Custom Items, Allies and Skills

[Admiral142 0]

Those are great Ivory Tower!  I really like the hypochondria one.  I recently made a kleptomania card myself.  I was using one of Mrs. Gamura's ideas for a character, the Thief, and after making him, thought it would make a cool madness.  Looks like I wasn't the only one who thought so!  Mine reads as follows:

<b>Any Phase:</b> When you shop, place a sanity token on this card. You must make a <b>Sneak (-X)</b> check. X is equal to the price of any item you have drawn times the number of Sanity tokens on this card. If you succeed, you may take that item. If you fail, you are <i>arrested</i>.

 

If you ever gain another <i><fullname></i> card, you are <b>devoured</b>.

It's a bit more complicated, and I decided not to make it because it was too close to the investigators ability.  Nice work!

[ivory_tower 0]

I need to fix those, forgot to put the part about if you ever get a duplicate.

I was thinking of making a list of diseases that could be drawn if certain circumstances happend but its just an idea

 

[Admiral142 0]

I really like the Narcolepsy one.  Question though, what happens if Mark Harrigan the Soldier gets it? 

I had considered making a disease deck in conjunction with the parasite monsters we started seeing in the custom monster thread.  I like having diseases as injuries since it would take up less space (and I don't know about you, but we operate on very limited space ).  On the other hand, I'd like diseases to be easier to get rid of than injuries or madnesses.  Here is one I just came up with, for example:

Just an idea.   

[Admiral142 0]

More Spam from the admiral...

Yes, I have been watching Supernatural.    The sigils of the planets are meant to be fairly low powered.  Just spells that it would be nice to have in certain situations.  I tried to adjust the casting modifiers to balance them.  I look forward to seeing what you guys think.  The Golden Idol is something that it would be nice to draw as a random posession.  That's the main reason I made it.  Looking forward to suggestions!

[ivory_tower 0]

I really like the devil's trap, and supernatural (a great show) is the first thing I thought of.  The sigil's look cool as well and I like the 0 sanity cost.

[Admiral142 0]

Happy 4th of July every one!  I hope you all have a safe and enjoyable holiday.

[Brooks2 0]

What do you guys think of an item like this? It's unusual since its power would vary depending on how much sneak you have, and its power could grow over time if you acquire the right Allies or Skills.  I made it expensive for that reason and also because it has the "2 successes on 6's feature", which I absolutely LOVE.

[Player 3 0]

I get kids following me around all the time when I go to parks. And as such, this natually came to mind...I am a nerd after all.

[Player 3 0]

 

 

A lot of these are just to amuse me. But I like em non-the-less.

[Player 3 0]

 

Alright, we got here a couple investigators I cooked up. I'm rather proud of them myself.

Here we go:

"The sniper" The sniper is a concept I had because, simply enough, I love snipers. The build went around that. I have yet to play test it, but I may get the chance soon enough.

 

"Party leader" This is me. When my friends and I really started getting into this game we always talked about what all of our stats would be converted. so I sat down with a pencil and paper, and thought of some things off the top of my head. wrote down abilities, and skill points. Not to much later, my friend who owns the game shows me Strange Eons, "Hot ****" I said as I sat down and started making my character. You can imagine my surprise when I entered all my stats and it came out completely fair. Every point used, Exactly. Not kidding in the slightest. I was impressed. In any case, this is about the end result. It's more or less supposed to be a small rendition of myself, not really "fair" by game standards.

-Apathy card. I'm very, very....very apathetic. I had to involve it into this somehow, never got very far with it. Perhaps when I care more I'll get back to it...

 

"the broken" This is also me. By nature I am a willful person, it's one of my gleaming qualities , i'm always calm, always level headed. Sometimes I think of what I would be like if I "broke" if my will snapped, sometime so traumatic would to happen to me, that I would go insane. This is what I came up with.

 

"the olympic runner" Playing around with a concept of a person who runs, very fast. This conecpt came to me after a game where I was playing the librarian, and got 12 movement points to play around with by the end of the game. Man that was fun.

 

Edit:: I just realized I put this in the wrong topic...crap. I'll have to move it later.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Admiral142 0]

Here are some spell ideas I've been fiddling around with:

 

 

I'm going to have to bump up my export resolution.  These are a little hard to read.  If you have any trouble, and are interested in these cards, just reply and let me know.  I'll repost if necessary.  Constructive criticism is welcome, as always!

