out...": Backstab had been kind of underwhelming pretty much the entire time I had it in the deck, so I finally decided to try swapping it out. 1 x Backstab -> 1 x Pilfer: The next scenario has a lot of four clue locations. ------------------------------ Scenario Six: Return to The Pallid Mask  We found an old, tattered map on Nigel Engram's coffee table depicting the infamous Catacombs of Paris, with one of the rooms circled and a note next to it saying, "The key to opening the Path lies here!" Sounds like exactly what we're looking for, so let's get underground!  There's no standard layout for this scenario. Instead, we begin with The Gate to Hell in play and a small deck of Catacombs locations. When we reveal one of them (including during Setup) we put into play a number of unrevealed Catacombs locations according to the instructions on the location. All locations are connected to each other orthogonally, and if there's already a location in play in the direction indicated by a newly-revealed location then we simply skip putting one into play. Our goal is to find the Tomb of Shadows, which will always be one of the bottom five cards of the Catacombs deck.  The Man in the Pallid Mask will be hanging out there, and once we defeat him we then proceed to the Blocked Passage (ignoring its Forced ability) which will always be nearby since it's also one of the bottom five cards of the Catacombs deck. When both of us are there, the final act will advance. Here's our token bag with a couple of values for the Skull token (-2 and -5):  Strategy: If possible, we'll try to explore in a manner which will let us develop a tight clump of locations instead of a long snaking path towards the edge of the table. There are potentially four VP locations here in addition to the Tomb of Shadows, but Return adds four new Catacombs locations to the pool and then has you remove four at random during setup so we won't know how many VP locations made it into the deck unless we reveal them all (or we hit four of them, whichever comes first). This scenario features the Ghouls set from the Core box so there are a number of small enemies here, and when they show up we need to deal with them quickly, along with the Catacombs Docent. If we don't, we risk spawning a Corpse Dweller.  Six of the fifteen Catacombs locations (of which eleven are in the deck) have four clues on them, so Rex will get to flex his cluevering muscles more than usual, but hopefully Winifred will get an early Lockpicks to help out. The treacheries here aren't too bad, but as always, a bad combination can be painful.  How it went: Rex's opening hand contained Practice Makes Perfect, The Eye of Truth, and Perception (2), so he immediately performed an Investigate with Perception (2), drawing an autofail. His second attempt with The Eye of Truth fared better, netting two clues, and on his third action he moved S, revealing the Bone-Filled Cavern. Cross one VP location off the list!  Winifred started with Lockpicks and a LCC in her hand, so she played both then grabbed a clue, with a 7-point oversuccess letting her find a copy of Delilah. So we were off to a pretty good start. Then, during the first Mythos phase, Rex drew the Malformed Skeleton so our start was getting a bit less good, though it wasn't too hard to deal with.  Winifred drew The Shadow Behind You, which was annoying to juggle for a few turns while she got her resources into a state where she could afford to sacrifice only one. This card provides a good example of the Must rule, which I'll give a... Rules Sidebar: If an investigator is instructed that he or she "must" choose among multiple options, the investigator is compelled to choose an option that has the potential to change the game state. In this case, it means that you cannot choose to discard all of your resources if you have no resources (or all of the cards in your hand if you have no cards) unless you have both no resources and no cards in your hand. On Rex's turn he played Breaking and Entering, evading the Malformed Skeleton and collecting two clues, then he moved E to reveal the Narrow Shaft, another VP location.  He investigated it at +2 and drew an Elder Sign, taking the option to automatically fail instead to draw three cards (I think this was about the third time this campaign I chose this option). A few turns later, we dealt with a couple of Ghouls and Winifred lost her Lockpicks to a Crypt Chill, but we were revealing new locations pretty steadily. On turn seven, the agenda advanced, spawning the Specter of Death at The Gates of Hell, which is where Winifred was waiting for it.  Also during this Mythos phase we pulled a Corpse Dweller, which replaced a Docent to the E of Rex (he was a few locations to the S at this point) and a Ravenous Ghoul.  Winifred evaded the Specter, then the Ghoul (killing it with a Hatchet-boosted Delilah hit) then put two damage into the Specter with a Sneak Attack. Rex (with Pathfinder out) returned to The Gates of Hell on this turn and put two points of damage into the Specter with his laser stone (one during upkeep). On the following turn, we pulled another Corpse Dweller which replaced another Docent three locations away to the NE (yeah, we were doing pretty badly on Humanoid management). Winifred put three more damage into the Specter with another Hatchet-boosted Delilah attack, and then on Rex's turn he finished it off with a 2-point Search for the Truth and a draw action. At this point he could only really head in one direction, being penned in by the Dweller to the NE and a Poltergeist to the S, so he fast-moved E, uncovering the Stone Archways, and then he moved E again with his last action, revealing the Research Site, neither of which were particularly useful.  