Grudunza said:

Re: environment cards, it should say "Discard and redraw" or "Discard and replace." I assumed it was just intended to ignore environments, not force redraws. I only figured that out because of your comment about more rumors.

Avi_dreader said:

Yeah, it does say exactly that now on the updated sheets, which still aren't showing as updated from Photobucket. Should be soon...

Finally updated now, above...

I just realized that I wrote "Overwhelming" instead of "Nightmarish" for Juk-Shabb. Whoops. Update in progress...

douggold said:

Alright... I'll try to catch up on commenting (a bit), I've had (and have) bronchitis for the past two weeks, so I've mostly been in bed when not at work. First off, cool picture, but could you upload a higher quality image? It's visibly fuzzy.

I thought Veet's idea was interesting. One problem I can already see with your design is that there's going to be *a lot* of time spent shuffling through the monster cup. I'm not saying that's a horrible thing in theory, but in practice I think it'd significantly disrupt the flow of the game. One potential solution is a variation on what Veet said, where basically you can retarget the movement to stationary monsters (but instead of cloning them— which requires you to search the entire cup— you just draw out another stationary monster). Instead of doing this every time a (non-Dark Young) stationary monster would move, you could have them roll a die, and draw another one on a 1-2 or a 1-3 (depending on how tough you want this effect to be) then place the monster on the least defended gate of your choice before finding the monster in the cup.

Also, if you want me to help edit, just say the word. I normally help people with that on this thread and in the heralds thread (but I'm a bit backed up right now, not just mucuswise, so realistically it might be a few weeks to a month).

For those who feel that the Ancient Ones from the base game aren't challenging enough, and don't want to use/don't have the epic battle variant found in the Kingsport expansion, here are a couple of simple suggestions to make the game more difficult.

1. Remove all skill checks from the Ancient One's attacks in final battle. The investigators' losses become unconditioned.

2. Always strive for a sealing/closing victory during the game

3. For each sealed gate you're short of to score a sealing victory, the Ancient One's combat rating is increased by (-1)

(E.g. You haven't sealed a single gate in a game against Hastur? His minimal combat rating would be (-6) then.)

4. To promote a sealing victory further, someone else suggested that any missing seals from the board would instead be added as extra doom tokens on the Ancient One's doom track during final battle.

I revised a few posts I made a while back. It's cleaned up into something clearer and more definitive now. It's basically a repost though.

For playing the Base Game only and for enhancing the difficulty of the Base Game Ancient Ones:

I wouldn't play with the modified Doom Tracks if you have other board expansions (particularly Dunwich and Innsmouth), or use the following Elder Sign/Encounter rule.

Doom tokens can not be removed from the doom track by any means prior to final combat (that means no South Church exploit, and no Elder Sign hunting). This makes it so you can't just play out the clock for a guaranteed win. Elder Signs are used as normal, but they don't reduce the doom track.

Optional: ban the use of clues with the fight skill and/or the shotgun during final combat.

Starting Doom Tokens for base game Ancient Ones [with the base board only]:

Yig: 0

Ithaqua: 2

Azathoth: 5 [if you are not just playing the base game, 3]

Cthulhu: 3

Nyarlathotep: 2

Hastur: 3

Yog Sothoth: 2

Shub Niggurath: 3

Yig: Investigators can not be blessed during games against him (Sister Mary is an exception to this rule). Twice as many successes as normal are required to remove a doom token from his doom track.

Cultists are fast.

Ithaqua: gains physical and magical resistance.

Each round of combat with a cultist, roll a die for each weapon or spell you are using, on a failure, it is lost.

Azathoth: Start him with 5 or 3 doom tokens.

Cultists and Maniacs deal four damage to an investigator who defeats them and are stalkers.

Cthulhu: when he reaches 7 doom tokens, his ability reduces all investigators maximum stamina and sanity by 2 instead.

Star Spawn have their toughness increased by two. If they are adjacent to an Elder Sign, they will move onto it if their movement is shown during the mythos phase, ignoring investigators and arrows. If they are still on the Elder Sign during the next mythos phase, remove it from the board. If they defeat an investigator in combat and are permanently on the board, they immediately move one space closer to the nearest Elder Sign (player's choice if there is a tie), following an arrow, or directly (if they are directly adjacent). They can not be taken as monster trophies. If they are defeated, return them to the cup. If they are placed in the outskirts, substitute them with any non-Star Spawn monster on the board that is not in the Sky— if there is a Cultist on the board, a Cultist must be chosen.

