Yep, Veet, you're right.

So, "Whenever an investigator draws or gains an Elder Sign, that investigator is cursed"?

Using that wording you could get cursed just trolling through the curiositie shop.

Veet said:

Exactly :'D

Okay, I think that will do. The elder sign curse deal is really harsh now, no chance of gaining allies outside of setup, and the Black Man becomes a progressively bigger murder machine every time he returns to the board. I'm going to play this herald along with the Azathoth AO card I created and probably Dagon or the Black Goat of the Woods.

So my Herald challenge from a few weeks ago fell by the wayside but I was hit with inspiration on the subject today and wanted some oppinions.

Hmmm.....now that I think about it the warlocks need to be elusive, or at least elusive while in the Asylum lest they start driving investigators insane over and over in immediate succession.

Veet said:

A slight bug ;') unless you *want* them to do that. Looks interesting. I can't tell how thematic it is though since I still haven't read the story. Sorry, I've been distracted, but I've read a play, a novella, and a book since then, so...

The basic gist of the story, Charles uses magic to revive a relative thats been dead for about 100 years or so, the relative kind of looks like him so kills and replaces him eventually gets committed in his name and another relative digs up the dirt on him and goes to the asylum casts a spell that turns him to dust and everyone thinks he escaped.

Keeping with the theme the Asylum seemed the natural place to put the warlock with no place else to go. Don't really want them to blockade the Asylum or Hospital but kind of like the idea of them blockading other stable locations.

...

Crap...

I'm just going to try and forget that now ;'D

My immediate thought is that there is a design principle that no monster should ever appear in the Hospital or the Asylum - it just causes too many rules headaches and can lead to endless loops where players can't defeat monsters and keep going round in circles. Maybe he could reside at Congregational Hospital instead. This would give players another reason to go to Kingsport apart from the whack-a-mole rift bashing.

A second problem occurs when Shudde Melle is the Ancient One or the stores start shutting due to the Terror Level or Mythos cards. The Warlock could turn up in a closed / destroyed location. Rift Markers from Kingsport could be used here - again having the subsidiary effect of refocusing some of the action to Kingsport, which fits in well with Congregational Hospital, although it does make the Herald less universal.

Not too sure about the Trail of Clues effect. Maybe killing the Warlock removes all tokens from the Herald, instead of awarding players with two clue tokens.

You pretty much find out all that in the first couple pages, it's no Dunwitch Horror.

Jake yet again said:

Making them elusive actually would address your first concern, they would never attack a person in the hospital or asylum then, you would have to go looking for them. Second one could be addressed with the word "Open" added to the description of stable location. Third point, I was trying specifically to give players a reason to have encounters in stable locations in Arkham.

It basically forces player to kill the warlocks and have encounter in stable locations. This sounds all nice to me. It should not be so nasty and had interesting effect on the game. Good job.

Making them elusive is clearly a good idea.

I am not sure where is the HPL story on this one though. ;o))

I apologize, I totally forgot about this charles dexter ward heralds... Ok I'll try to work on a different herald from the same story. I have been busy writing a case book story (a lot of work, but I enjoy it :-)

OK made the fixes, warlocks are now elusive, and only go to open locations. Also made the extra mythos card appear on a roll of equal to or less than.

OK tested Charles Dexter Ward. Investigators were Ursula, Wendy and Mary, Ancient one was Azathoth, no expansion boards or small box expansion stuff. Result was a seal victory in 18 turns.

The game itself was pretty easy, though that was Azathoths fault. a couple early monster surges made sure there was always a warlock on the board but also kept the doom track low. I did have to pay attention to the counters on the herald in order to keep them in check and despite this I had 2 turns with extra mythos cards, however I did have several encounters in areas I normaly don't visit. Ironically the extra mythos cards were helpful clearing out a street with several scary monsters once and removing "No one can help you now" right before Wendy returned from the Abyss the other time.

I'm going to add to the herald that extra mythos cards do not clues just to tip the scales to the more dificult side on this.

I believe that I promised a serious herald with this image a long time ago....oh and shoggoths.

Is that just Shoggoths, or Shoggoths and Proto-Shoggoths? If you mean for it to be both, just parenthetically put "(Shoggoths and Proto-Shoggoths)" after the first use of the word Shoggoths (like so).

I only meant for protoshoggoths to be affected by the power where they are specifically mentioned.

Shoggoths being what they are, this herald looks really scary. I shall try it asap ;o)

Tested Unnamable tonight, it worked pretty well. A single shoggoth cleared 5 clue tokens (an entire seal) off the board in a few turns and over the course of the game several more got snatched up and only a few were wrestled back. It made it a close game, Silas had to win his personal story to prevent the GOO from awakening in the end with 5 extra doom tokens.

Here is an idea I've been knocking around for a few days. I worded his first power in hopes of making it affect every single base game herald (except Hydra but who cares about her) and hopefully catch a lot of custom heralds in the net, the second power is made to stand alone but is enhanced by my version of Keziah Mason as well. The picture is the scariest rat picture I could find, there are good images of Brown Jenkin out there but none of them are of a similar style to Arkham (if you find one let me know).

I'm hoping for suggestions of revision for this guy.

Questions: in case you have two gate trophies (1 x Dreamlands, 1 x Kadath, for example), do you have to roll two dice, losing 1 Sanity per failure? Or just one check regardless of the number of trophies? And does this happen in every Arkham location? Or just in the unstable ones?

And a little typo: "when an investigator has a Dreamland encounter, roll a dice"; shouldn't it be roll a die ?

Julia said:

I meant for that power to be per encounter. So you either roll one die or no die. And yes I make that typo commonly.

Not keen on a Herald that a second herald to be used. Each Herald should be strong enough to stand on it's own.

Haunting Dreams - I don't like penalising players with gate trophies nor on having them make dice rolls every turn. That'll inevtiably either slow the game down or get forgotten. Perhaps a simple 1 Sanity penalty whenever you begin your upkeep are in the Dreamlands , Abyss or Plateau of Leng - this keeps the general intention, but doesn't slow down the game as much.

Perhaps you should start with a Rat Thing on the Witch House that counts as a Spawn and moves on several different symbols. Whenever it is defeated return it to the Herald. It respawns on the Witch House whenever a Doom Token is added to the Ancient One.