The Haunting - New Casebook

By OldManWhateley, in Fan Creations

Well, my first stab at a casebook went well enough - it certainly taught me how to design them at the very least. I am now in the midst of writing my second casebook, The Haunting , based on the classsic Call of Cthulhu adventure. In addition to the original scenario, I am drawing upon inspiration from Nyogtha's wonderful Haunted House supplement posted right here on the forums. Hopefully Nyogtha will not be displeased by the use of his material - I will certainly give all the credit for that work to him in the casebook.

Please, Nyogtha, if there is any problem with using your supplemental stuff for Haunted House, please let me know.

I will be posting the casebook in a zip file in both .eons and in pdf - the reason for pdf is so that I can spice the casebook itself up with some artwork. The casebook will be much longer than Dark Dreams and with alot more action ( Dark Dreams turned our rather linear and straight-forward in the story).

I would like to have my casebooks posted to the homepage.mac.com/nephilim/arkham_investigations/ wesite if nephilim would approve. Barring that, I currently maintain a website for my tabletop Call of Cthulhu rpg and am considering expanding it to include a section for Arkham Horror and Arkham Investigations. You can check out the rpg site here: coc-campaign.onlinewebshop.net/

I should be able to post some spoilers for the new casebook in a few days.

Cheers,

Old Man Whateley

Great news, can't way to try it out :)

Thanks for the hard work.

tibor

Hi OMW

My ego is suitably inflated so you have my blessing to source stuff from my Haunted House expansion. gran_risa.gif So long as I get a gold plated copy of the casebook; well maybe not gold plated, be a bugger to download! gui%C3%B1o.gif

Great! Glad to hear there's another casebook in the works! And, as has been said thank you for your HARD work. I'm trying to complete a fullboard expansion (same size as regular expansion boards) and it is a BEAST! I imagine a casebook is harder, since you have to keep track of all the redirects and pointers.

Howdy. Neph here. Sorry I've been out of the board game scene for a bit. Life. It happens.

Anyway, I'd be happy to post your two casebooks. Just private-message me the canonical title and download location for each casebook, and also give me a short blurb you want as a description for the casebook, plus any writing / art credits you want to add for each casebook.

Nice to see some casebook action!

Its great to hear enthusiasm about another casebook! Thank you very much Nygotha for permissio to use your material - you will most definitely get gredit in the book for this!

Neph, I will PM you with the info for the Arkham Investigations website once this casebook is finished - then both casebooks can be uplaoded to your site!

I have finished the prelimiary work on the casebook, having the general layout and direction worked out, so now its the actual writing and proof-reading to complete. This casebook will be unique in the use of another board expansion along with vignettes.

I shoould have some spoilers posted by the weekend.

Old Man Whateley.

Hi,

I am a newbie here and have just recently picked up Arkham Horror. After some initial play and general appreciation of the game, I was truly happy to discover the Investigation mod, which is exactly what I started to dream up for myself as a response to the somewhat limited gameplay of the original setup. However, I have been downloading the available casebooks and add-ons and are now close to a first try of Investigations. I was thinking about starting with Old Man Whateley´s Dark Dreams Of Dagon. There´s one thing that confuses me though:

in the rules, it is described as though the End Game Sequence has been revised with Investigations as well, up to each case book author´s own discretion, more or less? But I haven´t been able to find any directions in the casebook, in my shallow going through it not to reveal anything before playing. Or is the End Game actually being kept from the original AH, with a battle modified by "self-explanatory events to be revealed" from the investigation? I would be very grateful if someone could clarify this for me.

Other than that, I would like to encourage Old Man Whateley for his undertaking of writing casebooks. I know it is a lot of work involved and I am truly grateful for the prospect of playing more cases. Thanks and looking forward to your upcoming work!

best regards

Konoster said:

Hi,

I am a newbie here and have just recently picked up Arkham Horror. After some initial play and general appreciation of the game, I was truly happy to discover the Investigation mod, which is exactly what I started to dream up for myself as a response to the somewhat limited gameplay of the original setup. However, I have been downloading the available casebooks and add-ons and are now close to a first try of Investigations. I was thinking about starting with Old Man Whateley´s Dark Dreams Of Dagon. There´s one thing that confuses me though:

in the rules, it is described as though the End Game Sequence has been revised with Investigations as well, up to each case book author´s own discretion, more or less? But I haven´t been able to find any directions in the casebook, in my shallow going through it not to reveal anything before playing. Or is the End Game actually being kept from the original AH, with a battle modified by "self-explanatory events to be revealed" from the investigation? I would be very grateful if someone could clarify this for me.

