Hello guys,

Frrank, I hope your still with us. I am largely in agreement that the underworld ought to be interesting, and doing something game-wise, regardless if an investigator is there or not.

The sacrifice suggestion that TheCorinthian put forward as something that could be used much as a G.O.O.'s worshipper ability is something I think we ought to explore more. Having a mechanic that kidnaps allies, investigators, and effects the Terror Level seems solid.

Blight cards are something that I find extremely colorful, but new ones could have a more interactive quality.

Encounters that bring in personal story cards is a grand idea. I really like that one. I suggest that a D6 die could be used as a count down timer for the number of turns before a personal story card expires. Nothing revolutionary about that.

Having green monsters appear in the pit I am all in favor of. The journey through the darkness to encounter them is rich with story possibilites.

TheCorinthian your superheralds that you designed a while back, could work quite nicely with the underground as you suggested, but I wouldn't make them much different, with the exception of when they enter play and were. Instead of heralds they could just be supermonsters that start the game in the underworld. They grow stronger as the game advances, so taking them out early isn't bad. Hard, but not a bad game plan, as it also neutralizes their abilites.

Personally, the whole herald idea I think could be scratched in favor of underground scenarios. If you want to use the Blight scenario in synch, with earthquakes, then go for it. Or perhaps one just wants to play with the ghoul wars, or maybe, with a crawling worm scenario.

TheCorinthian your stranger deck is quite appealing, but I am not sure about it. Wild card monster/allies in a monster chip form is something that has potential. But the more I think about it the more I think they could be green monsters that have a specific point of appearance, like pit monsters.

The Mutation deck...hmmm...perhaps a type of card the would represent being tainted/marked by the G.O.O.s themselves, which largely would be spirit destroying, consumming, altering or possession, might be fun. But it seems a deck of cards isn't really needed. Personal story cards could do this nicely. Personal story cards could affect reputation.

Nyogtha's Tendril is something that I am working on expanding with new G.O.O. appendage/powers that would occasionally come into play as a result of the underground. They might be green pit monsters.

There are a lot of good ideas flowing about, they just need to be forged.

lemmingsunday said:

The more I think about this idea, the more I think it might really work - although it will probably need to be part of new Ancient Ones, instead of heralds. Although it could easily be both. Here's how you do it:

Some encounters say things like "Make a Sneak [-1] check to free the prisoner. If you succeed, draw 1 random ally. If you fail, lose 1 Sanity, and a sacrifice is made to the Ancient One."

Then the Ancient One has a sacrifice ability. We could replace the worshipper column (if that's possible), it could just be included under a 'Sacrifice' heading in the main column. It would says "Whenever a sacrifice is made, place a Blight card in play," or "Whenever a sacrifice is made, remove all clue tokens from unstable locations" and so on and so on.

The encounters would need to all do at least one other thing, so that something still happened even if the AO didn't have a sacrifice ability (so that the encounters are still worthwhile even if you're using an official AO).

Heralds could easily 'piggy-back' on to the action by having text like this: "Whenever a sacrifice is made to the Ancient One, such-and-such happens." In fact, almost any other type of card (Environment Mythos cards, for example) could trigger off sacrifices.

We wouldn't want there to be a sacrifice on every encounter, so we'd probably need to make the sacrifice effects quite severe in most cases, so that the investigators think it's worth trying to prevent sacrifices when they do happen.

lemmingsunday said:

Personal Stories are a great thing to give investigators, but I don't think it's a good idea to try to use Personal Stories for anything much different from what they're already used for. So if we're going to add them, they need to be 'un-assigned' stories that any investigator can pick, and which you can take in place of your name-specific story. Then obviously we need to design a shitload of them, because they're great fun and there's no reason not to.

lemmingsunday said:

On terms of how it actually works, a scenario isn't really much different from a herald, is it? It's just a sheet you stick beside the board with special rules on it. However most of the scenarios tend to quite radically dictate the components used in the game, and I emphatically do not want to do that. We can include scenarios, but the emphasis should be on modular content which players can combine in any way they want, to balance the game themselves. For one thing, that gives us a much better excuse for making unbalanced content.

The supermonster heralds can't just be turned into pure monsters - the only reason they were spawned by heralds in the first place was that the rules for a more complex monster won't fit on a monster marker. They'll barely fit on a herald. And I wanted the supermonsters to be 'stand-alone' when I first designed them, becuase at that point I wasn't making an expansion. We can make things easier by having an expansion rulebook which includes most of the common rules for the "pit-dweller" herald type, but if the supermonsters want to be really special, they're gonna need some sort of rules card, and a herald is the most sensible option.

I think Mutation/Transition cards might be best suited to being one of those special AO abilities, like Dust cards. So the Green God herald/AO will hand out mutations, but there's no need for it to be a general game mechanism.

Re: Nyogtha's tendril: I love the idea of a subterranean AO that pops up tentacles everywhere , not just in one place. Ages ago, before Kingsport came out, someone posted a custom Atlach-Nacha AO which didn't have a final battle - it just placed its eight "legs" down on the board, and the investigators had to run around the board killing all the spider's legs. It was a rules nightmare, but something like it could probably be made to work.

Hello,

Many good points TheCorinthian,

Heralds and scenarios are quite similar, although I had a notion, more of thought fragment, that scenarios might offer more possibilities.