Nyarlathotep: is magically and physically immune and requires twice as many successes as normal to remove doom tokens from his doom track.

If you defeat a Cultist, immediately search the monster cup for a random Mask, and fight or evade it as well. If the Cultist was on the board, the Mask remains on the board if undefeated, if not, return it to the cup.

Hastur: raise the terror track to four at the start of the game.

If a Cultist is in the sky, moves, and is unable to leave the sky (due to lack of investigators in the street), raise the terror level by one. When a Cultist is defeated, all investigators lose one clue.

Yog Sothoth: gains physical resistance. Flip all gates against him upside down until investigators enter them, increase their modifiers by -1.

Before investigators in an Other World draw their first encounter they must fight or evade a random monster from the monster cup. If this causes them to be devoured, add a doom token to the doom track.

Shub Niggurath: gains magical resistance. His final combat attack require investigators to lose 3 monster trophies.

Dark Young have their toughness increased an additional one, are Endless, and are not counted against the monster limit. Dhole moves like a Hound of Tindalos, is not counted against the monster limit, and is Endless. Every time a Cultist is defeated, roll a die, on a 1-3 search the cup and place the Dhole on the open gate with the least number of monsters on it (players choice if a tie). The Dhole and Dark Youngs can not be taken as trophies.

Uploaded with ImageShack.us ">

Ah there we go. First attempt, a joke between me and my friends.

Not sure what you mean by this but if you mean "how do you POST an image here" you first upload it to a hosting site like photo bucket then you link it here with the insert/edit image button on the posting screen. If you mean "how do you DOWNLOAD an image from here" just right click on the image and choose the save image option.

Hrm... Never mind.

Decided to try my hand at creating an odd Ancient One for folks here. The idea here was to create a very chaotic, random experience (based off an old RPG villain I created for a campaign I ran).

This guy ended up being very complicated! There's a heck of a lot of text on the card, and honestly I probably overdid it a bit on the random element. At the suggestion of Mi-Go Hunter, I dropped a chance to defend against the random damage (so if you die, you know who to blame!). (But seriously, thanks for taking a look, Mi-Go). With this AO, you will face randomly-changing gates, randomized card draws where you would otherwise have certain results, and a swiftly-changing final battle with randomized AO attacks and resistances.

Please note that this has not been playtested and probably won't be for some time unless someone else does it (I haven't even gotten through the included base game AOs yet).

Is there any particular accepted way you guys like to have the .eon files put up? I've put it on Google Docs right here for now, but if there's another way that works better let me know.

I don't have any "sinister plots" for this guy as I don't have the expansion that works with those, so I'm not sure if there's any particular way they're supposed to work.

Large Version here

Here's what it reads:

Combat Rating: -3

Doom Track: 10

Worshippers: Barganon's aid is random. Whenever a Mythos card is drawn, the monster symbols shown on that card have an additional -1 to their combat rating and +1 toughness until the next Mythos card is drawn. This applies to trophies as well.

Powers:

Mythos: Before the Gate step, all gates with symbols matching one of the symbols on the card are discarded and new gates are drawn for those locations. Any explored markers for those gates are discarded unless the new gate has the same destination as the old. This does not count as opening or closing a gate.

Any Phase: If any card names a specific other card for a player to draw, ignore that and use a standard draw from that deck instead.

Start of Battle:

Count each investigator's items, by type. Return all items to the decks, and draw an equal number (by type) of new items.

Roll a die for Barganon's resistance for the first round: 1-2 Physical, 3-4 Magical, 5-6 Both.

Attack:

Each investigator rolls a die to determine what damage is taken. 1: 1 Stamina. 2: 1 Sanity. 3: 1 Clue Token. 4: 1 Monster Trophy. 5: 1 Gate Trophy. 6: Nothing.

An investigator reaching 0 Sanity or Stamina, or unable to give up a token/trophy, is devoured.

After resolving damage, roll a die for Barganon's resistance next round, as during Start of Battle.

Other Notes :

To make the final battle even harder, replace the defense roll shown with the following (also suggested by Mi-Go Hunter):

1: Physical Resist

2: Magical Resist

3: Physical Immune

4: Magical Immune

5: Both Resist

6: Both Immune

You could also up the Stamina and Sanity damage to 2 each, and/or change the "Nothing" result to some combination damage (such as Sanity + Stamina). I thought about both of those but left it as is for now, but feel free to house rule what you want on this guy. I'm not particular.

