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 Assuming that I was sane and awake, my experience on that night was such as has befallen no man before. It was, moreover, a frightful confirmation of all I had sought to dismiss as myth and dream. -H. P. Lovecraft, The Shadow Out of Time Lovecraftian horror is a concept that needs little introduction. It's the idea of monsters and mysterious phenomena that exist in the depths of space, in the veil between universes, and in the corners of our minds, and has influenced works from Alien to Dungeons & Dragons. Arkham Horror: The Card Game is but one of many tabletop games set directly in the mythos of Lovecraft's fiction, and it's arguably the best. Originally released in 2016, this Living Card Game (or LCG) has players taking on the role of investigators, working together to unravel mysteries and sinister conspiracies. And maybe, if they're lucky, live to tell the tale. As they play through each scenarios, the investigators create a narrative campaign, in which gameplay and story decisions have consequences that will carry on to later games. Each investigator has their own deck of ability cards, and if they do well, they'll be able to upgrade those cards and be better prepared to face the increased challenge of later scenarios. Fail to hold back the monsters and madness, and the investigators will suffer trauma that will continue to haunt them. Arkham Horror has branching paths and multiple endings. Each scenario has multiple possible "resolutions", usually determined by how well the investigators accomplish their goals before time runs out. These resolutions will lead the players to the end of the campaign, for good or ill. By its very nature, Arkham doesn't exactly do happy endings. The best-case outcome for players is usually that they manage to contain the big nasty, and don't go insane in the process. Fail, and, well... you're lucky if all you lose is your life.  How will this LP work? This will primarily be a mechanics- and gameplay-focused LP. I will, of course, be transposing all of the flavor and story text from the game, but I won't be writing dialogue for the investigators. Forums user Inadequately ran a (sadly abandoned) narrative LP, which I'd recommend checking out if you're looking for that. Do I need to know how to play to follow along? Nope! While being familiar with the game will help (and I encourage anyone with the opportunity to give it a try), I'll be teaching as we go. Furthermore, the first campaign is a short one that's designed to introduce new players to the game. Will there be audience participation? We'll see! The first campaign we'll be playing is pretty straightforward, so there won't be any significant choices to make. If there's enough interest, we'll have votes during the later campaigns on major story beats and branching paths. Either way, we'll all be going through this mad thing together! Spoilers? Please avoid spoiling future content. As the game's narrative and choices are a major part of the core experience, we want to make sure everyone who hasn't seen this game has the chance to experience the story, narrative, twists and turns. That said, feel free to point out how bad at deckbuilding I am!  The Gathering, Part 1 The Gathering, Part 2 The Gathering, Part 3 Interlude 1, Deckbuilding The Midnight Masks, Part 1 The Midnight Masks, Part 2 Interlude 2, Deckbuilding The Devourer Below Alternate Paths  Extracurricular Activity, Part 1 Extracurricular Activity, Part 2 Interlude 1, Deckbuilding The House Always Wins The Miskatonic Museum, Part 1 The Miskatonic Museum, Part 2 The Essex County Express Blood on the Altar Undimensioned and Unseen, Part 1 Undimensioned and Unseen, Part 2 Where Doom Awaits Lost in Time and Space Epilogue  Curtain Call, Part 1 Curtain Call, Part 2 The Last King, Part 1 The Last King, Part 2 Interlude 1, Reality's Shadow Echoes of the Past Phelddagrif fucked around with this message at 01:20 on Aug 16, 2023 |
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Apr 14, 2023 02:15
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Awesome content goes here: A detailed recounting of Lovecraft's original story, The Dunwich Horror, which was the inspiration for the Dunwich Legacy campaign Phelddagrif fucked around with this message at 00:53 on Jun 20, 2023 |
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Apr 14, 2023 02:16
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Friday, September 18, 1925. Arkham, Massachusetts. It is the end of a long and abnormally hot summer. The first hints of autumn beckon, but a heavy heat persists, relentless. A silent, unspoken anger grips the town. Tempers are short, and in the last week alone there have been numerous reports of townspeople coming to heated, violent blows with one another over simple misunderstandings. And now, a call from James Hankerson. He claims to have found a dismembered body in his barn. Blaming the weather would be too easy. There is something wrong with this town, and not a whole lot this old soothsayer can do to stop the slide. My auguries indicate a small group of investigators will soon take note of these strange happenings and set forth to make things right. I’ll be watching their progress…but I won’t be holding my breath. Night of the Zealot is the campaign that comes with the Core Set, and is most players' first introduction to the game. While it's something of a fossil by today's standards, it does a decent job of getting new players' feet wet and preparing them for what's to come. We'll be heading in with two investigators. Arkham Horror scales much of its gameplay based on the number of characters, and playing with 2 will let us cover a wider range of bases without being too much to handle. Our first investigator will be Roland Banks:  Roland had always taken comfort in procedure and rules. As an agent in the Bureau, he was relieved to have guidelines to follow in any given situation. But lately, his Federal Agent's Handbook had been entirely unhelpful given the cases he'd been assigned. Try as he might, Roland could find no mention of what to do when confronted with strange creatures, gates through time and space, or magic spells. If he hadn't seen it with his own eyes, he would never have believed it... and there's no way his superiors would understand. Roland knew he would have to handle this one himself. Roland is a Guardian, one of five character archetypes in the game. As "The Fed", Roland is very versatile - he has a high Combat stat and can equip various weapons that will help him defeat most of the monsters he encounters. His special ability allows him to discover a clue after he defeats an enemy; in almost every scenario, gathering clues is what allows the investigators to progress, so this lets him kill two ghouls with one stone. And he has a lot of health, so he can take a lot of punishment and keep on going. It's not all good news; Roland's Agility stat is pretty poor, so he's going to have a hard time dealing with anything that he can't kill. And his sanity is a meager 5, so he'll have to be very careful around anything that attacks the mind. Backing up Roland will be young Wendy Adams:  Mama used to let Wendy play with her necklace when she was small. Mama would tell her stories, and Wendy would spin the necklace and watch as it glittered. Then, word came that her father had been lost at sea, and Mama started acting strange, drawing unusual symbols in chalk all over the house. They took Mama to the asylum, and Wendy went to the orphanage. Before they took her away, Mama gave her the necklace, to "protect her." Wendy stayed in the orphanage for several years before running away, deciding that she could take better care of herself on her own. Wendy's archetype is the Survivor, a class centered around dealing with failure. You won't always manage to connect with your attacks, or find the clues you're looking for. Survivors have tools that let them either turn a failure into a success, or at least get something else out of it. And her signature ability is a good example of this, letting her turn any card into a "reroll" when she needs to pass an important test. Her most glaring weakness is her abysmal Combat stat, meaning she's going to have real trouble killing anything. Thankfully, not only is she very good at running away from trouble, she'll have Roland nearby to take care of any serious threats. Before we dive into this, a couple notes on how this is being put together. Arkham Horror is a massive game - to date, there have been eight full-size campaigns released (not counting this one) and a number of standalone scenarios and investigator packs. That is an overwhelming amount of content, and absolutely not something I want to front-load new players with. Therefore, I'll be running this intro campaign using only the cards that come in the core box, and adding new content as we go. I've also decided to run the first campaign on Easy, rather than Standard difficulty. This probably isn't necessary, but again my goal with this first campaign is to show off how the game functions to anyone seeing it for the first time. Yes, yes, getting your rear end kicked is a big part of the game, but as anyone who's familiar with this campaign can attest, we're probably going to get our fill of rear end-kicks in the last scenario. Don't worry, we'll be scaling up to Standard in the next campaign, once our card collection has grown a bit.  Pictured: No Pun Included modeling this campaign's gentle difficulty curve. With that all out of the way, let's jump in!  Part I: The Gathering You and your partners have been investigating strange events taking place in your home city of Arkham, Massachusetts. Over the past few weeks, several townspeople have mysteriously gone missing. Recently, their corpses turned up in the woods, savaged and half-eaten. The police and newspapers have stated that wild animals are responsible, but you believe there is something else going on. You are gathered together at the lead investigator’s home to discuss these bizarre events. In each scenario, the group chooses a player to take the role of the "lead investigator". Their job is to break ties: if the group needs to make a decision and can't come to an agreement, the lead investigator has the final say. Also, some game effects happen in "player order"; when that happens, the lead investigator goes first, followed by everyone else in clockwise order. In our game we'll have Wendy be in charge; she wouldn't have it any other way. The game next gives us some setup instructions, but before we get to that, let's find out what our current objective is.  Every scenario has an Act Deck, a set of story cards that give the players instructions on what they need to do next. In this case, our guide is the number "2" with the hat inside the magnifying glass. That icon means we need to collect 2 clue tokens, per investigator, in order to advance to the next Act card. Finishing all the cards in the Act deck is usually what leads to the best resolution, so it's a good thing to work towards. However, we don't have all night to get this done. The game is working against us in many ways, most notably with the Agenda Deck:  That number "3" in the bottom is our clock. Each round, a doom token will be placed on the agenda. Once three tokens are there, the agenda will advance, and bad stuff will happen, including advancing to the next Agenda card. Once the last card fills up, it's game over for the scenario. Both the Act and Agenda decks fill us in on more of the story. Here we can see that there are strange noises in our house, as if someone or something is in here with us (spoiler alert, it's ghouls). And as we try to leave, the doorway to our study disappears, trapping us in the room.  Now let's take a look at the play area. Each scenario in Arkham is divided into multiple locations, though in our case we only have the Study. The character cards show where each investigator is located, and the location card gives a bit of flavor. Location cards start out "unrevealed", as this one is, and is flipped to its "revealed" side once any investigators goes there for the first time. Since we start here, let's reveal the Study!  There's a few things of interest here. The number on the right might look familiar - that tells us how many clue tokens are placed on this location. That little hat icon means "per investigator", so we've placed 2 clues, times 2 players, for a total of 4. The other number on the left side is the Shroud value of the location. This represents how difficult it is to collect those clues, with a bigger number being more difficult. A shroud of 2 should be no problem for our investigators to handle. And with that, we're all set up! Time to actually start playing the game. - Round 1 - Each round, every investigator gets to take a turn. There's no set turn order - players can decide who should go next however they want (though one investigator must finish their turn before the next one goes). On their turn, an investigator may take three actions, and there are a bunch to choose from. We'll go over all the actions in due time, but for now, let's start with Roland taking his first turn. quote:> Roland plays Flashlight.  Roland's first action is playing a card from his hand. At the start of each scenario, players draw a hand of five cards to give them some tools to start with (and may mulligan any of them away if they want more options). The Flashlight is one such tool, which will help Roland gather those clues. It's an Asset, which means it will stay in play, and that icon in the bottom-right corner means it takes up a hand slot. Two hands means two hand slots max. Roland also has to pay an amount of resources equal to the number in the top-left corner; each investigator starts with 5 resources, so he can easily afford it. Resources are the "money" of Arkham Horror, and most cards have a resource cost to play them. You'll collect a small trickle of resources naturally, and while you can gather more, it's a slow process, so resources should be spent carefully. As for what the Flashlight actually does, you'll see it has an arrow and a description of its ability. That arrow means that using the Flashlight's ability costs one of Roland's three actions for the turn. When used, the Flashlight temporarily reduces the shroud value of the location - as mentioned before, the shroud represents how hard it is to pick up clues, and this tool makes it easier. Finally, it has a certain number of uses - 3, in this case. Each activation of the Flashlight's ability costs one of those supplies, and once they're spent, it can no longer be used. Now, a Flashlight is useful, but what Roland really wants is a weapon. And he's packing heat. quote:> Roland plays Roland's .38 Special.  The .38 Special is Roland's signature card - every deck built around Roland includes this card, and it's designed to take advantage of his strengths. In this case, it's a decent weapon that's even stronger when there's clues around, to help him kill monsters and pick up those clues automatically. However, it doesn't have a lot of ammo, so we want to make sure it's fired only when it's needed. With those two cards played, Roland is out of resources. He could spend an action to gain one resource, but we've got a better option. quote:> Roland plays Emergency Cache.  Emergency Cache is an Event card - unlike assets, this is a one-and-done that does what it says and is then discarded. In this case it's a simple effect, gaining Roland three resources at once. With those three cards played, Roland's turn ends, so let's move on to Wendy. quote:> Wendy plays Rabbit's Foot.  