@Admiral: It's a pretty neat idea, although I'm sure the locations on the rift tokens are all stable for a reason. To investigate a rift, you need to have an encounter at the location on the token. If there's a gate, someone will have to travel through the other world and close the gate before the token can be removed. Although, perhaps that was your intent. Also, seeing as how there are only 11 unstable locations, one will have to be doubled up. Then again, the most practical way I can see this being used is if you mix the Arkham rift tokens with the Kingsport rift tokens. Or instead, every other token is an Arkham token, since it's likely those will look and feel different. That way, to get some of the tokens out of the way, the investigators still have to go to Kingsport, but they could half deal with it if they stay in Arkham. Still, it's a neat concept, and I might try it out.

@thecorinthian: Looks neat. 13 doom track means it'll take some time in waking up. It's followers ability is medicore. So now I can just run past cultists while shouting, "Whee!" At least with Tulzcha, you have a reason to deal with them, or else they'll wreck your seals. Here, I'll probably just ignore them. Sure, the Outskirts is likely to build up, but I tend to let it build up anyway. Still, I suppose the players are rewarded if they do try to go for the cultists. More than halfway for 2 clues, or a third of the way for an ally is pretty decent. The slumbering ability is kind of neat. Those tokens are likely to get shuffled around a fair bit. Although, it feels like it only does one thing. Then again, many of the default Ancient Ones only do one thing. Final combat looks doable, although prodding it awake may be a good idea. Granted, the check is an instant kill, so you'd have to weigh the risk against the possible reward. The part about the tokens being added to the track is not that threating. So it can recover 2 points. That's maybe only a turn of combat. Still, I'd rather not go to final combat against this one. I think I may try this one out.

Actually... I generally like this guy. I *really* liked the idea of having him make cultists elusive. It'll definitely make the vortices more interesting. My one complaint about him is that I'm afraid he'll be a bit too easy in final combat. Would you consider giving him a -5 combat rating?

Try using this text instead (less words).

"At the start of each upkeep the first player takes the Phobos or Deimos token from this sheet." [you can leave the if able here if you really want, but I don't think the text is necessary. Also, you might want to change At the start of each upkeep to "Upkeep:" or "Each upkeep phase" or "Each upkeep" depending on how wordy you want to be]

"An investigator with a Phobos or Deimos token who fails a skill check must pass the token to the first player."

"An investigator with both tokens is devoured, then return them to this sheet."

Mmmm... Would you consider making cultists elusive *and* fast? Or if you want to be really fiendish, have them count as two monsters when entering a vortex :'D (Also, you might want to make it so they count as spawn monsters, otherwise cultists in the main town make it easy to navigate with the ghost town effect— not so much of a problem if you only have two elusive monsters in the cup, a big problem if you have a whole bunch).

I'll probably print your AO out, but I'm going to wait for the corrected version ;')

Okay, here he is again. [Edit: ****... "A twice cursed investigators" ::sigh:: well, I'll wait for comments before editing again].

http://i622.photobucket.com/albums/tt307/avi_dreader/Death2.jpg

DeadGuyWalking said:

Thanks for feedback . You're right about the 'adding tokens to the doom track' being a bit pointless; I'll try to come up with something a bit more dangerous to make the final battle different. I think that final battle is quite easy though; back in the old days of the base game it would have seemed harsh, but the Innsmouth AOs don't even give you a chance half the time. Still, I think I'll try to come up with something a bit more original.

I thought that Elusive cultists actually makes the game quite a bit harder - at -3, they are difficult to find, which means they clog up the monster limit, and suddenly a common monster which normally can be defeated by making one very easy skill check requires two quite difficult checks... but you may be right, the advantage of being able to ignore them might be too great. I'll try something else.

Avi_dreader said:

All taken under advisement, I'll post a new version in a bit. Thanks guys.

thecorinthian said:

Well, the Elusive part isn't bad, but it just seems that there isn't that much incentive to taking out the cultists aside from clearing the town. Most of the time, I only play a few investigators, so the town often ends up filled with monsters. Granted, if the town is filled completely with cultists, then you have to at least try to hunt some down. The Elusive monsters I know of are Serpent People, which allows you to spend to gain extra combat dice, Werewolf, which could be ignored, but will harm investigators who end up in the streets, and Cultists under Tulszcha, which are a definite threat. One more thing to consider is if you want to keep the combat check at +1. Yeah, they are at 3 toughness, but they still only do 1 damage. Still, cultists aren't supposed to be Star Spawn, so do what you feel is right.

I could just boost up cultists' stats, but I don't like AO worshipper abilities which do that... fighting a cultist suddenly becomes very annoying when you have to look across to the other side of the board in order to know what every stat does. Also, just giving the cultists +2 to everything won't really make them much more interesting or distinctive.