Winifred found her Sawed-Off Shotgun during the following turn's upkeep, which made short work of the two Corpse Dwellers, while Rex continued to explore to the SE. He used the Parley action on a Docent since we were two cards into the bottom five at that point, and it showed the Tomb of Shadows. Our VP location luck held out, and we discovered (and cleared) all four of them with a few unrevealed locations left in play. Rex cleared the Tomb's four clues with a single Investigate (RTS plus Deduction) and from then on it was a pretty simple matter to defeat The Man and find the Blocked Passage. We advanced the final act on turn 13/19, so we had plenty of time to keep searching if we hadn't already found all of the VP locations. Resolution 2. Standing at the end of a blocked tunnel, the ground beneath us begins to collapse, and we're unwittingly cast into a seemingly bottomless pit. As we fall, we pass through an invisible gateway and into another realm with two skylines, one above and one below, swirling black clouds and crashing waves. We've discovered a passageway between realities, The Path to Carcosa, and all we need to do now is find out where on Earth this place exists. We fall into the waves below and then, some time later, we're shaken awake by a police officer and lifted to our feet. We've ended up at Mont Saint-Michel off the northwestern coast of France. We know the site of the gate. Conviction - 5. Chasing the Stranger +2 -> 5. Token bag: -2 Cultist, +2 Tablet. 7VP (five locations, one enemy) = 7XP for Rex 8XP for Winifred (LGSTO) Upgrades Rex:  1 x Inquiring Mind -> 1 x Logical Reasoning (4): We'll need two copies of this for the final scenario, but I also want to keep the other level zero copy for the next one because there's a lot of variance in the amount of horror you can take from it.  1 x Preposterous Sketches -> 1 x Preposterous Sketches (2): A nice upgrade to help with Indebted, but I actually began taking it on my later test runs anyway. The final scenario has the same two resource-hitting treacheries as Curtain Call, and I think this is a good place to put the leftover XP after we grab both copies of Logical Reasoning (4). 6XP spent, 1XP left. Winifred:  2 x Manual Dexterity -> 2 x Manual Dexterity (2): This doesn't provide any new capability but it does make just about every other card in the deck better. I wanted to make this upgrade earlier but it just didn't feel like it should take priority over most of the other stuff. 1 x Pilfer -> 1 x Copycat: The second copy...cat. 7XP spent, 1XP left. Adaptable No changes this time. ------------------------------ Scenario Seven: Return to Black Stars Rise  This scenario has the most complicated setup of any in the entire game. You create two agenda decks, one for the clouds and the other for the waves, and put both of them into play (there is no act deck to begin with). When you place doom on an agenda during the Mythos phase you choose only one to put it on, but all other doom in play counts for both agendas. If they both meet the threshold for advancement you pick the order in which to advance them.  One of the agenda decks contains The Path to Carcosa, and if we advance to it then we put one of the set-aside act cards into play, which requires us to be at a particular location and for that location to be cleared of clues, at which point it will advance. The other agenda deck contains bad things, and we don't know which is which when the game begins.  Our starting location is the Porte de l'Avancee at the south end. When we reach the Abbey Church a few more locations will be put into play.  Our objective is to reach either the Chapel of St Aubert or the Abbey Tower depending upon which one is the correct path (which we discover as we play). The location representing the incorrect path will be worth 2VP if we can clear it, and both locations require us to pass a test on other locations before we can enter them.   During Setup we had to add a random Madness, Pact, Cultist, or Detective weakness to our decks. Rex ended up with Atychiphobia (appropriate, given his curse) and Winifred pulled a Silver Twilight Acolyte (holy yikes).  Also during Setup, a -6 token was added to the bag. Here's our new token bag with three values for the Skull token (0, -4, and -8):  Strategy: There are a few VP locations here we want to clear, beginning with the Outer Wall and the North Tower. We'll stick together as we move to each of these because they each have two different versions, and one of those versions has an effect which triggers when doom is placed onto an agenda (so we can place doom onto the agenda that won't hurt us).  