The Rabbit's Foot is also an asset, this time taking up her lone accessory slot. Unlike Roland's items, this doesn't have an action ability. Instead, here we have a reaction ability, which has an effect when Wendy fails a skill test. We'll cover skill tests soon, but here we can see that the Rabbit's Foot lets Wendy draw a card when she fails a test, once per round. More cards is always good, but it's especially useful for Wendy - remember that her ability let her use cards to get a second chance at her tests. Since Wendy wants to draw cards, let's give her another tool to do that. quote:> Wendy plays Pickpocketing.  Pickpocketing is another asset, though this one doesn't have a slot icon, so it's not competing with other assets for space. This also has a reaction ability, this time that activates when Wendy evades an enemy. Wendy is not good at fighting, preferring to run away if possible, and this will give her a reward for it. (You might also notice that it has a different class icon - Pickpocketing is a Rogue class card, not a Survivor card. Each investigator has their own deckbuilding options, and Wendy is allowed to take lower-level Rogue cards in her deck, so we've brought a few that help her get away from enemies). All right, enough putting it off - let's start grabbing those clues. quote:> Wendy investigates. The Investigate action is how players collect clues from locations. To investigate, we first compare the Intellect (book) stat of the investigator against the shroud value of the location. Wendy has 3 Intellect, and the Study has a shroud of 2, so we're good! Right? Not quite. Investigating is a skill test, one of many, and skill tests are the meat and potatoes of the game. Even if you are ahead of your target, there's an element of randomness that gives you a chance of failure. This is where our friend the Chaos Bag comes into play.  The Chaos Bag holds a bunch of tokens, some good, most bad. Every time you take a skill test, you draw a random token out of the bag, which will have a modifier. Apply that modifier to your skill, and that's your result! If your final skill value is equal or greater than the target value, you pass the test. Otherwise, you fail. Either way, the token goes back in the bag, so every test has the same odds as the last. This is also where our difficulty level comes in. Since we're playing on Easy, the worst number in the bag is a -2 (minus two), so as long as we're ahead of the target by at least two, we'll be pretty confident of success. Higher difficulties mean worse tokens in the bag, meaning you need higher skill to have a good chance of success. Of course, it's not all up to luck. Investigators do have a way to increase their skill value, to improve their odds of passing skill tests. You might have noticed that most of the cards that were played had skill icons along their left border. Here's the Flashlight again, for example: That Intellect icon below the cost means that this card can be used during an Intellect skill test, but in a different way than before. If Roland kept that card in his hand, rather than playing it, he could "commit" it to a skill test instead. Committing cards is different than playing them; you ignore all the text on the cards, and it doesn't cost any resources. Each card that is committed to a test adds its icons to the investigator's skill for that test. Adding that Flashlight to Wendy's skill test would boost her Intellect up from a 3 to a 4, giving her a better chance of passing the test and picking up a clue. The catch is if you wan to commit any cards to a test, you have to do so before you draw the token out of the bag. So committing cards improves your odds, but you can't add more after the fact if you pull a bad token. Also, once a card is committed, it's discarded, so be careful using up your cards too quickly! So let's get back to Wendy's turn. She's investigating the Study, and her Intellect is 3 against the shroud of 2. We could commit cards to this test, but she's already ahead, and there's no penalty for failure aside from a wasted action, so let's draw that chaos token.  Bad luck! That -2 means that Wendy's final skill value is 1, which is lower than the shroud, so we fail that test. But Wendy came prepared! quote:Wendy plays "Look what I found!"  "Look what I found" is an event card, though it's not played in the same way as Emergency Cache was. As it says, it can only be played after Wendy tries to investigate, but fails by 2 or less. It also has the "Fast" keyword, which means it doesn't cost an action to play, though it still costs the two resources. It's well worth it, though - Wendy's turned her failure into profit, picking up two clues for just one action! And lest we forget, Wendy also has a Rabbit's Foot: quote:Wendy exhausts Rabbit's Foot and draws a card. All in all, a pretty good first turn! Now that both investigators have finished their turns, we move on to the next phase in the round, the Enemy Phase. Here, any monsters in the room would attack the players, dealing damage to their health and/or sanity. Since there aren't any monsters here, we'll skip this and move on to Upkeep. The Upkeep Phase is the end of the round, and a few things happen. Any exhausted cards, such as Wendy's Rabbit's Foot, are readied to be used again next round. Each player also draws one card, and gains one resource. Finally, each player checks to see if they have more than eight cards in their hand, and discards down if necessary. So with that out of the way, let's move on to round 2, when the game starts getting mean- quote:Wendy draws Abandoned and Alone.  Oh. Oh jeez. I swear this wasn't planned, but I guess it's time to show off the dark side of the investigator decks: weaknesses. An investigator's deck of cards represent who they are: what equipment and abilities they bring to the table, what allies they have, their experience and training, and so on. A Weakness card represents a personal struggle or trauma the investigator is dealing with, and each investigator has two weaknesses in their deck: a random "basic" weakness, and their signature weakness, such as this one for Wendy. In practical terms, this means that whenever you draw a card, there's a chance that something bad might happen. In Wendy's case, that means she does two things. First, she takes two direct horror. Horror represents damage to the mind, and if an investigator ever has horror equal or greater than their max sanity, they're defeated. The "direct" keyword won't make much sense yet, but it means it has to be dealt directly to the investigator, and can't be soaked by equipment or other cards. The second thing Wendy does is remove her discard pile from the game (just a single card, in this case). Removing cards from the game doesn't mean they're permanently out of her deck, just that she can't use them for the rest of this scenario. The horror sucks, but it's honestly best that she got this out of the way now and doesn't have to worry about it later. Now, let's move on to round 2 for real. - Round 2 - At the start of every round, except the first, the Mythos Phase takes place. This is where all the bad stuff happens. First, we add a doom to the agenda:  As mentioned before, doom is our clock, and each doom on the agenda brings us one step closer to a bad ending. Since this agenda card isn't full yet, we move on to the last step of the Mythos Phase, where each player draws a card from the Encounter Deck. This thing is chock-full of trouble, and failing to deal with it will lead to our early demise. These cards are always drawn in player order, so we'll start with Wendy's:  A treachery card! These represent some kind of hazard or unfortunate event. Each treachery card has a "Revelation" ability, which tells you what to do with it. Most treacheries are discarded once they're done, but this one says to put it into play in Wendy's "threat area" (a space in her play area for bad cards like this) where it will stick around. In this case we kind of lucked out - this card can be crippling in different circumstances, but here, where there's nothing to fight or evade and nowhere to move to, it's not a problem at all! As long as we can pass a Willpower test we can ditch this card before it slows us down, and Wendy has an excellent Willpower stat.  Less good. This requires an immediate skill test, and here Roland's testing his Agility stat, which is only 2. This card also has different results depending on how badly you fail by. Fail by one, and you only take one damage, but fail by three and it hurts a lot more. It's worth noting that the lowest your final skill value can be is zero - even if you draw a -8 token out of the bag, you'll never fail this test by more than 3. Here, we're down by one, and while Roland does have a lot of health, there's no reason for him to take damage when he doesn't need to. So let's commit a card to this test!  Here we have the final type of player card, a Skill. Skill cards, unlike assets or events, don't have a cost and can't be played as an action. Their only purpose is to be added to skill tests, which there's very useful for. Many skill cards will have some ability which can be used if you pass the test, but Unexpected Courage is different. This card is special for its skill icons - those two question marks are wild icons, and can be used for any kind of skill test. Now we're ahead of the target value by 1, so we should avoid taking too much damage from this treachery. Time to draw that chaos token. Not too bad - we fail the test, but only by one, so Roland takes one damage. Could have been a lot worse! With the Mythos Phase over, we now move on to the Investigation Phase, where players take actions. We'll have Wendy go first, so she can hopefully clean up the rest of the clues and not have to worry about that Frozen in Fear card. quote:> Wendy investigates. As before, we won't commit any skill cards. She's one ahead of the target and there's not much downside to failing right now.  A positive token! There's a few of these in the bag, though we definitely can't rely on drawing them. Wendy passes her test and gains a clue. quote:> Wendy investigates. Chaos token is a -1. Success! With her second action, Wendy pulls the final clue token off the Study. We now have enough clues to advance to the next Act card, but let's wait for just a moment. Unless otherwise stated, advancing the act is a free action that can be done anytime during the Investigation Phase. We want to make sure Wendy is prepared, in case there's any surprises in the next part of the scenario. quote:> Wendy plays Stray Cat.  Stray Cat is an Ally asset card, and each investigator may only have one ally at a time. The cat will help Wendy do what she does best - get away from any monsters until Roland can dispatch them. It's a one-time use, but it's automatically successful, and the squiggly line means it's a free effect, not an action. Wendy's turn is over, so now she takes the Willpower test on Frozen in Fear. Neither investigator has any cards in hand to contribute to this test, so she'll just go at it with her 4 Will.  That's a bit unusual! While most of the chaos tokens are numbers, there's a few with special symbols, such as this "tablet" token. When drawing a token with one of these symbols, we check the Scenario Reference Card to see what effect it has.  So a -2, in this case. Good thing there weren't any Ghouls around or we'd have gotten hurt! The reference card lets the designers do all sorts of different things with the special tokens, rather than just a flat numerical modifier. Well, in our case it was just a -2, which means we fail the test and don't get rid of Frozen in Fear. But hey, a failed test means an extra card from the Rabbit's Foot! Now before Roland starts his turn, let's spend those clues and see what happens. quote:Investigators spend 4 clues. Advance to Act 1b!  The "b" side of Act and Agenda cards is on the reverse of the "a" side, and give the players directions on making any necessary changes to the game. Here, we've got a few new locations in play, and we're automatically dumped in the Hallway.  Starting to get some more choices! We're currently in the Hallway, which is connected to the Attic, the Parlor, and the Cellar. You can tell which locations are connected by their symbols - the ones in the top-left represent that location, and the ones along the bottom tell you where that location is linked to (those grey lines are part of the mod I'm using, and let you easily see the connections at a glance). From here we can move to the Attic or Cellar, but take a look at the Parlor - there's a barrier in place that's stopping us from moving there. We'll need to keep investigating to learn more. Speaking of investigating, we're in a new location, so let's reveal it:  Disappointing - only 1 shroud means it's trivial to investigate here, but with no clue tokens to find, it'd be pointless. Looks like we'll need to find answers elsewhere. Now that we're done with the first Act card, let's take a look at Act 2:  New goal acquired: find six clues, and we'll need to gather them from the locations we can get to right now. This Act also has a restriction on advancing it - rather than doing so anytime, we can only advance this one at the end of the round, and only if we've brought enough clues to the Hallway. Let's get to it! Roland will spend his first action moving. Moving between two locations which are directly connected costs one action (so it would take us two actions to move from the Attic to the Cellar, for example). quote:> Roland moves to the Cellar. And as usual, entering a new location flips it to its revealed side.  Yikes! That 1 damage is scary, and the 4 shroud is even worse. It's a good thing Roland brought that Flashlight, or else he'd have almost no chance of picking up these clues. You'll also notice the "Victory 1" on the location. Since Arkham Horror is a campaign game, a big part of the campaign is giving players the chance to upgrade their decks with new and better cards. Upgrades cost experience, and experience is collected by earning victory points. Killing some particularly nasty monsters earns victory points, and completely clearing some locations of clues does, too. We want that victory point, so let's get to investigating. Roland's got his Flashlight, but that's not his only trick. quote:> Roland spends one supply to activate Flashlight and investigate. Commits Deduction.  Deduction is another skill card, with a very useful ability. In addition to adding 1 to Roland's Intellect, if he passes this test, he'll grab an extra clue. Very strong when these clues are hard to come by! We draw our chaos token and it's a... Tablet! A -2, but we're fine. Roland's base skill is 3, and Deduction boosted that to a 4. The Flashlight lowered the shroud to a 2, so with the tablet's modifier we barely pass the test and collect our two clues. Now we could investigate again, but Roland's down to one card in hand, so let's do a little something to remedy that. quote:> Roland draws a card. Like gaining a resource, an investigator may spend an action to draw a card. Since we live or die by our cards (literally), it can be worth taking a little time to draw more when we're getting low. With that, the Investigation Phase ends. No enemies means we go straight to Upkeep and the end of round 2. And the end of this update! Next time, we'll continue exploring our house, and find some answers before trouble comes knocking. Phelddagrif fucked around with this message at 05:08 on May 10, 2023 |
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Apr 14, 2023 02:16
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Ah back again. This should be good.