Anyway here is an improved Dweller, with a significantly more difficult final battle. Also, although I didn't set out to do this, this AO now fits almost perfectly with the events of the originating short story. It has the two tendrils which devour people, it has the aura of sleepiness which is difficult to shake off (that's the Will test) and it eats your whole expedition one at a time (which is why having allies can buy you time).

I was going crazy trying to get the formatting to look right, and in the end I decided the best way to make it work was just to shorten the AO's name. I figure it's better for it to have a slightly-less-good name than for some of the actual rules to be squashed up or shortened.

HOWEVER

I am a bit worried that I haven't thought the proboscis ability through correctly, and I don't know exactly how often it's going to devour people. It seems to me that it will probably claim a few victims across the course of the game, although there will often be turns when you know it's safe to fail skill checks, because all you can do is transfer your Proboscis token to another player who hasn't already got one. The upshot of it all is probably just that it puts a strain on your clue token resources, because every so often (and very unpredictably) a skill check will desperately need to be passed in order to not devour someone.

I'm also a bit concerned that if you've got a proboscis and you fail a check, it punishes the guy with the other proboscis for your failure. That might be taking 'encouraging teamwork' a bit too far. I could reverse the ability: whenever you fail a skill check, you take a Proboscis token from the first player if he has one .

I'm also worried that the basic idea willl encourage 'conservative' play, because the players will want to minimize the number of failed skill checks, which means not trying anything unless they're fairly sure they can succeed. On the other hand, the proboscis tokens are a little tiny binary star system of orbiting death whcih the players have to dodge for the entire game, so it will probably keep them on their toes.

There's nothing wrong with encouraging conservative play ;') remember, if players go too conservative they will run the doom track out.

Why is the proboscis ability only for slumber? It seems like it would be fun if it picked off two players simultaneously in final battle when one failed a will check. (I have to admit, you might have gone overboard for final battle— by making it a will check, you've forced the investigators to crank their fight down just to survive, the check is also highly lethal— worse than Yog Sothoth ;') Oh well).

Anyways, you could shorten the main body of text by changing it to

"At the start of each turn, the first player must take a proboscis token from this sheet. Investigators with a proboscis token who fail a skill check give it to the first player. An investigator with both tokens is devoured, then the tokens return to this sheet."

See? *Much* shorter :')

Anyways, I'm very pleased with this. It's quite fiendish. It will cause many players to scream at each other over the tabletop ;'D

P.S. would you consider bumping down the resistances to -4, I'm scared of it now ;'D its attack about as bad as Atlach Nacha.

thecorinthian said:

When I first read it, I tought you had to have both a Proboscis token and the first player token in order to be devoured. Maybe state "If any investigator ever has both Proboscis token" to avoid any confusion. As an aside, what is Proboscis?

As for the final battle, yeah it's though. Ally are quite rare in the game. You can be sure you'll fell at least one investigator in the first two round of combat. But hey, in my group we consider defeating the AO to be a draw anyway. But thematically, why does it destroy ally?

Hwever, what happens if the first player has a probocis token and fail the check? As it is written, nothing would happen (which gives the investigator a chance), but maybe it's not what you want.

Also, I really wanna see those proboscis token made with SE. If you want, I can help you with the image search. What do you need?

Collex said:

The phrase "both tokens" shouldn't really be confusing since the First Player thing is a marker not a toke n, but no-one ever remembers those subtle distinctions (least of all me), so I might try to fit in the change you mentioned.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proboscis . In the original CAS story, the Dweller in the Gulf has two proboscides sprouting from its mouth, which is what the tokens are meant to represent. It doesn't quite make sense for them to be a threat all over Arkham, but it's close enough.

Collex said:

Allies are pretty rare and expensive, but you can always hoard clue tokens in order to pass the Will check instead.

Thematically, the Dweller destroys allies because of what happens at the end of the short story. A group of explorers are mesmerized and brought to the Dweller's cavern. It extends its two long tentacle mouth things, and sucks out one of the explorers' eyes, then moves on to the next guy. All the explorers who lose their eyes are driven mad and herded down into the lower caverns to die. In one of the endings for the story (it was rewritten I think) one of the explorers manages to get away because his friends are eaten first and he has time to shake off the Dweller's aura of sleepiness and make a run for it. Really, the ideal form for this ability would be that only one person or ally would be eaten each turn, but Atlach-Nacha already does that.

Collex said:

Nope, that IS what I want! It's not much of a "chance" though, since if you're the first player and you've already got a proboscis token, the guy with the other token only has to screw up once in order to kill you. If you become the first player and two of the others have already got Proboscis tokens, you're probably fairly safe, since they'd have to both fail skill checks in the same turn (and that's much easier to prevent).

