'Arkham Underground' board/expansion

[pittplayer 0]

i have a garbage linex computer so can we make it so i can get the cards and stuff too!

[thecorinthian 3]

Frank said:

There are really only 3 movements. I don't think there needs to be a Moon and a Plus. And there certainly does not need to be a Star and a Slash. You can cut the Tremor tokens down a fair bit and make it easier to print and assemble. Remember that people have to cut these things out with a knife.

There's never going to be more than 12 tokens on the board, so cutting it down to 6, 6, and 3 (or twice that) would be a perfectly reasonable way to make the game easier to construct.

One thing I worry about with the current setup is that it'll take a long time for a Tremor to reach the surface. A Dark Blue Tremor lands on the board. It has a Triangle (or whatever). Now there are of course the occasional Mythos card where everything moves, but basically one third of the Mythos cards has a Triangle on it. Which means that while it could very plausibly hit Arkham in 4 turns, the average number of turns for it to hit Arkham is twelve. That's a very long time, if you're fighting the world's favorite Giant Snake Man, the game will on average be over (one way or another) before the first Dark Blue Tremor successfully comes into play.

I really like the board setup. It's clean, it's intuitive. It's easy to explain it to someone familiar with even the basic version of the game. But I think that the timer needs to be sped up. How about if each token had two symbols on it? A Tremor could move on Triangle and Plus for example. That would get one into harm's way in an average of six turns, which seems pretty reasonable for something you have to deal with in a timely fashion.

Yeah, obviously you're right... I don't know why I thought there would need to be so many markers. 12 will do.

It does take a long time for tremors to reach the surface, but the alternative is to shorten the routes, which means they'll go through fewer locations, which will reduce the extent to which we're encouraging investigators to visit locations.

I'm not sure about putting two symbols on each tremor, but I do have another way to fix the problem: we just include the words "All tremors move on the black/white path" in quite a lot of encounters. For example, any encounter involving a geologic or seismic disturbance - a location re-collapsing, for example - can make all tremors move too. That way, we can also make tremor movement more dependent on the investigators doing things, by having it as a negative consequence of a failed skill check for an encounter, etc. Also, the heralds can mess with the tremors extensively.

I've uploaded the files to my googlepage, here: sites.google.com/site/cultofthegoldenscarab/Home/underground. It's in the form of two ZIP files which anyone should be able to download. Get them both, extract them, and put all the files in the same directory. You might have to tell the board to re-locate some of the images and resize them, but it shouldn't be too tricky. Just use the last posted board image on this thread for reference.

Anyway, since we're all sharing it now, we should probably not make any major changes to the board unless we find there's a really serious problem - at which point one of us should make the change and share the files again.

[Thelric 4]

thecorinthian said:

You might have to tell the board to re-locate some of the images and resize them, but it shouldn't be too tricky. Just use the last posted board image on this thread for reference.

A bit of good news for you: I'm going to post SE 2.00.6 very soon (probably tomorrow) and one of the changes is that it will automatically locate image files if they are in the same folder as the deck (like it currently does for .eon files). In fact, this update includes about 20 new features and bug fixes for the deck editor—and several of them are quite substantial.

Not sure what you mean about resizing, though. they should stay the same size unless you've included a smaller image in the package than you used when you were creating the deck.

By the way, you need to move The Crypts to the front so it covers the movement arrow. And if you want to make the tokens easier to cut out, consider making them square and grouping them together in a square or rectangle to minimize the amount of cutting required.

Cheers,
Chris

[Frank35 0]

I don't think that encounters in the darkness addresses the slowness of the tremors. The tremors are slow enough that you could very plausibly never see them hit the surface over the entire game. This means that players can rationally simply send none of their characters into the underworld. If completely ignoring the board is a rational option, I think we've failed. The time should b fast enough that ignoring it severely punishes the Investigators.