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Apr 14, 2023 04:49
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For the record, my LP isn't entirely abandoned, I've been meaning to get back to it sometime. Started a new job which hasn't left me with a lot of free time, and the Dunwich campaign wasn't particularly inspiring enough to keep me going on. Still, I do plan to get back to it someday, but it's nice to see someone else take a shot at it too.
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Apr 14, 2023 16:07
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Inadequately posted:For the record, my LP isn't entirely abandoned, I've been meaning to get back to it sometime. Started a new job which hasn't left me with a lot of free time, and the Dunwich campaign wasn't particularly inspiring enough to keep me going on. Still, I do plan to get back to it someday, but it's nice to see someone else take a shot at it too. Hey, glad to hear it! Your LP was one reason why I started playing this in the first place.
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Apr 14, 2023 17:02
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Love this game, wish I had people willing to lay it with me haha.
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Apr 14, 2023 20:26
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On the one hand, this looks interesting enough to play myself. On the other hand, Gloomhaven served me my rear end with a side of lettuce, and I can’t imagine this will be any easier.
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Apr 15, 2023 00:23
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The Gathering: Part 2 Right, this house isn't going to investigate itself. - Round 3 -  Another doom, and more encounter cards. Starting with Wendy, we've got...  Hoo boy. This might be the most notorious card in the game, and with good reason. Adding a doom effectively means we've lost an entire round of play. That doom token also brings us to 3, enough to advance the agenda. When the agenda is advanced, we first remove all doom from play. This includes all the tokens on the agenda card, but if any player cards or monsters had doom tokens on them, we'd remove those as well. Next, we'll flip over the top card and see what's on the back:  As we can see, the agenda deck doesn't play nice. Neither cost is particularly high, but Wendy's already taken 2 horror from her weakness and we've still got a ways to go. Let's have each player discard a random card instead. With the first agenda done, we move on to the second agenda card:  7 doom is a much higher threshold; hopefully we'll have things wrapped up before we reach that point. There are three agenda cards in this scenario, and we can be sure the last one won't be pretty. Finally, Roland hasn't drawn his encounter card yet, so we've gotta take care of that.  Not great - Roland's Willpower stat is only 3, and he doesn't have any cards to commit to this test. Can only hope for a good chaos token here.  Not perfect, but we'll take it. Roland fails the test, but only by one, so he takes 1 horror. Right, let's get to investigating. We still need to collect at least four more clues to advance the act, so we'll have Roland go first and see if he can clean up the Cellar. quote:> Roland spends one supply to activate Flashlight and investigate. We don't have any cards with Intellect skill icons to commit to this test, so we're going in just 1 ahead. Still, this is Easy difficulty, so not many tokens will cause us to fail-  Spoke too soon. I was wondering when this would show up! Meet the bane of every Arkham player's existence, the dreaded auto-fail. No matter how well-prepared you are, how high your skill, how many cards you commit, there's always a chance you draw this token. As the name says, you pull this token, you fail the skill test, period. And if your final skill matters, like with those Rotting Remains, it's treated as a zero. Failing this test wouldn't be a big deal since we're only investigating, but it did cost us one of our Flashlight uses, so now we won't have enough to clear out the Cellar. We'll have to worry about that later, Roland's got two more actions. quote:> Roland spends one supply to activate Flashlight and investigate. Chaos token is a 0. Success! One clue down, one to go. The Flashlight is out of juice, so let's replace it with something else. Even though Roland's hands are full, you can still play an asset with a hand slot - just choose something to discard first. quote:> Roland plays Machete, discarding Flashlight from play.  The Machete is another weapon, and unlike our gun, it doesn't have any ammo, so we're free to whack away with this thing as much as we like. (I should note that we're playing using the most recent Taboo list - for a while this card was modified to cost XP, but that's no longer the case as of the current revision). Over to Wendy, who could come down and try to pick up that last clue, but her time is probably better spent checking out the other location we haven't visited yet. quote:>> Wendy moves to the Attic.  Another bit of horror, but Wendy's doing all right still. Thankfully this room is much easier to investigate, with a measly shroud of 1. However, thanks to Frozen in Fear Wendy had to spend two actions getting here, leaving her just one to investigate with. quote:> Wendy investigates.  Another special token! Let's have another look at the scenario reference card to see what it means. No Ghouls here means this is a -0 token, so Wendy succeeds and picks up a clue. Now, let's take another shot at that treachery card. Not again! Well, Wendy could use her special ability, discarding a card to re-draw a token. However, her next turn will probably just be investigating to get those three clues, so we don't need to worry about that just yet. We'll take the card from Rabbit's Foot and end the turn. With the round over, we take our upkeep. - Round 4 - One doom gets added, and Wendy draws...  Our first enemy! And it's a doozy. Let's cover what it does, from top to bottom. At the top of the card are three triangles. The left is its Combat stat, the right is its Agility stat, and in the middle is its health. This thing is a tank - it's hard to hit and harder to kill, but pretty easy to get away from. We're also told that it spawns in the Attic. Normally, when an enemy is drawn, it will immediately engage with the investigator who drew it. In the case of the Flesh-Eater, however, it shows up in a specific location - the Attic, in this case. If Wendy had still been in the Hallway, we would have just put the monster up there and she'd have been fine. In this case, however, she happens to be in that location already, so it'll engage with her now. This monster also has "Victory 1" - we've seen this on locations, and now it's showing up on monsters. If we can manage to take this thing down, it'll be worth an extra Victory point at the end of the scenario. The last thing to point out are the damage and horror icons. These mean that whenever this monster attacks, it deals one damage and two horror to whichever investigator it's engaged with. Thankfully it won't attack until the Enemy Phase, so we have a bit of time to deal with it before then. However, Wendy's going to have to do something about it right away, or else she's going to be in real trouble.  Here's the player reference card, which lists all the actions an investigator can take. We've covered most of these already, though we haven't discussed fighting or evading yet. What's more important is what it says at the bottom: if Wendy takes any actions other than fighting or evading (or parley/resign, which aren't available right now), the monster will immediately attack her. Ignoring this thing is not an option. Well Wendy's card was big and scary; let's check out Roland's:  Markedly less so! Swarm of Rats is another enemy, but this one's a joke; with just 1 Combat and 1 health, a stiff breeze can take this thing out. The "Hunter" keyword means that it would come after us if left on its own, but we have no interest in leaving this alive. Let's have Roland go first; he'll need to take out these Rats and make his way up to help Wendy. quote:> Roland activates Machete. First, let's kill this enemy. We could frankly just punch this to death, but let's show off our weapon. The Machete has an activated ability, which would normally give the Rats an attack of opportunity. However, this ability causes Roland to take a Fight action, so he gets by. A basic fight action is a test of the investigator's Combat stat against the enemy's, but weapons like the Machete will let the investigator take an improved action. Our base Fight is a 4, and Machete improves that to a 5. Out of the chaos bag comes... a Skull, which here is a -0. A successful Fight action deals 1 damage to the enemy, and this is where the other part of the Machete's ability kicks in. Since the Rats are the only enemy Roland is engaged with, they take an extra point of damage. Overkill in this case, but most monsters are a bit beefier. Furthermore, since Roland just defeated an enemy, his special ability kicks in, letting him grab that last clue from the Cellar for free! That precious VP is all ours. Roland's last two actions are spent moving to the Attic. He takes a horror by moving in, but we want to kill that Flesh-Eater and he's well-equipped to do it. Now to Wendy. She'd love to evade the ghoul and start looking for clues. However, Frozen in Fear means she'd have to spend two actions just to evade it, taking up nearly her entire turn. Thankfully, she's got just the partner for the job. Her cat jumps in, letting her automatically evade the monster. It's a free ability, and since it doesn't involve taking an action or doing a skill test, Frozen in Fear doesn't apply here. When an enemy is evaded, it disengages from the investigator and exhausts, moving from the investigator's threat area back to the location.  This thing won't be bothering us for a little while. And that's not all - Wendy also played Pickpocketing earlier, which lets her draw a card after she evades an enemy. Well, she just evaded, so hello free card!  And goodbye resources. Paranoia is Wendy's randomly-picked basic weakness, and as weaknesses go it's not too bad. Losing all your resources can be scary, but as long as you know it's a possibility you can play around it. Here, we only lost two, so it didn't hit very hard. That's also the last weakness in her deck, so we're free to draw cards with abandon, at least until we run out and need to reshuffle. Now that Wendy's freed up, we could pick up a few clues, but let's pick on that ghoul first. quote:> Wendy plays Emergency Cache and gains 3 resources.  Wendy is awful at fighting, but fantastic at sneaking, so this just makes sense. Rather than doing a skill test, we just deal an easy 2 damage to the ghoul that we exhausted earlier. Not enough to kill it, but now Roland should have an easier job of that next round. With one action remaining, let's go for a clue. quote:> Wendy investigates. Chaos token is a 0. Success! And once again we test Frozen in Fear.  Another special token, the Cultist this time. Looking back at the reference card, we see that this is a -1, with a penalty of taking a horror if we fail. Thankfully, Wendy's Willpower is 4, so with the -1 we succeed at the skill test and finally ditch this card. In the Enemy Phase, the Flesh-Eater would normally attack, but since it's still exhausted it doesn't get to do anything. Finally in Upkeep, in addition to readying all exhausted player cards, we also ready all the monsters. Now that the Flesh-Eater is ready, it will immediately re-engage with one of the investigators, and since there are two in the room, we get to choose who it will engage. Let's have it go for Roland, who can hopefully take it down and get out of there next round.  - Round 5 - Doom's at 2/7, and we have another round of treacheries. Wendy draws...  Another new card. Dissonant Voices doesn't involve any tests - for this round Wendy can't play asset or event cards, and it wears off by itself at the end the round. Pretty glad we didn't have that one last round, or we couldn't have done that Sneak Attack! Roland's card we've seen before. Neither player has any cards with Agility icons to contribute to this test, so we're going in down by one. Luckily the chaos token is a 0, so we only take 1 damage. We'll have Roland take his turn first, so he can kill this ghoul and get back to the Hallway. quote:> Roland activates Machete. Fights Flesh-Eater. Wendy commits Leather Coat. When taking a skill test, you're not limited to just the active player being the one to commit cards. Each other investigator at the same location may commit up to one card to a skill test, if they want. Here, Wendy has a Leather Coat that she's discarding.  As an asset it's not bad, costing nothing to play and letting Wendy place up to two of the damage that she takes onto the coat, protecting her from harm. However, she's still at 7 health so we're not really worried about her being defeated, and she can't play the asset this round anyway. Instead, she commits it to Roland's test for the Combat icon, bringing his total skill up to 6 against the Flesh-Eater's 4. And he draws a +1! The Flesh-Eater is defeated, and rather than discard it, we add it to the Victory Display (basically, it's set off to the side so we remember to add it to our victory point total at the end of the scenario). Also, since we defeated an enemy, we gather one of the two remaining clues for free! Now, Roland could try to pick up that last remaining clue. However, since Wendy can't play cards this round, let's let her grab it, and instead we'll get ready to advance the act. quote:> Roland moves to the Hallway.  Another ally, and this one's a good'n. For starters, he gives Roland a passive +1 boost to his Combat, making him even better at fighting. He also has two health and sanity, so he can take a hit or two in Roland's place. In a pinch, we can also toss the Beat Cop to deal an automatic 1 damage to anything at our location, without costing us an action. Well worth the price of admission. Wendy's going to grab that clue and join up with Roland. quote:> Wendy investigates. Chaos token is a skull. Success! Moving on to Upkeep, each player draws a card and gains a resource. Dissonant Voices goes away, and now we have a choice - we can spend six of our clues and advance the act, or we can wait and try to draw some more cards and play some more assets. In some situations you're racing against the clock and need to push as hard as you can go. Here, we're well ahead of target and could easily stall for a round or two. That said, let's not push our luck - we're decently equipped, and every round spent is a chance for treacheries to whittle down our health and sanity. We'll spend the clues and advance now. quote:Investigators spend 6 clues. Advance to Act 2b!  Uh...   ...No take-backs? Phelddagrif fucked around with this message at 05:09 on May 10, 2023 |
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Apr 16, 2023 01:30
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I'm interested to see where this game goes. I played the mobile version of Elder Sign a long time back and mainly remember getting my rear end handed to me.