To clarify on the damage: You are devoured upon reaching 0 Sanity or 0 Stamina, as usual for AO battles. For the Token and Trophy damage, you may go to 0 Tokens/Trophies safely. You are only devoured if you have 0 of a Token/Trophy and roll that type of damage. (I'm aware that for other AOs this may work differently, but it seems to work better in my mind with this guy to do it this way.)

For those wondering what the picture is, it's a nighttime picture of a lit fountain surrounded by some campus lights on the campus I went to a few years ago, rotated at an odd angle to look strange.

Try checking deviant arts or google images for a picture. The mythos power is highly problematic (it'll ruin the game, in my opinion, not only is it going to cause LITAS, it will result in one shot to seal gates). This might not be a problem if this thing had a 14 doom track, but with a 10 doom track, it's absurd. Only a very large team of investigators maybe 5-8 would have a decent chance at a sealing victory. Arg! Must go!

Avi_dreader said:

I'll eventually Poser up a picture or something.

Not sure that it'll always cause just one shot/LiTaS, since only gates that bear one of the symbols on the new Mythos card are switched. Haven't played enough, though, to be honest, to know how often any one particular symbol comes up. In my opinion, it's less likely to be problematic than Daoloth's, but that's just because I've gotten multiple "surges" in every game I've played so far. (Note that unlike Daoloth's power, this one lets you keep your "explored" icon if the new gate matches the old one, too). I also don't have any of the expansions, so if there are cards in there that more reliably move all symbols, that's something I wasn't aware of. In my experience so far with monster movement, we tend to go multiple rounds without getting some of the monster symbols, so my assumption was that this would be similar with gates.

Not entirely sure how often this will actually cause LiTaS, either. If the gates switch away when you're in the first part of the otherworld, there's a chance one to the proper world might switch back in before you come back out.

I could see raising the doom track, but I suspect that might make the final battle a little crazy if you went to it (14 doom + randomized defenses + large attack variety seems like it might be too much).

But overall, you guys know more about this than me. What if the gates only switched if their symbols were in the black section on the Mythos card (or white, if that's less frequent...don't know if there's a difference)? That keeps the concept but makes the switches less frequent, I'd think. The idea here was to make it very difficult to get a seal victory even in just the base game because of the chance of gate switches, but if you think it goes so far as to make it impossible to get a seal victory, then making the switch less frequent should help.

(I'm surprised at you, though, Avi! From the other posts of yours I've read, I was expecting you to say it wasn't lethal enough. )

As for splitting some into a Herald (as you suggested elsewhere), I'd considered doing that (actually, I'd probably make Barganon the Herald and just ignore the final battle parts of this). However, I don't have any of the expansions that deal with Heralds, so I wasn't sure if there were particular rules I'd need to watch out for.

I agree with Sdrolion: I'm surprised at you Avi! I thought you relished in creating bone-crushing heralds. But now that I think about it, Barganon's doom track should be longer, maybe at least 12. And yeah, a better pic is needed.

mi-go hunter said:

Aww...nobody likes my fountain-at-night pic. I probably should do more than just go through my hard drive and find a crappy picture, eh? It was late and I didn't have any pictures of ultimate cosmic evil lying around. I'll go digging later.

And aww...but I set it at 10 just for Avi (in reference to his concerns...I think they were his...elsewhere that AOs with 12+ doom tracks can't fill their tracks on the base map alone without investigators making mistakes)! I do have to admit that 12 would somewhat disarm the concern about making seal victories impossible, though, since it would fall into (at least for the base game) the realm of AOs that couldn't awaken by gate openings alone (so long as you didn't close a gate instead of sealing).

Looking at the expansions through the wiki, I do see that if you're using all places together it looks like, what, 20 unstable locations? So yeah, that would make it crazily difficult.

I'd like to see what it would look like if we just raised the doom track a little and made the gate openings a little less frequent (the aforementioned "only on black" or "only on white"), though, rather than going to a full 14 (Azathoth-level) doom track.

Alternately, if the "gates" power is one that people feel like will be too problematic, period, I could keep the 10 track and switch that for a different randomizer (perhaps something else dealing with the monsters, such as a reasonably random condition that makes them sometimes change into other monsters).

mi-go hunter said:

I enjoy difficult games. But at the same time, I always try to create heralds or Ancient Ones with one or multiple weak points. And as a general designing rule I always make a sealing victory possible (I mean, I think about how I could win vs a herald/Ancient One with randomized characters, and if I don't think it could do it at least a decent amount of the time then I alter it).