[Brooks2 0]

Those all seem really powerful. Enlargement and Lightning Strike seem weaponish, yet they don't require any hands to use. If the librarian was using double shriveling (or Azure Flame), enlargement would be REALLY beneficial.

And what's the Sanity cost of Draconic Sigil, it says "special" but I don't see where it explains the cost. Is the doom token the "cost"?

[Brooks2 0]

I like Sigil Seal and Ancient Sigil a lot, just as they are. I wish they were more real than a few of the spells we're stuck with. In our group, it's almost always just the librarian who does the spell casting, so in our case, spells with Sanity cost of 1 are always sanity cost of 0. So I think I have a warped sense of spell-casting. I would think you'd always want to get Sigil Seal deployed ASAP, even with its Sanity costs. Keeping gates from opening is nice.

[Admiral142 0]

More of my junk:

Constructive criticism is welcome.  I do employ the comments made in many of the things I make, even if I don't re-post them.  Thanks!

[Admiral142 0]

Brooks said:

Those all seem really powerful. Enlargement and Lightning Strike seem weaponish, yet they don't require any hands to use. If the librarian was using double shriveling (or Azure Flame), enlargement would be REALLY beneficial.

And what's the Sanity cost of Draconic Sigil, it says "special" but I don't see where it explains the cost. Is the doom token the "cost"?

I wanted lightning strike to resemble plague of locusts, only a little better.  I changed the phase from Any to Movement, which should help make it less powerful.  I reduced Enlargements bonus to +1.  I didn't want it to take any hands, because thematically, it's meant to resemble becoming giant size, and mechanically, I just wanted something that worked more or less like the Magic card, "Giant Growth."  I figure a +1 bonus is still pretty good, considering it takes no hands, so that works.  I may keep working on the lightning strike; I want that to be a pretty cool spell.  Thanks for the feedback!

[Brooks2 0]

Since Caedmon's special ability is similar to that of Ammi Pierce, do you think Caedmon should be discarded if the Ancient One awakens?

http://www.arkhamhorrorwiki.com/Ammi_Pierce

I like those missions too, they're interesting. On the one mission is a small typo, it should be "The Unnamable" not "Unnameable".

I may have been too tough on enlargement before. After all, Alien Device is +2 to combat checks, and it doesn't require any hands either. So I think enlargement could be ok at +2.

[Admiral142 0]

Yes, indeed!  Added the discard if ao wakes up, and thanks for catching the typo!

[Joshua585 0]

Of these cards, I think Sleeping Giants is my favorite. It has a good balance of difficulty, sacrifice, and a fairly unique effect. It reminds me of the one mission that removes the rumor mythos cards.

 

I like Chalk, effect-wise, but it seems a little mundane for a bonus to spell checks. Perhaps something like runic circle, or even Latin Notebook, might sound a little more mystical.

 

[Admiral142 0]

Cool, thanks again for the suggestions!  As you may or may not know, I'm building a custom expansion.  I'm close to being done, though I think the hardest part is yet to come with mythos and location encounter cards .  The name of my expansion is, "The Price of Progress," and it's meant to have a sort of industrial feel.  To that effect I have really wanted to make a lot of tasks and missions for my expansion; however, I have only come up with 3 tasks so far.  I was thinking about it, and I thought it might be cool to make tasks or missions that allow you to get allies.  Here is an example of what I'm thinking:

There is at least one typo on the mission, it should be, "add the Train Station to this Missions list of locations."

Now, here is the question: Are these too powerful?  Is the mission more balanced?  What would an appropriate sacrifice be, if any? 

I'm thinking of making one of these cards for each ally, and have the outlines for the 11 base game allies set up, but would that be too many ally finder cards in the common and/or unique items decks?  In the interest of deck space, would it be better to have a card such as this target 3 allies?  For example, instead of just Anna Kaslow, it could be Anna Kaslow, Thomas F. Malone, or Professor Armitage.

 Also, would it be more beneficial to make these only for allies that are not in the base set?  We often play with one large and one small expansion, and leave the other expansions out, so that's why I'm thinking it might be better to make this type of card for the expansion allies. 

I look forward to your feedback on these cards, as I'm hoping to make tasks/missions a large part of my expansion. 

Thanks!

