From Richard's House rules. I was wondering if you guys use them. Such as face down gates. Players losing a spell or skill instead of half items. Not being sucked through gate when entering a location.

Many of these House Rules he suggests seem to be old. As the 2 monsters per gate for 4+ players came out in a later expansion. Then you have the madness and injury cards to use in place of the sanity and stamina KOs. The tougher Old One rules seemed dwarfed by the Epic Battle cards. I think you can no longer close a gate on an investigator as a rule so that penalty is gone also.

So I guess what I am wondering is if you play with 2 monsters at start of the game, gates face down, 2 gates appear after 6 doom tokens, elder signs removed in place of gate opening, ability to chose to go through gate or have location encounter, 4 investigators for single play and 2 player games?

Thanks. I want to get back into this game. I played it a lot back in the day with just base game (1st edition). College got in the way for about 2 years. Now I return and own 2nd edition and all expansions. Any suggestions are welcomed, I plan on playing this before oscars start.

A few notes.

• I remember the rules as clear as day
• I have read each GOO and Investigator to get a feel to what was changed or brought to the game.
• I plan on using Epic Battle, Personal Stories, and Gate Burst. What is best way to get a good mythos deck with gate burst (ie what expansions MINIMUM to add)
• Do any Location cards from the expansions need to be removed or can you just shuffle them up for 25 card or so decks. If any need to be removed is there a list anywhere?

Thanks

Curator said:

Almost no one uses face down gates (at least here). It's a bad rule. It takes away key strategies (killing monsters with gate signs). There's already enormous amounts of luck in the game, no need to have more. It's still quite fun in theory. I constructed a herald around the face down gates idea, Kerathimel. It actually makes the gates effect even more random. Check my photobucket and you'll see :')

http://s622.photobucket.com/albums/tt307/avi_dreader/

Lannius' house rules are *very* old, and aren't really appropriate for utilization considering that I think he came up with them pre-Dunwich. It's been a while in Arkham game development time ;'D

I think the reason some of his rules seem so absurd now is that they were designed in an Arkham only context (the base game was ludicrously easy once a player understood it).

There are problems with allowing players to end movement on gates and not get sucked into gates (btw, they can still move on and off a gate if there's no monster there, or if they evade the monster there— since they're only sucked in in Arkham Encounters, not in Movement). Not just thematically speaking, since it's understood that a gate replaces a location, but because it would allow you to clear off monsters from a gate that a weak or unprepared ally is coming out on (let's say they were sucked in by accident a few turns earlier).

If you really want house rules to toughen the game for you, I have plenty of heralds you can try :') and there are quite a few more in the fan creations section of the site (I have 19 heralds by other people that I liked enough to save in my folder).

There was a long thread on customizing mythos decks recently, let me see if I can dredge up a link for you...

---

http://www.fantasyflightgames.com/edge_foros_discusion.asp?efid=5&efcid=1&efidt=283973&efpag=0#284384

I like making the "base" deck a mix of Base, Dunwich, and Innsmouth, since not only does it make the game harder (and allow for triple town activity) it allows for a decent number of gate bursts. You'll understand what I meant by that after you read that thread. Probably :')

I have been trying face down gates last few games. I like it theme wise (i mean why would your investigator know what is on the other side), but yeah, you can end up walking butt naked into R´ yleh with only a pine cone and stale piece of toast for defence. I think it changes your strategies actually because you don´t go closing easy gates first or send weaker players into easy gates, you have to expect the worst. I have actually been liking it i must confess. Call me a looser if you will!!

DoctorDR said:

I'd prefer the term, "loser," actually.

So I guess I will just play normal rules. Mixing the Dunwich Mythos and Innsmouth Mythos into the base game. I saw mentioned in a thread that a few locations from each expansion cater to the addons by the expansion. For instance exhibit items can be found on a few arkham location cards from dark pharoh.

Avi, the photobucket page you linked only has your creations. Do you have the others that you can link from fan creations. You seem to be the leader of this board for all that is arkham, so I would love to see the creations that you found fun or challenging. I have surfed through the customs thread but I have know idea how to tell what is a good creation or a problematic/broken creation.

I see your point with the gates and killing monsters on them to make way for other investigators. Very good point indeed. However Richard does explain how a gate is not replacing a location thematically. A gate is only like 12ft by 12ft and a location represents an acre of woods for example. But also going by this theme I guess we can house rule that a monster on a gate space has an acre to hide in.

So maybe house rule that investigators have to search for a monster on a gate location to be able to kill it. Time is key in this game and wasting turns trying to find a monster before an investigator returns is risky.

What about the 4 investigators minimum rule, for single and 2 player games? Anyone use that.

If you wanted your return to Arkham game to be fun and throw a lot of challenge at you, using injury and madness, personal stories, epic battle, gate burst, what would you add to the decks Avi. That thread is more of an anti-dituling thread. I just want to know a good returning set of cards to use.

Curator said:

Heh... This game has departed from Richard's original vision a long time ago. It's Kevin's crazy cannibal baby now :') with gates that replace locations and suck you into them regardless of your will. I wouldn't tamper with the game design yet. If you really want a house rule of the searching sort, I'd suggest you go to the fan creations threads and see if some people will work with you on creating something that's balanced (taking game design into consideration as well as theme).