I certainly don't have any problem with introducing more personal story cards. Perhaps, a herald might have a story deck or something akin to an unfolding quest dynamic.

Ancients Ones that don't have a sacrifice ability, would need some general ability. Perhaps, a random sacrifice event deck.

Your super heralds are a blast to play with. I see what you mean, in that they aren't a pure monster, but incarnations of a herald.

Yeah, I had a game or two with that custom Atlach-Nacha. The Final Battle rules had to be made up as we went along. One idea is that a specific Ancient One might have tendril like appendages that came into play under certain circumstances. My general feel is the tendril ought to be extremely tough and hard to evade. Failure results in the investgator being dragged to the Pit, and facing a superbeasty, being sacrificed, or...

An Ancient One with a mutation deck could be quite entertaining. The investigators will never be same in spirit or body again.

I had been thinking more along the lines of Impersonal Stories. Ones that used the same basic mechanics as Personal Stories but came online for everyone to participate in. It would be entirely possible to hand out additional personal stories to characters dring play. Say one where you get the obsidian shards and then you have to get them translated and go to Gharne before the monsters find out about it and steal your shards and your kidneys.

Regardless, when a new story gets dealt out we have to make sure that the pass and fail conditions are based on events that happen since the story comes into play . So a story might get a stamina token on it when the terror level rises and go to the fail condition when there are two stamina tokens - rather than going to failure at Terror Level 3. It's important that they be written like that because these story quests might come into the game very late and we want to make sure that nothing stupid happens like having the story succeed and fail the moment it lands on the board (if I recall correctly, it is actually possible for this to be the case if certain investigators come in as replacements for devoured/retired investigators on a highly advanced board - Kate coming in as a replacement for a character with several gate trophies for example).

As for Sacrifices, I think the best way to handle these is to have blight cards get transferred to the Herald or Ancient One that takes sacrifices. At this point the blight stays in play (because the citizen is still missing), but the card acts as a counter (so we don't need to make an additional token type), and the blight can no longer be removed with rescue attempts (because the person in question got their heart ripped out on a cthonic altar).

-Frank

Blights could certainly function as a Sacrifice deck. It certainly works in the sense that those characters have been taken out of play, and remain so, as a result of open heart surgery via maw and claw.

Frank's take on an Impersonal Story Deck is actually what I was thinking a while back, when some of us where brainstorming about how to make clue tokens have a story element behind them. Yes, Impersonal Story Cards would have to clearly be designed so they won't have been or will quickly be triggered when entering play.

TheCorinthian both of the above would meet your modular desires.

Frank how would you like to develop the Ghoul Wars? Would a herald/scenario not work, or is this something you would like as a permanent element?

did you all give up on it? can i know take over this thread and actually do something with it now that people are done having way to complicated ideas and yelling that my ideas are not worthwhile? can we post the board into another thread and keep going with it?

How about this... The reason to go underground is to travel between locations.... This way, if an investigator doesnt have the cash for the train, they can head underground and brave the dangers there to travel. Make travel between boards and locations work simular to other world travel. Have an underground board that links other underground areas together for faster, but more dangerous travel.

pittplayer said:

Sorry if we were shouting down your ideas - Frank and me disagreed over some stuff but I think the latest version of the board is probably 'broad' enough for anyone to create content for it.

Here are the board links again:

Image of the board (not very high-res): farm4.static.flickr.com/3340/3639400457_fae8c5bcdc_b.jpg

Zipped-up versions of the .eon files can be found here: sites.google.com/site/cultofthegoldenscarab/Home/underground

Obviously anyone is free to create whatever sorts of cards they want, but in order to have a chance of making some of the ideas from earlier work, here are some guidelines for what encounters in the underground should probably do:

- Stable locations should sometimes allow investigators to remove a "closed" marker from an adjacent yellow-star (collapsed) location.

- A common effect of encounters should be "...and all tremors move on the black/white path." We need to get the tremors moving or there's no threat.

- Most locations should have some tricky encounters which can result in a sacrifice . What a sacrifice does will depend on the herald/AO.

- 'Tremor' cards need to have three entries on them: "Lost in the Dark", "Investigator Uncovers Tremor", and "Tremor Enters Arkham".

- The Uncharted Vaults is a blank slate so that we can each put in a custom location without forcing it on the others. So do whatever you want with it!

Of course there's nothing to stop you just creating fairly normal encounters which don't interact with any of the special rules for the board. Also, we're obviously gonna want new monsters, and new underground-themed items/investigators won't hurt either.

no problem corinthian i love your work it just seemed this idea was spiraling out of control. just want to give it another go.

pittplayer said:

Yes. Sorry if that wasn't clear.I gave up on this project and you are fully within your rights to take this projct in any direction including directions suggested by me without crediting me in any way.

-Frank

3D board Arkham Horror

This publication aims to present my project I had in mind for some time, the size of the model are very small (28x56cm), this is from the beginning been one of the goals that I have assigned, in addition to the gameplay course.
Below you will find photos in addition to a schema, which is the heart of the project in If you would like to engage you on this achievement could return useful.

enrico

this is the plan for the 3d model

That's really great stuff and I want one now but why post it there in the underground expansion thread ?? ^^

why don't u make a dedicated topic ?