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Golden Bee posted:It’s a low XP campaign. There’s one treachery that deals 10 damage when you go through your deck, so you need ways to deal with the encounter deck and mitigate it. (Alter fate and cards that discard encounter cards from play are good but there’s no level zero ones.) Yorick players SWEATING.
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Feb 29, 2024 01:48
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Not really, he can run delay the inevitable. It’s Winifred who just won’t mesh with that campaign.
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Feb 29, 2024 05:39
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LifeLynx posted:I finished with Kohaku and Kate, I really didn't want to not see the story through even though I got the worst ending. Defeated in act 1 lol. Yeah, I flamed out hard in Act One too. I'm going back in now, and I think I've found the perfect answer to the Aloof/Elusive problem:  I'll probably grab the new Occult Reliquary as well so Patrice can still carry her violin, cause it's real good.  I think I've settled on Wilson running 2 x Stand Together (3) as well, because he can't tutor a bunch of his good stuff and there are a lot of treacheries that make you discard. Plus, it will provide fuel for Patrice to get stuff done too. Here goes nothing!
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Feb 29, 2024 09:16
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Golden Bee posted:Not really, he can run delay the inevitable. It’s Winifred who just won’t mesh with that campaign. Yeah Winifred in Dunwhich is just about the worst thing. But as others have said, Willpower and the ability to get Clues is super great. Also you need Combat as evading is not super helpful most of the time in Dunwhich. Someone like Zoey is great here. Edit. And if at all possible, consider getting the Return to... -box and play with it, as they no longer print it.
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Feb 29, 2024 11:15
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I was struggling to build Parallel Agnes. Not that she's not good, but 25 cards is restrictive when there are so many powerful Mystic events. And I was running Down the Rabbit Hole, so I want everything I'm ever going to play in the level 0 deck. Then I read Sparrow Mask. Parallel back Pagnes is dead; Parallel front + OG back with Sparrow Mask makes her a 7 willpower Mystic from the first scenario. The only thing I'd miss is Occult Lexicon (3). Hallowed Mirror is powerful but I'd have to buy Relic Hunter, and Jessica Hyde is probably better.
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Feb 29, 2024 13:36
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Bandages is such a great pick for Zoey. Especially with Grete. Supplemental clues by doing what she does best.
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Feb 29, 2024 17:39
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Tried Curse of the Rougarou with some friends. I feel like most of the bite of this scenario comes from Beast of the Bayou, which can deal high, unavoidable damage and horror to multiple people at once, depending on how many Insatiable Bloodlusts are attached to the Rougarou and the position of the group. The first time someone drew Beast of the Bayou, it dealt FOUR DAMAGE and FOUR HORROR to THREE of us. Beast of the Bayou can affect multiple people at once, and with four people drawing encounter cards, it will come up more often. Also, there's no way to predict when it will appear and there are two of them in the deck. There's no skill check or anything. Once the card is drawn, if you are in the wrong place, there's no way to avoid the damage. We had a character with Martyr's Vambraces and Tooth of Eztli to try to protect the other characters from the encounter deck, but it's literally worthless against Beast of the Bayou. On the other hand, effects like Ward of Protection/Fool Me Once thwart Beast of the Bayou to the extent that I would feel bad using them. Maybe we just got unlucky. I'm trying to think of a way it could be errata'd to give the players some agency, but I can't come up with much. Maybe get rid of it and change On the Prowl to deal 1 damage and horror to investigators the Rougarou passes by? I was the lead investigator as playing Preston Fairmont, which made the Curse of the Rougarou weakness very difficult to deal with. I managed to buy someone's spare Runic Axe using Black Market, which kept me from dying of Horror. Is it common practice to ensure that the lead investigator is more of a fighter type? I guess Night of the Zealot kind of assumes that, since it gives Lita Chantler to the lead investigator. I was surprised how many enemies there were. Zoey and Nathaniel Cho together couldn't really keep on top of them.
