If you're going to have the tremor tokens have a symbol on both sides, it can be the same symbol on both sides. When a tremor gets encountered you can remove the token to the cup and draw a Tremor Encounter Card. If the tremor reaches Arkham you can draw a Tremors in Arkham Card. If the Tremor Encounters cards are (in general) less bad than the Tremors in Arkham cards, players will be incentivized to go exploring them rather than passively waiting for them to be unleashed upon town.

For example: if you encounter some of the cultists while they are still underground, you may get beat up and you may rescue one of the current hostages (removing a Blight and possibly getting a reward for doing so). The equivalent card in the Tremors in Arkham deck simply involves someone getting kidnapped and a Blight going down.

-Frank

Frank said:

That will work, but it adds another deck of special cards, which I wasn't keen to do.

There might be a solution though:

I had the idea that there'd be a 'Lost in the Tunnels' encounter deck, and that when you got Lost (which is a bit like LiTas) you had to keep drawing Lost in the Tunnels encounters until you could return (which would usually be quite quick).

Couldn't we combine these two decks, into one deck of large cards with multiple 'types' of encounter on it? Since we seem to have a few types of infrequent event that we want to happen on the underground board, it makes sense to use a deck like this.

For example: each 'Underground' card has three headings. Here's an example I just made:

Also, here is another version of the board. Not as high-res as the previous one, but should still be comprehensible:

Slightly bigger version here: farm4.static.flickr.com/3414/3632728826_9b7c59478e_b.jpg

The red lines are the 'Tremor tracks'. I don't know what the Dunwich-style vortices do yet, I just added them because there needs to be a way for tremor blips to 'vanish'. Obviously we'll want some custom graphics instead of Dunwich ones, and we'll want a special version of the monster movement patterns, instead of just putting the blocks in there directly. Really we still need to work out how the whole Tremor system would work, but this board is a good enough mock-up for the moment.

I tried to keep the location concepts quite 'archetypal' so that they could stand in for a variety of things. For example, the Crypts is standing in for all the mausoleums/tombs/charnel-houses etc. that people have suggested.

I need proper pictures for 'Archaeological Dig' and 'Lost in the Dark', and better pictures for 'Crypts' and 'The Pit'.

(Yes I know that G'harne is in Africa and not underneath Arkham, but it's too good to not use it.)

I like the Darkness encounter card, but I think the categories should be:

• Tremors In Arkham
• Tremors Revealed
• Lost in the Dark

The tremors themselves should not have different vortices that eject onto different street areas and locations, they should just go to Arkham. When the tremor hits the vortex, you draw a Darkness card and read the Tremors in Arkham result. If you jump a tremor before that you can get the Tremors revealed result.

But regardless, none of the tremor starting points should be right next to vortices. It's not much of a game when the mythos flips over, the blip is placed, and the blip moves to the vortex all before any of the players get to move.

-Frank

@thecorinthian: wow your board is almost perfect, love the encounter cards!! needs to be a graveyard lookin place! does there really need to be a lost in the dark place? what makes that different then litas?

never mind i didnt get that you still have encounters there!

I've spent the last twenty minutes trying to rearrange the board to make it work the way I think it needs to work... and it doesn't. Fitting the 'tremor tracks' around the edges is really tricky! I also think that using monster movement patterns to spawn things which actually move according to other monster movement patterns is going to be too confusing. It confuses me and I invented it.

A few things would make it easier:

- Scrapping 'streets' altogether. I could make the board entirely out of locations. Is this worth a try, or would it break the game? (It would have one advantage, which is that we wouldn't need a rule to explain why flying monsters don't swoop down on investigators who are underground).

- Ditching the seperate 'tremor tracks' and having something slightly simpler. It would still have blips but they'd just move around the same places investigators could go.

Any thoughts? I guess I can always send the .eon files over to someone else and let them take over.

Also: I'm pretty confident that the set of locations is good enough, so if anyone wants to start coming up with location encounters, go nuts.

Well, a possibility is to simply have a tremor token spawn every turn and just have the tokens themselves be colored. You could have the spawn locations be themselves colored, so that there could be 3 or 4 distinct start locations.