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Apr 17, 2023 02:11
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Are you using tabletop simulator to play it? How does it handle playing solo?
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Apr 17, 2023 03:04
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MonsieurChoc posted:Are you using tabletop simulator to play it? How does it handle playing solo? Yes I am, and very well! I'll probably do an in-depth post at some point, but it scripts the setup for each scenario, and you can import decklists from ArkhamDB, along with a few other QOL features.
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Apr 17, 2023 03:32
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I've never played this, but it looks neat, and I'm proud of our street urchin for owning her own house. I look forward to more.
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Apr 17, 2023 16:35
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The Gathering: Part 3 Things just got a bit more complicated. Let's run through what's going on, step-by-step. First, we were told to reveal the Parlor, meaning we flipped it to its revealed side. It no longer has the text preventing us from moving there, so we can get inside freely now. It also introduces two new actions that were hinted at earlier. Resigning is an action that investigators can take when they need to exit the scenario. It's usually not the preferred outcome, as it means the players didn't manage to complete the Act deck, so it often leads to a less desirable resolution. However, if things are going south, and it looks like you might be defeated, running away might be your best option. Better to live and fight another day, as they say. Parleying is another special action, which involves an investigator interacting with another character in a way other than combat. It usually involves a skill test, but what kind of test and what happens is up to the scenario. Here, we're told that if we can Parley with Lita Chantler by succeeding at an Intellect test, we'll gain control of her as an ally. As for Lita, she's a very important asset in this scenario. Not only does she have a high health and sanity pool, she provides a passive bonus to all investigators when they fight at her location. We definitely want to prioritize picking her up as soon as possible. But we've been neglecting the elephant in the room.  This is by far the strongest foe we've faced. With 4 Combat and 4 Agility, he's hard to hit and hard to evade, and his Hunter keyword means he'd just chase us down anyway. The Retaliate keyword is new, and it's nasty: if we attempt to fight the Priest while he's ready and engaged, and fail the skill test, he immediately attacks (and hits like a truck!) That's a massive health pool too - 5 health per player means it'll take 10 damage to knock him down. The Prey keyword is also new, and functions as a tiebreaker. If we were to evade him and run away to different rooms, he'd go after the investigator who best fits his Prey instruction (highest Combat, in this case). Or if he has the choice of which investigator to engage, he'll go after his Prey first. So since he's spawned in the same room as us, he'll immediately engage with Roland, who has 5 Combat to Wendy's 1. Okay, we're done with that Act card. Let's take a look at Act 3a, the final Act of this scenario:  No more hunting for clues, it's time to kill this thing or die trying. Or bravely run away, I suppose. Either way, the round is finally over, so it's on to the Mythos Phase. - Round 6 - We're at 3/7 doom, and draw more encounter cards. Wendy gets Dissonant Voices again, so she won't be playing any assets or events this round (it's fine, we hadn't planned to anyway). Roland gets...  Crypt Chill! This one can be absolutely awful or kind of a nothingburger. It's worth noting that if you fail this test, you can pitch any asset you control, even useless ones - for example, if we still had that empty Flashlight, and failed, we could discard that instead of something useful like our gun. As it stands, we might as well try to succeed, especially since we've recently drawn a useful card to commit.  Guts is a staple card for most investigators, even if they don't use Willpower for their abilities, since so many treachery cards test your Will. Its two matching icons bring Roland up to one ahead, and Wendy will pitch in too, committing another copy of Rabbit's Foot from her hand for its wild icon. A skull token is drawn, and with one ghoul enemy at our location it's a -1. Roland passes the test, and draws a card from Guts. We could have Roland try to fight this thing, but let's see if Wendy can go and Parley with Rita Chantler first. Rita's boosts to Combat and damage will give us a much easier time of dealing with the Priest. quote:> Wendy moves to the Parlor.  This is an Intellect test, so let's commit a few cards that boost our Intellect. Perception is to Intellect as Guts is to Willpower, giving us a nice stat increase and an extra card if we succeed. (In case you're wondering about Dissonant Voices, it prevents us from playing assets or events, but we're allowed to commit them to tests). A -1 result puts our final skill value at 5, well ahead of the target of 4. We take control of Rita, and draw a card for succeeding. Now let's get back and help out Roland. quote:> Wendy moves to the Hallway. Right, time to kill this ghoul. Between the Machete, the Beat Cop, and Rita, Roland's fighting with a Combat stat of 7 against the Priest's target of 4. If we're lucky, we should be able to finish it off this turn. quote:> Roland activates Machete. Fights Ghoul Priest. Chaos token is a skull. Success! Ghoul Priest takes 3 damage. The Ghoul Priest has the "Monster" trait, so Rita's ability kicks in, giving us an extra point of damage on top of the two Machete normally deals. quote:> Roland activates Machete. Fights Ghoul Priest. Chaos token is a +1. Success! Ghoul Priest takes 3 damage. Nine damage down, one to go. Now, Roland's used up all 3 of his actions, so we could end the Investigation Phase here. If we did, the Priest would attack, dealing two damage and two horror to Roland. That's pretty bad, but he'd be able to tank that hit and easily finish off the Priest next round. Of course, why go through all that when we can just end it right now? Our ally steps in to deal the final point of damage! Using the Beat Cop's ability is a free action, so we can fire it off whenever it's needed. The Ghoul Priest dies, and goes to the Victory Display with its 2 wonderful victory points. With the Ghoul Priest dead, we've completed the objective on the final Act card, so let's flip it over and see what happens.  Choices! Narrative structure! Okay, it's not exactly a world-changing decision, but it's our first example of an opportunity for the players to have a say in how the story unfolds. "R1" and "R2" indicate different resolutions, and depending on what we choose to do, we'll read a different ending for the scenario. In this case, we're going with option two. Wendy doesn't care how many ghouls and ghastlies are lurking around, it's her house, dammit! Squatter's rights! quote:Resolution 2  Here's our Victory Display - between the monsters we fought and the locations we investigated, we've earned 5 experience. The resolution also gives us two bonus XP, plus one for Wendy as the lead investigator. And with that, the first scenario is complete! Not very challenging, but that's to be expected of what is essentially a tutorial. We've been introduced to the basics of gameplay, and the next two scenarios in the Night of the Zealot will build on this foundation. Here's our Campaign Log, where we keep track of our investigators, their experience, trauma, and any notes we're told to record: quote:Campaign Log Next up, deckbuilding! Phelddagrif fucked around with this message at 05:10 on May 10, 2023 |
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Apr 19, 2023 03:14
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This is great and I'd like it to continue, but also as a warning, Imgur is gonna purge all its images that aren't associated with an account in May, so if you didn't upload these under an Imgur account all the images will vanish.
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Apr 20, 2023 22:57
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Man I like Roland a lot, but his Sanity is so low. That Priest is scary, three attacks on Roland and it's Bad Times at Arkham High.
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Apr 20, 2023 22:59
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StillFullyTerrible posted:This is great and I'd like it to continue, but also as a warning, Imgur is gonna purge all its images that aren't associated with an account in May, so if you didn't upload these under an Imgur account all the images will vanish. Thanks for the warning, I saw the post in the stickies as well. I'll be re-uploading the images in the next day or two.