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Mar 1, 2024 20:34
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When I play two-handed my lead investigator is always my primary fighter. Yeah I guess Night of the Zealot kind of forces that idea on you with Lita. In early campaigns when the agenda advances, it's usually the lead investigator who gets a monster dumped into their threat area, has to draw an encounter card, or has the scenario boss spawn at their location. It's bad when that happens to the defenseless clue-getter.
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Mar 1, 2024 20:43
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Night of the Rougarou is the first expansion and it shows. Every single one of them is better. Ironically, becoming a werewolf is very good for some characters… including one you were playing as.
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Mar 1, 2024 21:54
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Golden Bee posted:Night of the Rougarou is the first expansion and it shows. Every single one of them is better. I dunno about this, the blob that ate everything is pretty not great outside of its context as a massively-multiplayer event scenario, playing it as a 1-4 player campaign insert is doable but one of the most annoying things I've ever done for the least payoff (I really just wanted a migo weapon for zoey in dunwich, for reasons) I personally love it, but fortune and folly can very quickly turn into like, a four hour slog if the tokens and card suits just do not want to show you a good time - the same can be said of every scenario, but there are so many checks and such randomization that it's constantly a toss-up whether you get to play the coolest game of ocean's eleven, or like, that really bad movie 21
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Mar 2, 2024 06:44
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We only played it once and it was a tense version (Amanda and Joe Diamond). I’m sorry I went slow for you but I think it’s way above the Roug in that it’s clear from every section what it’s going for.
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Mar 2, 2024 06:46
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We just finished most of a first run of Hemlock Vale over the weekend. It landed a lot better than Scarlet keys on almost every level for us. The scenarios we saw were on the whole diverse and well executed (though almost every one ends with a high health boss enemy for some reason). Looking forward to a second run where everyone doesn't hate us.
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Mar 5, 2024 04:09
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This weekend, we finally finished Forgotten Age. In the end, we couldn’t close the deal because of a combination of a treachery making me discard all of my investigating tools and our primary clue-gatherer getting locked down by an enemy in a location that nobody else could reach. I wish we could have played just one more scenario. I had just started getting use out of the multi-color tech my deck had been investing towards, and it was fun. Overall, I liked the campaign. The balance can get a little wacky, and the storytelling is spare (we definitely missed some threads, but do they ever explicitly say that the Yithians and Valusians are both trying to restore their lost worlds, or that Ichtaca is (maybe?) afflicted by the curse of Yig? Or what is actually going to happen to the earth as we know it?) But every scenario is fun, maybe excepting Heart of the Elders A.
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Mar 5, 2024 04:48
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Wallet posted:The scenarios we saw were on the whole diverse and well executed (though almost every one ends with a high health boss enemy for some reason). I loved that about it. I did my second run of Wilson/Patrice a few days ago but I bowed out before the finale because Wilson had built up seven trauma due to a bunch of unfortunate events (my bad planning plus a couple of unexpected results). After a bit more sandboxing with the first scenario or two I've settled on a couple of lists to take in my third and final run with these two investigators. I posted them to ArkhamDB along with some card commentary if anyone's interested: Wilson Richards Patrice Hathaway
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Mar 5, 2024 10:24
