I know that a lot of people have issues with Kingsport. Gates never open there, yet it is some weird unstable nexus that produces rips in spacetime; but in other towns? The rift mechanic is clever in that it does not get diluted with multiple expansions, but investigating the rifts seems to be kind of a detached effort. There should have been specific encounters that removed rift progress tokens, or a location ability that could guarantee some for a price. But the motivation to explore town is nice too.

Anyway, I had an idea for one of these problems that I was thinking of trying next game: whenever a rift opens, you put the rift at the location shown on the last placed rift progress token, not on the activating card's gate location as normal.

So Kingsport causes the rifts, and they open in Kingsport. It'll be a tiny bit less of an obstacle for investigators on other boards because the monsters won't be in their way (often they're not anyway); however, the doom token issue will still be just as much of a problem, and those investigators who want to close rifts will find themselves confronting all those new monsters in order to get the rifts closed.

I know, I know, not really game changing, but it is much more comfortable thematically. I don't like how the place that causes rifts can never get any rifts itself.

I like it a lot. I have played several games where a gate opens with the same mechanic. That made some interesting games.

Since you're changing a few rules, you could count monsters in Kingsport against the monster limit too. That way dealing with monsters wouldn't be "detached" from the main game either.

I'm definitely going to try it as soon as I get Innsmouth out of my system.

Tibs said:

I've thought about this as well. It just doesn't make sense to me that the rifts open in other towns. I've also thought about drawing and placing a monster on each location drawn during the rift progression (which wouldn't count against the monster limit). Alternatively, I thought about adding a monster to the location shown on the mythos every time a token should be drawn for the rift progression track but it is already full (i.e. it already has two tokens on it). So, if these locations were in Arkham, they would count against the monster limit. I guess I could play it both ways and see which way added more threat.

The problem with number two is that you could possibly have monsters appearing in sealed locations, but I guess rifts in the space-time continuum are not the same as gates opening to other worlds.

mageith said:

I had a feeling someone else thought of this already. Yeah, I don't know if I really want to count them towards the limit, because then it would feel like I was making an exception. Besides, I'm starting to like the idea of the monsters spilling into Kingsport and clogging up the streets for the poor investigator who is trying to close the rift.

By the way, didn't get to test this in tonight's game. Dan sent someone over to Kingsport early and left him there almost all game (traded out for another investigator). In our last game, he insisted that I try to pass someone's personal story rather than send him into Kingsport to deal with the rift threat, and we ended up getting burned pretty bad. I guess he knocked rifts up on his personal threat perception.

Another genius idea he had was to enter Innsmouth instead of Dunwich. Dunwich had more clues, weaker monsters, and fewer monsters in the way. He insisted, for some reason. He ended up getting arrested and devoured, costing us a seal (ultimately this cost us the game).

But anyway yeah, I'm still excited about getting this variant rolling.