 

-Frank

[thecorinthian 3]

Thelric said:

Not sure what you mean about resizing, though. they should stay the same size unless you've included a smaller image in the package than you used when you were creating the deck.

The background image is about 1200x600, and when I add it as a 'custom tile', Strange Eons seems to shrink it. Obviously it's easy to expand it to the right size using the 'image dimensions' box, but if the image file itself is moved to another folder and the custom tile is pointed at the new location, itdoesn't keep the dimensions. Is there an easier way that I've missed out on?

 

Frank said:

I don't think that encounters in the darkness addresses the slowness of the tremors. The tremors are slow enough that you could very plausibly never see them hit the surface over the entire game. This means that players can rationally simply send none of their characters into the underworld. If completely ignoring the board is a rational option, I think we've failed. The time should b fast enough that ignoring it severely punishes the Investigators.

 

Damnit, Frank is right as usual. What's wrong with my brain these days? We could overhaul the tremor tracks, but I like the idea that tremors can end up moving through almost any location.

Ok, I guess we put two dimension symbols on each tremor, then. Each dimension symbol comes from a different monster movement pattern, so that two of the three possible monster movement patterns will move each tremor. And then we ALSO put loads of tremor-moving encounters in, and we make the heralds affect the tremors too, and hopefully between all of that stuff, we've given people enough reason to visit the board.

[pittplayer 0]

tremors move two spaces towards the "outside" everytime a doom token is placed on the doom track?

[Thelric 4]

thecorinthian said:

The background image is about 1200x600, and when I add it as a 'custom tile', Strange Eons seems to shrink it. Obviously it's easy to expand it to the right size using the 'image dimensions' box, but if the image file itself is moved to another folder and the custom tile is pointed at the new location, itdoesn't keep the dimensions. Is there an easier way that I've missed out on?

Ah, that makes sense. It shouldn't be a problem opening it in 2.00.6 then. In fact, I just downloaded the ZIP files you posted and tried it out, to be sure.

As for the second question, the best way to do a map background is probably to create an extension that adds it as a custom tile. Then as long as the extension is installed you can never have a problem finding the image, and the tile is always the exact size specified by the extension. However, with the changes in 2.00.6 working with custom tiles will be a lot less problematic regardless.

Cheers,
Chris

[pittplayer 0]

are we still working on this?

[The Message 0]

pittplayer said:

tremors move two spaces towards the "outside" everytime a doom token is placed on the doom track?

 

That would probably make them too fast in the beginning of the game (Since a doom token is added almost every turn for the first few mythos phases) and then nearly inactive near the end (When open gates and seals slow the doom track to a crawl). It just seems like a complete inversion of tension.

In other news, great work guys. I can't wait to see the final product, this is looking really cool.

[Frank35 0]

So it is my opinion that there should be 12 encounter cards of each location type, because that happens to fit well on a legal size sheet and is evenly divisible by many numbers. Each location should have a most commonly used attribute as well as providing the things that they promise at least 25% of the time for each thing on the list. So for example, when you go to G'harne you should be making Luck checks a lot (remembering that "The Explorer" is a Luck character), and at least half the time you should get a chance for clues or unique items. Encounters down here can be pretty good, because they will often be taken simultaneously with a Tremors Encounter, that will mostly be bad.

Here's how those would work out for 12 encounter cards (minus stories), with the encounter order of Archaeological Dig, G'harne, Nameless Sea:

 

Ruins 1

• Open one location in the Ruins. You are lost in the dark.
• Luck check to draw a monster trophy and keep it. Gain clues equal to the toughness of the monster.
• Fight check to remove a tremor token from the board, lose 2 Stamina if you fail.

Ruins 2

• Luck check to draw a common item.
• Fight check against a Cthonian. Gain a Unique Item if you win.
• Lose 2 Stamina.

Ruins 3

• Open a location anywhere in the underworld.
• Make a luck check to avoid being Lost in the Dark.
• Chance to rescue a captive. Make a Sneak or Fight check to remove a blight or lose 2 Stamina.