-Frank

to many rules people getting discouraged? "cough cough i may have said..." lol just picking on you guys, any way i dont like the tremor idea, just have a monster spawn from cultists in the chambers! and before it spawns have it explode with its tentacles out at random locations and attack investigators! make it so prevelant that investigator HAVE to go underground at a certain point, like the doom track getting to 5 than it gets 2 attacks.

Some awesome work so far.

Four different colored tokens that are placed on a certain spawn points doesn't seem that bad at all. The tokens would still have a movement symbol on them?

Thecorinthian I wouldn't do away with streets. Streets will just be various underground conjunctions, caverns, chasms, tunnels and the like.

Pittplayer I really do think the tremor idea is brilliant, spawning can still happen because of location encounters, heralds, or Great Old Ones.

I was thinking that maybe, in part for Pittplayer, but in a larger way perhaps there could be two locations set off the main path. These locations wouldn't have to be used if you don't like this idea. The idea is that these locations would be blank, and that players could put at random or by design to locations that have set abilities. This way Pittplayer could have have his Festival, and if at some point down the line someone comes up with a cool location idea there are spots for it.

Having encounters in Arkham that led downward isn't a bad idea, but perhaps we might explain how the scholars arrived at the dig?

The vortices are entery points to Arkham?

The card solution is an excellent idea. The only thing that I am uncertain off is how those cards would reflect certain Great Old Ones tremor abilities? Specific cards could be designed for each new Great Old One. That really isn't such a bad idea.

Maybe, we should attempt to work in a new Great Old One at this time, and rules for using just the officially listed ones.

The Worm that Gnaws in the Night I am partial too, and when can work the Shaggi into the game.

Any suggestions for a herald or superbeast?

The Worm that Gnaws, which Thecorinthian made seems ready to be used for the Underground as is.

thecorinthian drop me an email at [email protected], and I send you some jpgs. for locations. Some pretty good stuff, just waiting to be used.

i like tremors, not so much the idea of locations under locations. let it be its own thing. and please please all of you working on this board, please read The Case Of Charles Dexter Ward if you havent already, the BEST scenes of underground horror are in there.

@Frank, re: tremor cards: I think actually what we should probably do is have a simpler system of how Tremor markers appear and move, and then have it that whenever an investigator enters the same location marker as a tremor, or vice versa , you draw a Tremor card. There's only one 'Tremor' encounter on each card, and some of them cause the tremor to move away, or move somewhere else, or spawn a monster, and so on. So basically, the tremors are 'wandering events', which is a genuinely new game concept I think. AH doesn't have anything quite like it yet. We can still use the same deck for 'Lost in the Dark' encounters, since there'd be ample space on the cards even if they were small cards.

Also -

Expanding on the idea of really forcing the investigators to 'explore' the locations, how about including mission- or task-like things in the encounter decks? This is a bit inspired by the Innsmouth jailbreak thing (my copy of Innsmouth arrived this morning)

So like this, using the 'Ruins' neighbourhood and the Temple (from my latest version of the board, earlier on this thread):

Technically this is a 'trick' card, which looks like one thing on the back and is something else on the front. This may not be a good idea, since it creates a bit of ambiguity about whether or not you're really having an Arkham Encounter (which some special abilities refer to). But it might be worth the trade-off, just for the added fun.

Yeah, I like the wandering events thing, my main concern is that they have a timeline to happen by so that people actually go after them. Otherwise people might be tempte to just ignore the entire board, which is very much not the plan. So the events should have a countdown until they start affecting other boards and become worse . This makes there be an incentive to go down and trigger the events (even if they can be bad) before too long.

My suggestion would be to have each marker be simply a color and a movement symbol on both sides. The color can correspond to the neighborhood color of the street area it is placed in. Thereafter it simply moves as directed. Street areas (or mybe just one street area) adjacent to the ones that spawn tremors can spigot into a vortex. When a Tremor hits a vortex you get a Tremors in Arkham event, which is usually rather worse than a Tremors in the Depths event. This way there is always at least one turn where the players can move in and stop the event from hitting Arkham and it is advantageous for them to do so and they can still choose to not do so in order to do other things.