This ability looks fairly simple, but working out how often it will devour people is actually really difficult, so it needs playtesting. Thanks for the feedback.

Corinthian, can you update a copy of your Dweller with my text compression suggestions, or send me a copy of your strange aeons file (so I can make one for myself)? I'm going to the printer in a few days and I'd like to make a copy of this.

Here's one with your shortened version of the ability. Tbh I still prefer the way I wrote it out before, but there's really not a lot in it either way.

Also it is now -4 instead of -5, to counteract the general fiendishness of final battle Will checks.

Thanks. I think pushing down the combat modifier was probably the right idea too. Maybe :') Normally I'd say no, but I figure you might lose a fully stocked investigator or two over the course of the game, so gearing up won't be as much of an option.

Something I came up with. Apologies for the less than stellar picture:

YellowPebble said:

For Worshippers, it needs to say "The Raven," not "The." Weapon immunity is extremely powerful, you may want to at *least* down the Raven's combat modifier to -3.

Here's a raven picture you could try.

http://fc03.deviantart.com/fs12/f/2006/338/e/0/Ravens_Nest_in_memorial_by_liallan.jpg

I can photo edit it so that it looks *much* more sinister though.

Aaaand, this might be the final version (I'm pretty happy with it— and will remain so unless playtesting reveals that the cult encounters as currently designed are too exploitable— I don't think they will be though, there's a built in balance to mess up camping). If you don't have Black Goat of the Woods, feel free to just turn off the corruption features. It'll still work (kindof). The added monster limit, and double gate spawning is enough to drastically alter the game, and the mobile Dark Young would add a little more spice. ::Shrug:: it is intended for players who own Black Goat of the Woods though. Hopefully it will be good enough to persuade fence sitters to buy it :') If you can think of any suggestions on how to improve it or criticisms, let me know (I'm not promising that I'll change it, but I will at least consider it especially if it deals with a thematic or balancing issue).

direct link: http://i622.photobucket.com/albums/tt307/avi_dreader/Blackgoatofthewoods.jpg

Ello there new here and just for a laugh i couldnt help but release the ultimate evil upon Arkham.....

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::face palms:: aaaand I just realized I posted the Herald in the wrong thread... Ugh...

hyeperionx said:

This was great! Anyways hyeperionx if you get this, find me on Facebook.com/pazuzu777 or myspace.com/pazuzu777 so we can talk more about the Silent Hill material you plan on working on. For some stupid reason I cant figure out how to message you through this website.

Here you go:

It's a bit of a 'mixed bag' of abilities, but there is a common theme: if the investigators don't work together and coordinate their efforts, they're screwed.

If anyone has any better pictures of a big black misshapen column of twisty stuff, let me know!

thecorinthian said:

Cool :') One question though. Does the final battle take place in Arkham? I assume it does, but it's never really been determined. Also, does Worm Shapen continue to take effect during final combat? (It's relevant to spell casting). Or would you argue that the ability only affects losses, not costs? Anyways, thanks for posting. Watching the Hello Kitty as the last GOO for so long has been getting me depressed ;')

Ah, I always tend to assume that the final battle doesn't count as being in Arkham, although obviously this worshipper ability is even more dangerous if it does.

And I think that the words 'stirs in its slumber' should mean that the ability only applies while the AO is asleep , and when it wakes up those abilities cease to apply. However I'm pretty sure there was a big thread about this at one point, and we all concluded that ...we don't really know how it's meant to work. So to be honest I'm happy enough for people to use it any way they want! It's much more difficult one way, but it does still work.

As for sanity costs... i think that they do count as a type of 'loss', so if the first player casts spells he will also be driving the other players mad. Again, it doesn't really matter which way you play it; all it does is slightly change the difficult of the AO for some playing styles.

I think the stirring abilities also apply while waking, and I will play your AO in accordance with the detriments of the investigators :'D

So here is my first shot at a GOO, I've seen the image before used as a "Leviathan" GOO but thought it screamed of the Great White Worm.

That's pretty great, although the 'Start of Battle' ability is too easy for my liking. A challenging combat modifier for this AO would probably be -4 or -5, but in order to get that, there'd have to be 12-15 points of monster toughness on the board... which is actually quite a lot of monsters. This ability really ought to put the players under pressure to clean up the monsters... so if I were you, I'd just scrap the 'divided by three' part, or make it half the total toughness instead. If the players end up fighting an AO with a -15 combat modifier it's their own **** fault!

That is a great picture. I did my own version of Rlim Shaikorth not long ago, but don't have a picture half as good as that. I may post mine at some point - it is very different from yours.

Isn't it a great picture? :')

Of course you should also post your version.