Here is a question I thought of. What if due to a run of bad cards and bad rolling, during the course of a game many investigators were devoured and you started to run out of investigators to replace them? What happens then? Does the player stop playing if there is no more investigators to replace the one that was just devoured?

Ken on Cape said:

I just had such a run of bad luck, but for a somewhat different reason. I've lost 8 or 8 of my last 10 games in the campagin I just finished. Whenever an old one wins, the devoured investigators are removed from the pile of investigators. I was down to my last four investigators and one was devoured. I went on with the three I had left and they were subsequently devoured in the final battle. You just can't stop tying to save the world. This was my 4th such run through. I won the first two and the Old Ones won the last two. This last tun through was really a convincing loss. The Old Ones are meaner, and/or the investigators are weaker and/or I've forgotten how to play.

Of course, you are asking for a ruling on the possibility of losing enough investigators in a single game. That would truly be a run of bad luck. The most investigators I've had devoured in a single game before the final battle was 3. As far as I know, losing irreplaceable investigators is not one of the timing clocks.

The rulebook is unclear on many things, but this ain't one of 'em.

Devoured investigators aren't permanently removed from the game. When an investigator is devoured, you just shuffle their investigator sheet back into the pile. Then you draw a new investigator for that player. So not only is it impossible to run out of investigators, it's also possible to draw the exact same investigator again straight away.

thecorinthian said:

OT: Ah, the good ol' days of Talisman 2nd ed. The combo we used had 36 characters, already using the "say a number; you drew it, you play it rule" back in those late 80s days. In one game I got killed 4 times . I started off as the Witch Doctor, died, the character deck got reshuffled, got WD again. Died, got WD for the 3rd time. So it was grand pappy, pappy and son all trying to gain the Crown of Command, a true quest of family legends .

Yeah, we noticed that rule the first time we were devoured, and likened it to our RPG background. Either we were resurrected or we went ahead and made a new character that was exactly like our old one because we were too lazy.

That said, we never played this game that way. I never saw a need. We always just eliminated the character for the game. I suppose that, if we went through all (16, 24, 32, 48) investigators, we would just shuffle them all up and draw again. We had one nasty Yog-Sothoth game where five characters were devoured in different, messy ways, but that's the max.

Ken on Cape said:

In my considered opinion you would have to shoot the players one at a time to keep the numbers in balance with the number of investigators.

Perhaps to keep things fair a die roll (oh how pleasingly apt) should be made to decide on who "goes before us" as they say.

Anything else would seem thematically anticlimactic.

- Mariana the ex-nun cultist

Looking at the number of invests sheets... come on, that deck is scarrily huge, that shouldn't be any possible situation.

Hem said:

Normally I'd agree, as in a four-Investigator game it would take 11 turns to devour all 48 Investigators and as you're too busy getting et to seal Gates the game would probably end. However, it's theoretically possible if you draw a lot of monsters that devour on failed combat checks (plus Dimensional Shamblers, if the GOO is Yog). You'd have to be unlucky on the dice and keep throwing yourself at them - probably The Terrible Experiment would need to be involved - but it can happen.

In classic AH with only 16 Investigators it was probably possible.

Ken on Cape said:

If that ever actually comes up, feel free to set the precedent yourself. Choose something and then tell us all about it.