Avi_dreader said:

Ok... maybe it's better if I don't ask the difference (maybe one is more metaphorical, the other one more physical?), and do my best to remember this point. Sorry for the mistake, anyway ;-)

Avi_dreader said:

I'm afraid I'm little more into Bergman movies rather than horror movies. Sorry Avi! But if you say they are good, I can give them a try
[btw, this thread becomes every day more an OT thread... great fun, anyway, but probably our forumites will shoot us]

Hey, The Seventh Seal is one of my favorite movies, but uh, as for nut vs. nuts, nut means crazy person or type of food (crazy person there given context), nuts often means testes (and... yeaaaaah), although it can also be plural for food nuts or crazy nuts. You need to watch out when talking about nuts! Yeah, sorry, let's end this here and continue it on email if you want to respond.

Avi_dreader said:

Technically the sun is in the process of exploding right now.

Veet said:

Wah hah hah! Oh ye of little faith ;'D

By the way, this section's dried up. C'mon, doesn't anyone want to post anything new? Here's a challenge. Come up with a version of Lurker of the Threshold that is actually a herald instead of a guardian. I'd start by giving all stationary monsters +2 toughness, endless, and not having them count against the monster limit. Heh heh heh :')

I've got something half worked up.

I kinda of like the idea of a herald version of the lurker. I like it already as a guardian. No pressure on you Veet :-) Take your time, make it cool :-)

Personaly, I am busy working with scenarios (and this f*** book case :-). I have seven in french now but should translate them one of these days.

OK so it became way to hard to work something up to replace the Lurker and still make use of the dark pacts and reckonings, just way too much space was needed to reprint rules on how to get the dark pacts and reckonings out. So instead I made a herald that must be paired with the lurker as a guardian reflecting the double nature of the pacts.

It may take a bit for photobucket to update, but I made a correction adding a clause about not spending power on pacts that were exhausted.

I really like it. I think it makes up for the Lurker's toughness decreasing issues.

It's not entirely clear what happens if you don't divide for an even number for the purposes of calculating gate decreases.

Yeah it should say (rounded up) each time it says "divided by". That way even one pact will decrease the gate limit by 1.

Veet said:

Yes, I'd say it's a herald now ;'D By the way, you should make taking a pact and reckoning mandatory (otherwise people will just keep the pact/reckoning down by reducing their max san/stam and retiring by kamikazi the next turn). At least that's what *I'd* do to get around it.

Probably a good idea since only 1 reckoning forces pacts on you, even with the almost double frequency of reckonings that one would be rare.

To be honest my ideal fix of lurker would be done on the reckoning and pact cards themselves, making the reckonings more dangerous and altering the power flow of the pacts slightly.

Veet said:

Heh... But we're working with what we have, not what we haven't.

Another potential ability. After the doom track is at eight (or something like that), investigators can not spend their last power token. I'm not entirely sure how negative an effect that would be. If it's really awful, one might want to up it to nine.

Avi_dreader said:

Not so sure if what I'm about to write has sense or not (I played only twice with the official new Guardian and haven't got a couple of things yet). Anyway... I noticed that many Reckoning cards causes a certain amount of disasters, that increases as long as the number of pacts / tokens you have increases too. When I read Avi's challenge, I thought it could have sense that as soon as an investigator makes a pact with the Lurker, he gets a power token that cannot be used nor discarded nor whatelse. And this for every pact they have. So, basically an investigator with 2 pacts will have a minimum granted of 2 power tokens, an investigator with 3 pacts, 3 power tokens. This should make some cards quite nasty. In addition, when the terror level hits 3, 6, 9, every investigator at least one pact gainsa power token that cannot be used / discarded / and so on.
Additional rule: every time an investigator draws and keeps an Ally, s/he must also take a Bound Ally, in case s/he doesn't have already one. Same stuff for Sanity / Stamina, like: every time an investigator is knocked unconscious, s/he must decide whether drawing an Injury & have his/her maximum Stamina reduced by one or taking a Soul Pact (so basically quite similar to what Veet's said. Yeah, probably Veet's is better than mine)

I think that overall this new herald is great.

I however think that in its current implementation, it adds too many different (sometimes confusing) rules and that there may be some room for improvement. That being said, let's dive into it :-)) (please be sure that I am only trying to provide constructive feedback)

You Need Me
1) Great idea
2) What is good for ? Maybe just remove it. What does it add really to the game?
3) Interesting. So, when you gain power token, they are placed on pacts ?

They are Drawing near
1) looks nice.
2) really increase the difficulty of the game (especially when lurker mythos card with 2 gates are used) and at the same time this rule is confusing. I would remove it too.

Not on Your Side
1) Yes. Nice. But it can be stated more clearly. "When the AO awakes, place all power tokens in play to its sheet. They should be removed using extra sucesses from the investigator attack." or something like this (avoid the conversion into doom tokens)
2) Simple and nasty. I like it

Maybe you could incorporate Avi/Julia suggestion about the non-expendable power tokens. What about: "At the upkeep phase, an investigator loses 1 sanity (1 stamina) if its soul pact (blood pact) has no power token on it". Therefore, you can choose to spend all your power tokens but then you have to pay a minimum fixed price :-)

@amikezor: I'll touch on a few of your points.