Now the question of when to spawn a Tremor counter, that's quite open in my opinion. Reasonable possibilities include:

• Every time there is a monster surge.
• Every time the Terror level rises.
• Every time a Doom token is placed.
• Every Mythos Phase.

It could even reasonably be more than one of those, depending upon how many of these events we want to happen during a game. For example, if one is placed whenever a Doom token hits the floor then against Cthulhu you'll probably see 9 or 10 Tremor Events (combined Tremors in Arkham and Tremors in the Depths events).

-Frank

Hello -

Images on the way TheCorinthian.

Why not keep with the Tremor card idea of yesterday, that incorporated Tremors in Arkham, in the Underground, and Lost? Wandering tremor effects could be handled nicely by these cards. An investigator might encounter a tremor in the undergrounds, and the effect says bascially, "The tremor has moved away," or is "Only shadows on the wall."

Frank summed up the tremor mechanic rather eloquently.

"My suggestion would be to have each marker be simply a color and a movement symbol on both sides. The color can correspond to the neighborhood color of the street area it is placed in. Thereafter it simply moves as directed. Street areas (or mybe just one street area) adjacent to the ones that spawn tremors can spigot into a vortex. When a Tremor hits a vortex you get a Tremors in Arkham event, which is usually rather worse than a Tremors in the Depths event. This way there is always at least one turn where the players can move in and stop the event from hitting Arkham and it is advantageous for them to do so and they can still choose to not do so in order to do other things."

I'm working on another draft of the board, which is hopefully a bit nearer to what we want, but isn't perfect yet.

Here's how it works at the moment, in sequence.

1. Event 'X' causes a Tremor marker to be placed on the board. Currently I'm using monster movement patterns as X, so there are three places Tremors can appear, each corresponding to a pair of movement patterns. This means that you will almost always get a new Tremor in the Mythos phase. (However I'm not sure I like this; it would be better if we tied the three tremor-spawn-points to different events. For example, one triggers when there's a monster surge, one when a gate tries to open on a seal, and one triggers when the terror level goes up.)

2. Tremors move during the Mythos phase. Each Tremor marker has a dimension symbol on both sides (i.e. it's the same on both sides). Whenever that symbol comes up on a Mythos card, the Tremor marker moves along the Tremor Movement Path . I have added these paths to the board. Investigators and monsters can't move along them. In many cases Tremors will pass through a location and across into another neighbourhood, and investigators will have to go "the long way around" in order to catch the tremor. Of course, since Tremors have dimension symbols, we can (and probably should) include a rule which says that they're removed by gate-closings, just like monsters are.

3a. Tremors reach 'The Pit'. The Tremor tracks are purely 'downhill' - Tremors won't move one way then back. And all the tracks will eventually cause the Tremor to fall into the Pit. When a Tremor moves into The Pit, Event Y happens. I haven't decided what Event Y is yet either, but it has to be pretty severe - a Doom token is added, for example, or the First Player is devoured. Alternatively, 'Tremor Reaches Pit' can be one of the types of 'encounter' on the Lost in the Dark cards. They should clearly be the really dangerous effects, like earthquakes, gate bursts, rains of magma, dogs and cats living together, that type of thing. Of course, tremors won't necessarily reach the pit, because:

3b. If an investigator moves into the same location as a tremor, or a tremor moves on to an investigator , you draw the Lost/Dark card and resolve a different entry on the list - 'Tremor Disrupted' or whatever. These will be nasty events - sometimes hurting the investigator, delaying them, spawning a monster, or (occasionally) doing worse stuff. In most cases, the Tremor marker then returns to the cup/stack, so the investigators have stopped that tremor, although of course more will be on the way.

A few other points about how this will work:

- 'Collapsed' (yellow-marked) locations on the Underground board are initially closed and can only be opened up by specific encounters in other underground locations. In many cases, tremor tracks run right through 'collapsed' locations, and tremor markers ignore the 'closed' status. So unless they run around the board opening up the collapsed locations, the investigators will sometimes have a very limited window of opportunity to jump into the way of the tremor markers.