Ruins 4

• Gain one Skill.
• Opportunity to go to an open location in the Tunnels. Draw two encounters and select one.
• Make a Sneak check to gain a spell.

Ruins 5

• All tremors move Black.
• The Cthonian! Make a fight check or discard dynamite to clear all the tremors from the board. If you fail, you are unconscious.
• Regain all your Sanity.

Ruins 6

• Search the common item deck for Dynamite.
• Gain 2 Clues.
• Draw a spell

Ruins 7

• Open a location in the Ruins. Make a Will check or lose 2 Sanity.
• A monster appears.
• Chance to rescue a captive. Sneak check to remove a blight or all Tremors move.

Ruins 8

• Make a Lore check to gain a skill. Lose 1 Sanity.
• Draw a Unique Item.
• Sneak check to regain 2 Sanity.

Ruins 9

• Make a Luck check to open a location anywhere in the Underworld. Otherwise you are lost in the dark.
• All Tremors move black. Gain 1 Clue.
• A Monster appears. If you defeat it, gain one spell.

Ruins 10

• Draw a Common Item
• Search the deck for an Underground Map
• Fight check to regain all your sanity.

Ruins 11

• Luck check to gain 1 Skill.
• Make a Speed check or discard dynamite to rescue a captive and remove a blight. Otherwise you are Lost in the Dark.
• Rescue a Captive. Remove one blight.

Ruins 12

• Search the common items for dynamite.
• Gain 1 Clue. Make a luck check to search the deck for an Underground Map.
• Make a Fight check to remove a tremor token from the board.

-Frank

[Frank35 0]

OK, having just mocked that up, I am finding that this doesn't open up new locations fast enough. Probably half the cards should opn a closed location. Probably put a skill test to open a location in the Ruins on 2 of the encounters where you find something. Something like you run off with the thing, so you get a Common Item and then you have to make an Evade check to open a location or you become Wanted.

 

-Frank

[Dylath_Leen 1]

thecorinthian said:

Thelric said:

 

Not sure what you mean about resizing, though. they should stay the same size unless you've included a smaller image in the package than you used when you were creating the deck.

 

 

The background image is about 1200x600, and when I add it as a 'custom tile', Strange Eons seems to shrink it. Obviously it's easy to expand it to the right size using the 'image dimensions' box, but if the image file itself is moved to another folder and the custom tile is pointed at the new location, itdoesn't keep the dimensions. Is there an easier way that I've missed out on?

Had the same problem with the background for my Haunted House board, I did sort it out eventually although the image did end up slightly distorted and I couldn't get it to embed it so had to provide it as a separate file to load into SE.  Unfortunately I can't remember how I did it atm so this aint really much help.  If I do will let ya know.  Probably easier to wait for Thelric's update. ;O)

[pittplayer 0]

so the tremors try to rise to the surface and if they do u draw a tremors surface card, bad things happen and so on, what if you allow too many to surface, supermonster? it that what the herald is going to do? if this is right i will start work on a herald.

[Frank35 0]

pittplayer said:

so the tremors try to rise to the surface and if they do u draw a tremors surface card, bad things happen and so on, what if you allow too many to surface, supermonster? it that what the herald is going to do? if this is right i will start work on a herald.

 

Probably the easiest way to do it is that if there are too many Blights in town, the supermonster awakens in the pit. Once that goes down, bad things start to go down until someone dispatches the beast by jumpig into the Pit and having a climactic battle. If the beast leaves play you get to clear off the Blights but since you just got to Encounters in the Pit, you are Lost in the Dark.

So if you unlock the Nameless Sea or the Temple, you can have encounters to remove Blights and try to keep the beast from awakening. But otherwise you have to deal with a very bad monster that interferes with all players along the lines of a cross between the Dunwich Horror and a Cthonian.

Something like "Instead of moving Black, raise the Terror level by 1 and add a Doom token; instead of moving White, all Investigators lose 2 Stamina. Overwhelming 2, Nightmarish 2."

-Frank

[lemmingsunday 0]

Too many Blights triggering a super monster is a reasonable solution. 

We will need to come up with Blights for those that don't have the King in Yellow, and to offer more variety for ourselves.

I've been working on two heralds. 

One seems promising.

[Frank35 0]

I figure at least 12 additional Blights are going to be wanted. Here are some suggestions (sorry, IH is at a friend's house):

Harney Jones

• Whenever an Investigator draws an item, they must make a Luck (+2) check or discard that item.

Darke

• Investigators do not roll to get rid of Curses. A Cursed Investigator may not become Blessed.

Joshua Place

• Do not place clue tokens during the Mythos phase.

Ted Covey

• The first player loses one Sanity each Upkeep.

Principal Miles

• Whenever the Terror level rises by one or more, it rises one more.

Nurse Heather

• After an Investigator pays money to regain Sanity at the Asylum, they lose 1 Sanity.

Doctor Mortimore

• After an Investigator pays money to regain Stamina at St. Mary's Hospital, they lose 1 Sanity.

Kathy Sheldon

• No Investigators may gain Sheldon Gang Membership, nor may they perform crimes with the memberships they have. The Outskirts limit is reduced by 2 (to a minimum of zero).

Doctor Harris

• Whenever an Investigator gains Sanity and Stamina, they must choose to gain the Sanity or the Stamina.

Professor Verne

• During the Mythos phase, the first player must select one Tremor. That Tremor moves on White.

-Frank

[thecorinthian 3]

Re: how to awaken supermonsters: each supermonster ought to have its own appearing/disappearing conditions, which affect exactly how long it spends on the board, where it goes, and how the investigators can influence it to appear.

For example, my 'Dweller in the Gulf' appeared whenever there was a monster surge, and vanished when there was another monster surge. My 'Worm That Gnaws In The Night' supermonster appeared almost immediately and spent the whole game slowly munching its way around the board. I'll make new versions of both of these for the underground board at some point.

At the moment we don't have any kind of special 'track' which counts up until the supermonster appears, nor do I think one is necessary. Little tracks which have tokens added to them are pretty awkward, and there are enough of them on expansion boards already.

The main point I want to make is this: the board shouldn't require the players to use a supermonster herald. Part of this 'supermonster' idea was that it's basically "the Dunwich Horror, but modular", so that you can swap in and out different supermonsters by picking different heralds, and the rules make it easy to design new supermonsters. If all the board's rules are going to work independently of any specific supermonster, it follows that the rules really need to work independently of supermonsters in general. So the trigger conditions on supermonsters should be on the herald, and that herald can refer to tremor cards etc. if we want, but tremor cards shouldn't say things like "the supermonster awakens" because the players might not be using a supermonster.

(This is all part of my desire to make the expansion as 'modular' as possible. Players should be able to pick which components they want to use, and there should be as few components as possible which 'stop working' when you don't have something else. This is even more important for a fan expansion since we're expecting people to print all the stuff themselves, and we may not be able to make finished versons available all at once.)

 

Re: the Blights: I have a few concerns:

- We already have one extra deck of cards 'attached' to the board. If we want to add Blights, there should be a herald that adds them. I know I included references to Blights in one of my encounter examples, but I'm starting to think it may be a bad idea. Here's an idea though: one of the supermonsters I was planning was going to be based on The Horror under Warrendown and would have been handing out 'Harvest Taint' cards which mutated people. And likewise, the Dweller in the Gulf has a habit of eating people's eyes and driving them insane. We could just make Blight cards a 'theme' of supermonster heralds, so that several of the heralds make use of Blights, and create them in different ways?