Even if we don't get one of those versions we'll still stick together because it will give us more options to place cultist enemies, and also there isn't really a lot of room here to go wandering, and we only want to enter the Broken Steps once each because its two different versions are absolutely awful:  Once we've made it to the Abbey Church we'll then proceed to both "find a guide" and "find the tower key" so that we can open both ending locations and grab the 2VP for clearing the incorrect one. For that reason, we don't really care which location is correct until the very end, so we'll manage the agendas by trying to keep them balanced, at least until the real one is revealed. Keeping them in their first stages for as long as possible also helps us deal with these treacheries:  How it went: Rex didn't get much in his opening hand this time, but Winifred got Delilah, the Ankh, and both copies of Sharpshooter. We ended up getting both of the damaging versions of the Outer Wall and the North Tower, and the action loss version of the Broken Steps, so we executed our typical strategy of sticking together as we moved around to the steps. We ended up with the Abbey Tower being the correct Path to Carcosa, but I'm kind of at a loss to find anything interesting from my notes on this one, so instead I'll offer up a few pages of them to provide a bit of a window into my process (yeah, my handwriting is terrible):  On the third page there I planned on doing Read the Signs at the Abbey Tower to get around its condition, but I didn't think it would actually work so I consulted the MB Discord's rules gurus and they confirmed that, yeah, it doesn't because it's a continuous effect.  One thing I can say is that this scenario is a lot more exciting if you flip a coin and focus on advancing one of the agendas as fast as possible, because it makes the two treacheries back there extremely dangerous. But maybe that's the problem with this scenario; if you go slowly you're pretty safe but if you try to gamble or use the actions on the agendas too much you'll find it very difficult. When the second incorrect agenda advances it spawns the Beast of Aldebaran at the correct location, and it being so predictable he might as well have been served up on a platter. I almost forgot about him this time (that RTS play from earlier would have ended the game) but in any case, the Ancient Stone (4) made short work of him and then Rex did play that RTS, committing all seven cards in his hand to satisfy its condition, and we advanced the final act. Resolution 2. We opened the path above. Doubt +2 -> 2. Conviction - 5. Chasing the Stranger - 5. Token bag: -2 x Tablet, +2 x Elder Thing. 6VP (four locations, one enemy) = 7XP for Rex (1XP leftover) 8XP for Winifred (1XP leftover, LGSTO) Upgrades 1 x Logical Reasoning -> 1 x Logical Reasoning (4): Very important for the final scenario. 1 x Preposterous Sketches -> 1 x Preposterous Sketches (2): Both copies are now upgraded.  1 x Inquiring Mind -> 1 x Forewarned: I like this card for some investigators, and I think Rex can handle the cost of dropping a clue pretty well with his ability. There are definitely some treacheries in the final scenario that are worth losing a clue to, but taking this also means we use up all of our XP. 7XP spent, 0XP left. Winifred:  2 x Sneak Attack -> 2 x Swift Reload: Hastur is going to have 18HP so we'll have to reload our Sawed-Off Shotgun at least once to bring him down, and there will also be a bunch of other mid-sized targets we'll have to deal with. I opted for two of these instead of one more shotgun because they're kind of like getting additional shotguns for only 2XP, provided we can find the original.  1 x "Let God sort them out..." -> 1 x Unscrupulous Loan: Finally, we can spend some XP on money! This was never an option before now because there's no way we would've been able to pay it back before the end of a scenario, but since this is the final one we don't have to worry about the fine print.  1 x .25 Automatic -> 1 x Momentum: And to use up our last point of XP we'll take one copy of Momentum. I was impressed with it during some of my testing runs and I think it'll be more impactful than the card it's replacing. ------------------------------ Scenario Eight: Return to Dim Carcosa  After being sucked up into the clouds we suddenly find ourselves falling, eventually hitting the ground with some force. Before us lies a warped, alien city. Its twisting streets and aberrant architecture have no semblance of order or structure. In the distance, a murky lake reflects the glare of two suns. When we look up, the abbey of Mont Saint-Michel peeks just below the clouds, flipped upside-down. This is Carcosa, the realm of madness in the stars, where Hastur reigns supreme.  Since we entered through the clouds we begin at the Dark Spires.  Each of the locations here is double-sided, with a story on the back. Most of the locations also have more than one version, and during the third act we can flip them over to gain a beneficial effect.  When we gather four clues we must immediately spend them to advance the first act, at which point The Man in the Pallid Mask is spawned at the Palace of the King. Defeating him advances to the third act and he gets replaced by Hastur: Lord of Carcosa.  