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Apr 20, 2023 23:03
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Interlude - Deckbuilding With the intro scenario behind us, it's time we took a closer look at our investigators and the cards in their decks. As mentioned before, an investigator's deck represents the assets, allies and abilities that they bring to the table. Each investigator has a role to play, and if a deck is built well, it will give them the tools and skills to achieve that role so the group can succeed. Let's see how our team is currently built, and what we can do to improve them.  Roland Banks is a Guardian, who works best when he's killing monsters. His stat-line is middle of the road, with a Combat skill that's good enough to take on most enemies with a weapon equipped. Taking a look at his deckbuilding requirements, he's allowed to bring Guardian and Neutral cards of any level (Neutral cards are colorless ones like the Flashlight). Additionally, since he's a detective, he can bring lower-level Seeker cards as well, to help him pick up some extra clues.  We've seen a few of his weapons already. The .45 Automatic is a worse version of his .38 Special, but that gun is unique to his deck, while any Guardian can bring the .45.  Roland's allies give him more ways of dealing damage to enemies. The Beat Cop we know and love, and the Guard Dog counter-attacks every time it gets hit. Very handy for killing enemies that only deal 1 damage. Those weapons and allies are expensive and will quickly run Roland dry of resources, so we've got a few Emergency Cache cards to keep the money flowing  Our last tools for dealing with enemies. Vicious Blow is a skill that deals an extra point of damage - very good when you've got something tanky that absolutely must die now. And Dodge is there as a panic button, in case we haven't been able to kill or evade something big and bad.  Now, Roland's best way of picking up clues is killing enemies, but when there's nothing to kill, he's got other ways of getting them. Flashlight is a great tool for investigating, and Deduction will save us an action if it's successful. Evidence! and Working a Hunch are similar, with the former costing one less resource, but only playable when Roland kills a monster.  Our remaining skills are there to support Roland with doing those jobs - fight enemies, find clues, and deal with any nasty treacheries that get in his way.  Now for Roland's weaknesses. Psychosis is Roland's randomly-chosen basic weakness, and it's pretty simple. When Roland draws this card, it goes into his threat area (the same place that monsters and other treachery cards go) and sticks around until it's removed. While it's in play, every time Roland takes horror, he takes 1 damage as well. To get rid of this, it'll take two actions just to discard it. As weaknesses go, this one is pretty safe for Roland to ignore. With his low sanity, he wants to avoid taking horror anyway, and if he does take damage, he has a large health pool to work with. Cover Up is much, much worse. Unlike Psychosis, there's no easy way to get rid of this card. If he wants to deal with this, he (or another investigator at his location) has to waste three actions investigating, not collecting clues and not advancing the Act deck. Of course, the ability that gets rid of clues doesn't have the Forced keyword, so he could choose to ignore this weakness completely. But if he does, he suffers one mental trauma (meaning he starts each scenario with one horror) and his sanity is already perilously low. We've got to hope he doesn't draw this one!  Wendy Adams is the opposite of Roland - she's awful at killing things, preferring to evade and run away. She's also got a very good Willpower stat, so she's relatively safe from a lot of the dangerous treachery cards. Finally, her special ability lets her retry any test, as long as she has an extra card to discard.  We've seen most of Wendy's evasion tricks already. Pickpocketing gives her an extra reward for evading, Sneak Attack lets her get in some extra damage, and Stray Cat is a single-use guaranteed evasion from any normal enemy. Survival Instinct is a skill that, if it's used in an evasion, turns it into a free move as well, saving precious actions.  Being a Survivor, Wendy also has a few ways of dealing with failed skill tests. The Rabbit's Foot gives her a card as compensation for failure, which she can then turn into a reroll on a future test, if necessary. And Lucky! can let her pass an important test, even if the modifier is a bad one. (Though it won't save her from the auto-fail).  Now, Wendy also needs a way to pick up those stubborn clues, and she has a couple of tools for that. Her Flashlight is the same as Roland's, and "Look what I found!" gives her a way to pick up clues from investigating, even if she fails the test.  We've also got a few odds and ends that don't fit into the previous categories. Leather Coat gives her an extra little boost to survivability, and Emergency Cache is very useful early on to get her important assets in play. The Baseball Bat is there in case she draws a Swarm of Rats or similarly weak enemy, to give her a fighting chance of taking it down.  And of course, she's got the usual suite of skill cards.  Of course we haven't talked about her signature card yet. Wendy's Amulet is an interesting one, as it lets her re-play event cards from her discard pile. Getting an extra use out of something like Lucky! or "Look what I found!" can be extremely powerful. The catch is, while this is in play, any event that she plays is put on the bottom of her deck, rather than her discard. This means that if she wants to get use out of it, she either needs to play the events before playing the amulet, or get them into her discard in other ways, like committing them to tests.  This dovetails neatly into her weakness cards. Abandoned and Alone seems specifically designed to counteract her amulet. You might have built up a discard pile full of event cards, and then this weakness comes along and gets rid of them before you can play them. If that's what you've been trying to do then it can be crippling; otherwise it's just a minor annoyance. Paranoia's already been discussed, and for a basic weakness it's on the weaker side of things. We just want to make sure we get all our assets in play before drawing extra cards, in case this pops up. So, that's both of our investigator's starting decks. We've seen what they can do, now how can we improve them?  In Roland's case, it's pretty simple. He has 7 XP, and 4 of that will go into upgrading his Beat Cops to their level 2 version. Now we don't have to discard the ally to deal 1 damage, but can instead re-use its ability up to three times. This lets us get way more mileage out of a single card, especially if we happen to come across enemies with 1 health that are important to kill quickly (not foreshadowing anything here, no sir). Since his Beat Cops are significantly improved, our Guard Dogs are falling behind the curve, so we're cutting one of them to bring in an Elder Sign Amulet. With 4 sanity to soak with, this should really help shore up Roland's survivability.  Wendy's a trickier case. Her biggest problem is that her deck is too unfocused - she's good at evading, but not much else, and just running away from monsters isn't going to win any games. We're going to work on that by having her focus more on gathering clues, and Lockpicks are a great tool for that. While they can only be used once per round, they bump up her investigating skill to a 7, easily surpassing any shroud value, and they don't even consume a supply if her skill is high enough! Paired up with the Flashlights, she'll be able to gather clues with ease. To make room for them, we're cutting the Baseball Bats - her terrible Combat stat means that even with their help, she's not going to reliably kill anything. They also take up both of her hand slots, so she can't fight and carry investigation tools at the same time. Both copies of Lucky! are also getting upgraded to the level 2 version, which adds a card draw on top of the skill boost. Wendy loves drawing cards, and if she can get extra use out of this with her amulet, all the better! These upgrades cost her 6 XP, leaving her with 2 left over. Everything else we want costs more than that, so we'll bank the rest for next time. Here's the links to both investigators' decks, before and after their upgrades: Roland's starting deck Roland, scenario 2 Wendy's starting deck Wendy, scenario 2 In the next scenario, cultists! Hell, we might even chuck a cat at them! Phelddagrif fucked around with this message at 04:58 on May 10, 2023 |
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Apr 21, 2023 03:51
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 Part II: The Midnight Masks In the wake of the disaster at your home, Lita Chantler, the red-haired woman from your parlor, lays out a tale that—even in light of what you have just witnessed—strains the limits of your belief. “The creatures in your home,” she claims, “are called ghouls—cruel beings who plague the crypts, caverns, and tunnels beneath the city of Arkham… “These creatures feed on the corpses of humans, and they are served by a dark cult within Arkham whose members have inexplicably come to worship the ancient master of the ghouls. This cult has been killing innocent people and feeding them to the ghouls, satiating a monstrous hunger. A dark balance was maintained. Until now. Recently,” Lita continues, “one of their lairs, where the corpses were stored, was destroyed. Since then, the ghouls have been more active than usual. I have tracked their movements and tried my best to stop them from running amok throughout the city. But I think there is something worse going on. The cult has been planning something darker, and more ominous, than anything I have yet observed. Indications are that this plan shall come to fruition tonight, shortly after midnight. Beyond that, I cannot fathom what to expect. “Many of the cultists,” Lita continues, “will seem like everyday people, despite their foul intentions. Whenever the cult meets, its members don masks shaped like the skulls of various animals to protect their identities from one another. These masks are our mark. Symbols of death and decay. We must unmask the cultists to expose and derail their plans. We have but a few hours. The more cultists we find before midnight, the better.” Now that we've finished the tutorial, we're starting to get into the real meat of the game. This scenarios' not going to go as easy on us, and we've got a lot more to do and a lot less time to get it done.  And a lot more locations to explore! We skipped over some of the setup last time in the interest of getting to the gameplay, so let's cover setup in more detail now. After assembling all the investigators, cards, and tokens, the first thing to do is draw our opening hands.  Here's Roland's opening draw. The first thing you'll notice is Psychosis - starting with a weakness in our hand is awful! Thankfully the game is kind here, and if your opening hand contains a weakness, you set that card aside and draw a replacement (Unexpected Courage, in this case). We also get one chance to mulligan any cards we don't need right now. I really like the Beat Cop, Flashlight, and Emergency Cache, but we don't need skill cards at the moment. We'll set both skill cards aside and draw two new cards.  Not much better - we were really hoping for a weapon. We'll probably have to spend a few actions drawing cards until we find one. The cards that were set aside now get shuffled back into Roland's deck.  Wendy's hand is even worse - the only thing I like is that Pickpocketing, and we don't really need two right now. Let's keep one and pitch the rest for new cards.  At least we got different assets. No investigation tools though. Sometimes that's the way things go; we'll just have to deal with it. The next step is to go through the intro and setup steps in the campaign guide: quote:Setup That's a lot of setup! But most of that is just gathering the right sets of cards, setting up the map, and figuring out where we start. We also see where choices we made in the last scenario come into play here, such as whether or not we burned down our house. That "Cultist deck" we were told to create is pretty interesting; we'll see how it comes into play soon. We were also told to put an Acolyte enemy into play:  In combat, he's not very scary. What's more concerning is that doom token. All doom in play counts towards the agenda threshold, so as long as he lives, he's going to reduce the time we have to finish the scenario. We're just about ready to start - the last thing to do is to read the Act and Agenda cards:  That's our one and only Act, by the way. We can spend four clues and one action to uncover a new Cultist, and once we've dispatched all six, we win the scenario! But wait, there's only five cards in the Cultist deck... Mysterious... And with that, we're ready to begin! - Round 1 - Let's check out our starting location.  This scenario picks up right after the last one left off. We made it out of our house after killing the Ghoul Priest, and now we're venturing from here into the streets of Arkham. Before we run off, let's see what this location has for us.  Very nice! An easy source of clues, and a very useful action that we'll be taking advantage of right away. (The Forced ability can be ignored, as we've already killed the priest). It doesn't matter who goes first in round 1, so we'll start with Wendy. quote:> Wendy activates Your House, drawing 1 card and gaining 1 resource. We get Sneak Attack; not very useful right now. quote:> Wendy plays Pickpocketing. Assets out, now over to Roland. quote:> Roland activates Your House, drawing 1 card and gaining 1 resource. The location ability is limited to once per turn, but that limit is per player, so both Wendy and Roland can use it. Roland's card is...  Ouch! Of course we start with a weakness. We'll just have to ignore it for now, we need to get moving on the objective. quote:> Roland plays Flashlight. No enemies, so we move to upkeep. Both investigators draw an Emergency Cache, which isn't as useful thanks to the location action we have here. - Round 2 - We put one doom on the agenda; with the doom on the Acolyte that's 2 in play out of the 6 needed to advance. Wendy's once again the lead investigator, so she'll draw the first encounter card:  A new keyword! Peril means that this card can only be dealt with by the person who draws it. If this were a skill test, Roland couldn't assist in any way, and Wendy also can't consult him on any choices she makes. Here we don't have any option - she doesn't have any clues, so she must take the 2 damage. Roland's seen this one before - either we pass a Willpower test, or lose the Flashlight. Wendy will pitch in an Unexpected Courage, as we'd like to hang on to our tool while it still has charges. It pays off, and we pass the test. Wendy's up first again: quote:> Wendy activates Your House, drawing 1 card and gaining 1 resource. And we get a Flashlight! That's going out right away. quote:> Wendy plays Flashlight. To Roland now, who would like to pick up that last clue before he gets busy fighting. quote:> Roland activates Your House, drawing 1 card and gaining 1 resource. We get another copy of Evidence! - still no weapon, unfortunately. quote:> Roland plays Beat Cop. This spot's run out of clues, so we'll be moving out next round. Upkeep gets Roland a .45 Automatic (finally a weapon!) and Wendy another copy of Pickpocketing. - Round 3 - Second doom goes on the agenda, and Wendy draws...  