- I know I said this before, but I really don't like stuff which refers to cards from other expansions which players may not have. Sheldon Gang Memberships are  rare and fairly pointless anyway, so it doesn't seem worth having a Blight which removes them.

- I don't like Harney Jones, whcih add extra skill checks at odd times. It's very fiddly and slows the game down - for example, when you went shopping, you'd have to make three seperate Luck checks. It's especially pointless since it's a very easy luck check. I know these Blight ideas were only provisional; I'm just saying that I'd like to veto that one...

[Frank35 0]

The point with the Blights is that it's an already existing mechanic that easily allows the game to represent people from town being kidnapped and tortured in the darkness. By printing out additional blights for this set, we don't need people to have King in Yellow or any special herald to use the Blight Mechanic. Relegating the blights to a herald effect would render the entire purpose of including extra blights or even referencing the blights naught.

 

The most common effect when a tremor hits Arkham should be "Masked cultists kidnap a respected city resident from their home. Increase the Terror level by 1 and place a Blight into play." And then you have the chance to rescue people (that is, remove Blights from play) by having the right encounters in the Nameless Sea or the Temple. Areas which you have to open up by having encounters elsewhere in the darkness first. But yeah, little counters on little tracks are annoying, and I'm not suggesting that we do that. I'm suggesting that having 3 or 4 Blights in play should make things go to hell by itself. If the whole point of kidnapping people is to awaken a foul beast in the pit, there should be some teeth to that. It could be as simple as the third blight and every blight after that comes with a free Monster Surge. Or it could be that the third Blight and every Blight after that spawns a monster in the pit.

 

I don't really know where you're going with the super monster heralds. I'm not even really sold on the idea frankly. I think I'd rather just have a small pile of monster tokens that were separate from the main monsters and were full of bad assery and were spawned directly or indirectly (through Blights) by Tremors in Arkham events. Frankly, any monster tokens we make up for this expansion are gong to be self printed, so they won't feel like the monsters in the rest of the monster cup. We should use that by making it a separate monster cup. If they spawn in the pit and don't move (like Cthonians and Colors Out of Space, not like Dark Young) then it creates that cool mechanic where you have to fight hem in the pit and then get lost in the dark. Heralds should be usable with just the basic game, I don't think that they should tie in with the pit at all.

 

As for the Sheldon Gang one, I agree that it's a pretty minor effect. It's intended to be a mirror of Sheriff Engle, who removes the Deputy cards and reduces the outskirt limit. I think I've gone the last dozen games without anyone becoming the deputy, so I honestly don't care about that aspect of the card. The reduction in outskirt limit is really painful though. And that's the same thing with Kathy Sheldon. The fact that she turns off the Sheldon Gang mechanic is flavor text. The important part is that while the gang is flipping out you lose a huge buffer of outskirts limit and the terror track is in a lot of danger of rising by potentially several points if a Monster Surge breaks out.

 

-Frank

[thecorinthian 3]

All good points. I guess a Blight deck doesn't really do us any harm. Plus, we can expand King In Yellow at the same time.

The idea of a seperate underground monster cup isn't bad, but it's another set of special rules for the board, which I am keen to avoid unless the rules are absolutely necessary. We can have heralds/supermonsters which create special monster cups (like the Black Goat), and I once made a herald which was quite close to this idea already, called the Cthonian Nest, whcih created a "Cthonic monster cup" containing Cthonians, Dholes, Gugs, Ghouls and a few other things.

As for monster tokens being distinguishable by touch: I seriously don't think this is a problem. I mocked up 30+ custom monster markers for Golden Scarab, and I managed to get them almost indistinguishable. We blind-tested a bunch of monster draws, and the players found it difficult to reliably pull out the custom monsters. Of course, it's difficult for everyone to get it exactly right using one person's method of printing/assembling the markers, but I don't think it's a very severe problem anyway. You reach into the cup, you grab the first monster you touch. And you 'stir' the monsters every time. Works for me.