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(Forgotten Age spoilers)Anonymous Robot posted:(we definitely missed some threads, but do they ever explicitly say that the Yithians and Valusians are both trying to restore their lost worlds, or that Ichtaca is (maybe?) afflicted by the curse of Yig? Or what is actually going to happen to the earth as we know it?) A lot of it is more implied or mysterious than explicit, but the Yithians and the Valusian serpents are not trying to restore their lost civilizations, exactly. They're trying to shift themselves to alternate timelines where their past civilizations weren't destroyed in the first place. At least, that's how I interpret the various resolutions to Scenario 8. The rest of it is a lot muddier. Ichtaca seems to pick up some kind of Yig curse as a result of her efforts to stop Padma and the temporal incursion in Mexico City (scenario 4), I think. If you help her a bunch in the first half of the campaign, she stays loyal to you, and doesn't become an enemy. She implies that she was a Yig worshipper but your help gets her to renounce it, saying that her faith in humanity is "restored". What does that imply about her and the Eztli's prior relationship to humanity? She does seem to be part snake. Her and the Eztli's relationship to Yig isn't entirely clear - were they always Yig worshippers, or did they get infiltrated by snake people at some point? How long ago? Are there pro-Yig and pro-humanity factions within the Eztli? Is Ichtaca turning evil a result of the curse, and Yig getting a hold of her, or is she evil from the beginning and just lying to you? If she's evil from the beginning, does that mean Padma's good? What's Padma's deal anyway? A rival Yig worshipper, usurper to Ichtaca's position as leader of the Eztli, maybe? A third faction vying for the Relic and the Nexus? Since her time-fuckery shows you a vision of a future with Tenochtitlan in it, maybe she is just a native Nahua who learned about the Relic's alternate-timeline-powers and decided it'd be a good idea to use those to try and create a conquistador-free timeline where the Aztec empire still reigns, similar to the Yithian's and Valusian's goals. I think if you completely lose Scenario 8, Earth's fate is basically that the "normal" timeline is completely loving annihilated in some kind of temporal crash, and if any timelines do survive, you aren't in any of them. Tl;dr: there's not that much more to the story that you missed. Arkham Horror is more about vibes than a coherent plot anyway.
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Mar 5, 2024 11:48
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Sounds about right with our time with FA. I think my problem with the story is it kinda goes from like 10 to 100 fast. There's like 5 scenarios where it's all pretty grounded then SURPRISE ALIENS. And I know that's a bit of a trope in Arkham Horror in general, but like there could have been a bit more foreshadowing or tying the plot threads together in the book.
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Mar 5, 2024 12:15
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Yeah lol, it honestly took me until Smock’s post to nail down that the Eztli and the Valusians are for sure different groups, and I honestly completely forgot about Padma because she just shows up, implies some history with Ichtaca and then gets discarded from the story as part of whatever is going on in Boundary Beyond. That’s more what I was thinking about when I asked about the fate of the Earth- in Boundary Beyond we see a vision of the sky turning red and then the narrative suddenly says “oh hell no. You know exactly what has to be done.” and then we’re off to a cave to spin some pillars. It seems odd that Ichtaca seems to glimpse a different future than what actually happens if you fail the campaign, which I think is actually conceptually clear- time becomes flattened as a dimension that can be traversed as freely as space, leaving us as floundering prey to all manner of bad entities. It’s definitely the story that is least clear of the campaigns I’ve played (Dunwich, Carcosa, Circle Undone.) I don’t mind that much, but getting insight into the story is definitely a bigger reward/motivator for the other people I play with.
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Mar 5, 2024 13:20
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kaffo posted:Sounds about right with our time with FA. Well, there's a little bit of foreshadowing with Alejandro being vaguely shady. But yeah, that he is in fact a Yithian in Alejandro's body is still a really big surprise. It helps if you've read some Lovecraft, I suppose; when they showed up the first time I was less baffled and more "oh, yeah, those guys." Anonymous Robot posted:It’s definitely the story that is least clear of the campaigns I’ve played (Dunwich, Carcosa, Circle Undone.) lmao to include Carcosa on that list. I mean, if you're a Conviction player, it definitely seems clear. . . (carcosa spoilers)  Speaking of that, I'm halfway through Hemlock Vale with my usual playgroup, and the first Prelude has another one of the things from Carcosa above. (Hemlock vale spoilers) I got curious when I noticed the Prelude's act card had no reason to flip it, so I peeked, and was rewarded with +1 xp. Nice! But then in the prelude of day 2, I said "well, they rewarded us the first time, so they might punish you this time. . . do any of us want to flip it?" and we ended up leaving it alone 'cause we were all a bit nervous. I'm very curious to find out, once I've finished the campaign and I no longer care about spoilers. I love that poo poo. A fun way to put in a mechanic that works well with the themes of deception and mystery imo.