- Due to the exploration stuff on underground cards, there will also be other encounters which make tremor-chasing more difficult. For example, if you sit in the path of a tremor, you might end up having an encounter first which collapses the location. If this happens, you'd be shunted out to the street, but the tremor would still carry on through where you were. Of course, a few encounters will also let you affect tremors directly - moving them backwards, or discarding them etc.

I still think that Tremors should be moving up towards the surface rather than down into the pit. They should be coming out of pits. Other than that, sure.

-Frank

TheCorinthian those collapsed locations that need encounter to open up, or encounters that might close off locations certainly captures the feel of working together in an extremely dangerous underground environment.

I was thinking that tremors might go down, as you suggest, but really most of them ought to go up. The evil rises to the surface and all hell breaks loose, perhaps literally.

I was going under the impression that you wanted them to go both ways. You had mentioned earlier that if they went down add a Doom token or something like that. Do you recall that Lovecraft tale that takes place miles under the pyramids of Egypt? An unfortunate soul spies on a grand sacrifice to some elder being, and barely finds his way to the surface again. A changed man.

Well, that is what I was thinking about tremors that go down. They are feeding some giant uber beast, and that brings it closer to being released. Furthermore, having investigators going deeper and deeper is a play characteristic that seems ambient in a good way.

lemmingsunday said:

I do recall that story - it's one of my favourites. It's called Under the Pyramids, and I drew on it heavily when making Golden Scarab . (HPL ghost-wrote the story for Harry Houdini, incidentally, and Houdini is the narrator of the story. Houdini's real name, if anyone didn't know this, is Erich Weiss - so he's the only 'real person' to appear as an Arkham Horror card, as far as I know.) The "Proto-Sphinx" (or whatever it is) from that story would make a great supermonster herald, but I'd feel a bit odd doing it, because I already made it as an AO for Cult of the Golden Scarab. Still, I might give it a try.

The reason I had the tremors moving towards 'The Pit' is that I imagined that the Pit is where all our supermonsters would appear - so it's the equivalent of Sentinel Hill, except that the supermonsters may move off it.

I could change the tremor tracks so that tremors sometimes go one way and sometimes another , so that some of them head up towards the surface (hitting Arkham) and others reach the pit (disturbing the 'pit-dweller' herald in its slumber). However that would mean having two Tremor movement directions, whereas right now I've just added one (it's 'the red path', and any tremor that moves black or white moves that way). If I 'split' tremor movement, then it really has to become 'black/white' arrows, and suddenly the board becomes very visually confusing, because some locations have two seperate black/white arrows, one on a red line (for tremors) and one on a normal movement line (for monsters). It's easily solved if I just 'integrate' tremor movement with normal monster movement, but then I lose all the cool ideas like the fact that tremors move along special routes that investigators don't have access to.

Also , the 'supermonster heralds' aren't meant to be compulsory, so there'd be some games where the Pit is empty, and the tremors still have to do something when they reach the Pit. I suppose the Pit could reach to the surface, so really the Pit is the entrance to the underground board, as well as being the deepest chasm? How would everyone feel about that? It'd be a fairly cosmetic change - but it would make it make more sense if we want to add effects that affect Arkham.

I had one other idea, which might solve our "How do you get to the underground board?" problem: the board could come with two custom 'gate' markers which don't lead to Other Worlds, but instead lead down into the Underground board. When a gate into the underground board is drawn from the gate stack, it behaves almost like a normal gate (for the purposes of surges, adding a token etc), except that if you want to get back and close it, you have to go through and explore specific things in the underground board first (or alternatively, an underground board gate is just permanent and can't ever be closed). Then, 'The Pit' is the location which links the Underground Board with Arkham, and things moving up through there are placed on the open gate in Arkham, and can start moving around town (according to their normal rules).

