amikezor said:

Thank you :-) The major issue is to balance the thing in order not to break the game the other way round. Too much power can produce incredibly bad effects on a "normal" game. I'll playtest very soon my original scheme and Avi's suggested one and see how to balance everything.

Hi Julia,

the main advantage of power (I found while playing) is that it can be of incredible help to seal toward the end of the game. Limiting the number of power to 6-#seal should prevent the "free" easy seal toward the end. To use them, now you have to get a pact at the begining... very cruel and very cool indeed. That is an excellent rule. I think I could use it as it (so simple and elegant). Do you mind if I add it to Misquamacus ?? (that would be a hijack, clearly :-)

best

amikezor said:

Yep, very true. I won a couple of games thanks to this exploit, and even some terrifying AOs can be handled in an easier way thanks to the guardian. 2 or 3 gates sealed is enough to try to win thanks to power investment ;-)

And yep, do not worry about hijacking it, if you like ::smiling::

No copyright on any creation ::laughing::

I'm still working now (11PM, no comments, please); if I'm able to return home not too late, I'll post something... really strange ::laughing::

Julia said:

Personally, I preferred my suggestion (it goes with the whole randomness aspects of the Lurker better). You could gain zero, you could gain three, who knows :') There'll definitely be plenty of pacts out because of the curse or pact aspect of the card.

I'd force a Bound Ally on terror level three though. Five is rarely reached.

Avi_dreader said:

Honestly, I probably didn't get the meaning of your post. Rewording (beware: Julia-no_brain-mode: ON) - rewinding: you meant the first player rolls a die and gets as many successes as his pacts are? Or roll a die for each pact and for every failure, then a power token is gained? or the first player rolls and the others smoke (sorry, don't know whether this play on words works in English)? H-E-L-P

Ok for the terror - 3 thing. It was in my original design, but I thought it could have been too brutal. Nice to hear that it's not.

Julia said:

Yeah, roll a die per pact and gain a power per failure.

@ Julia

You'll have to rebold and italicize and check for capitalization errors, but here's the abridged text. I made a few minor functional changes which I'll explain, there's really only one I think you might find objectionable (but I hope you won't). I made it so that there's no ambiguity about how to treat dual gates with R'lyeh (or the gate copies). I think the phrase moving gate is clear since it's already defined for the Dreamlands Gate. One change in how this will work though, is with the gates being copies of the Lurker gates, there's a higher chance of being devoured by an opening gate. Personally I think that's cool, I hope you'll agree :')

I also cut out the bit at the end about the extra successes. It just isn't worth the bother of all that extra text (there'd probably only be an extra two or three hits anyways, not significant).

One issue that I think is potentially very problematic (so I wouldn't revise this just yet), is how monsters in aquatic locations aren't counted against the monster limit, this means that you're going to have to be constantly recalculating your monster limit, also, the card doesn't specify what happens when a monster moves out of an aquatic location into a non-aquatic location while you're over the monster limit. I'd assume it'd go straight to the outskirts, is that what you want to happen? And that if multiples move simultaneously, it's players' choice as to which go to the outskirts? Alternatively you could have it so that you completely ignore the monster limit whenever a gate surge occurs on a gate in an aquatic location, and that the monsters on the board are not removed for being over the monster limit. That could be fun :') (I love monster apocalypses).

Also, you should repost Weaver. It's not visible in the heralds thread anymore.

---------------------------------------------

See if you can fit these first three lines into the left side box:

Other Heralds may be used cumulatively with this.

Start of the game: Search for a gate to R’lyeh, reshuffle the rest of the gates, and place it on top of the gate pile.

All South Shore and Harborside locations are aquatic.

Dark Waters
Gates with Another Dimension or Another Time are identical to the R’lyeh only gate. Gates to R’lyeh are moving gates, aquatic, and locations they are in are aquatic; if they can not move, their adjacent street becomes aquatic permanently, there is a gate burst at Unvisited Isle, and all monsters appearing from it are placed there; they can not move to sealed locations.

The Hunting Tide
Aquatic monsters and monsters in aquatic locations don’t count against the monster limit and are not removed from the board by closing gates.
Shoggoths and Protoshoggoths are aquatic; Cultists are treated as Protoshoggoths (their name changes also).

The Horror From the Sea
If Cthulhu is the Ancient One, R’lyeh gate modifiers are increased by -1, and his combat modifier increases by -1.

Avi_dreader said:

Ok, it's clear now! What about this thing for the first player and "all other investigator, with at least one dark pact, gain one power"? just to keep this thing a little threatening, otherwise you can have pacts without great troubles, since you can avoid using them

@ Avi: thanks a lot for the editing work on R'lyeh awakens. I'll read carefully your observations in the next days (certain things require a little time and no rush) and I'll answer to your post more properly. But I *really* appreciate you managed to find time for doing this.

And thank you for telling me of the Weaver. I thought that previous posts will automatically refresh, but probably I uploaded the file with a different name, and so... ok, here is the final version:

Julia said:

Maybe make that random too. Have the first player roll a die and on a failure everyone else gains a power too. It's past my bedtime. G'night ;')

We should make a herald for a Cthulhu cult.

We can scrap the two abilities from the modified Cthulhu. (Aquatic cultists, and permanent sanity/stamina reductions from insane/unconscious).

I was thinking defeating a cultist or an aquatic monster could cause the drawing of an innsmouth look card.

Any other suggestions? Maybe turn all unstable locations (and locations with gates) aquatic, and turn riverside streets and merchant district streets aquatic as well.

Some sort of modification for R'lyeh gates, final combat, and perhaps a mechanism to search for aquatic monsters? Maybe aquatic monsters don't count against the monster limit, and whenever a R'lyeh gate is drawn, place two aquatic monsters on it?

The investigators thought thier past in Silent Hill behind them, but they have not escaped thier sins entirely. The Darkness has followed them to the town of Arkham and it has brought its herald with it, the one known as Pyramid Head.

This is the first content I created. I wanted to use the corruption decks included in the Black Goat of the Woods expansion. If you dont use the BGotW herald and go out of your way to get a cult membership, you dont get to ever use them. (And there is NO incentive to join the cult in the first place!). Silent Hill has always been a favoite Horror genre. And Pyramid Head is an awesome nemesis that can lend itself nicely to the Arkham Horror game. I would like to make "Silent Hill Origins" cards for each investigator, telling of past encounters with the fateful town.

Let me know what you think and I could use some feedback!

SlyMcNasty said:

For a start, I'd cut the text about Darkest Night since it's such a rare event. I'd probably also cut the part about adding a doom token. On an average game that would add 2-4 doom tokens. And on a weird shuffle it could make the game add who knows how many (iow, it's such an uncontrolled effect it could lead to extremely short games).

There's a their misspelled "thier."

I don't really like the mechanism for removing corruptions. For one thing, there's already a mechanism for removing corruptions, for another blessings are too cheap- if you really want to keep it, I'd advice making blessings cost ten instead of five, I'd advise getting rid of it though. Half the fun of corruptions is having them stick around for a while, not being able to remove them same turn with ease. Causing corruptions for failed encounters will overburden the corruption deck, I think. Particularly if you remove the blessing mechanism. I'd fix that part by making the Darkest Night effect cause the drawing of a corruption on failed encounters or encounters with a monster (only on a defeat in combat, since otherwise 4 draws of this would possibly end the game in an eight player game, although if you take the attitude that an eight player team should have won by then, you could just make it so that it's whenever a monster encounter is drawn at that time, not dependent on win or loss I'd do some trial draws with red other encounters or better yet, check through the cards to make sure that the proportions of monster draws would be reasonable in that case though).

Hope that was helpful.

I'd also cut a lot of the flavor text (it's taking up a lot of space), but we can discuss that later.

Gtg.

Thanks for the advice.

First off, the flavor text MUST STAY!!! But I could trim it down a little. I wanted "The Darkness" to be an uncommon, but sure event. Maybe if its too infrequent I can change the dimensional symbols up. I hadn't looked into how many times stars move on black, but I knew it was a less common monster movement. I agree adding a doom token each time may accelerate the AO awakening too much, maybe it can be prevented by discarding a gate trophy?

So closing gates with the dimensional symbol is the only other way to get rid of corruptions? I could get rid of this mechanic and make "Repentance" the only way to get rid of them, or I could remove "Repentance" for now and see if we die too much due to "Final Judgement".

Only fails on MASK monster checks OR other world encounter checks will cause corruption cards to be drawn, so I don't suspect the deck to become too overburdened.

I will play a game tonight with some of the suggested tweaks and let you know how it goes!

SlyMcNasty said:

I think all symbols have the very same chance to appear, thus 1/6 is the chance you have a star moving on black

I love the idea of a Pyramid Head Herald, but I personally feel he needs to be a monster token. Having him just eat you is scary, but I'd rather him just be an overwhelming, nightmarish stalker monster that could screw you up and is endless. Also, the corruption card things are screwy. Corruption cards already make you draw more corruption cards fairly consistently. Anyways, I love the idea and will look out to see how it's developed.

In any case, I've come up with a Herald of my own. It started out as an idea for a moving location with original mechanics, but is quickly growing into something more relevent. The Link to my original thoughts in this forum is here: www.fantasyflightgames.com/edge_foros_discusion.asp

The Herald, "The Traveling Carnival" (first draft):

img341.imageshack.us/i/carnivalherald.jpg/

The Token

Front (the Wandering Location): img31.imageshack.us/i/carnivaltoken.jpg/

Back (the wandering Gate): img23.imageshack.us/i/mirrormaze.jpg/

SlyMcNasty said:

Trimmed text is good (it can be slid into the left box once the text there is trimmed too, when I have a bit more free time, I'll help you edit this herald, I think it has some potentially very interesting mechanics). I'm not saying that you should get rid of all the effects of The Darkness, just the bit about Blackest Night (since it's taking up space and not doing much-- isn't that what the card is actually called?) and the doom track accelerator (we already have a Black Goat thankyouverymuch, and not that many people are crazy about it, personally, I loved it so much I made a modified version of it ::eyeroll: . Anyway. There's no point about taking up card space for an event that's going to be less than 1/100 (even if you're playing a severely trimmed mythos deck of sixty the odds of you getting it in a game are maybe 1 in 3.

I think Repentance is a bad idea, as I said before, because it extracts the corruptions' teeth.

Likewise, Final Judgement undercuts the general effects of the herald (i.e. extreme corruption distribution). To me, what's so cool about this herald is that there is a real possibility of it getting investigators into the red corruption, and possibly even running out of the corruption deck entirely and going to final battle as a result if they aren't careful with it. I'd get rid of Final Judgement entirely.

Massive corruption distribution is itself a powerful game altering effect (and have you seen some of those red corruptions?)

If you're worried that the card would be weakened too much (and I'm not convinced that it would be, just initially, the red corruptions are brutal), you could make the +1 toughness -1 combat -1 horror a permanent effect instead, or you could make it a temporary +2 -2 -2 effect instead (although if you gave +2 toughness to monsters, they shouldn't be able to be traded that way or major game exploits can ensue).

Personally, I'd prefer if the herald didn't have a monster token for Pyramid Head (I dislike printing out fake monster tokens, iow I won't). I think the red corruptions and their effects are devastating enough. To me the only real question is that you manage the herald so that it's likely to go into red corruptions, but preventable from running out if investigators are fast or careful.

A little Herald to help poor Glaaki in the eternal fight for Arkham

As usual, any feedback is very welcome :-)

I played with him with no alterations last night. My investigators got SWARMED with corruption cards, and "Final Judgement" was WAY to harsh combined with "Sins Revealed". Even with "Repentance" I could not get blessings fast enough. I think there are possibly 2 fixes to this...

1) I could Keep "Final Judgment" and "Repentance" and get rid of "Sin's Revealed". This would make a slightly slower build up of corruption and allow more time to get blessings for "Repentance".

2) I could get rid of "Final Judgment" and let the corruptions fly! I would probably get rid of "Sins Revealed" for this revision.

I would suspect the corruption deck would go TOO fast for fix #2. Thats why I liked the idea of "Repentance" it allows the corruption deck to refill (although not clear in the current text, I intended the red corruptions to get reshuffled each time they were discarded).

As far as symbol frequency, I would have to take Julia's word for it, but in my experience Star seems to occur much less frequently than circle and square.

I will work on an update this weekend and post again after that. Thanks again for your suggestions. I'm sorry if I am stubborn and try to stick with my original concepts. I will try to keep an open mind!

SlyMcNasty said:

Give a look at the whole deck you're using. Monsters movement is pretty well balanced. I checked for you the Dark Pharoah expansion: 18 cards, all 6 combinations appear exactly 3 times each. And it's the same for every expansion. Otherwise the game's wouldn't be that well balanced (some Rifts in Kingsport would be by far less scary, in example). Sometimes it happens to have a series of movements happening always following the same pattern, or an Enviroment lasting for the whole game. It's just a question of fate. But indeed, all monsters have the very same chance to move.

SlyMcNasty said:

I'm fairly certain that symbol frequency is identical.

I'd go with #2, although it might require a bit of tweaking.

Heh... It's your idea, you can go wherever you want ;') and if wherever that is is not to my liking, I'll just plagiarize and alter your original idea ;'D I think you have something very cool (and by cool, I mean quite unlike other corruption distribution mechanisms) here, and it'd be a shame to see it disappear.

@Julia

You forgot to ban retirement of mad investigators.

Also, one thing I'm a little worried about is a sealing victory... Terror level will rise *6* times. This will be devastating if Glaaki is the Ancient One. Perhaps you should make the investigator sealing the gate roll a die and raise the terror level on a failure. This will reduce that number a little bit...

Also, I'm not sure if you should discard the blessing after it gets three clues (that way Blood will pour from the sky is almost impossible to trigger and kind of a waste of space). Just stop it generating madness.

It's a nice picture even though it doesn't quite feel Glaakiish to me ;'D

Anyway, I'm looking forward to the final product.

Avi_dreader said:

True, I forgot the banning thing. Good point, otherwise you won't be bowed under the weght of madness.

Seals: got the point. I'll fix this by introducing the die roll

Blessing discarded: I'm going to fix this in the way you suggested. Nonetheless, I'll playtest both versions, in order to see how things go.

Picture: not so sure it's the final one. It's dam(n) difficult to find something decent related to Glaaki. If you have any image to suggest me, feel free to hyperlink them here!

And thx for the feedback!

Ok, fixed!

I've updated the picture to Photobucket, so I suppose I have to wait a little for the preview to be updated, right?

Hey, this is very cool. I remember you writing that twisting the blessings could be neat. It sounds like it indeed. nice.