Do the colors mean something about difficulty? Or are they based on the actual worlds with the colors?

If using option two, does it mean some other worlds have higher difficulty with the encounters?

I don't know if worlds necessarily have varying degrees of difficulty(except for gate closes) but I did go through all the Gate cards for the main board and expansions that have Dunwich and Kingsport and I found the following patterns:

Red = Almost all bad

Yellow = Mostly bad

Blue = Some Bad, Some Good

Green = Mostly Good

Bad = Outright loss, skill checks to avoid loss, monsters appear, no encounters.

Good = Gain something, skill checks to gain something, gain something while sacrificing something, returns to Arkham.

To take it further, "Other" encounters for all 4 colors tallied were around ~45/55% good/bad between all 4 colors; with, of course, their color indicating the chances of something good or bad happening.

Basically, with this knowledge, you will know your chances of getting something beneficial out of an Other World encounter in R'lyeh(Red/Yellow) are slim indeed, while one of the others with Green/Blue give you the better chances to get something good.

I thought it was Green-Yellow-Blue-Red, but thanks.

Would all 4 colors (like Another Dimension) be classed as easier than red/green? Or Harder?

A while back one of the posters suggested

blue: messes with your sanity

red: messes with your stamina

green: mostly friendly

yellow: I forget

At the time, I look over the cards at the time and thought that made as much sense as any other theory.

I think the order of difficulty (from hardest to easiest) is red-yellow-blue-green. But of course it depends what you regard as 'difficulty', which depends on how you adjust your skills and whether you're in the habit of diving into gates while on 1 San/Stam. For some people, "A monster appears!" is the worst possible encounter, but my usual response is "Excellent! A big lump of toughness I can spend later!"

By far the most common OW effects (as far as I can tell) are "A monster appears" and "You lose a small amount of sanity."

'Another Dimension' has no encounters of its own - you always get 'Other'.

Starting to piece together some homemade other worlds, I just needed to know which colors are suitable for them. Thanks a bunch

Well, I guess I can go ahead and clarify the thoughts behind the colors. I mean, the game has been out for years now, after all.

Red - Red tends to be bad and attacks an investigator's Stamina.

Yellow - Yellow tends to be bad and attacks an investigator's Sanity.

Blue - Blue tends to be bad and attacks an investigator's possessions.

Green - Green tends to be good or neutral.

Now, obviously, none of these rules hold 100% true. But there are trends in those directions and I have tried to keep them intact even when working with other designers on later expansions.

Other notes that may be of interest...

The Dreamlands uses all 4 colors and has special entries in all 4 colors. As a result, special encounters are more likely there.

Another Dimension uses all 4 colors but has no special entries at all. You always encounter "Other" there, as it represents one among an uncountable number of dimensions.

That sums things up pretty nicely. Who would've known another Legendary person would come to my threads.

This forum is amazing

KevinW said:

Obviously I hestitate to contradict the very obliging Mr. W, but the way I add it up, Dreamlands special encounters are no more likely than special encounters in any other OW; it's just that any specific encounter is only half as likely because there are twice as many possible ones to choose from. In an ordinary OW, you're effectively drawing from a 24-card deck of which 12 cards have encounters specific to your OW, but in the Dreamlands it's a 48-card deck with 24 specific encounters. I only know this because when I did my fan expansion, I went through counting all the proportions of the OW deck to make sure I expanded it right.

(Also, KevinW, if you're reading this, I don't suppose you'd be willing to satisfy my curiosity: are you by any chance a Bob Dylan fan? One of the Other World encounters from 'King in Yellow' is a quote from a Bob Dylan song, and I always wondered if whoever designed that expansion happened to be listening to Desire at the time...)

Do remember there's one white card in there, which is pretty useless. Do the expansions have new white cards that don't re-shuffle?

They just made that card white b/c there's no need to colour a card that tells you to reshuffle the coloured ones. And if you're giving that card its own group, what else would you expect white to do?

Knuckles Eki said:

No - that's the only one. And it's not useless exactly, it's quite a sensible design decision. There has to be a rule somewhere which specifies what to do if you run out of OW encounters, and I'd rather it was on a special card than in the rulebook.