 

Supermonsters are the "mid-game boss". They could just be extra-tough monsters, like masks, but there are serious limits to what rules and special abilities you can fit on a normal monster marker. To get all the rules you need, you need to create a larger card. As far as I can see, there are two options:

1. All supermonsters are part of heralds. This lets us vary a few more things, since there's space to specify appear/disappear conditions, and to include a wider range of special rules.

2. All supermonsters work like the Dunwich Horror - there's a monster marker, but there's a stack of a few large-size cards which determine how the creature works in each combat. I also think this would work quite well, and there's already a rules framework in place because of the Dunwich Horror. The downside is that the rules card is only drawn for the combat, so the monster can't really do anything else, because you'd only be determining its rules once you fight the thing. (If we were really clever, we'd make this fully backwards-compatible with the Dunwich Horror, so that players using the Dunwich board can swap one of our components in for the Dunwich Horror and the Dunwich Board will still function. But that's not a high priority.)

I guess the real idea behind supermonsters wasn't just that extra-special tough monsters were fun, but that I liked the idea of "heralds you can fight". And in order to fight a herald, you need it to have some physical presence on the board, and a special spawn-monster seemed like the most sensible way to do this within the normal rules of the game. In theory there could be some sort of 'mid-game battle' which was equivalent to the final battle, but I thought that it was too clumsy, and you've have to specify a hell of a lot of special rules in the rulebook. The heralds I made were stand-alone; all the rules you needed were on the card. Of course, if we want to integrate them more closely with the underground board, we'll have to change one or two things.

[Frank35 0]

Personally, the printer I have access to will not do cardboard, so my Enemy Tokens don't feel a bit like Fantasy Flight monster tokens. As such, any monsters  printed out would have to go in a different cup. As such, an underground monster cup does not feel like an extra rle to me - there is simply no other choice. What I would like is if it was cards from the set that specified when tokens were drawn rather than have an extra rule to remember.

 

Now as for the impact of heralds and the board on Blights, it's a sticky problem. Probably the best idea is to have all the Blight limits appear on the Herald. So the thing where the Dweller Awakens at the third Blight is on the Dweller herald. The Dweller also should have some kind of rarish method of putting a blight into play. If used with the Underworld board it becomes more dynamic, becase the board lets people remove blights by performing rescue missions, but it also has a lot more means of putting blights into play. If you ignore things you'll get a Blight on about turn 6 and every other turn after that. So combining the herald and the board the stakes get higher.

 

But I think the monsters that show up in the pit need to be special green bordered monsters like Cthonians, not Dunwich Horror analogues. If the hralds show up in the pit then you can't use them without the Underworld board.

 

-Frank

[thecorinthian 3]

Frank said:

Personally, the printer I have access to will not do cardboard

Nor will mine... I just print both sides on to seperate sheets of paper, cut them out, and stick them on to cardboard. It takes ages, of course.

 

Frank said:

Probably the best idea is to have all the Blight limits appear on the Herald. So the thing where the Dweller Awakens at the third Blight is on the Dweller herald. The Dweller also should have some kind of rarish method of putting a blight into play. If used with the Underworld board it becomes more dynamic, becase the board lets people remove blights by performing rescue missions, but it also has a lot more means of putting blights into play. If you ignore things you'll get a Blight on about turn 6 and every other turn after that. So combining the herald and the board the stakes get higher.

Sorry, but I'm starting to lose track of how exactly this will work...

I like the idea that each pit-dweller herald specifies how many Blights cause its monster to appear - but once you've got that rule, we're back to a situation in which there's no reason why each herald has to activate using Blights. Some of them can use Blights; others can trigger off other things, which is what I originally had in mind.

Similarly, once we're making the components modular enough that they can be used with just the main board (which I think we should be), there's no reason why they have to interact with Blights at all. I only say this because if we're setting up a rules structure in which it's possible to have a pit-dwelling herald which doesn't interact with Blights, I'm probably gonna want to make that type of herald. I like the Blights as an optional component, but I don't like the idea that the board will always produce Blights.