Other than that, I would like to encourage Old Man Whateley for his undertaking of writing casebooks. I know it is a lot of work involved and I am truly grateful for the prospect of playing more cases. Thanks and looking forward to your upcoming work!

best regards

First of all, welcome Konoster to the forum and thank you for your praise! I am very happy that people are using my first casebook and are interested in more to come.

As far as to your question about the end game rules, here is the section from the rulebook for Arkham Investigations:

Endgame Sequences
There are only two possible endings to a game of Arkham Investigations: either the investigators finish their investigation in time,
or they don’t. Both of them result in a Arkham Investigations climactic endgame sequence that determines whether you have won or lost the game. If you are told “The Investigation is over,” then you have (probably) succeeded in completing your investigation and are ready
to take on the Ancient One. Turn to the index and follow the instructions for “Endgame.” If instead the Timeline runs out before the
investigators complete their investigation, the villain’s plans have come to fruition. Turn to the index and follow the instructions for
“Endgame.” Typically, the endgame sequence will be much easier if you have completed the investigation.

So, basically, you continue moving through Vignettes and reading paragraphs until either you reach the End Game (which will be described in a particular paragraph in the casebook or the timeline runs out. What might confusing is the sentence that reads: "Turn to the index and follow the instructions for “Endgame.” The Endgame will be listed in the Vignetee Index

In my casebook, Dark Dreams, I actually forgot to include an End Game entry in the Vignette Index - rather, the end game is reached through the series of Vignettes. Hope that helps out.

In other news, progress on the new casebook is going well. I don't have any spoliers to post as of yet but I hope to finish the first version within a week. I am eager to find out people's interest in this caebook - it will be alot of fun to play, and will actually require some investigative work on players' parts.

I also have two more drafts for new casebooks in the works. Naturally, I opted to cannibalize other people's work here on the forum as well. First is Airborne's M achinations of the Mi-go as a sequel to The Whisperer in the Darkness. Next will be makken 123's At the Mountains of Madness expansion, a sequel to Dreasd Sleep in R'lyeh. Hopefully I can get in touch with both persons to make sure they won't mind me cannibalizing their works for casebooks. Writing casebooks is not hard for me, but coming up with ideas is, thus plagarism!

I like the idea of sequels to previous casebooks, as I am toying with campaign rules right now where you start a campaign with one character and use him/her over multiple casebooks.

Hi again and thanks for the enlightment! Yes indeed, that is what perhaps made me a little confused: I didn´t see any End Game inclusion in the index. Thus I started to wonder. Looking forward to the first glimpse of your the new case!

OldManWhateley said:

I like the idea of sequels to previous casebooks, as I am toying with campaign rules right now where you start a campaign with one character and use him/her over multiple casebooks.

Is your idea for a campaign something you have planned as a casebook or something totally different?

Nyogtha said:

OldManWhateley said:

I like the idea of sequels to previous casebooks, as I am toying with campaign rules right now where you start a campaign with one character and use him/her over multiple casebooks.

Is your idea for a campaign something you have planned as a casebook or something totally different?

What I have in mind for campaign rules is to start a game with one casebook and pick your investigator. When you complete the casebook (win or lose), you then play another casebook, using the same investigator (that is, if he survived and was not devoured). At the completion of a casebook, you keep all items, spells, skills, etc that your investigator has on his card at the end of that particluar game. In addition, you can better your investigator at the completion of a successful casebook in several ways - ie, one idea is getting one additional skill card for completing a casebook to represent experience advancement at the start of a new casebook. When you begin a new casebook, all those spells, skills, items, etc from the previous game, are given to your character for the new game but only as long as you were not devoured. Sort of a way to play Arkham Horror like a table-top rpg.

Heh. I've been toying with a similar idea, myself. Sort of a cross between "Call of Cthulhu" and "Arkham Horror", using the simple mechanics of the board game but without the board itself. "Call of Cthulhu" is an uncommonly excellent RPG, but it requires a Keeper, so a casebook-driven Arkham Investigations adventure could fill that void in the same way that the old Flying Buffalo solo adventures (and others of their ilk) could run an adventure for one or more players.

Indeed, the casebooks are already pretty close to this already. They are overlaid on top of the game board, but really, the important part of the game (i.e., the investigation) doesn't need the board for more than the mundane aspects of investigation (getting equipped, moving around town, etc.), and in some cases would be actively hampered by it (as in, say, a "Mountains of Madness" scenario, which wouldn't take place anywhere near Arkham, Massachusetts). The gameplay rules for Arkham Horror as an abstracted investigation simulation work regardless of the setting, it turns out, so it seems like a natural for fan-made creations to replace the setting while keeping the core mechanics, especially since Lovecraftian source material is so globe-trotting.