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Mar 5, 2024 13:45
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DontMockMySmock posted:Well, there's a little bit of foreshadowing with Alejandro being vaguely shady. But yeah, that he is in fact a Yithian in Alejandro's body is still a really big surprise. It helps if you've read some Lovecraft, I suppose; when they showed up the first time I was less baffled and more "oh, yeah, those guys."
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Mar 5, 2024 13:52
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That's the real gently caress up they did with Forgotten Age imo. If they wanted to have some intrigue and ambiguity as to who to side with, making one of the options be seemingly very racist against the indigenous folks was a mistake. It just turns out that he's an alien cone man who is racist against snake people instead. The one friendly Yithian in City of Archives is the real Alejandro right?
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Mar 5, 2024 13:56
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thebardyspoon posted:The one friendly Yithian in City of Archives is the real Alejandro right? I've always assumed so, yeah.
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Mar 5, 2024 14:06
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All this talk about TFA makes me want to play the Return box again. I never did get the "true" ending, though I know it's only like a tiny bit of extra content. It's still my favourite campaign, theme-wise, but the big box ones are structurally much better and EotE/FHV are mechanically and narratively superior as well (I do think most of the stuff in TFA holds up pretty well though, especially compared to all the other old-style campaigns). I love the whole expedition into the unknown vibe and I can't wait until they get around to doing the Lovecraft version of Egypt, which has a lot of lore, though I'm not sure how much is original or how much was created by FFG in their other games. They've done jungle and ice expedition campaigns so it only makes sense that the desert would be next.DontMockMySmock posted:Speaking of that, I'm halfway through Hemlock Vale with my usual playgroup, and the first Prelude has another one of the things from Carcosa above. (Hemlock vale spoilers) I only noticed this on my second playthrough. I also only realized later that the Preludes are more than just (spoiler for the mechanics) "you keep your hand and an asset of your choice." I looked up what steps 1-8 in the rules reference are, and I've since seen a few clarifying comments in the Discord, but basically you should think of them as Agenda 0 of the scenario you're about to play. You keep your discard piles and any damage/horror you took, and any cards that are exiled or removed from the game stay that way. The entire game state is pretty much preserved as you head into the scenario.
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Mar 5, 2024 14:16
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Going through Hemlock Vale a second time, now with Pagnes and Alessandra. Alessandra is a beast in this campaign. Even if there were no parley actions on scenario cards, she's still amazing. Parley can do pretty much anything well, and the extra action is so good. I was worried about her being my primary cluever, but there's always an enemy around to give her a free chance at clues. Pagnes has the investigate spell events and a Sixth Sense as backup. She's good at killing enemies but sometimes it's better to have them alive for Alessandra to parley off of. Massive Hemlock Vale finale act 1 spoiler: They pull the "become a Yithian" trick again! It works better this time, but extremely brave of them to attempt probably the most loathed mechanic a second time. Do they actually pull it off? I don't know, my run sucked and I died in act 1.
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Mar 5, 2024 14:16
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LifeLynx posted:Massive Hemlock Vale finale act 1 spoiler: They pull the "become a Yithian" trick again! It works better this time, but extremely brave of them to attempt probably the most loathed mechanic a second time. Do they actually pull it off? I don't know, my run sucked and I died in act 1. I somehow missed the part where you're supposed to shuffle your actual investigator cards into the deck, so after a few rounds I was thinking, "hmm, this is a bit tricky. How am I supposed to get better? Oh..." but by that point my investigators were so ravaged it would've have made much difference and they would've just evaporated into dust anyway. Right now I'm enjoying not knowing what happens next. It's nice to have something to look forward to!
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Mar 5, 2024 14:21
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DontMockMySmock posted:Well, there's a little bit of foreshadowing with Alejandro being vaguely shady. But yeah, that he is in fact a Yithian in Alejandro's body is still a really big surprise. It helps if you've read some Lovecraft, I suppose; when they showed up the first time I was less baffled and more "oh, yeah, those guys." I think Carcosa is pretty straightforward, but the fine details of the plot just aren’t that important. The King In Yellow is Squidward’s Suicide, it’s Yusuke’s black videotape. It depicts something unfathomably tragic and grisly, so much so that the players are only permitted to glimpse at it in passing, as to do otherwise, even metatextually (as it is implied that the text itself may be the powerful thing here,) drives you insane. What the plot is really concerned with is those who are seeking the path. It speaks to a peculiar aspect of trauma and psychotic delusions, which is that they can become singular fixations that replicate and compound on themselves, and feel like they must be shared with and communicated to others, or repatriated onto the world in some way. It’s possible that the King In Yellow is a metaphysical manifestation of some horrible personal/political tragedy that occurred in some other universe, a psychic ripple that carries its grievous tale into our world. But it doesn’t really matter if Carcosa is real or not, and once you have come into contact with it, there really is no way to know for sure. Every killing in Hastur’s name makes it more real, and that’s its perverse power, and why it needs to be sealed away.
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Mar 5, 2024 14:23
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Innsmouth conspiracy makes complete sense, it’s just told out of order. Running Hemlock for the first time with Wendy and Wilson. A balacned combo, considering they both have Drifter as a trait. There was a scenario we loved, That we picked purely because “Wilson would try and do that one first.” Super funny to have an adult man and a child, both wandering around an island with burglary tools.
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Mar 5, 2024 14:28
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thebardyspoon posted:That's the real gently caress up they did with Forgotten Age imo. If they wanted to have some intrigue and ambiguity as to who to side with, making one of the options be seemingly very racist against the indigenous folks was a mistake. It just turns out that he's an alien cone man who is racist against snake people instead. The one friendly Yithian in City of Archives is the real Alejandro right? Funny, I had assumed that one of the threads we missed was that Alejandro is human until Threads of Fate, when he’s held prisoner at the newspaper office while the Cult of Pnakotus is running around Arkham.
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Mar 5, 2024 14:41
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Anonymous Robot posted:Funny, I had assumed that one of the threads we missed was that Alejandro is human until Threads of Fate, when he’s held prisoner at the newspaper office while the Cult of Pnakotus is running around Arkham. That's my assumption as well. It's reasonable for him to be suspicious and not want to work with Ichtaca's tribe, even as a human. I think doing Alejandro's side in a second playthrough works out well, since in hindsight he actually was right to mistrust them and he probably wasn't just being racist. They really are Yig worshippers. We just interpret it as racism from our perspective.
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Mar 5, 2024 14:58
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Nephthys posted:That's my assumption as well. It's reasonable for him to be suspicious and not want to work with Ichtaca's tribe, even as a human. I think doing Alejandro's side in a second playthrough works out well, since in hindsight he actually was right to mistrust them and he probably wasn't just being racist. They really are Yig worshippers. We just interpret it as racism from our perspective.
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Mar 5, 2024 15:42
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Anonymous Robot posted:I think Carcosa is pretty straightforward, but the fine details of the plot just aren’t that important. The King In Yellow is Squidward’s Suicide, it’s Yusuke’s black videotape. It depicts something unfathomably tragic and grisly, so much so that the players are only permitted to glimpse at it in passing, as to do otherwise, even metatextually (as it is implied that the text itself may be the powerful thing here,) drives you insane. Well, you're not wrong about any of that (although I have no idea what those references are that you compare TKIY to). But the question is (further Carcosa spoilers) what the campaign looks like from the perspective of an objective, non-insane outside observer. For all we know, the entire campaign could be entirely in the investigator's heads, but that answer is boring so let's assume we at least know that the investigators did attend a play and that they were insane already or went insane or at least started to go insane at that time. What then? How much of what the investigators do is "real"? We are shown moments where it seems like "reality" is seeping through, like when you come back to Engram's house after the party (scenario 2) and find the facade isn't broken and covered in blood like you saw earlier. But what's the "reality" behind, say, Daniel? Or The Organist? Or a million other things? And is any of that "reality" actually real, or is that, too, part of the deluded fantasy? And is that delusion actually caused by an extradimensional entity, or the investigators' insanity mundane, and Hastur a figment of their imagination? You essentially have no idea what's going on for the entire campaign. And that's not a slight on the campaign - you're not supposed to know; that's the point, as you identified in your post. The subjective experience of the investigators is all you get, and all that matters to us as we experience the plot. And that subjective experience is pretty clear to us, like you say. But the objective reality is not - and that's what I meant when I said it's extremely not clear what's going on in the campaign. Just about the only thing I can say for certain about the plot is that the investigators are, at some point, admitted to an asylum as patients - they are not just visitors who came willingly to search for Daniel. But even that's information you only get from inference.
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Mar 5, 2024 15:55
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Kalko posted:I can't wait until they get around to doing the Lovecraft version of Egypt, which has a lot of lore, though I'm not sure how much is original or how much was created by FFG in their other games. They've done jungle and ice expedition campaigns so it only makes sense that the desert would be next. I said I was hoping they'd do an Egypt campaign in the discord when discussion of "hopes for future campaigns" cropped up as a topic and someone said "oh they probably won't do an Egypt one because that'd have to include the revolution being set in the 1920s and that's probably a topic they want to avoid" which seemed like spurious logic to me, if they want to avoid it they'll just avoid it by not mentioning it. Seems too ripe a topic to not do eventually to me.
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Mar 5, 2024 15:59
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Looks like Arkham Horror is being adapted into a TTRP: https://twitter.com/edge_english/status/1765399441648029882 Press release: https://www.asmodeena.com/en/news/2024/3/6/Arkham-Horror-The-Roleplaying-Game/ This makes sense, I think we're nearing the end of the life cycle for the card game so adapting into a full table top experience is the natural next step.
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Mar 7, 2024 13:01
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Nephthys posted:Looks like Arkham Horror is being adapted into a TTRP: Notably it looks like it's adapting The Night of the Zealot. Lita and the Ghoul Priest are on the cover. This might actually get me to play an RPG again.
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Mar 7, 2024 15:00
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I wonder how they’ll distinguish Arkham Horror from other Lovecraft inspired TTRPG’s, gameplay wise. Not for me, though. I like the LCG because it’s a game first and a narrative experience second. Plus, I don’t want to GM a game.
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Mar 7, 2024 15:24
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I love how they imply this is the first time you can use this setting, as if the Call of Cthulhu RPG wasn’t first released in 1981. It’s one of the oldest things you can do in RPGs! Still, a one hour per scenario box is shorter than anything but single player LCG, and 80% faster than the board games, so I’m interested at that level.
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Mar 7, 2024 16:33
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I'll be interested to see how modern the rule set is and how crunchy it is. It being Arkham Horror rather than CoC gives me the impression we'll be shooting and slashing monsters with stat blocks rather than spending a session going insane at the weird noises coming from the looping audio played from the GM's phone.
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Mar 7, 2024 16:59
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LifeLynx posted:Notably it looks like it's adapting The Night of the Zealot. Lita and the Ghoul Priest are on the cover. This might actually get me to play an RPG again. I think they swapped Yorick in for Wendy.
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Mar 7, 2024 19:21
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Batterypowered7 posted:I think they swapped Yorick in for Wendy. That makes sense for an RPG. it would be impossible at some level not to play Wendy for comedy because the idea of a eight-year-old with lockpicks, faustian bargains, and running Bank Jobs is cray.
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Mar 7, 2024 19:25
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Is there any eight-year-old who wouldn't if you let them?
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Mar 7, 2024 19:33
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As much as I love coc, I'm interested in this
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Mar 7, 2024 20:13
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