Oh crap! This will prevent us from investigating at one of the locations until we get rid of it. That's going to be a real problem since now we can't get any clues from... uh...  Wait... no locations have any clues on them right now. I guess that means...  Lock up before you leave!  Roland's card is also new, and it's a problem. That Acolyte over in Southside has 3 doom on it now. This means that when the third doom goes on the Agenda next round, there will be 6 doom in play, and it'll advance! We've gotta kill it this round. quote:> Roland moves to Rivertown.   Rivertown's the central location of this scenario, connecting to most of the other spots. And happily, it has some very easy-to-find clues! No time to dawdle though, we've a cultist to kill. quote:> Roland moves to Southside. Acolyte engages Roland.   Another location that's easy to investigate, and with a very nice ability! If we use up our Beat Cop, or Wendy tosses her Stray Cat, we can come here to dig up the other copy. And speaking of Beat Cop... quote:Roland exhausts Beat Cop, dealing 1 damage to it and 1 damage to Acolyte. The Acolyte is defeated, and Roland discovers 1 clue! This is why the upgraded Beat Cop shines. Not only did he take out the Acolyte for free, without spending an action or doing a test, but he sticks around and can do it again and again. We could play one of those Evidence cards, but let's save them for someplace with a higher shroud. quote:> Roland plays Emergency Cache. Couldn't quite afford the .45, so we'll play it next round. quote:> Wendy activates Your House, drawing 1 card and gaining 1 resource. Probably the last time we're doing this, as we need to get moving. quote:> Wendy plays Pickpocketing. Pickpocketing isn't unique, so with two copies in play that means we'll get two cards each time we evade! Upkeep brings a Perception for Roland, and Wendy finally finds her Lockpicks. - Round 4 - Doom is now at just 3 of 6, after killing that Acolyte.  False Lead is another new card with another new keyword. Surge simply means to draw another card, and since Wendy has no clues, that's what we do. The new card we draw is Locked Door and there's no cheesing it this time - it's going in Rivertown.  Roland draws yet another Crypt Chill, and with no matching cards to commit, he draws a -1, failing the test and losing his Flashlight. quote:> Wendy plays Lockpicks. With the door gone, we're once again free to investigate. quote:> Wendy exhausts Lockpicks to investigate. Chaos token is a -1. Success! Using the Lockpicks brings her base skill value to a 7, making it even more trivial to find clues at this location. We collectively have 4 clues now, so let's spend them and find our first Cultist target. quote:> Roland spends the group's clues, drawing the top card of the Cultist deck.  We draw Victoria Devereux, a collector of occult oddities. Rather than engaging with Roland, she spawns way up in Northside, so it'll take a few moves to reach her. We're also introduced to one of the main gimmicks of this scenario. While we can defeat these cultists by fighting them as normal, many of the ones we encounter will have an alternate means of victory. With Victoria, money talks, and we can spend some resources to get rid of her without fighting. That's for later though; Roland has two actions to go. quote:> Roland plays .45 Automatic. Finally ready for combat; it's a good thing we didn't draw any monsters sooner. - Round 5 - Doom's at 4 of 6.  Wendy draws another enemy, the Wizard of the Order. He's a bit tankier than the Acolyte from before, but he shouldn't be too much trouble for Roland. Since he spawns at any empty location, let's send him to the Miskatonic University in the west, so Roland can take him out on his way up to Victoria.  Another new card, this will make it much harder to pick up that last clue in Southside. Or it would be, but Roland's learned that sometimes you don't do things by the book. quote:Roland plays Working a Hunch, discovering 1 clue.  Grabbing a clue without a skill test or spending an action is always great, and Roland has resources to spare at the moment. Now let's go deal with that wizard. quote:> Roland moves to Miskatonic University. Wizard of the Order engages Roland.   Yeesh, that's a high shroud. And a lot of clues! We'd really like to collect them all for the victory point, and thankfully Roland's uniquely prepared to do so. quote:> Roland activates .45 Automatic, spending 1 ammo to fight Wizard of the Order. Chaos token is a +1. Success! Wizard of the Order takes 2 damage and is defeated, and Roland discovers 1 clue! But that's not all: quote:Roland plays 2 copies of Evidence!, discovering 2 clues. Spending two actions to get four clues is pretty drat good. We've got enough for the next cultist, so let's go for it. quote:> Roland spends the group's clues, drawing the top card of the Cultist deck.  Our next target is Herman Collins, the undertaker who hangs out in the local graveyard, like normal people do. He spawns on the east side of the map, near Wendy, and his unique Parley is pretty costly! Still, it's probably best if Wendy just deals with him now. quote:> Wendy moves to the Graveyard. Herman Collins engages Wendy.  Another valuable victory point location. It's tough to get into, but Wendy's Willpower is high enough that she has no problem, pulling a +1 token from the chaos bag. quote:> Wendy discards 4 cards to Parley with Herman Collins, adding him to the victory display. Excellent, we've defeated our first cultist! Five to go before our time is up. During upkeep, Roland draws a Machete(!) and Wendy finds her copy of Wendy's Amulet(!!) - Round 6 - One round to go before the agenda advances.  Wendy's card, On Wings of Darkness, is an annoying one. The damage and horror are trivial, but getting pulled out of the Graveyard means we'll have to spend another action and take another test to get back in. Still, we had to discard all our cards last round, and I don't want to waste the Amulet on this, so we're going in at 4 to 4. That's a fail. Our only consolation is we get to draw a card off the Rabbit's Foot, which happens to be another copy. Roland draws another copy of Hunting Shadow, and with no clues to spend he takes the 2 damage. It's his turn to take on a cultist target, and while he could spend his resources to Parley, he's got another use for them. quote:> Roland plays Machete.  Yowza, that's pricey. Roland's burnt through all his money playing assets and events, but he's not here to go window shopping. quote:> Roland activates Machete to fight Victoria Devereux, committing Vicious Blow. Chaos token is a -1. Success! Victoria Devereux takes 3 damage and is defeated, and Roland discovers 1 clue! Very impressive! Now, let's have Wendy show off her prized possession. quote:> Wendy plays Wendy's Amulet, discarding Rabbit's Foot from play. Her amulet lets her re-play her events from her discard pile, essentially giving them twice the bang for their buck. And speaking of bucks, let's show that off now.  Here we have the current state of her discard pile (as you might guess, changing the order of the cards is not allowed). The top-most event is an Emergency Cache, and since Wendy just spent the last of her resources on the amulet, she'd like to replenish her supply. quote:> Wendy plays Emergency Cache from her discard pile, gaining 3 resources. Emergency Cache is placed on the bottom of her deck. No spamming of powerful events over and over, sadly. Now the top event is a Lucky, which will definitely come in handy soon! quote:> Wendy exhausts Lockpicks to investigate. Chaos token is a -1. Success! Well, we've defeated two cultists, have a bunch of clues and we're looking strong. We should be ready to handle whatever this agenda throws at us! - Round 7 - 6 doom in play, and the agenda advances. We flip card 1a to the reverse side and it's...  ...well poo poo. Phelddagrif fucked around with this message at 05:07 on May 10, 2023 |
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Apr 23, 2023 22:45
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Hello, sailor. This was the scenario that made me fell in love with the game, warts and all. It felt so unique.
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Apr 24, 2023 12:09
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Last time I played Night of the Zealot, we were four investigators, so that Ghoul Priest had 20 health. I was a poor Roland without any Beat Cops, so we just ran, really. This means we hadn't defeated him, which was recorded in the Campaign Log - which makes it possible for him to reappear in followup scenarios in the campaign. That bastard kept popping back up early every god drat time causing serious troubles. We really should have have had more proper combat characters, I think. We ended up exhausting him more often than not.
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Apr 24, 2023 15:42
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Well that's one scary MFer right there.
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Apr 24, 2023 18:01
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It’s just some guy with a skull on their head, how bad could they be??
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Apr 25, 2023 05:34
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The Midnight Masks: Part 2 When we last left off, we'd explored a good amount of the city of Arkham, collecting clues and confronting creepy cultists. Oh hey, there's one now! That's right - the agenda didn't spawn an enemy; the agenda is the enemy. Much like the Ghoul Priest from the last scenario, this is the toughest foe around; with 8 health it'll be difficult to take down, but very rewarding if we can manage it. Since Wendy has the most clues right now, he starts out engaged with her.  No way she's taking him down; she'll have to evade him until Roland can make it over there.  And here's our second (and final) agenda. Nothing special here, just 8 rounds to get through as many cultists as we can. And this was all just the start of the Mythos Phase, we've still got to deal with the encounter deck.  Wendy draws another Acolyte. Since it spawns at an empty location, we'll put it at the Miskatonic University so Roland can grab the last clue there on his way to the Masked Hunter.  Though it looks like he's going to be delayed! Both investigators have their own monsters to deal with, but Wendy can't spend any clues while she's engaged with the Hunter, so she'll go first. quote:> Wendy evades the Masked Hunter. Chaos token is a -2. Success! Great, we've left him behind and can use both copies of Pickpocketing to draw two cards. We get a Perception and... Of course. The horror's not a big deal, but we lose access to Lucky and Sneak Attack from her discard pile. This card was just a minor annoyance in the last scenario, but here it's rendered her amulet more or less useless. quote:> Wendy moves to Easttown. I'd like to get those clues from the Graveyard, but we don't want to get cornered by that Hunter.   Not a useful ability for Wendy, but Roland might keep this in mind in case he needs to replace his Beat Cop. quote:> Wendy exhausts Lockpicks to investigate. Chaos token is a -2. Success! Right, over to Roland and his prey. quote:> Roland activates Machete to fight Hunting Nightgaunt. Chaos token is a -1. Success! Hunting Nightgaunt takes 2 damage. Easy peasy. We could move down and take out that Acolyte as well, but since Roland's ability can only be used once per round, let's hold off, and spend our clues instead. quote:> Roland spends 4 of the group's clues, drawing the top card of the Cultist deck.  Peter Warren is another cultist that we could parley with, but 2 clues is a pretty steep price to pay when we need them to find more cultists. Still, I'm sure he and Roland will be able to come to a... mutual understanding. - Round 8 - Doom is at 1 of 8, plus 1 from the Acolyte. Wendy draws... Another Nightgaunt! I guess all the monsters were hiding at the bottom of the deck. Gonna have to evade this for now. Roland's card is... bad? Bad's the best way to describe this. This is going to dump us right on top of the Masked Hunter. No way we're passing this test, let's just get it over with.  Hooooly crap. This is the Elder Sign, the best token in the bag, and it's come through in our hour of need. To see what it does, let's take another look at Roland's investigator card. Right below his special ability, we see his Elder Sign effect. This token gives Roland +1 for each clue on his location. And since Northside has two clues remaining, we get a +2, and somehow pass the test! Still, no time to celebrate, we have four enemies on the board and more will show up soon if we don't hurry. But I think I have a plan. quote:> Roland moves to Miskatonic University. Acolyte and Peter Warren engage Roland. One enemy down. We could spend our remaining actions here fighting Peter, but then the Masked Hunter would move over and attack us in the enemy phase. We definitely don't want that to happen. quote:> Roland moves to St. Mary's Hospital. Peter Warren makes an attack of opportunity, dealing 1 damage to Roland. Better to take a little damage now, than a lot more later.   Yeah, we're gonna need that healing, Roland's starting to take quite the beating. quote:> Roland activates Machete to fight Peter Warren. Chaos token is a 0. Success! Peter Warren takes 2 damage. Not quite dead, but we've softened him up for next round. quote:> Wendy evades Hunting Nightgaunt, committing Rabbit's Foot. Chaos token is a skull. Our first special token! Let's check the scenario reference card to see what it does.  There's no doom on any cultists, so it's a 0. We successfully evade the Nightgaunt, and draw cards from Pickpocketing. quote:> Wendy exhausts Lockpicks to investigate. Chaos token is a -1. Success!   Our last unrevealed location; this ability works nicely with the one next door to buy 2 clues for 5 resources. During the enemy phase, Peter attacks Roland again, dealing him 1 damage. The Masked Hunter also moves, and to see where he goes, let's look at the map.  The shortest path to reach either Wendy or Roland is two spaces. Since both investigators are equally close, the Hunter uses his Prey as a tiebreaker. Roland has 1 clue, while Wendy has 2, so he'll chase after her and move up to Easttown. (If it were still tied, we'd get to choose where he moves). - Round 9 - Doom's at 2 of 8. Wendy draws another Obscuring Fog, attaching to Downtown and bringing the shroud up to 5. Roland draws yet another Acolyte, and this time there isn't a very convenient place to put it. We'll just put it in Rivertown since it should be easy to get to later. quote:> Wendy exhausts Lockpicks to investigate, committing Perception. Chaos token is a skull (-1). Success! Obscuring Fog is discarded. We've got 5 clues, which is enough for another Cultist. However, if Roland takes an action to spend them, he'll provoke an attack of opportunity, so let's deal with that issue first. quote:Roland exhausts Beat Cop, dealing 1 damage to it and 1 damage to Peter Warren. The Beat Cop is discarded. Peter Warren is defeated, and Roland discovers 1 clue! Okay, let's see who we're dealing with next. quote:> Roland spends 4 of the group's clues, drawing the top card of the Cultist deck.  