You Need Me

1 I am going to rewrite a little when I have the opportunity.

2 This power would prevent a devouring kamikazi from being the boon it often is. Since many of the heralds powers are dependent on pacts being out, when an investigator is devoured their pacts don't go away. Read it again with They are Drawing Near #2 and Not on Your Side #2 in mind.

3 This is an attempt to slow down the input/output flow of power effectively making it harder to spend power on the turn you got it.

They are Drawing Near

1 I figured effectively doubling the frequency of reckonings would make them a little more dangerous, also you don't avoid them as easily by spending a bunch of power to seal a gate.

2 This is the main bite of the herald. With this in play pact spamming will lose you the game quickly and the pacts are dangerous even if you don't have power. I also think it's a little more thematic as the more pacts you make with the Lurker you actually help the ancient one wake up sooner.

Not on Your Side

1 I agree. Often on first drafts of heralds I just write a power down how I want it to work and worry about streamlining language after I get input.

2 This makes the other pacts have a similar bite to the bound ally in final combat, which I thought they always should have.

@Julia: I like this idea do you mind if I use a variation on it on this herald to replace a couple of the more clunky powers of this herald?

Veet said:

It'd be a pleasure for me if you use it the way you prefer ;-) Anyway, the job you did is great :-) When it's finished, I'll give it a try in our first gme with the Lurker ::smiling::

And if you don't mind too... there is a little idea you worked out for Basatan that I'm using right now for a Cthulhu-herald (hopefully I'll post something today)

After a long playtesting, this should be the definitive version of the Weaver of Worlds:

Basically, I added the rule that Cultists are immune to Handcuffs and I changed the way the Herald influences final combat.
Any feedback is, as always, very welcome ::smiling::

@Avi: feel free to check / condense the text the way you like; rules should be fixed, now

@Julia: I like it like that. I already incorporated it in my next scenario "M le Maudit" based on Kingsport and Dreamlands (to be translated one day :-).

amikezor said:

I've just seen your scenario! Honoured and delighted to have contributed to it ::bowing::

As far as the translation thing is concerned... your scenario series is really interesting. It'd be a great thing for the community to see them in English. Rhapsody in blue was great

Hi everybody,

a little scenario / Herald for enchancing Cthulhu and the aquatic theme in the game. I playtested it already; the game was pretty tough, especially during the first rounds when we had 4 gates to R'lyeh opened, but we manage to beat it (in quite a long time, 4 hours). Feedback and comments are, as always, welcome, it was pretty difficult to word it precisely

While they are sleeping oversea... very nice herald/scenario. As you said, it sounds tough. One things is that it is very crowded. You do not have space to a flavor text if you found uncessary rules, you may try without them. :-)

I am not sure why locations with r'lyeh gates are aquatic. When you travel back ? The unvisited island gate burst open an extra burst when the gates cannot move ??

Finally, I am not a big fan of cultist are treated like another monster, because, it forces you to have one of this monster on the side. Maybe you can print their characteristics on the sheet (same may apply to the weather of the world) so we have them somewhere :-).

Anyway, good job !

amikezor said:

Hi Amikezor,

thank you for your feedback :-) Yeah, it's quite crowded ;-) I'd love to include some flavour text, but it was already difficult to write down everything without using an extra sheet ::laughing:: anyway, in case some rules can be condensed, I'll gladly add it!

The location has to be aquatic for the monster limit rule. I wanted a scenario with tons of monsters swarming around, so everytime a monster is in an aquatic location, it doesn't count against the limit. If R'lyeh locations were not aquatic, all the monsters on those gates would have been treated following the "normal" game rules, thus making the whole a little easier to beat (they'd count against the limit and would be removed from the game when closing matching dimensional symbol gates)

Unvisited Isle: yep, it's an extra burst. So basically in the very same Mythos phase you can have 2 (or 3 if you're unlucky enough and play with the Lurker) gates opening, one (or two) as normal, during step 1 of the Mythos card resolution sequence, and one during the movement phase

And ok, I'll add the protoshoggots statistics near the Cultist description :-)

Actually if you use the Child of the Goat and Dark Druid as precedent for a "treated as" scenario then their stats do not change unless stated by something, they only gain a second name. So in this scenario a Cultist would be a Proto-Shoggoth and a Cultist and would be effected by everything effecting both Cultists (like an ancient ones worshiper power) and everything effecting a Proto-Shogoth (Like being aquatic). So you would need to state the stats unless you wanted a bunch of easy to kill Proto-Shoggoths running around.

Julia said:

Sure. Sorry, I've been afk the last couple days. Personal drama and job interviews make a great combined time sink. Would you mind if I changed some of those introductory lines into short flavor text instead? It might be a bit more appropriate. I'll throw something by you later and you can incorporate it if you want. I'll definitely do it within the coming week, possibly sooner. I'm kind of excited to try fighting Atlach with this herald. It'll be one hell of a challenge.