 

Instead of specifically mentioning Blights during encounters, we could simply have heralds which trigger Blights based on specific game events, such as Terror level increases or allies being returned to the box. I wanted to include quite a lot of Terror level increases in underground encounters anyway, since it seems like the Terror level has always been under-used. So we can still have all those fun 'rescue' encounters, but while the positive consequence might be an Ally, the negative consequence will be a Terror increase rather than a Blight, and then certain specific heralds trigger a Blight in response.

The actual monster from the story The Dweller in the Gulf (which started me off with this whole concept) wouldn't be a bad example here: it eats people's eyes and leaves them blind and insane, then leads them down into its underground lair. That seems like the type of thing which could be represented by Blight cards. So the Dweller in the Gult could be a Blight-heavy herald, while other heralds could ignore Blights altogether.

The alternative to using Terror/allies and other pre-existing game events as triggers is that we create a new game term which is a shorthand for referring to a particular type of ability on the herald. The Ancient One has a 'worshipper' ability which is always different, and other cards can sometimes refer to it; likewise, we could have a 'Sacrifice' ability on our heralds. So an encounter describes someone or something being sacrificed, and on the herald sheet it says "Whenever a sacrifice is made, such-and-such happens." So sacrifices could be come Blights, or tremors, or doom tokens, or terror increases, or monster spawnings, or anything really. And obviously if there is no herald, nothing extra happens. It's not ideal but it does make the expansion a bit more 'open-source', so that if someone wants to design a pit-dwelling herald, they're not locked in to using Blights.

 

Frank said:

But I think the monsters that show up in the pit need to be special green bordered monsters like Cthonians, not Dunwich Horror analogues. If the hralds show up in the pit then you can't use them without the Underworld board.

Agreed, although I think it'd be quite easy to put a clause on each herald which specifies where it appears, and if there's no Underground board, it can always appear somewhere else. Any supermonsters which move will need to have a movement pattern which works on any board, but that's easy enough. I don't imagine that all the supermonsters will move anyway.

The way I designed my original 'Dweller the Gult' supermonster was that it appeared on the surging gate whenever there was a monster surge, and disappeared at the next monster surge, so it would pop up now and again, but you wouldn't know how long it would stay around for. I eventually managed to work out a fairly watertight set of spawning rules, so that if the supermonster ever left the board for any reason, it would just go back and sit on its herald sheet, and it would re-appear later.

[Frank35 0]

Honestly, if I wanted to save a random one of the eleven allies at Ma's Boarding House from a monster (or whatever), I'd just go have encounters at Independence Square or the Devil's Hopyard. That's a really standard encounter and it's not particularly interesting or noteworthy. The Underworld board needs to do something to justify its existence. Otherwise it's just taking up space. If the encounters down below aren't doing something to the game environment with and without actually going there, the whole board is a waste of time. A waste of time to design, a waste of time to print out, and a waste of time to set up.

 

The board should be doing more interesting things to you, not less. There should be an entre mechanic where there are Ghouls in the underground who are fence sitting about whether to help the investigators or the cultists. These Ghoul Lumnaries should be represented by additional personal story cards that get dealt out on certain events. Fail to do the story quests that get them on your side before the events that tip them against you and the failed ending comes out.

 

Blights should be added and removed from play by failing to engage sufficiently or exploring deep into the underworld respectively. That's something the rules easily could do but just don't. It's interesting. It's different. It's a reason to actually bother having an extra set of locations.

 

If you just want to have normal encounters where people have the same kinds of things happen to them that could be in any unstable location - I frankly want off the project. If you just want to make some heralds that make the game slghtly harder, you should just do that.