If you want a tough return to Arkham game, only use the mythos cards from the base game, Dunwich, and Innsmouth. And throw in a nasty herald ;') if you want madness and injury, go for my Arbiter of Reality/Lovecraft herald. It's very nasty. It was designed to showcase madness and injury cards. He's a good greeter (but don't expect to win by final battle if you play him). And the game will be *tough*

::Laughter:: or you could just go for all for of Rovdjuret's Avatars of Nyarlathotep, but they don't encourage injury, just death :'D (if you play all four, preyour investigators, although personally, I'd think it'd be more fun to play them one at a time, and then slowly combine them into the super herald).

I like three investigators. Four seems a little easy :') DAM. (Seriously though, I've been considering adding in another investigator recently, I like four player games better, sealing victories are much more likely to be pulled off, still, four player games aren't as tense in my opinion, I guess it depends on your play style, and what you're playing against).

-

Welllll.... I was actually thinking about uploading my favorite creations from other players into a separate album on my photobucket page, although that'd be a bit of a pain, and I'd have to ask the other players permission, still it'd be nice to not have them scattered around for everyone else, throughout 40+ page threads.

I'll send you the list of what I have saved of other people's stuff. Everything's in the heralds thread, except for a few of the AOs. And now I'm going to misspell some screenames no doubt...

Rovdjuret has an excellent series of Avatars of Nyarlathotep that are all posted recently:

The Bloated Woman, The Black Man, The God of the Bloody Tongue, and The Haunter in the Darkness. He also made a *tough* King in Yellow herald The Phantom of Truth. This is sort of the equivalent of giving Hastur a nuclear arsenal.

Tibandovarvan (agh, that's not even close, but it's close enough for you to recognize who posted it) made the best stand alone Nyarlathotep herald I've seen (although it has one design flaw where it doesn't operate correctly with one of the sinister plot cards, you'll need a house rule to fix it, he disappeared and never did). It's simple, powerful, elegant, and terrifying. Just how I like it :') It's called The Crawling Chaos Messenger of the Ancient Ones. Make sure it's the final copy (there might be an earlier version floating around). There's actually several other good Nyarlethotep herald ideas prior to this one, but it synthesized many aspects of them and simplified them, and added in some excellent ideas of its own (and they also tended to have similar art), so I'm not going to mention them.

Admiral made a delightful werewolf herald a while back (within the last half year— I haven't seen him on the board for a while though, so I'll probably just post it in my photobucket without permission if I do post the things).

Umm... In terms of AOs, there was a recent Mordiggian by Corinthian that's fairly interesting. But there's another Mordiggian that Veet's working on right now that is also quite interesting, I'm not sure what to do, since I don't want to print both of them (since they're the same person), but one's very thematic and interesting, and the other has a very unusual doomtrack, and just from where it's at in the proto-development stage, I'm very excited. There's an old Hecate with green and black hair and four purple tongues that's kindof photorealistic, it's supposed to be played with two heralds (make sure it's the last version, since there were *alot* of different Hecates posted that month), Brown Jenkins and Dreams in the Witch House (all three of these were made by... I don't remember exactly, Indigo something? Those are all rather old, probably about a year old, and they're so packed with text you'll feel like you're playing a scenario, but if you want a highly thematic game, look for them). The other AOs I liked are Rlim Shaikorth, Nka'ji Ara, Glath En'qun, Shathak, and Thasaidon. Don't bother with my Hecate. It was the first Hecate in the Hecate thread, it was designed to work with the other person's heralds, but he took my ideas and made his own Ancient One :') which is fine, even though I think his final version has a design flaw (it's probably a little too hard unless you preinvestigators, and coming from me, that's saying something). There was another Corinthian ancient one, that the picture disappeared to :'/ It looks like a big turtle made out of sand, so, if you see it, consider getting that one too.

T'Yog is a tough Ghatanothoa herald. Make sure you have the last version of this. I'm not entirely sure if it's balanced though (I suspect it is against Ancient Ones who aren't Ghatanothoa, but I think it'd be *really* problematic against Ghat, since it'd add on 2 or 3 doom tokens to his track— I wish that player was still here, I'd tell him to modify the part of the card that says Ghat can have up to 6 visage tokens now, I think that's disfunctional, so if you play against it, you may want to modify it as a house rule).

And last, but definitely not least (it's my favorite aquatic herald), there's Veet's Basatan.

Heralds that function like user made scenarios:

Ubbo-Sathla competently designed, and tough, you'll need an extra investigator just to deal with it. If you like the theme, go for it. Aforgomon is basically a scenario (you'll see). I can't remember who made him. It might have also been Tibandovervan (or whatever), or it might have been Admiral. I can't remember. Amikezor's The Colour Out of Space also plays like a scenario almost, it's *very* cool. It's fairly recent. Very recently we have a Dr. Herbert West which really is more heraldish than a scenario, I guess, but, heh.

Thanks for all the help recently Avi.

Curator said:

You're welcome. I much prefer helping to writing the descriptive cataloging paper I'm supposed to be working on ;'D