I don't have time to do more than skim these responses, but it seems like this thing is getting closer to the right track already. Gtg :')

Avi_dreader said:

I shall still take the "Made an Ancient One that scared Avi" trophy, just because.

Avi, when you do have time, which do you think would be better of the below?

1. Doom Track 12, with gates switching but only if their symbol appears on black.
2. Doom Track 10, with the gate-switch replaced by some kind of monster-switch (since that wouldn't interfere with seals).

Sdrolion said:

I think 1 or 2 could work, but 1 would be more interesting. I'm still a bit worried about 1. Especially with dual gates (I haven't calculated the probabilities). You could also toss in the random monster bit. It'd be interesting.

Generally speaking, I don't make custom content to appeal to owners of the base game only ;') although I kind of did a variant setting for them once. Let's face it, most players who are playing AH enough to want custom content are users of multiple expansions.

Avi_dreader said:

No idea on the dual-gate stuff, as again, I don't have the expansions that pull that sort of stuff. Is that Lurker?

Not sure I'd want to do both , as there's enough text on that card already, but I'll look at it and get another Eon file made up, probably tomorrow night (tonight is for actually playing Arkham Horror).

After seeing the sheer number of possible gates allowed by the expansions, I agree with the concerns about the gate-switch. I think #1 should address it pretty well, but we'd have to see through playtests.

As for dual gates, do they have two symbols? If so, I'd probably say the best thing to do with them is say that they change only if both symbols appear on black.

Sdrolion said:

http://www.arkhamhorrorwiki.com/Gate_marker#Lurker_at_the_Threshold_Gate_Markers

Unfortunately the page seems to be down :'/

Yeah, it's Lurker.

6 of its 18 gates are dual gates (they have two symbols and you can choose which one you want to use).

Hrm... I'll just tell you what they are.

Slash/Star

Square/Circle

Cross/Square

Cross/Hexagon

Diamond/Slash

Star/Triangle

If you went with the changing only on black fix, the 'Star/Triangle' and 'Slash/Star' will have a frequency of change of 1 in 6 while the others will have their frequency doubled to 1 in 3. If you leave it as is then I beleive the 'Cross/Square' 'Cross/Hexagon' and 'Diamond/Slash' will double their frequency to 1 in 1.5 from the 1 in 3 vs everything else.

....if my math is correct.

I don't know if any of you guys watched Power Rangers... But this is my attempt at Lord Zedd, the archnemesis dude from season 2. Still probly a few wording kinks to be worked out, but whatever. For the record, on his attack, one hit=1 success.

In addition, I made a Rita Repulsa herald, Goldar Monster, and Zordon guardian. I don't even have those online yet, but if you want, I can just briefly detail their effects, since they all kind of fit together although they don't all have to be in play at once. ALthough I did try a power ranger themed game last night, and it was CRAZY! Slash epic/awesome.

Crap, I don't understand linking. Here's just the straightup URL

http://s1086.photobucket.com/albums/j447/richardraya11/?action=view&current=Lord-Zedd-Front-Face.png

rayawolf13 said:

Oh! And I made some sinister plot attacks for Zedd, which I'd appreciate critique for as well. They're on the photobucket site where he is. So I guess I'd better explain Goldar. During the game, if Rita's herald, he appears when investigators get unexpectedly thrown into an Other World and are delayed. So instead of OW encounters, they just fight/evade Goldar. He's -4 awareness, +0 horror with a damage of 1, -4 combat with a damage of 4, and 4 toughness.

I think in final combat he would go down easily and with a doom track of 13 a sealing victory is likely. A double monster isn't that difficult to deal with and you are quite unclear on what happens when monsters that combine have incompatible powers (such as a stationary and fast monster combining). A lot of what you printed about the cultists abilities is just restating what is already on their tokens and doesn't need to be reiterated if it doesn't change.

Veet said:

Agreed. Except I'm not entirely sure how easy final combat would be considering he'd eliminate all common and unique items.

Also, I really like the Merge Monster ability. I'd probably make it in addition to the monster surge, and have the monsters generated by it not be counted against the monster limit. You'll need to think about how to manage double movement types.

Personally, I'd prefer if you made this all into a herald that wasn't a power ranger, but something more thematically appropriate to the game. It's an interesting new idea, and I'd like to play with it someday.