Yesterday had a two-player-game against Rise of Elder Things (my first one). It was quite epic (3,5 hours long), and we nearly won - had all requirements for 4 Mysteries, but then, during Mythos Phase, both of our Investigator's (Finn and Tommy) died (we started out with Lily and Ursula), which caused Elder Things to awaken. Thus Defeat by Elimination.

Anyway, near the end I ended up with about 20 Assets, Unique Assets, Spells and Artifacts in my possessions, due to an Defeated-Investigator-Encounter. It was a little overwhelming and too good to be true, imho. Therefore I thought about methods to make Defeat feel a little bit more significant. Wouldn't it be thematic, that an Investigator would lose some of his possessions while humping to the nearest City, barely alive, possibly hunted by some evil entity?

A quite thematic tweak came to mind:

- Investigator went Insane = discard all Spells and Clues (Investigator forgot chants and important knowledge).

- Investigator got Crippled = discard all physical possessions, like Tickets, Non-Ally-Assets, and Artifacts (Investigator had to leave stuff behind in order to get him/herself to safety).

- In any case, always discard half of his/her Allies, either randomly or by choice (some of them ran for their life, were honorably removed from office, or just decided to cowardly abandon their friend in need).

And on the occasion, that an Investigator would go both Insane AND Crippled at the same time, just consider him Devoured instead.

I take the game is too easy for you.

Having a defeated investigator mean losing any improvement tokens you had and spending 1-2 turns to get a new investigator to recover his belongings. The time is the biggest problem usually.

Still having the high influence investigators defeated tend to not backfire (looks at charlie).

Well not always it's possible to recover a defeated investigator belonging - for instance when there is a power monster guarding it, or it is too far away.

The game does not, by any means, feel easy for me. And I thank the Gods (Old and New ones alike) for it.

Note, that even that one game, where I ended up with 20+ possessions due to an Defeated-Investigator-Encounter, we lost. Still, it kinda felt wrong, getting so much stuff from a single encounter where I didn't even have to test any Attribute. And since I like some thematic chrome in my games, I'll keep making up variants like that.

How about this one?

When an Investigator is defeated, before discarding Improvement-Tokens, test each Attribute and (maybe) lose some stuff:

- LORE failed: discard all Artifacts

- INFLUENCE failed: discard all Allies

- OBSERVATION failed: discard all Clues

- STRENGTH failed: discard all physical (non-Ally) Possessions, like (Unique) Assets and Tickets

- WILL failed: discard all Spells

But I still like that tweak, that when an Investigator gets defeated due to simultaneous loss of Health and Sanity, consider him devoured instead. It removes the thematically rather awkward situation of the player having to decide on whether his Investigator got insane or crippled.