 

-Frank

[pittplayer 0]

just have the tremors break the surface and release a monster in arkham that chases the investigators, that would be plenty of reason to go underground, have the blights come from encounter cards, just use the ones we have, and make them a subtheme. make it so you can only stop tremors by going into the pit, which gives you a reason to explore. i think people are overthinking it and getting upset. make a tremor deck, a herald, encounter decks and tremor tokens thats it. simple. i love this board lets not jump ship!!

[Frank35 0]

pittplayer said:

just have the tremors break the surface and release a monster in arkham that chases the investigators, that would be plenty of reason to go underground, have the blights come from encounter cards, just use the ones we have, and make them a subtheme. make it so you can only stop tremors by going into the pit, which gives you a reason to explore. i think people are overthinking it and getting upset. make a tremor deck, a herald, encounter decks and tremor tokens thats it. simple. i love this board lets not jump ship!!

 

That would be a perfect example of something that I wouldn't bother continung work on.

 

-Frank

[thecorinthian 3]

Frank said:

That would be a perfect example of something that I wouldn't bother continung work on.

 

The reason I was talking about modular components was so that we can each develop our own stuff if the others don't want to do it. Obviously there's only so far that can extend though... because we probably all do want to use the same encounter decks etc.

Anyway, I'm not complaining about how much there is to do, and how much effect it has. Of course I agree that there should be more - but Blight cards don't really capture my imagination.   They are a pre-existing game mechanic, so there's some merit in using them instead of making up something new that does the same thing... but nothing much interacts with Blights, so if we want to make things interact with them, we're starting from scratch. Plus, they are from King in Yellow, so we would have to explain how they work... which admittedly isn't complicated.

But if you want lots of new game mechanics, let's really make them. I quite enjoyed hammering out the tremor mechanism, and it took us a while to get it in shape. How about these ideas:

'Strangers', who are like a mixture of Allies and Blights. Each Stranger card is double-sided, with one side representing what happens when that stranger is against the investigators, and one side when they're helping. A few random Strangers could be dealt out at the start of the game, or we could have it that you only go and get them when an encounter tells you to do it. Each Stranger can switch between being friendly and hostile depending on what the investigators do. This could incorporate the slave-traders, their prisoners, the ghouls.... all sorts of characters we wanted to include anyway. OR, if we want it to work as a proper deck, we have two versions of each card - a good version and an evil version - so when you encounter a particular character, it can tell you to go and get the good version if such-and-such, and the evil version if such-and-such instead. Sometimes, you'll end up with a 'bad ally' whom you can't get rid of; sometimes, the Stranger basically becomes a Blight; sometimes, they attack and it's a monster fight (with the stats shown on the card). Other times, the Stranger will become an Ally, hand over an item, you name it. There could even be multiple 'good' versions of each character and multiple bad, so you don't know exactly what you'll get even if you're told to search the deck for a particular character.

A Reputation deck, representing how popular and well-liked each investigator is. It represents good press for investigators as well as ugly rumors. All investigators draw one random Rep card at the start of the game; each Rep card has an advantage, a disadvantage and a 'replace' condition. When you replace a Rep card, you discard it, draw three more cards, take one of them, and shuffle the deck. So you always have to have one Rep card, but you can keep changing what it is.

Mutation cards which provide absolutely bizarre mixtures of effects. These could be an alternative 'third' type of penalty card, after injuries and madnesses. You could draw a Mutation as an alternative to drawing an injury or a madness, or it could be something that happens when you get LiTaS, although that's quite rare. Aha! How about this: it's a type of card you can draw in order to avoid being delayed in an Other World. Alternatively, if we don't just want it to be about physical mutation, it can be called the 'Transition' deck, in honour of the Transitions of Juan Romero and Titus Crow, and it can include all the bizarre changes that happen to characters in Mythos stories.... mutations, possessions, all that From Beyond type stuff.

 

Of course if you're really set on Blights, we'll use 'em, but I don't want to make them a requirement for pit-dweller heralds.