Our goal then is to simply (heh) kill Hastur, but we can't defeat him unless we "know the secret," which we discover by flipping the Palace of the King, which we can't do until he drops below 5HP. As mentioned, all of the locations in play have some sort of beneficial effect on their story side, and most of them will deal damage to Hastur and/or exhaust and disengage him. Some of them will heal horror on us, which is very useful here because you don't actually get defeated by losing all of your sanity points. Instead, things just get much more difficult, as with the effect on Hastur himself. Also, during Setup we each take horror equal to half of our SP, rounded down, which means Rex will begin with six horror and Winifred with four (accounting for our trauma). The value of the Skull token here depends upon the amount of horror you have, which means the difficulty of this scenario is very closely related to your current horror level, just like in Curtain Call. Here's a plot with a few values for the Skull (0, -6, and -10):  Strategy: It's critically important that we find at least one copy of Logical Reasoning (4) within the first few turns so that Rex can turn his Skull token into a zero. If that doesn't happen then our next best option is to clear the Depths of Demhe and flip it when we reach the third act, because one of its two versions will heal five horror from each of us. By then, though, we'll probably have built up more horror, but it's better than nothing. Out of the remaining locations, the ones with a disengage and exhaust effect are the most useful. The Shores of Hali has this effect and it only has one version, but it's pretty far away from our starting location. The Dim Streets and the Ruins of Carcosa each have an exhaust, but they also have three different versions so they're not reliable. In any case, each time we flip a location we'll get something useful, and we'll just have to hope it's enough to help Winifred deal with all of the other enemies that might appear while we work on Hastur's HP. How it went: Rex did not get a Logical Reasoning (4), and Winifred did not get a Lucky Cigarette Case (3), but she did get both Lockpicks. We began clearing the Dark Spires to advance the first act, and during the first Mythos phase the Creature Out of Demhe appeared (while Winifred was at Demhe). Rex cleared Demhe of clues but was very annoyingly unable to play Crack the Case because of its restriction.  Winifred didn't have many tools to fight with but she could Evade the Creature fairly easily each turn, so she stayed there for the next few turns while Rex proceeded to the Palace (she would be able to flip Dehme and potentially get the horror heal as soon as Rex defeated The Man). Rex ended up getting a Melancholy, but it miraculously went away during the following turn's upkeep. He was able to play the Ancient Stone (4) and an Archaic Glyphs (3), and he defeated The Man at the beginning of turn five, which was also the turn Winifred found a new friend:  She evaded the Creature and then flipped Demhe (granting us the 5-point horror heal) then she evaded the Spawn of Hali and moved to the Streets. A couple of turns later the Winged One appeared, and Winifred flipped the Streets (taking a hit from the Creature) to put two damage onto Hastur (we were hoping for an exhaust instead). On turn nine Winifred pulled a Preying Byakhee, and the Silver Twilight Acolyte appeared during upkeep that turn.  On the following turn, Rex got caught in a no-win situation on while on 1HP when he failed to evade Hastur twice with a Visions in your Mind (Failure) in hand. If he gained a resource to satisfy the Visions, Hastur's attack would have dropped his sanity below zero and he would've taken one damage, and if he tried to evade Hastur again and succeeded he still would've taken one damage from the Visions.  On turn ten, Rex Murphy was defeated. Winifred held out for two more turns before being buried beneath the weight of four enemies, one of which was Hastur. She was defeated, and our campaign was over. Resolution 4. We awaken to find ourselves sitting in the choeur gothique of Mont Saint-Michel’s abbey. No rain pelts the glass of the windows above, and we hear no thunder, nor the screeching of winged horrors overhead. Somehow, we have escaped the island’s certain doom. Opening the door of the abbey, a dazzling light sears our eyes - the glare of two suns. We stand overlooking the Lake of Hali, black stars hanging in the heavens above. Beyond, over leagues of tossing cloud-waves, the towers of Carcosa rise behind the shattered moon. The realm of Carcosa merged with our own, and Hastur rules over them both. The investigators are driven insane. The investigators lose the campaign. Rex Murphy in Return to The Path to Carcosa (Hard) - 42XP Winifred Habbamock in Return to The Path to Carcosa (Hard) - 47XP Kalko fucked around with this message at 05:04 on Jul 15, 2022 |
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Jul 14, 2022 19:32
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Return to The Path to Carcosa Part Three: Final Thoughts Our investigators began their adventure weeks ago and a world away by attending the performance of a play so bad the audience was dying to leave. Their path would take them through a bizarre dinner party, an asylum full of monsters, the streets and catacombs of Paris, and, uh, Egypt. And it would culminate in them discovering and entering the mystical realm of Carcosa, a place they would never be able to leave. And neither would everyone else on the planet. So, what went wrong? In the immediate aftermath, three things occurred to me: 1) Rex didn't get a Logical Reasoning (4) despite having only eleven cards in his deck when he was defeated. 2) Winifred didn't get a Lucky Cigarette Case (3) (or the Unscrupulous Loan) so she couldn't access much of her deck. Both copies were in the bottom eight cards of her deck when she was defeated. 3) Both investigators failed a lot of tests due to Skull token pulls in the turns leading up to their defeat. Do you just lose if you don't get your key cards? That may be true sometimes, but I don't like accepting that as an excuse because my main rule when planning these runs is to build decks which can perform in a consistent manner. We were a bit behind on doom compared to the one test run I did (which I actually won comfortably, and Rex did get a Logical Reasoning (4) in his opening hand that time) but we still had plenty of time to finish off Hastur. The bigger issue, I feel, is that Winifred couldn't deal with all of the enemies efficiently. If she had killed the Creature Out of Demhe on the turn it appeared it would have saved her 3-4 actions and some chip damage on both investigators later on, and if she had killed the Preying Byakhee in the same manner she would have been able to handle Hastur by herself. Throughout the campaign, her enemy handling capability was good enough, but never actually good. But is that because the investigator isn't suited to the role or the campaign, or is it because I didn't build a good enough deck for it? The former is definitely true to some extent, but my experience in the later half of this campaign makes me think I could definitely have built a better deck. One thing about the way I do these runs, though, is that I don't iterate on the later scenarios nearly as much as the early ones. And the reason for that is partly because I already spend a huge amount of time preparing for the proper run, and partly because I don't actually want to completely 'solve' the entire campaign, not that that's even possible in this game. I love optimizing and min-maxing, but I also love trying to simply intuit a good deck-building solution to a scenario problem, so I'll always leave some wiggle room for that in my runs. And I also love taking some cards which aren't completely optimal but are a lot of fun to play either due to their effect or their thematic appeal (but having said that, I'll never take something purely just for the hell of it). If you've ever tried to play Winifred Habbamock as a primary enemy handler I'd love to hear about your experience. I have a few ideas about what I should change, but I definitely don't have all the answers. Rex Murphy  In the first post I mentioned that one of the main changes to Rex's deck was the removal of Delve Too Deep. The other main change was that it actually began life as a Scavenging/Ice Pick (3) deck.  I ran Curtain Call a bunch of times with Ice Pick (3) before realizing that Rex simply didn't need the clue compression from it, and also most of the locations in the campaign didn't have more than two clues anyway. I then tried starting with two copies of Eon Chart (1) but I could never find a satisfactory way to spend that last 1XP, and I really wanted to leverage all of it for that scenario. It also felt like Rex didn't really need the action compression from that card, either.  So I settled on Pathfinder because I did want at least some action compression, and it's a really strong card which always proved useful. Regarding The Eye of Truth, it first drew my attention when a did a card search for the "Practiced" trait after contemplating Practice Makes Perfect. I felt that PMP was a good addition because Rex gains additional value from stat boosts, and it allowed Perception (2) to be reused for both its boosting potential and its card draw. And that card draw, along with Preposterous Sketches and Search for the Truth, provided him with a lot of boosting consistency through card commits. The Eye of Truth has amazing icons which almost ensures Rex's reaction will trigger, even on Hard, and being able to reuse it with PMP added enough extra value that I felt it could justify its 5XP cost. Then, when I realized that Winifred could also make use of it with Copycat (and return it to his deck for even more reuse) that synergy made it seem like an even more perfect fit. At times I wished Rex had some extra ways to shuffle his deck (I took Eureka! out of an earlier version) because Copycat places the card on the bottom, but he drew through his deck fast enough that it didn't matter most of the time, and when you only have nine cards left you know exactly what PMP is going to hit. Despite the value the The Eye of Truth/Copycat combo provides for Winifred (and I do think it's substantial - it's a 5-point wild boost which draws her a card) the one change I would be very tempted to make to Rex's deck after the campaign failure would be to replace it with this card:  When you have a small number of super impactful cards in your deck, No Stone Unturned (5) is an excellent way to increase your chances of finding them every game. I purchased it fairly early in my Innsmouth Conspiracy run for Minh Thi Phan because her signature card, Analytical Mind, and her Dream Diary (3) both had an outsized impact on the outcome of the game if they were drawn early.  