That's... different. No option to parley here, just good old-fashioned violence. We had 6 clues to spend, so we'll leave each investigator with 1 in case they're needed for an encounter card. quote:> Roland activates St. Mary's Hospital, healing 3 damage. Our first ally was used up, so it's a good thing we have a spare. Both hunter enemies move to Downtown, and we draw another Machete and Guts. - Round 10 - Doom up to 3, plus one from the Acolyte. Wendy draws another False Lead, and since she has a clue this time, she has to take an Intellect test. Failing here isn't too bad, as we'd only drop one clue at worst, but it'd still be a wasted action to collect it and we have a bunch of Intellect cards in our hand. quote:Wendy tests Intellect (3) against False Lead (4), committing two copies of Look what I found! (+4). Chaos token is a -2. Success! And since we committed those events, they go to her discard, ready to be played with the Amulet if we need them. Roland's encounter card is another Mysterious Chanting, which adds 2 doom to the Acolyte. While that's still not enough to advance the agenda, we'll deal with the problem this round to get it out of the way. But first, clues! quote:> Wendy exhausts Lockpicks to investigate. Chaos token is a tablet. Checking the reference card, the tablet is a -3, which forces us to drop a clue if we fail. Our skill with the Lockpicks was 7, and the shroud is 3, so we pass the test. However, we only pass by 1, so a charge is removed from the Lockpicks. quote:> Wendy activates Flashlight to investigate. Chaos token is a 0. Success! We have enough clues to draw the last card in the Cultist deck, so we don't need to investigate any more. Still, if we have time we should try to clear off the Graveyard for the victory point. quote:> Roland moves to Miskatonic University. Time for the final Cultist. quote:> Roland spends the group's clues, drawing the top card of the Cultist deck.  Hello Ruth! Our last target is a curious one - with only 2 Combat, she's pretty easy to kill, but if we can evade her once, she's immediately defeated. Now to the enemy phase, and let's take a look at the map once again.  Once again, both investigators are equally far away from the hunters, and this time both players have no clues, so we get to choose where they move. Roland would like to take out the Masked Hunter, so we'll move him to Easttown, while the Nightgaunt goes to Northside. - Round 11 - 3 of 8 doom, still plenty of time. Wendy draws Hunting Shadow, and with no clues to spend she takes 2 damage. That leaves her with 2 health left, we'll need to be careful! That was actually the last card in the encounter deck, so it's reshuffled and Roland draws Crypt Chill. We'd prefer not to lose any of his assets, so he commits Unexpected Courage. It's not good enough - the chaos token is a tablet, which is a -3, so we fail and lose a Machete. At least we don't need to worry about losing clues anymore! Wendy's up first; she's going to deal with Ruth and heal up at the hospital. quote:> Wendy moves to St. Mary's Hospital. Ruth Turner engages Wendy. Ruth isn't Elite, so the cat's ability works on her. We've done it! We've thrown a cat at a cultist!  Oh, and we draw 2 cards from Pickpocketing, including...The weakness takes away our resources, but we don't really care at this point; we don't have any expensive cards to play. quote:> Wendy activates St. Mary's Hospital, healing 3 damage. Much better. Now, Roland's got two options. He only has 2 resources right now and the Machete in his hand costs 3. He could gain a resource, play the Machete, and move away from the Masked Hunter so it doesn't attack him this round. Or, he could go up and attack it with his .45, though he wouldn't be able to kill it this round so he'll definitely get attacked. Ah hell, we've got health to spare. quote:> Roland moves to Easttown. The Masked Hunter engages Roland. That's what I was afraid of. It always seems to show up at the worst possible time! Well, we're committed now, let's see this through. quote:> Roland activates .45 Automatic to fight The Masked Hunter. Chaos token is a -1. Success! The Masked Hunter takes 2 damage. The hunter now attacks Roland, dealing him a total of 3 damage (including one from Psychosis) and 1 horror. We're allowed to split that up however we like, so the damage is going on Roland and the horror will go on the Beat Cop. We'll have the Nightgaunt go towards Wendy; Roland has more than enough on his plate right now. - Round 12 - Doom's up to 4 of 8. Wendy draws False Lead, which surges into an Acolyte since she has no clues. With no great options, we'll put him in Rivertown. Roland's card is yet another Crypt Chill, the last thing we need right now. We toss an Unexpected Courage and hope for the best, and get lucky with a 0 chaos token. Roland is in trouble, and Wendy's pretty far away. As much as I'd like to have Wendy investigate the Graveyard, our first priority is surviving and taking out this Hunter, so she's going to move up to support Roland. quote:> Wendy moves to Southside. Seems kind of wasteful to spend our entire turn moving and taking damage, but she's got useful skill cards and Roland does not. quote:> Roland evades The Masked Hunter. Wendy commits Manual Dexterity. Chaos token is an autofail. C'mon game, give me a break. Wendy can't use her "reroll" ability here, it's only for tests that she's performing. Roland's pretty awful at evading, but we really need a turn to re-equip him since his gun is out of ammo. quote:> Roland evades The Masked Hunter. Wendy commits Stray Cat. Chaos token is a skull (-1). Success! The Nightgaunt moves to Rivertown, while the Acolyte deals another damage to Wendy, finishing off her Leather Coat. In retrospect I should have put the Acolyte somewhere out of the way, but I wanted it nearby in case we needed to kill it to buy ourselves another round. When the Hunter readies it can engage with either investigator; we'll give it to Roland who has a pretty good shot of killing it now, as he only needs to deal 5 more damage. - Round 13 - Doom's at 5 of 8, plus one from the Acolyte. Getting down to the wire! Wendy draws Hunting Shadow and takes 2 damage, as does Roland. Both investigators are pretty beat up, but if we're lucky we'll have just enough time to kill both Cultists. quote:> Roland activates Machete to fight The Masked Hunter. Chaos token is a +1. Success! The Masked Hunter takes 2 damage. Hey, we haven't seen this one yet! What does it do? Well, a -2 means we pass the test - between the Beat Cop and Machete, Roland's Combat skill is a 6 to the Hunter's 4. We do still have to place a doom token, and since the Hunter is a cultist enemy, let's put it on him! quote:Roland exhausts Beat Cop, dealing 1 damage to it and 1 damage to The Masked Hunter. The Beat Cop is discarded. The Masked Hunter is defeated! Finally! If we can just take out Drew, we'll get a perfect result. Let's go for it. quote:> Roland moves to Downtown. "Wolf-Man" Drew engages Roland. quote:> Wendy evades Acolyte, committing Survival Instinct. Chaos token is a 0. Success! Wendy exhausts Acolyte and moves to Downtown.  Survival Instinct is a very handy skill card, not only saving Wendy a move action, but if there were other monsters around, we'd get away from them too. Successfully evading also draws us a Sneak Attack and Leather Coat. quote:> Wendy plays Leather Coat. We could have spent our last 2 actions engaging Drew and evading him to save Roland from taking the hit, but that won't be necessary.  Roland plays Dodge, protecting himself from the 2 damage that Drew was about to do. - Round 14 - The doom clock is at 6 of 8, and with the 1 doom still on the Acolyte, this will be our last round of play. Wendy's encounter card is Mysterious Chanting, which adds 2 doom onto Drew, though that doesn't matter now. Roland draws Hunting Shadow, and with no clues to spend he takes 2 damage. He only has 1 health left - if not for the Dodge, he'd have just been defeated! Can Roland finish off the last cultist? He'll drat well try! quote:> Roland activates Machete to fight "Wolf-Man" Drew. Chaos token is a -2. Bad luck on the first swing - the Beat Cop's gone, so Roland's only attacking at a 5 against Drew's 4. Another attack will probably do it, but let's try something different. quote:> Roland evades "Wolf-Man" Drew. Wendy commits Manual Dexterity. Chaos token is a 0. Success! We've done it! Drew is exhausted, and it's over to Wendy to finish things off, personally. quote:> Wendy plays Sneak Attack, dealing 2 damage to "Wolf-Man" Drew, who is defeated!  That's one hell of a display. With the final Cultist down, we've achieved the objective of our Act card, so it's finally time to flip it over.  quote:Resolution 1 The six Cultists we defeated earn us 7 experience, plus 2 from Northside and the University, for a whopping 9 exp earned! quote:Campaign Log Well that got a bit scary towards the end, but overall I think that went very well! We've got a nice pile of experience to spend on our decks, which will hopefully prepare us for what's to come in the final scenario of this campaign, The Devourer Below. Look forward to it! Phelddagrif fucked around with this message at 05:19 on May 10, 2023 |
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Apr 26, 2023 02:20
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The Masked Hunter only has 4 health surely? There is no investigator symbol on its health to indicate it scaling with the number of investigators, like the Ghoul Priest.
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Apr 26, 2023 10:24
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Rythian posted:The Masked Hunter only has 4 health surely? There is no investigator symbol on its health to indicate it scaling with the number of investigators, like the Ghoul Priest. Its effect text says it gains 2 HP per investigator.
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Apr 26, 2023 10:42
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Sure, Roland "convinced" Peter to leave the cult. With the help of his buddy,
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Apr 26, 2023 10:49
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TeeQueue posted:Its effect text says it gains 2 HP per investigator.
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Apr 26, 2023 11:42
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I've been doing a few practice runs to test out deck upgrades, and am reminded that (a) the last scenario is crazy and (b) there are not a lot of great cards in the core set!Rythian posted:The Masked Hunter only has 4 health surely? There is no investigator symbol on its health to indicate it scaling with the number of investigators, like the Ghoul Priest. Yeah that seems like kind of an oversight, not using the investigator symbol on the card there. Makes it kind of easy to overlook. They're better about that in the expansions.
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Apr 27, 2023 04:25
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Phelddagrif posted:Yeah that seems like kind of an oversight, not using the investigator symbol on the card there. Makes it kind of easy to overlook. They're better about that in the expansions. Masked Hunter has 4+2*Characters health, the normal pattern can only do things of form N*Characters
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Apr 27, 2023 05:47
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Well, that was nice work. It was close for you to be able to take all the cultists down. And yes, it does look like that using the basic cards does make this very hard.
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Apr 27, 2023 15:26
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Interlude II - Deckbuilding We've got one last chance to upgrade our decks before the final scenario. Thankfully the game has been generous with XP, so we'll be able to swap in some powerful, higher-level cards. Given the third scenario's reputation, we'll need them!  "I've had worse..." is pretty much a straight upgrade to Dodge. Not only does it give you resources, it cancels out any source of damage or horror, not just enemy attacks. The only downside is that it won't protect Wendy, but she shouldn't have much trouble getting away from trouble. We'll be adding in two copies of this, and dropping Dodge.  Our last point of XP will be adding a single copy of Extra Ammunition. Roland doesn't want to be caught in the situation he found himself in last time, when his gun was out of ammo and he was engaged with a tough enemy. To make room we're cutting one copy of Perception; Roland doesn't do as much investigating as Wendy so we'll lean a bit more on his combat side.  Wendy's a bit more complicated; she doesn't have any more cards that will really help her investigate. Instead, we're going to make sure that she doesn't let skill tests or monsters slow her down, and Close Call is a great tool for the latter. Unlike Sneak Attack, which costs an action and only deals 2 damage, Close Call gets the monster off the board and does it fast.  As for skill tests, no matter how well-prepared you are, sometimes the auto-fail just decides to wreck everything. Eucatastrophe is one of the rare cards that solves that problem, turning a failure into an elder sign, which is enough to succeed when it really matters. This isn't as important for Wendy, since she can discard a card to re-draw a token, so we're only adding one copy of this.  But the pièce de résistance of our new additions is Will to Survive. With this card, we're straight-up guaranteed to pass any test we take for our entire turn, as long as we meet the target. If there's a turn you know you're taking a lot of skill tests, this completely removes any and all risk and ensures you'll succeed. Definitely adding two copies of this. Her cuts are pretty simple; Sneak Attack is going, as we don't need to deal damage with Roland around, just evade and find clues as fast as possible. We're also cutting Leather Coat; it's a nice little bit of damage soak, but most of Wendy's damage should come from treacheries and she's pretty good at handling those. Roland's Final Deck Wendy's Final Deck Here's our final decklists! Will they be enough to end the cultists' plot and save the world? We'll find out in the final scenario, The Devourer Below! Phelddagrif fucked around with this message at 05:21 on May 10, 2023 |
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Apr 30, 2023 18:53
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I don't remember Eucatastrophe. Is that from v2 of the base game? Also, I guess you don't need it, but Dynamite solved so many problems in the last scenario when I played it...
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Apr 30, 2023 20:23
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Fat Samurai posted:I don't remember Eucatastrophe. Is that from v2 of the base game? Also, I guess you don't need it, but Dynamite solved so many problems in the last scenario when I played it... Yeah, it was first printed in one of the more recent expansions, and was also included in the revised core set.
