great ideas! lets keep them coming

I like to do fun stuff sometimes, and I thought this would be really fun:

What do you think?

Hadanelith said:

Agreed.

Godzilla works.

He's quite similar to Shub-Niggurath though (during the main game, anyway). He boosts monster toughness, and like Shub he also gives you an incentive to not spend monster trophies (although for a different reason).

The final battle makes me laugh, it's quite a novel approach to timing the number of turns. It seems a shame that the investigators can't do anything to delay Godzilla's progress though - SInister Plots would make things a bit less predictable.

kroen said:

hate it when the page switches too fast and no one bothers to go back

Don't spam the thread with re-posts of your own stuff just because you don't think it's getting the attention it deserves! I'm pretty sure we're all capable of pressing the 'previous page' button. I DID read this AO the first time round, I just didn't comment on it yet. If you want to get us to comment, here's what you do: don't argue with us or take it personally when we criticize your designs. If we're hesistant to comment on your cards, it's probably because a) you often vehemently disagree with criticism even though it's based on a perfectly legitimate alternate experience of the game, and b) you rarely bother with an 'updated' version which addresses even the most serious problems. It makes me wonder about who exactly is benefitting from this arrangement.

But for what it's worth...

Summanus is alright, but it doesn't work all that well. The 'flipped doom token' thing is quite fiddly, and although it has some interesting dynamics if you flip a lot of them, by that time you're pretty well screwed anyway. If you only get a few flipped doom tokens, it's not much different from just adding extra tokens at the start of the final battle (like Rhan-Tegoth and his cultists).

The Attack might be too harsh, I'm not sure. Have you tried playing against this? With no elder signs - everyone immediately dies. With 1-2 elder signs, realistically, you expect to lose 1 player every 1-2 turns, which is pretty harsh. With 3-4 elder signs you'll have one turn's grace (probably), then you're back to losing a player per turn. With 5 elder signs, if you're lucky, you'll have two turns before you start needing to devour people.

The Terror level is quite good fun though, although it effectively shortens the Doom track by couple of points (since once you hit 10 Terror, which will almost certainly happen before turn 10, you are effectively adding an additional Doom token every Mythos phase, in addition to gates etc.

Other minor pedantry: the box which says 'Special (see attack)' is purely intended to be a box for immunities/resistances, so it should just read 'none'. Ideally, the second paragraph under 'Attack' should be under a heading saying 'Final Battle' to make it clear that it applies all the time.

Also, there's a typo: it should be 'Monarch of Night' not 'Monarch of Nigh'.

what do you mean by "the defenece box is reserved to resistance/immunity"? :/

and I guess the attack is a pretty harsh... should change it to "the first player rolls X dice, where X is the number of elder signs on the board. on a failure, 1 elder sign is removed from the board."

As you can see I do adress some of the problems but I see no need to remake and repost it. What's the point? not like anyone is gonna play with them anyway. Most of this forum is for pure fun and discussion.

Admiral142 said:

ha ha nice but I would change his worshippers toughness bonus... seems to Shubby for me... what monster would worship this guy? beside all... Aquatic? Snake People?

the -6 with both resistance is kind of evil... one reason the Spider AO is hard -4 both resistance but then again you do get... what 6-7 turns with no one dying before before everyone does!

but every thing else looks good... use a mini Godzilla as the marker?

Now I got to make a Gamera Guardian!

Avi_dreader said:

Yeah, I went ahead and took that last line out. Hopefully that makes him more workable. Admittedly, he has not been play tested, so there may be other problems that would show up in a play test. I've got some other stuff coming along these lines too, like mechanical men and cyborg monsters, as well as at least one new ally card and some new common items. Your feedback is much appreciated! Thank you!

MrsGamura said:

LOL, A Gamera Guardian would be awesome! I'm going to do some sinsiter plot cards for Godzilla too, and one of them gives the investigators an extra turn to try to take him down. Also, I think I'll be making some fun allies and a unique item or two to add to the ambience of having a Godzilla AO.

kroen said:

Fair point about the resistances box! I never really noticed that before, it is a bit odd.

Don't people ever play with anyone else's custom AOs? I've played against some stuff from this board. I quite like the discussions in which we spend a while trying to fine-tune a specific AO.

Anyway I don't have a problem with people re-posting altered versions of AOs they already posted, but just trying to bump a previous AO back up the thread seems a bit spammy. It's also kinda dismissive of everyone else who has posted in the meantime. It feels a bit like queue-jumping! The only reason for trying to dictate the course of the conversation is if you've got something new to contribute. If no-one jumps for joy then you might just have to live with it...I've posted plenty of things I've thought are genius only for no-one to be particularly inspired by it.

