Hello everyone!

I have received my copy of MoM, and I have already tried an (unsuccessful) run with it. While I was playing, I had an inspiration of how we could potentially negate the need to put together a Mythos deck and deal with the one inflexible factor in the game: when you run out of Mythos cards, the game ends, without you getting the (slim) chance to fight the awakened AO (not counting Azathoth, of course).

The idea is presented below. Some of you people have a lot more experience with the game mechanics than me, so I am asking you to have a look at it (perhaps even try it out). I will definitely have a try next week to see if this works.

Pulling Mythos Cards

You do not prepare any kind of Mythos deck whatsoever. Instead, you put down all the Mythos cards in nine decks: the various yellow, green and blue cards in 3 different rows, all easy, medium and hard cards in a separate pile next to one another. When it comes to drawing a new Mythos card, you throw 2D6 and consult the chart exactly what colour card you will pick. Then you apply the card as you should.

The closer the Ancient One is to awakening, the more difficult it gets to fight against it. Whether you draw an easy, a medium or a difficult card depends on the Doom tracker. The chart below contains the initial Doom of the AO as well as at what point you will start drawing cards from the medium or hard decks.

(It is advisable to place an Eldritch token on the relevant Doom values to mark where you will have to draw cards from a different deck).

You should consult the Doom tracker the moment you would draw a Mastery card: if the card’s effect advances Doom (which is quite likely), that should only influence your next Mythos Phase.

Should the Doom tracker by some miracle exceed the initial Doom value of the AO at some later point of the game, you will simply continue to draw easy cards. Good on you.

Even if you keep rolling a blue card, there can only be two active blue cards at the same time except when some other card or effect requires a new Rumour to be placed down. If there are already two active Rumours in play, simply re-roll any result which would require you to draw another blue card. On the other hand, if there are two Rumours in play and you once you successfully solve one of them, you roll another blue card. Bad on you.

Naturally, if the AO awakens, you will only draw cards from the respective hard Mythos decks, with one exception: you will not draw new Rumour cards at this stage of the game (an awakened Ancient One will render all lesser evil forces, sinister plots and similar problems irrelevant anyway). The Rumours which are still active at this point will remain in play and affect the game normally until somebody bothers to solve them amidst the carnage the AO causes in the world. Double bad, I guess?

The above method will negate the effect of the green hard card Evil Never Sleeps as it would only require you to throw away that card. Should you follow the above method, simply leave that card out initially or instead advance Doom by 1 when you draw it. Doom has a double effect on the game in this version, so it should be punishment enough.

Also, the above method will require a gaming space of 3X3 new decks, so the game might be a bit more clunky. On the plus side, the game kind of gains a semi-infinite mode as long as the investigators can keep Doom at a reasonable level. Also, the importance of retreating Doom would get a LOT more significant in this way, and clever gameplay with Doom kept on a high level would result in more forgivable Mythos Phases, as a reward for your hard work.

So, the “chart.” As I have absolutely no talent for mathematics, I simply checked the decks of the AOs, counted the cards in the various stages on their sheets and tried to find the logic behind the allocation of cards. The number of cards in a given stage on the AO’s sheet (irrespective of colour) gave me an idea when the game should reach a number on the Doom tracker when you have to start drawing from a more difficult deck, while the number of green and yellow cards kind of told what the chances are to make a 2D6 roll and get that colour as the result.

AO Easy/Medium/Hard draw Card type
acc. to Doom

Rise of the Elder Things 16/11/5 (G 1-5, Y 6-10, B 11-12)

Yig 10/7/4 (G 1-4, Y 5-11, B 12)

Cthulhu 12/9/6 (G 1-4, Y 5-10, B 11-12)

Yog-Sothoth 14/11/6 (G 1-4, Y 5-10, B 11-12)

Azathoth 15/11/7 (G 1-4, Y 5-10, B 11-12)

Shub-Niggurath 13/10/5 (G 1-4, Y 5-10, B 11-12)

Itaqua 13/10/5 (G 1-4, Y 5-11, B 12)

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to all.

Meaneye,

the structure of the Mythos deck is something that represents the core of the EH experience. It's not by chance that three subdecks are formed to make a bigger Mythos deck, and it's not by chance that the Mythos deck has a specific number of cards. Knowing the stages of the Mythos deck represents a way to plan your strategy: you'll know exactly how many rumors, how many reckonings and how many events you'll have to resolve, and you can plan to leave this or that gate open to avoid surges or plan when to risk taking this or that condition.

Removing this fixed structure from the game to go with a different cards distribution wil totally transform strategy into anarchy and result in the game being impacted too much by unpredictable factors.

The thickness of the Mythos deck should not be worrying you: it's not that common that you reach the end of the deck playing. I understand that the game has a steep learning curve and that the first experience could be not enthusiastic, but I'd suggest you before trying any custom variant, to spend at least 10 plays to understand how the game is structured and how to deal with the different strategical problems. The game is extremely solid and based on sound math, and it's worth studying it a little bit. If you need help with the basic strategy, I'd suggest you to read this article , detailing pro and contra of investigators and a lot more of interesting stuff. The guy who wrote it had, at that time, something like 90 plays under his belt, and he really knows what he's talking about.

Hope this helps

JULIA

Also, you know right that rolling 2D6 will mostly result in 7 (6 cases out of 36) so that, if you wanted all cards to have the same odds to be triggered, rolling 2D6 will not result in a homogeneous distribution, right? And clearly you cannot roll any '1' on 2D6? Or am I missing something in your table?

Just looking at Ithaqau, if you were to shuffle his mythos deck all together in one big ole pile, the chances of drawing yellow, green, or blue cards would be about 50%, 37% and 12%, respectively. Using your system, the chances would be about 80%, 17%, and 3%. (Like Julia mentioned, with 2d6 the numbers don't distribute evenly, numbers in the middle show up more often than high or low numbers). Using a d12 on your chart is much closer to what you want.

In addition to what Julia said about strategy and what not, I think it's important for the game to have a timer to keep the investigators from lollygagging about thinking they have all the time in the world. Without the mythos deck acting as a timer, I imagine the game could get rather long and boring when played with the best strategy, since the investigators can (and probably should) spend all their efforts on gate control and take their sweet time solving mysteries. I would (if I wanted to win instead of have fun) make gates the top priority, occasionally leveling up my stats and buying stuff. No need to even start on the mysteries till I'm good and ready. (I guess this is another way of saying that "semi-infinite mode" doesn't sound like a plus to me).

All that being said, there's nothing wrong with trying things out for the fun of it. If I were forced to play the game with something like your house rule, however, I would at least insist that things go crazy hard when you reach a certain number of rounds, like maybe draw 2 mythos cards and always from the hard deck or something. You can't just expect Cthulhu to sit around and do nothing while the puny humans go around closing all of his beautiful gates.

Aye, good points Wmtheta, especially when you talk about the clock vs the management of gates. If no timer were set, investigators will spend the first hour and a half simply boosting stats and sealing gates and then they will kill the game.

Additionally, since you're talking about Ithaqua, I'd like to add that the structure of the Mythos deck for Ithaqua was expressively designed considering the fact that you need to spend focus to avoid Hypothermia, and the color of cards in each segment of the Mythos deck was thought to allow some strategy based on risk management. Removing such a structure from the Mythos deck, and Ithaqua will feast on the investigators (and he's enough strong anyway, I believe).

Well, I have tried a game wih the above method, using the Rise of te Elder Things as the AO, which I won with three investigators dead and replaced by the end of it. Here is what I found.

First of all, a big facepalm. Possible result of "1" with a 2D6 ? I was an idiot. Luckily, I had a twelve-sided dice at home, which also eliminated the problem of getting more "7" results on average.

Second, it kind of worked in that I was aware that I only needed to avoid the advancement of Doom while working on the Mystery with one or two guys, and I would eventually get things done. I did a lot of expeditions, and I kept managing to retreat Doom throughout the game. I had fun with it for a while, but there was one factor which I did not count on, and because of which, I will probably not play the game again this way. It took almost half a day to finish it, even with a lunchbreak. By the end, my head hurt like hell. I lost track somewhere in the middle, but I had about 25-30 rounds, and I seriously wanted to just give up. The last 5 rounds were no fun, just exhaustion and desperation to reach the final mystery and just get over it (kind of like the investiogators would feel in real life, really).

Anyway, thank you for the comments, Julia and wmtheta. Happy new year for everyone; may none of us fall into a cryogenic tube today, only to wake up 1000 years in the future (but may FFG make an awesome game out of it ).

Hey, if this were to happen, I wanna wake up with all the Eldritch Horror expansions appeared in the future near my bed so that I can recover the time lost hybernated!

Happy new year everyone! And for those of us who follow a different calendar, some good wishes never hurt Best in life folks