That said, I'm not entirely convinced it's a good idea to go that far with it. At some point, you'd just be aping "Call of Cthulhu" so much that you might as well jump over to that. I mean, if what you really want is a tabletop RPG experience, well, "Call of Cthulhu" is one of the best. Why reinvent? The only real reasons I can think of are to make it one-player and/or "pick up and play". And maybe to introduce it to audiences who might otherwise eschew it. But that is a really, really narrow niche. Are there enough people who would be interested in that tiny area to make it worthwhile? (Says the insane guy who wrote Arkham Investigations...)

Neph said:

That said, I'm not entirely convinced it's a good idea to go that far with it. At some point, you'd just be aping "Call of Cthulhu" so much that you might as well jump over to that. I mean, if what you really want is a tabletop RPG experience, well, "Call of Cthulhu" is one of the best. Why reinvent? The only real reasons I can think of are to make it one-player and/or "pick up and play". And maybe to introduce it to audiences who might otherwise eschew it. But that is a really, really narrow niche. Are there enough people who would be interested in that tiny area to make it worthwhile? (Says the insane guy who wrote Arkham Investigations...)

I see what you mean, Neph - the problem is that, of all rpg games, Call of Cthulhu is my favorite! Indeed, there would be a VERY small niche for campaign rules for Arkham Horror. The idea of campaign rules are probably more to give me a Call of Cthulhu fix (to which I can very seem to get enough of) than to disseminate campaign rules for others to use. :)

In other news, I have trudged through the new casebook with zeal and have managed to get alot of work done. So far, I have completed 6 Vignettes and 80 some paragraphs thus far. One thing that I am trying to incorporate into this casebook is one problem I found when writing Dark Dreams - at the start of that casebook, there was a good deal of "down time" while the Investigators ran around to various Vignettes looking for clues and what not. In this casebook, I decided to include some side line, albiet parallel activites that tie into the main plot. This gives some action early on in the casebook to brrak up the more boring actionless reading of paragraphs over and over to mold the casebook plot.

One last point to mention. I know most people like to have casebooks available in .eon format, but I also thought of offering casebooks in a pdf format as well (all bundled in a zip file for downloading). The pdf casebook would be flushed out with art and pictures or the like. Would this be something people would like to see or is the simple.eon file form good enough?

I think a PDF version would be a nice thing to have available. Not everyone is as invested in the game as to have Strange Eons already installed on their computer, and if they don't, then that's a pretty high barrier to getting started. I think the .eon files should still be available, too, but a PDF version might be more accessible to people.

I'm looking forward to checking out your casebook.

The timeline only had 4 days. These seems way too short. Is this correct?

ivory_tower said:

The timeline only had 4 days. These seems way too short. Is this correct?

That is strange - I looked at my files, both .eons and the pdf's and they have all the timeline. Is anyone else having this problem with the files?

I printed from the .eon file, but I just checked the pdf has up to day 12. Also, I cannot read the words on the corbitt print out monster, they are too small. Other than that, still playing and will give you constructive crisitism when finished.

The problem with the small text on the Corbitt counter is probably my fault, something that I meant to correct that has carried over from the Haunted House expansion. I had planned to lose some of the info off the token and put it in the rules instead. So my bad, not OMW's. It's easily edited though with .eon files.

Here's the text from the token anyway:

  • Undead
  • Physical Resistance
  • Overwhelming 1
  • Immune to Firearms

Movement : Instead of moving Corbitt summons a Dimensional Shambler, which appears at a random gate. If there are no open gates or no Shambler tokens, nothing happens.

Before first round of combat Corbitt casts Domination , make a Will(-1) check or all equipped items. Dropped items are exhausted. If you defeat Corbitt you find a strange black stone, as you pick it up it dissolves; Lore permanently increased by +1. Also close one Gate of your choice.

Sorry, I haven't found a general thread on arkham investigations and casebooks, so I'll hijack this one.

I have tried playing Dread Sleeper in R'lyeh with a couple of friends, but we are actually confused on a couple of things.

- For how long do you keep on playing a vignette, exactly? We stopped when we moved from one square to the next, like when it says "go to B2" we stopped there and read B2 only on the following turn. It actually seemed to take too much time, in a few cases.

- How do you catch up with an investigator that is already to the second or later squares in a vignette?

- What is the purpose of having team leaders make the only check for the whole team? We had to do some research at the library, we had to get a total of 6 successes on a will-1 check, but it took ages as only one could take the check while the others had to stay there standing and staring. They could have just as well walked away, as they had no way to help the leader at all.

I think a revision of this last rule I mentioned would be nice. Only one check is a reasonable rule when you have, for example, to evade the monster while going to the Unvisited Island with the skiff, but it feels pretty dumb when you need to accumulate successes, like with the encounter at the Arkham Asylum.

Thank you very much and sorry for my english

Marco