H.P. Lovecraft said:

Well :') either you're being facetious, or more likely you haven't gotten expansions with heralds or guardians yet. Heralds are basically negative game modifiers that are added to the Ancient One. Guardians are positive game modifiers.

Here are the official ones. Although as you may have noticed :') we have our own thriving cottage industry of herald production going here.

http://www.arkhamhorrorwiki.com/Herald

http://www.arkhamhorrorwiki.com/Guardian

P.S. The Lurker at the Threshold is a Guardian. FFG is lying to you.

Avi_dreader said:

I created a small matrix in excel (said the Julia the shopkeeper, whose last points of Sanity left her quite a long time ago), gathering all the official AOs and some of the fan-created, together with Heralds (official and fan-created): the total number of combinations of AO + Herald is 1650. Terrifying...

Avi_dreader said:

When? When? Scenario 15? Earlier?

Julia said:

And that doesn't include what I often do which is face off against 2 heralds at once.

Veet said:

Yep. Not to mention that when playing with Janus or The crevice of Chaos, you should add extra Heralds, so you should multiply the base 1650 for the number of permutations (class 2) of the Heralds depending from the "first" Herald... ::shock:: if you play a combo / week (considering only the basic 1650 combos), you'll need something like 30 years to try to defeat them at least once...

Julia said:

::Cough cough:: I don't want to give any time spoilers :') but I'd guess within 3-4 months (depending on how slow I am to keep producing these). So yeah, earlier.

Julia said:

And that's why I made them ;'D

Avi_dreader said:

Avi, how many AH games have you played yet?

Avi_dreader said:

I dont own the base game yet, hopefully I will get it by the end of next week

Julia said:

Hoo boy... I used to play quite a bit. Now it's probably a 1.5 a month on average. And it's been what, four and a half years? Probably somewhere between 200-500 games. I'm not really sure to be honest.

sorry to interrupt the song of "good old days" :-)

Avi, did you test the new version of the Wendigo ?

Honneslty, it worked great until the final battle where you do not have the slightest chance to win. So I suggest, get skill slider frozen but remove the cripple winds. during final battle.. anyway, that is how I shall play it in the future ;o) besides this great.

Ithaqua is a nice "short" game and with the herald, it is perfect (same applies to Set, which I like very much.

Julia:

I like the herald. I agree with all what Avi wrote. I may add that if the spider awakes you loose. So you do not need to enhance its final battle ability (ie kill the allies). I am not sure, cultist tokens make good leng spiders. Why don't use directly the spider tokens ? or give cultist some bonus but keep them "half-human". They could be human-spider hybrids or something like this (so they benefit from the bonus from the AO but remains humanoids).

anyway good job again.

amikezor said:

I disagree :') you have a *slight* chance of winning (much better than against something like Quachil, or Tsathoggua). But it relies entirely on luck (having your characters all blessed, and not losing too much of your stuff). It's *intended* to make relying on final combat for an Ithaqua win a *very* bad idea. You can house rule it if you want (I won't mind), but it was my intention to make final combat very difficult, or to make it so that investigators going for a final combat win would actually have to deliberately gear up to win, not just get an accidental victory (I hate those).

amikezor said:

That's a neat idea (I did something like that with my Shudde M'ell herald). That way you can have two types of special monsters running around the board :'D besides, this will finally vindicate J. Jonah Jameson's theory that Spidermen are trying to eat us.

Avi_dreader said:

I like it difficult but to give you an idea, on 4 investigators, we rolled 1 dice (which failed) and that was it (could not roll anymore ;o) not enough to reach the 44 successes :-). So, I will house rule it ;o) as I said, "cripple winds" is an excellent idea in terms of game play and ambiance, so I will play it again soon.

::Laughter:: alright. But gearing up for it really is quite possible. You just have to realize that all your investigators fight skills will be at their lowest, to stay alive against the winds you'll need to sacrifice clue tokens, and to get the combat weapons necessary you'll probably have to go for spells and unique items (and obviously, you'll want to be blessed). It's really not intended to allow for final combat victories (well, without a great deal of effort). I wanted players to put their effort into the 11 doom sealing attempt while dealing with the slowing factors. At the same time, a final combat victory *is* possible... Just very difficult. And there's almost no way you'll have it without amazing luck or planning.