[mattherobot 0]

I like the idea of tasks or missions to get allies. I think following the Masks from CotDP is a good idea in that you could have a few generic named tasks/missions to get one of three allies, themed in a particlar way. Per your example, "Occult Friend" for any of the Lore or spell-boosting allies works, or you could have something like "Shady Character" for the sneak-boosting ones.

[Admiral142 0]

Here are some of the cards I have come up with so far for finding allies.  I've made them tasks because there is a little bit more space on them since you don't have to put a sacrifice cost.  This may make them too easy, or it may be necessary to make some of these cards missions.  We'll see how it goes.

The mission is just one I thought would be a lot of fun.  It could also be very powerful, so I tried to make it hard, but not impossible.  I look forward to feedback!

[thecorinthian 3]

@Admiral142: Those tasks seem to work. Some of them are a lot easier than others, though: for example, 'Employing the Adventurous' has two high-frequency gate locations and one medium, and requires about ten movement points to do the whole itinerary, while Seeking Professional Help has a street, a low-freq gate location, and a stable location, all quite close together. (It's not necessarily a problem, I just wanted to make sure you realized.)

 

The Brain Transplant is a terrific idea, but bear in mind that it's gonna 'glitch' when used with a few particular investigators' abilities:

- The Martial Artist''s special ability makes no sense if another investigator has it. The Spy's special ability also has a very odd effect on 'normal' investigators, although there's no reason why it actually doesn't work. (Taking either of these investigators' special abilities away and replacing them with someone else's is also peculiar. In the Martial Artist's case, it'll just lock her stats in place, since strictly that track isn't a "skill slider" so she could never move it again. In the Spy's case, taking the ability away improves her dramatically, since she'll stop resetting her skill tracks every turn, so she can just use her focus as normal until all her stats are maxed out, then leave them there.)

- The Ex-Convict's ability says he can't become Deputy or get a Loan - would you discard those things if you gained this special ability? The Urchin has a similar problem. Also, bear in mind that Brain Transplant lets you get the special abilities of an investigator who has a "permanently fixed" item, like the Cultist's STL membership or the Dreamer's gate box, without having the item itself. That's not really a problem, just an odd effect the transplant will have.

- In a few cases, an investigator's special ability is incredibly powerful because you're meant to be unable to overcome a particular downside. The Reporter is the most obvious case of this: if you gained his ability, you wouldn't get a Curse with it, so the "don't roll for your Curse" wouldn't be much of a drawback.

I think there are probably other problems caused by the fact that it's "any other investigator", which seems (to me) to allow you to duplicate the ability of another investigator still in play. You should probably limit it to investigators who aren't already in use in the game.

(If you wanna get really pedantic, there's a bigger problem, which is that if you just "cut and paste" one investigator's ability on to another investigator, the new ability will still use the name of the investigator it came from, so strictly speaking it won't be affecting the investigator who now actually has the ability. For example, Amanda Sharpe's ability says "Amanda draws an extra skill whenever she etc etc". If you put this ability on Ashcan Pete, it still says "Amanda" so it will still affect her not Pete! You could have Amanda in the game, and someone else with Amanda's ability, and since there were two instances of her special ability, she'd be drawing three skills every time, and Ashcan Pete himself wouldn't have an ability that did anything for him. Of course it's obvious how this should work in every case, so you can just ignore the problem.)

[Admiral142 0]

Great insights, thanks!  I tried to base the tasks list of required locations on the power of the ally they would receive.  I may not have done a terrific job at that, so I'll review the paths taken and check my gate probabilities (from Universal Heads reference charts) as soon as I can to try and make sure the itenerary's are appropriate.  I'm glad you like them!

The mission is meant to be fun, though if used correctly, it could be pretty powerful.  I was thinking Michael McGlen with Zoe's power.   I'll see if I can word Brain Transplant to be a little more clear.

Any feedback is always welcome!  Did you get a chance to see my rewording of the Druid?

[Admiral142 0]

Here are some more items I've come up with:

With Dean, should I make it that he can add +1 to one rolled die? Kind of like the Lawyer or how the Vampiric Blade works. I think he might be too powerful how he is, but then again, it is all he does. Feedback is welcome as always!

[mattherobot 0]

Well, right now he's just Endurance. Using the Lawyer's ability is interesting but makes him somewhat less special. If it only applies to Combat rolls, it might work.