No Stone Unturned (5) would have helped Rex find that Logical Reasoning (4) for Dim Carcosa, and it also would've helped Winifred find a Lucky Cigarette Case (3) or her Sawed-Off Shotgun. The only other place I could've maybe found the XP for it would have been to skip upgrading both copies of Magnifying Glass and Preposterous Sketches and drop the Ancient Stone (4). I might've got away with the former two (though probably not in an Indebted run) but the Ancient Stone (4) was critical for a lot of boss killing. Another idea might have been to try to put more horror healing cards into each deck for Dim Carcosa, but the options for that in the yellow and green card pools are pretty slim. On the whole, Rex Murphy is easily the strongest Seeker I've played and I would guess the strongest overall if you exclude release Mandy Thompson or busted Amanda Sharpe combos. Winifred Habbamock  The first version of Winifred's deck tried to use these two guns:  And it also ran this combo for the stat boost and horror soak:  It was a dismal failure. Both of those guns are terrible if you can't consistently boost every attack (and the Mauser is just terrible in general) and while Winifred can keep the boost train running for longer than a lot of other investigators it still proved nowhere near viable for the amount of fighting in Curtain Call. I tried running one copy of Sharpshooter with the XP from In the Thick of It, but the problem with that card is that it's only good in combination with a second card (and it's also only good for one use per turn). Delilah O'Rourke is good by herself, and while adding her solved my damage problem it created an entirely new one: lack of resources. Out of all the possible resource generation cards I could've purchased with XP, I think the one that would've fit best is Another Day, Another Dollar.  It's only an extra two resources (or four with two copies) but resources at the start of the game are worth more than resources on any other turn, especially if you don't have to spend an action to generate them. Being able to play all of your key cards early every game is a powerful advantage, and while in this case Delilah would have made short work of any leftover resources that's still resources you wouldn't have otherwise had. Winifred was running on fumes most of the time but it wasn't always famine; sometimes due to the natural variance within a scenario we wouldn't draw any enemies for multiple turns so she was able to build up a stockpile of ten or more resources. But it's still better to plan for the worst case scenario rather than the best, so I was still only looking at resource generators which could be played on an empty tank. These two were the other main considerations:  I tested Easy Mark for a while but I didn't like that it was three cards because it felt like it took up too much room in both the deck and the hand (having it replace Faustian Bargain didn't really lead to a net gain in resource generation). I didn't actually try Emergency Cache (2) but, honestly, I like the look of it. Three resources and a cantrip effect for 2XP isn't a terrible deal in the right deck, but its downside is obviously that it has no icons. Regarding the upgrade path I took, I never really worked out the right time to add Sharpshooter. I think it's a good card for Winifred, and it's good with the Sawed-Off Shotgun in particular because its limitation of only one shot per turn is less of an issue (because how many 6-damage shots do you really need to take each turn?) but it's still a big XP investment when you don't have a lot of guns in the deck, which I didn't. I did try these two XP guns:  The .41 Derringer (2) is good, and the Mauser C96 (2) is a big improvement over the level zero version but still not really worth its cost. I didn't bother trying the .25 Automatic (2) because it didn't strike me as a good value proposition even with all the evading the deck would do. I still think the level zero version of it is the best fit for this deck because being able to play it as a fast action is handy for holding onto the resources until you need to spend them, and its bonus attack and damage doesn't depend upon oversuccess. That might seem like a counterintuitive thing to say in a deck designed for that very thing, but oversuccess does require the expenditure of resources (mainly cards) so it's not something you can afford to do for every test. The obvious place to make room for any alternative upgrades is Copycat. In a vacuum it's not a good card, but within this context (Winifred taking it and grabbing Rex's cards) I think it easily justifies the slot. It was mostly used on The Eye of Truth to guarantee a success or to score a big oversuccess reward, but at the same time it did also do a fair amount of work mitigating treacheries and it was really her only defense in that regard apart from the Ankh. But that still doesn't mean it was the right call. I think the real issue with the deck I built is that to be effective as a primary enemy handler it needed to be hyper-focused on that task, so no Copycat or Lockpicks or probably even Manual Dexterity (2). Those are the things I would probably change if I were to try again, and I think two copies of Swift Reload was definitely a mistake at the end there. One would have been enough, and by forgoing the second copy and Momentum I would've been able to purchase one copy of Another Day, Another Dollar (or two copies by dropping the Unscrupulous Loan, which might have been correct, too). In a different campaign it might've been possible to get past the first scenario without Delilah as well, and while having her in the deck did send it down a particular path I'm not really sure whether Winifred actually has a better option. Winifred probably wasn't a great choice for this campaign or the role I chose for her (I can see how she would be great in a three player game providing secondary support for enemy handling and clue gathering) but then on the other hand, in all of my test runs I didn't have any major issues in any part of the campaign except for the first and last scenarios. I did end up learning a lot about the Rogue card pool, and I'm tempted to see how Tony Morgan fares, being a Rogue that's actually designed to fight, but I'm also kind of tempted to take Zoey Samaras through the same campaign and just murder everything in sight.   And the other reward from The Eternal Slumber, John & Jessie Burke, is a perfect Zoey card, too! It would be so good against The Man in the Pallid Mask.  Oh, and before I forget, one other neat thing I learned about the Rogue card pool, or rather one other neat card I found which I'll definitely take in a future campaign, is "You owe me one!" I took it for a while in Curtain Call so that Winifred could take care of Rex's Archaic Glyphs research:  It's not as janky as it sounds because you don't have to be at the same location as your target, it draws two cards, and Winifred made good use of the five resources it generated from the Glyphs. It could also be used to safely remove a Painful Reflection with Logical Reasoning which, well, yeah that part was pretty janky. Return to The Path to Carcosa I didn't really keep track of what Return to The Path to Carcosa changed about the original (except that it made Curtain Call a lot harder) so my parting thoughts will assume that this version of the campaign is the only one. It's generally regarded as one of the best campaigns, though I do think The Innsmouth Conspiracy and particularly Edge of the Earth really overshadow it. But that's to be expected considering they're the product of all the campaigns that came before them. The weakest part of Carcosa is easily the third scenario, Echoes of the Past. It's pretty forgettable from both a design and thematic perspective, and it also rewards a very paltry amount of XP (unless you can both clear the library and kill the boss, I suppose). I also think A Phantom of Truth and Black Stars Rise are both a bit undercooked. One thing they have in common is that they're both trying to support two different modes of play, and Phantom having the same goal across all three agendas makes it feel like it never really gets going, as though it only has one stage. Black Stars Rise has a great location layout; the first part feels suitably dangerous and requires some planning, and the back half creates a nice spread that may force you to consider whether you have enough time to pursue both ending locations, but the encounter deck feels lacking in a way that's hard to describe. Tearing it down and setting it up again was also pretty laborious (compared to all of the other scenarios) and I know that shouldn't factor into how well it played, but it still leaves an impression. I appreciate the fact that Carcosa tried a lot of new things, and I don't mind it when game designers shoot for the stars but miss (as long as they don't do it all the time!) The best stuff in Carcosa holds up very well with the modern game. The Last King was a novel design in 2017 and it still is today, and I've always thought it was one of the best examples of the narrative/mechanical blend this game excels at. The Pallid Mask is my pick for best scenario of the campaign, though. I love the element of exploration it presents with the catacombs deck and you can see how parts of its design formed the basis for several future scenarios, including City of the Elder Things in Edge of the Earth. I also think Dim Carcosa is a good final scenario because it's difficult; I loved the design of the final scenario in Edge of the Earth but unfortunately it just didn't present much of a challenge. I also don't hate Curtain Call despite feeling like I've played it a million times - I can easily see how a different pair of investigators would make it feel fresh again. Oh, and the asylum is cool, too. One thing I remembered from my original solo run years ago is that it felt like there just wasn't enough time to get everything done and escape. That's the best kind of pressure in this game, where you're forced to make difficult decisions and revise your plans as your situation changes. If I was to make a personal list of best campaigns, Carcosa would be in the top half for sure. Below Edge of the Earth and The Forgotten Age, and above The Dunwich Legacy and The Circle Undone. And while I technically did beat it because my one test run of Dim Carcosa was a success, I didn't do it according to my own self-imposed ironman rules, so it doesn't count. Which means that one day... I will Return to Return to The Path to Carcosa. Addendum Well, I returned sooner than I planned to. I reran the campaign, incorporating feedback from the thread, and posted an update here. Kalko fucked around with this message at 06:59 on Jul 23, 2022 |
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Jul 14, 2022 19:32
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Fantastic write-up as usual! Getting the Ankh to limit the effects of Carsosa-specific treacheries is a stroke of genius.Kalko posted:If you've ever tried to play Winifred Habbamock as a primary enemy handler I'd love to hear about your experience. I have a few ideas about what I should change, but I definitely don't have all the answers. I haven't done a Winifred deck yet, but I did just run a combat-focused Finn deck that was somewhat similar to yours. To solve the money problems, I took Faustian Bargain and Watch This! like you, but I also took Lone Wolf for a steady +1 resource a turn as well as Pickpocketing (2). Lone Wolf probably can't be taken unless the other investigator can take care of themselves but given how much evading you seem to have done Pickpocketing could have been pretty helpful I think, it definitely competes with Lucky Cigarette Case imo. Getting 3 resources a turn makes the Rogue cardpool much more sustainable. For guns I took the .25 automatic (2), since with Delilah that gets Wini and Finn to 6 before you use any other boosters, and it's a really strong combo with Delilah to evade, shoot and have Delilah cap them all in one action (that Finn gets as a bonus!). Then the Beretta M1918 was the big gun for getting to 8. I considered the Chicago Typewriter but the Beretta is more action-efficient, if riskier. Finally, Hard Knocks (2) got used for some bonus combat (or agility) when needed for big enemies after I stockpiled some cash. But I play on Standard so I can't say how successful this would be on Hard. Plus it helped to have Jacqueline on hand to pass 1 or 2 crucial tests per turn consistently. I would still recommend it though, it was one of the most fun Rogue decks I've ran.
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Jul 14, 2022 21:37
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I ran Winnie as the main combat fighter in return to forgotten age. Enchanted weapon from father Matteo meant that I could clip almost any snake in one hit. Stella was backup. Mind blank to handle vengeance, I can’t remember if Delilah was part of it but that seems likely.
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Jul 14, 2022 23:27
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Nephthys posted:Fantastic write-up as usual! Getting the Ankh to limit the effects of Carsosa-specific treacheries is a stroke of genius. I tried Lone Wolf in Curtain Call but it was a bit awkward because both investigators were often together. It might not have been a bad Adaptable swap, though, I just kind of memory-holed it after that first scenario. I looked at the level zero version of Pickpocketing and dismissed it because it would take two evade actions to just cover its own cost, but you're right, I did do a lot of evading (probably more than I might expect if I actually counted up every instance). It's worth testing. Your comments about two-handed guns reminded me that I did have one other idea, and it's this:  This is another one I dismissed on paper because it only hit for two damage, but thinking about it later pretty much all of my hits throughout the campaign were only two damage, and being able to do it twice for one action probably would have been pretty effective at times. It's an expensive gun, though, and it means I probably wouldn't be able to take Lockpicks, but maybe swapping Pilfer and perhaps Intel Report in and out with Adaptable would work for some backup cluevering. But yeah, I'd have to really get to the bottom of my resource generator dilemma. And if I had the Thompson I could also use Sleight of Hand, and that might also open up the Lupara.  Food for thought... Golden Bee posted:I ran Winnie as the main combat fighter in return to forgotten age. Enchanted weapon from father Matteo meant that I could clip almost any snake in one hit. Stella was backup. Mind blank to handle vengeance, I can’t remember if Delilah was part of it but that seems likely. Yeah, it's always interesting how each investigator interacts with or benefits from different partners. A Mystic paired with Wini would at least have made "You handle this one!" more worthwhile for the entire campaign. edit: meant to say that one of Wini's stand-out problems was dealing with more than one enemy at a time, and that's where the Thompson might come in handy. I should probably test the .25 Automatic (2) as well. Kalko fucked around with this message at 00:59 on Jul 15, 2022 |
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Jul 15, 2022 00:41
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In other news, new cards! Thieves' Kit is incredible, and there's the doom support we've been looking for. edit: like, wow, if I'd had Thieves' Kit in my Carcosa run... I wanna play with it right now! edit 2: wouldn't be surprised to find an XP version of the Kit as well since it's associated with one of the set's investigators. Probably something simple like +2 skill value for the test, at 2XP. Kalko fucked around with this message at 05:39 on Jul 15, 2022 |
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Jul 15, 2022 03:49
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