Actually yeah, screw it, I'll just reverse to the direction the tremors move in. It's easy enough. Then I'll put 'portals' on the underground board at the end of the tremor tracks, leading to particular Arkham locations.

There are 24 gate tokens in the stack, so having people have to draw a special gate token before they can go downstairs is almost just like not allowing people to go to the board at all. People can go to Kingsport by the trainstation and paying a dollar, there's no reason you couldn't have similar mechanics for getting down below. Just arbitrarily say that there are certain board spaces where you can pay something and a movement point to move to the new board. Obvious choices would be the Graveyard (Lose 1 Monster Trophy), the Artists' Colony (Lose 1 Sanity), Devil's Hopyard (lose 1 Stamina), and I don't know... something in Innsmouth for something else. Maybe let you permanently open a "free" entrance to and from Innsmouth by paying a Gate trophy? Not sure.

Anyway, one of the very real advantages of having the tremors move "up" is that you could tier it off so that they started in the deeper areas that were initially inaccessible. This way, as the Investigators opened up the lower levels they would have more control over when ad how they interacted with the Tremors. While only the upper most level of the Darkness was accessible, the Investigators might have as little as a one turn window to intercept a Tremor before it hit surface. When they opened up one of the deeper neighborhoods they would have a chance to intercept the Tremors earlier if they wanted to take it. As for waking up the beast in the pit, I genuinely think that should be a prospect of Tremors reaching the surface. After say three people get kidnapped, they get fed to the beast and it goes on a rampage.

-Frank

i like to be the voice of reason.... tremors sound a little like the vortex acts like the kingsports rifts, which i hate!!! please dont have it go monster movement that is a pain in the ***!

pittplayer said:

With literally all due respect: everyone likes to be the voice of reason. You, however, are not one. You've been using a lot of exclamation marks and accusing a fair number of people of "cheating" for having different interpretations of ambiguous rules than you. That's not reason, that's beligerancy. If you want to be a voice of reason, you have to make reasoned arguments. That means using actual math, logic, and complete sentences. Simply saying that you hate something and using masked swear words is literally the opposite of being reasonable.

Monster Movement icons are very good for an expansion set because:

• They scale to any sets you happen to be using, because every set of Mythos cards has the same monster movement symbols no matter what gates it is or is not opening.
• Happen exactly once per turn, and are not subject to vagueries of encounter decks or GOO abilities.
• Occur during a phase that the players really do interact with every turn, unlike say Upkeep which is sometimes glossed over.
• Are divided into distinct and evenly likely subunits.

Your turn. You can try to make a reasonable counter argument that has distinct points and a persuasive demeanor. One that does not, for example, use dismissable tertiaries like strings of exclamation marks or invectives.

-Frank

you dont have to like my ideas and thoughts but we all allowed to have them!! haha! do we all just agree with each other and be nice nice? i find that to be boring. i have reasonable points and i have said nothing negative about anyone that didn't come at me first, and some verbal jousting is fun every once in a while.

back to your point. i dont like the kingsport rift mechanic cause it is one more thing to have to keep track of. the deep one uprising track is perfectly simple and easy to keep track of, so is the dunwich track. a lot of people dont play arkham horror cause there is so much to keep track of! it slows down the game and makes it more like bookkeeping then a fun lovecraftian romp through arkham. so as everyone knows i like simple elegant rules and i feel that using the monster movement stuff to open tremors is a little to much for my tastes! and it is a valid point and i am allowed to have it.

@sorry at thecorithian! dont mean to waste space on your cool arkham underground thread with this, just had to make a point. great work all and i will continue to try to help. i do like the tremors idea and i havent thought of a better way to do them but i am thinking of the problem and i am just saying lets hear ALL ideas and come up with something cool!

btw, frank i have a lot of respect for you and i think you have a lot of great ideas and it makes me a little sad that you blew up at me, i dont see why but my bad, i think you are always worth reading when you post your ideas.

Hello-

Pittplayer what don't you like about the tremor movement? Maybe, I am slow here, but they are going to move like monsters. They'll have a gate symbol and if a Mythos Cards shows that symbol off to the races they go.