Avi_dreader said:

good news. This herald is next on my list (seriously ! :-). I think I tested a pretty large number of custom heralds, guardians scenarios that are around... (including several in french not translated into english) and still new ones keep coming. Several play with similar ideas though (especially the ones for Nyarlathotep but I like mask monsters, so that is OK :-)

Anyway, what is missing for the english ones is a webpage (like the french wiki) which store them all. Maybe someone should do this one day...

Yeah, I suggested it at some point, but ::shrug:: nothing happened. Someday someone will probably gather them though.

I think you'll have fun with The Great Dark Worm. Out of my own herald designs, it's one of my favorites. Pray you don't draw any Lloigors though :'D

amikezor said:

Amikezor,

thank you for your feedback. Yep, the difficulty of final combat increases a lot because of "rolling for keeping allies". Shouldn't be that *impossible* anyway. Don't know, although I have to admit that this one is the ability of the Herald I like the less. I was searching for something boosting a little the final combat, simply because - obviously, it's just an opinion - I think that if a Herald increases the difficulty during the "normal" game, then it should do something even during the final battle. I had some ideas like
- you need an extra success to remove doom tokens from Atlach-Nacha doom track (4 investigators party, 5 successes / doomer)
- at the start of the battle, add an extra doomer for every cultist in play (maybe this is too heavy)
- every time Atlach devours an investigator, he gains a doomer (maybe this can work better)
Thoughts / suggestions?

As far as your other ideas is concerned... well, not that I dislike it. But I really love spiders. For a reason quite peculiar. When I was a child, I read some strips with spiders doing the strangest things in the world (the crusader spider returning home with some legs less, two spiders trying to make love but unable to do it because too many legs hindered their bodies to be near, commando spider stealing cheese from the fridge of an elder spinster and so on). Maybe they weren't that much fun, but as a 7 years child I loved them. More or less at the same age, I read "The Hobbit". Other spiders there. Nastier, but still lovable (do not ask, I do not have a *real* answer for this. And no, I do have a pet, but it's a hampster, not a spider. So don't worry Avi, in case you return to Italy, you can enter my home without being eaten. Maybe). And so.. yeeeeeh! Flying spiders everywhere! spin your web into the air! we are spiders, spiders of the world (adapted from the nefarious Manowar's "Warriors of the world")

amikezor said:

Could you kindly indicate me a link for custom material on the french wiki? They could be interesting to play with ;-) I'm not good at all at speaking French, but I can read it (more or less; I have a good dictionary at home ::smiling:

Julia said:

Heh... Well, Atlach is already pretty tough in final combat. You could make it so that he gains a doom token for each ally discarded in final combat. Functionally, it's a bit cthulhuesque (although it's much harder because of his double resistances), but tying it to dying allies makes it *feel* more thematic (I think). Or you could just cut the final combat change. Not all AOs need final battle boosting. I did it for most of the base game AOs because their final battle powers are so weak, but Atlach? Heh... Not so weak.

I'm not actually arachnophobic ;') I'm just Itophobic. I read Hobbit at six. I can't wait to see it as a movie (finally, finally, whenever finally will be). I am however, mortally afraid of hamsters. Furry flesh gnawing fiends, disgusing their man-eating natures beneath adorable exteriors. They're like the cliched innocent looking civilian that then starts chewing on someone's face in the beginning of zombie movies :')

Julia said:

Sure. All french version of custom material can be accessed here

Avi_dreader said:

Uhm. I'm going to playtest all the possible combos and then see how things change under what condition. I'd have playtested it yesterday, but unfortunately no time (and my friend wanted to play Fury of Dracula instead of Arkham Horror , sigh). Probably sunday will be a good day for fan creations :-)

Avi_dreader said:

Wondering if the FAQ will be available earlier... ::laughing::
Interesting to see how many people read the Hobbit as soon as they were able to read a book. Amazing. I hope the movie will be better that the last chapter in the Lord of the Rings saga. I was a little shocked by the "free" adaptation of the story

Avi_dreader said:

Have you ever seen Zombieland (nuts up or shut up)? A marvellous zombie movie. No hampsters there, but a lot of intelligent humour (quite rare today). You should like it ::nodding::

amikezor said:

Merci beaucoup, mon ami

Nut up, not nuts up ;'D in English, those two phrases bring *very* different things to mind. I've seen it twice so far. I'll pick it up when I see it on sale somewhere— not in any rush though. Speaking of excellent zombie movies, have you seen Quarantine or the original Rec?

The FAQ will be available... Probably sometime before the sun explodes (no guarantees).

Julia said: