I'm about to start Dunwich with my group (I've already played it solo) and I'm trying to decide the best place to do the two side quests. Thematically it feels wrong to go on a trip to New Orleans or Venice whilst investigating in Arkham & Dunwich - the campaign scenarios seem to continue on with no break between them.

So I thought about doing the side quests before starting the campaign, but the character's can't pay the XP (they are new characters). Would it be balanced to play Ragarou stand alone but keep the rewards and penalties, and then use the XP (assuming we get enough) to play Carnivale (using Carnivale's token set)? Then we go into the campaign. Or play them both as stand alone, and then start the campaign?

I'm interested to hear people's thoughts on this and how people have approached it.

Well, first off if you're playing Rougarou and Carnevale before a campaign, they're not side-quests. They're standalone scenarios that you happen to be taking persistent decks through. So you won't have to pay XP to enter them, but you're going to have to deal with their considerably harder Chaos Bags while doing so.

Side-quests by the book have to be played between the first and last scenarios of a campaign. Of course, your house, your rules, but playing them as part of a campaign before you get access to any XP to buy your way into them, and using the considerably easier base Dunwich Chaos Bag than their own bags is a pretty big boost up.

OK thanks, didn't realise the stand-alone chaos bags are harder. That's good to know as I won't feel like we're cheating if we start with them.

Not sure how much Carnivale differs solo and with a group, but I played it solo and just scraped through (1 more turn I would have died to the boss). I might leave this one for now as don't want to kill the characters before we start the actual campaign

I would just play Dunwich Legacy and if at some point between scenarios you are feeling brave, have extra xp or it feels thematically possible then go ahead and do one of them.