Re: Summanus' attack: you could even make it into a more conventional skill check. It'd be quite traditional, after all: "The first player makes a Lore (+1) check or removes an Elder Sign token from the board. This check's modifier decreases by 1 every turn. If there are no Elder Sign tokens when the check is failed, all investigators are devoured." That would be quite cool - it's something that the investigators can plan for, even if they don't have any seals down, by boosting lore and keeping clue tokens. Sometimes it's easy to forget that the standard AO attack format is quite carefully chosen because it has a lot of advantages to it.

Here's a concept of an "Ancient One" that hasn't been done before: (surprisingly)

Plot cards and character marker for Godzilla, King of Monsters!

Sorry these are so big. Strange eons spat them out in .jpg format instead of the .png format it has been using. I'm not sure what happened. Anyway, I thought these would be fun for the plot deck; take a look!

Here is the irradiated injury card also:

kroen said:

I got a surprise here. It's a pretty "high concept" AO, so I expected it to take me about five seconds to find a way in which it didn't work. In fact, I think it does work. I can't see any way in which it...

...wait....

...ok yeah, it doesn't work. It's a great idea Kroen, but do your research: there are only six monsters with the triangle symbol. Two Cthonians, two Shan, and two Yithians. With only six monsters, you couldn't ever fill the Arkham Streets. You need to choose another set of monsters to become Yithians. 'Cultists' would be the traditional one. All cultists are treated as Yithians. THEN we've got a ballgame. Or use 'circle' symbol - that takes away the Dhole, but also loads of boring-ass monsters like Witches and Byakhees.

Other than that, though, it's great! Here are a few more thoughts though:

- Rather than bothering to explain what Yithians do in the text of the main ability, you could just instruct the players to remove one Yithian from the cup and put it on Yithian Invasion as an 'example', to be referred to throughout the game. (Alternatively, you could make a copy of the Yithian monster marker and add the image to the text of the AO in strange eons, so it actually shows what a Yithian does. But that's a bit unconventional and it might not work anyway, I don't know).

- Isn't it crying out for some 'variant' Yithians? Yithian Elders or something like that? Super-Yithians who turn up to direct the troops whenever there's a monster surge, something like that. In fact, that suggests an entirely different approach: you could mock up a load of extra Yithian monster markers, and do what the Black Goat does: have a second monster cup purely for Yithian-related monsters.

Hmm didn't know there are only six triangles... also nice ideas there, but making new monsters isn't elelegant enough and adds complexity. How about making all moons yithians, have them+the 2 yithians set aside, making them all yithians, stating they can't be banished through gates and make yithians appear just like hex monsters... although perhaps making all moons is maybe too much... cultists might be enough, as there are 13 of them with all expansions+2 yithians=15 which is enough I believe. Good thinking.

kroen said:

Have you got the 'Bestiary' plug-in for Strange Eons? It lets you open a table of all the monsters' stats, and it even tells you how many were in each expansion (up until Black Goat anyway). I don't think there are as many as 13 cultists, either. Six from the original game, one from Dunwich, one Dark Druid, and three Children of the Goat. What have I missed?

Something has to be done about the triangle-symbol gates (which are to the City of the Great Race and Unknown Kadath, I think). Either these have to have no effect when they close (a trick borrowed from the black goat) or else it's got to be much more difficult to close them in the first place.

You're probably right about the new monsters, it's complex enough if you're already changing what some monsters do. I think a seperate second monster cup might be the way to go, though. It's the most 'foolproof' method of seperating out particular monsters (all the rummaging is done at the start of the game, rather than during the game), and it's also got precedent on an official card (the Black Goat).

Plus, once you've got a working version of the 'create a second cup' ability, you can put it on other AOs and have it do different things.

There are 12, my bad. There's 1 in Kingsport.

thecorinthian said:

Eeh. The AO is *way* too hard. It's almost guaranteed to wake up and kill all the players in two to three turns. Try playing it once, you'll see.

kroen said:

Actually, that's not true, I keep a folder with some of the Arkham Horror custom heralds and Ancient ones and intend to eventually go to Kinkos and print out a few of the best (provided they are proven interesting *and* balanced). I'm not interested in printing Investigators or custom items or monsters though.

i really like playing custom goos and investigators!!

Here's a tough Ancient One in the spirit of Innsmouth:

*the monster=the trophy (in the power)

kroen said:

Hrm... It looks like you'd have to gear up for combat to beat this one, but it'd still be doable. Like Yig, but tough :') And the expenditure of clue tokens for trophy keeping will prevent first turn kills. One question though, the combat rating only goes up if there's a monster or gate to remove from the sheet, right? That's what your text indicates, and I want to make sure that's the case (otherwise I'd say that combat with this AO would be *very* difficult, although not impossible, because investigators could still stock up to kill him in one or two turns.

Yes, his combat rating only improves if you remove a trophy from his sheet. That's part of the ingame strategy.

kroen said:

::Shrug:: he's doable then, I'd never go for a sealing victory against him though (unless I had five or more investigators).