It's snowing in my city, so I decided it's a good day to fight Ithaqua!
Characters used: Wilson Richards and Finn Edwards to start.
The first several turns mostly favored Finn with Wilson getting condition after condition and becoming paranoid for the entire rest of the game . Give him a large enough dice pool, and he will fail every time! On the plus side, Wilson only once had to deal with the effects of his paranoia, but circumstances largely negated the worst of its effect. Seems that poor Wilson doesn't like people but excels at single die rolls for everything but learning to like people. Why? Because he doesn't like those extra dice either! They look shifty!
Meanwhile Finn was amassing quite a fortune in magic, equipment, and allies. And then tragedy struck. One of the two rumor cards they faced triggered its final effect followed by a very unhappy mythos card and poor Finn froze to death ( or so we thought ). The other rumor card was dealt with swiftly by a curmudgeonly, and lonelier, but well-placed Wilson.
Enter Akachi Onyele. Due largely to Wilson's thoughtfulness in leaving Finn's corpse alone, Akachi was able to visit Arkham where Finn died, only to find that he was only mostly dead (full body frostbite is unpleasant) and has left her all his stuff. Enter a quickly well-equipped Akachi (whom only gets more well equipped through a series of following events). Meanwhile Wilson finally got his butt out of Arkham and resolved the first of the mysteries.
For the next several turns gates were popping up like popcorn, and monsters were growing plentiful, but the heroes were trotting the globe to quickly resolve the second mystery. Wilson was beat to hell, was mostly out of his mind, and was about to do battle with three monsters in Tokyo because the omens had been bad, and doom had marched down to two (even after a couple timely doom retreats, partly thanks to Wilson). He might take one, even two of them, they're pretty scrawny beasts, but he's almost certain to die in the effort. But maybe, just maybe , Akachi can finish the final one and close the Tokyo gate. Maybe it'd give them just enough breathing room to finish the final mystery.
Akachi, meanwhile, had been using her arsenal to kill monsters and close gates elsewhere in the world to slow the roll of the death knell. She was also accumulating clues at a breakneck pace. So many clues. Clues to great old ones, clues to the holy grail, clues to Montezuma's treasure, even Colonel Sanders' secret recipe. All the clues. But time was short, and the world was down to two turns at most before Ithaqua dropped down the chimney like a toothy Santa Claus. She headed to Tokyo to join up with Wilson for the monster mash. But what was this? A gate in Sydney just a short hop from Akachi! The final mystery was up, but it was a beast, and there was pretty much no chance to finish it before the big bad came to town. But if she could just close one gate, she had a task that would allow her to complete the final mystery immediately. That gate in Sydney with the scrawny ghoul guarding it, that's the one! She just needed to turn the boat around!
She goes. Wilson was all alone, staring at the teeth of three hungry monsters in the frozen streets of Tokyo! She makes it to Sydney, kicks a ghoul in the nads, and works her mojo (with some help from some friendly ghouls who strangely wanted their nads unbludgeoned)! THE GATE CLOSES!
With a snowy plop the end of the world was averted, and Wilson was spared a cold, bloody death, and so was the rest of the world (though he didn't much care because he clearly doesn't like people).
Takeaway: Ithaqua is an unforgiving foe. So much hypothermia. Constant, unrelenting hypothermia. It got Finn killed (mostly) and left Wilson a partially ambulatory ice-cube for most of the game. My roommate (who played Finn) was pissed when rumor and mythos conspired to deal five damage to Finn in one fell swoop. Wilson spent a lot of the game catching naps and not healing much because when the world is about to end, and you're in a city full of people you don't like anyway, the best thing is to get some sleep right?
But it was a good, close game, and we stuck with it even after my roommate decided that maybe I needed to go outside and play in the snow for the rest of the night for getting poor Finn into that mess.
Two player game played, Ithaqua beaten with the doom track at 2.
Edited by Deathseed