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May 1, 2023 00:40
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 Part III: The Devourer Below After a frantic nighttime search throughout Arkham, you have tracked down and questioned several members of the cult. Your findings are disturbing: they claim to worship a being known as Umôrdhoth, a monstrous entity from another realm. You are able to confirm much of Lita’s story: the cult is agitated over the destruction of a ghoul lair. However, a surprising detail also turns up: the one who invaded the lair and set this night’s events in motion was none other than Lita Chantler herself! You are not sure why this important detail was omitted from Lita’s story—did she tell you only as much as was necessary to draw you into her conflict? But in another light, she seems to be fighting to protect the city of Arkham from a terrible menace. The final piece of the puzzle was found written in a journal possessed by one of the cultists. It describes a dark ritual to be performed deep within the woods south of Arkham, this very night. According to the journal, the ritual’s completion will open a gate and bring forth the cult’s dark master into this world. “If the cult is not stopped,” Lita warns, “there is a possibility that Umôrdhoth’s vengeance will consume all in its path.” Frightened but determined to stop the ritual, you head into the woods… quote:Setup The events of tonight have led to this moment. We started with a simple task: figure out what's going on in our house, and find a way out before the ghouls kill us all. Then we took to the streets of Arkham, to track down members of a mysterious cult and interrogate them about their evil plans. Now we head into the woods to find their ritual site and put an end to their madness, before they summon Umôrdhoth, an ancient creature of vengeance.  I looked around to find any lore about Umôrdhoth, but it looks like it was an original creation for this game. We won't be facing down any giant Elder Gods tonight it seems, but this is still a monster we definitely don't want to let loose in our world.  The starting map is suspiciously simple. Nothing out here but trees and silence. We start in the center, and will have to explore the surrounding woods to find any clue as to the ritual's whereabouts.   As there's no clues here at all. The last thing to read before we begin are the agenda and act cards.  Simple enough, we need to collect 6 clues, and 4 doom will advance the agenda. Each deck has three cards this time around. Nothing for it, let's get exploring! - Round 1 - quote:> Roland plays Machete. Each unrevealed side is the same, so we're just picking one at random.   Interesting; rather than using our Intellect skill, here we investigate with Willpower instead. This isn't great for Roland, but Wendy might have better luck here with her high Will stat. quote:> Roland plays Emergency Cache. We could go explore another location, but we know this is one that Wendy can handle. quote:> Wendy plays Lockpicks. Good start, but we've only just begun. - Round 2 - Doom clock: 1 of 4 Wendy's encounter card, Mysterious Chanting, we saw in the last scenario. As there are no enemies in play right now, we find an Acolyte, and spawn it at one of the other Arkham Woods locations. If Roland can make his way down there, he should be able to grab a clue when he kills it. Rotting Remains returns from the first scenario, and as we know this is bad for Roland with his low sanity. Thankfully Wendy's here, and she pitches in a Guts to help. We draw a -2 token, so Roland passes the test. Of course Wendy draws into a weakness as a result! Oh well, at least it happened early. quote:> Roland moves to Main Path.  This spot's pretty annoying! Since Roland only has 3 Intellect, it might take a couple tries just to get out of here. quote:> Roland activates Machete to fight Acolyte. Chaos token is a -1. Success! Acolyte is defeated, and Roland discovers a clue! Wendy doesn't have resources to play cards with, so let's keep investigating. quote:> Wendy exhausts Lockpicks to investigate. Chaos token is a +1. Success!  Another fun location! We're not going to commit any cards here, a little damage and horror is the least of our worries. It ends up not mattering as the chaos token is a 0, so we pass the test anyway. - Round 3 - Doom clock: 2 of 4 Wendy draws Frozen in Fear, and unlike in the first scenario we definitely want to be rid of this as soon as possible. There's a lot of moving around to do here and we can't afford to be slowed down.  Roland finds a Ravenous Ghoul, a big, tough monster that isn't easy to take down. Well, not easy without a Machete, anyway. quote:> Roland activates Machete to fight Ravenous Ghoul. Chaos token is a -1. Success! Ravenous Ghoul takes 2 damage. Our first special token; as usual let's check the reference card to see what it means.  A -3! That drops our Combat skill to a 2, meaning we fail our attack, and since the ghoul is a monster, we take a point of damage. Also, I'm not liking the look of the last token on that list... quote:> Roland activates Machete to fight Ravenous Ghoul. Chaos token is the elder sign. Success! Ravenous Ghoul is defeated, and Roland discovers a clue! Nice! The elder sign token is a +1 here, more than enough to finish off the ghoul. quote:> Wendy exhausts Lockpicks to investigate. Chaos token is a cultist. Success! The cultist token is a -2, so we pass the test, but only by 1, so we spend a supply token from the lockpicks. Thankfully there aren't any enemies in play, so no doom gets added as a result. quote:> Wendy plays Stray Cat. At the end of Wendy's turn we test Frozen in Fear; we get lucky and draw a 0 token, so Wendy passes the test and the card is discarded. - Round 4 - Doom clock: 3 of 4 Wendy's card is another Rotting Remains; she draws a 0 and easily passes the test. Roland draws Dissonant Voices, so he won't be playing any cards this round. We're getting all the old hits! quote:> Wendy exhausts Lockpicks to investigate. Chaos token is a 0. Success! That's our sixth clue; let's spend them and advance the Act!  Oh boy, we're in trouble now. We have to face all of the cultists that we didn't deal with in the last scenario, all at once!  All of the, uh... the cultists that we...  Well, maybe the next Act will give us some clarity.  Let's... let's just move on. quote:> Wendy draws a card. Since Roland can't do much besides move this turn, let's head into the Ritual Site and see what's there. quote:> Roland attempts to leave Arkham Woods (SW), committing Unexpected Courage. Chaos token is a +1. Success! Roland moves to Main Path.   An unlimited supply of clues? Oh Arkham Horror, you are so generous and benevolent. Right, we've entered the Ritual Site; let's advance the Act once again!  Oh joy.  Well that's not too bad, Roland can easily handle this thing. Before he does, let's take a look at our final Act card of the campaign:  This is why we're given this source of clues. We have to gather at least 4 clues, and then for each one, do a skill test to try to move it to the Act. If we fail a test, we still spend the clue and will need to collect another one. But if we can do this enough times, we'll be able to disrupt the cultists' ritual and stop Umôrdhoth. quote:> Roland activates Machete to fight Ghoul Minion. Chaos token is a -1. Success! Ghoul Minion is defeated, and Roland discovers a clue! And Dissonant Voices goes away. - Round 5 - The first agenda has met the doom threshold, and advances:   Oh how nice, Wendy's made a friend! In all seriousness this isn't too bad, Wendy should be able to evade this and let Roland deal with it while she works on advancing the Act.  Of course the game can't make it too easy on us.  Especially if our encounter cards get us two more cultists right off the bat! Alright, we don't have time to dawdle. We need to clear these things out, now. quote:> Roland moves to Main Path.  We've put the cultists in two of the revealed locations that are connected to each other, so we can (hopefully) take them out quickly. quote:> Roland activates Machete to fight Wizard of the Order, committing Vicious Blow and Elder Sign Amulet. Chaos token is a skull. No Overpower or similar card in our hand with a bunch of combat icons, so we're throwing what we've got to pass this test. We haven't drawn the skull yet, so let's check the reference card again. The cultists aren't "monsters" but the Ravenous Ghoul is, so that's a -1. That's good enough to pass the test and kill the cultist. quote:Wendy activates Stray Cat, discarding it to automatically evade Ravenous Ghoul. Wendy's gotten away from the ghoul, but she's recently picked up another trick to get rid of it for good.  Close Call takes the threat off the board and puts it back in the encounter deck. That should hopefully buy us enough time to get started on collecting those clues. quote:> Wendy moves to Ritual Site. Ooh, we haven't seen Wendy's elder sign ability yet! What's this one do? A +0 isn't very exciting, but it becomes amazing when she has her amulet out. Even so, a +0 is good enough for almost any test we care about. quote:> Wendy plays Emergency Cache. - Round 6 - We're at 1 of 5 doom, plus 1 from the Acolyte. Wendy's treachery is another classic, Grasping Hands. With her high Agility she easily passes the test. It's everyone's favorite card, Ancient Evils! There goes a round of play. quote:> Roland plays Guard Dog. We haven't had a chance to show off Roland's other ally yet:  The Guard Dog serves a similar purpose to the Beat Cop, letting us deal some free, testless damage. Thankfully, the Acolyte has happily volunteered to help demonstrate!  "I did what now?"quote:> Roland moves to Arkham Woods (SE). Acolyte engages Roland. Roland tests Willpower against the Arkham Woods and fails, taking 1 damage and 1 horror. It takes a little more work than the Beat Cop, but it still makes the monsters die just fine. quote:> Wendy exhausts Lockpicks to investigate. Chaos token is a 0. Success! Wendy's picked up 2 clues so far, let's start putting them on the Act. quote:> Wendy spends 1 clue to test her Agility (4) against the Act (3), committing Manual Dexterity. Chaos token is a skull (0). Success!  Ah, the elder thing, the final special token. If you recall back in setup, we added one of these to the bag, and according to the reference card, it's a -5. That's bad enough to fail the test, so we'd have wasted the clue, except... quote:Wendy discards a card to cancel the elder thing token and reveal a new one. Chaos token is a -2. Success! Excellent! Two clues down, two to go. - Round 7 - Doom clock: 2 of 5. Wendy pulls another Ancient Evils, bringing our doom count to 3. Roland draws...  Oh hey! The yellow sign is the mark of Hastur, the King in Yellow. We'll learn more about him a few expansions down the road. For now, all it means is a bad skill test that we don't have any matching cards for, so we fail. Ironically we draw the elder sign token here, but since the Main Path has no clues, it's just a +0 which isn't good enough to pass. That once again brings out Roland's Psychosis, which once again we'll ignore. quote:> Roland moves to Ritual Site. Roland has cards he could play, but there's no need. We only need to put one more clue on the Act card, and Wendy's got this. quote:Wendy plays Will to Survive.  Will to Survive is a powerful Survivor card; for Wendy's entire turn, she's guaranteed to succeed at every test she takes if her stats are at least equal to the target. There's no longer a question of "if". quote:> Wendy investigates. Success! It's over.  quote:Resolution 1 And that's the end of the Night of the Zealot campaign! Roland and Wendy have stopped the cultists' plot and ensured that Arkham is safe, for at least a little while longer. This was a pretty short campaign, designed to gently introduce new players to the game, but it certainly had its share of excitement and danger, and there's plenty more to come! After this, we'll be moving on to the first expansion, with new investigators, new monsters, new abilities, and new- Wait just a second. I thought this scenario was supposed to be hard! Well yeah, it does have that reputation. And while I did get through it pretty quickly, we had some pretty good luck with the chaos bag and- Nothing happened! You picked up a few clues, killed a few ghouls and that's it? How is that supposed to be a challenge? Ah, I think I get it. Fair enough, the game deserves that much. Join me next time, when we see... what could have been. Phelddagrif fucked around with this message at 05:26 on May 10, 2023 |
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May 3, 2023 02:04
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Nice run! And yeah, that went much smoother than my usual run.
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May 3, 2023 10:13
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NOTZ is one of the campaigns where early successes or failures can really snowball into later ones. If you don't take out the Ghoul Priest he shows up to dog your footsteps in the later scenarios, which slows you down in Midnight Masks, and failure to capture all the cultists means they show up to pester you in the third scenario too. On the other hand, if you can take out all of those when they show up, then in addition to not having to deal with them down the line you're up ahead by a good chunk of XP.
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May 3, 2023 11:49
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Two mental trauma despite easily kicking the cult's rear end before anything could happen? phhht, weak
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May 3, 2023 23:14
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I'm interested to see the other types of characters, whether that be because we swap to an entirely new party or just add one or two more characters with us.
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May 3, 2023 23:20
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Junpei posted:I'm interested to see the other types of characters, whether that be because we swap to an entirely new party or just add one or two more characters with us. For sure! The next campaign will use new characters. Current plan is to bring Rex the Seeker and Jim the Mystic, but if anyone would like to see someone different, feel free to suggest them! I can post the options if needed.
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May 3, 2023 23:36
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