Sounds like a challenge...

Worshippers: Baneb Djedet is worshipped by all and none. During the Upkeep Phase draw a random monster from the cup and place it on the Baneb Djedet's sheet until the next Upkeep Phase. All monsters which share a name with this monster deal one additional point of Sanity and Stamina damage, gain Ambush, Endless, Overhwleming 1, Nightmarish 1, Physical Resistance and Magical Resistance and move as though they were Stalkers.

Also, shouldn't all Investigators discard their Monster Trophies back to the cup at the start of combat.

Thanks for the suggestion! I may not go with the exact set of extra abilities, but the idea that the bonus constantly changes is a good one. I'm also thinking about the idea that it would basically make monster surges much worse somehow. Actually.... hang on... hang on... hehehehee, I've got a sadistic idea. Behold, my most evil plan ever! -

"Baneb-Djedet can spawn life where there was none. Whenever a monster surge occurs, monsters placed in Arkham are distributed between the streets and locations of investigators in Arkham, instead of between gates."

That puts monsters in stable locations (always fun), and makes everyone have to deal with them. It's like a trial run for the final battle! I'm definitely gonna try that. It's not really a traditional 'worshipper' ability, but I think it's too much fun to not use...

Jake yet again said:

No... the whole idea is that shrewd players can gather good trophies in advance. Of course, if you end up drawing monsters in the final battle that are just as nasty as the ones you killed in Arkham, you're not much better off (because you can onyl spend one trophy per round, and you have to deal with the final battle monsters anyway or you're dead).

Determining the mid-way locations might be tricky. Also it's important from a gameplay perspective that the monsters never spawn in the Hospital or the Asylum. Perhaps you should use a deck of cards with all the street names and (un)stable locations...

Aha, interesting. I thought it might get misinterpreted like that!

I didn't mean 'between' as in 'somewhere in between'. I meant that instead of appearing on a gate, each monster appears on an investigator. Sorry, it was very clumsy wording. I've amended it so it's now written like this:

"<name> is a source of spontaneous growth. Whenever a <b>monster surge</b> occurs, monsters are placed on streets and locations which contain investigators, instead of on locations with open gates."

That's how I'd like to phrase it, but the question is: is it clear enough how that works, do I need to specify that all the other ways of determining monster placement apply to it in the "normal" way? That would require a whole extra sentence on the end of the ability:

"Monsters placed this way must be distributed as evenly as possible among these streets and locations."

Any if I add that sentence, this is starting to look like a seriously text-heavy AO. Not ideal.

As for keeping monsters away from the hospital or asylum - I have no problem simply saying "tough!" and having the monsters appear there anyway. If the investigators aren't up to the task of killing monsters then it's their own **** fault! Someone healthy will need to rush to the hospitals and save the sick people! And bear in mind that although it may seem important that monsters "never" appear in the hospital or asylum, the official expansions do allow it to happen - 'Summon Monster' will do it, as will 'Milk of Shub-Niggurath'.

thecorinthian said:

WOW! This looks really fun (and I like the picture) :'D I'd love to do a final battle against it. I hope you give it a cool in game effect.

Mmm... How does this sound? When a monster appears on a gate with no monsters, it is stationary, has toughness +1 until it is defeated and does not count against the monster limit. :'D :'D :'D ? Eh?

Jake yet again said:

I kindof like this idea (and may partially incorporate it into something someday); however, there's the problem of it being *too* temporary. Investigators can just ignore a tough monster for a turn. It's not enough of a threat. If it made the monsters considerably more powerful and it lasted for perhaps three turns (using clue tokens to mark the passage of time), then ;'D

@The Corinthian

I also like your idea of making monster surges haunting horror generators ;'D also fun. Anyhoo. It sounds like you have a bit to work with now. I'm looking forward to seeing the final product :')

One problem with that ability though— you stock up an investigator or two with strong items and they can use the instant monster surges as an easy way to stock up trophies (assuming they're just going for a final battle kill), while the gates will be largely undefended (especially if you're fielding a team larger than two players and you're already near the monster limit when surges occur). ::Shrug:: maybe it's a tradeoff if you want it that way. It would still be cool. You might want to raise the monster limit a bit though, perhaps by two or three, just to prevent this exploit. You also might not want to allow this to effect gates in Dunwich and Innsmouth (that would cause the terror track to go crazy, and it also would ruin the threat of the vortexes in both towns).

Avi_dreader said:

I don't think that it's too much of a problem that it's "delivering" monsters direct to your door. In my experience, the problem in AH is seldom 'getting to the monsters' - if anything, quite the opposite. If players wanted to camp at a particular location, they could be fairly sure that some monsters would come calling sooner or later, but it doesn't affect the number of monsters, the number of gates, or any of the other stuff that you need to deal with.

It's possible that by forcing confrontations between investigators and monsters, I've increased the efficiency with which investigators will kill monsters - but I doubt it. I think that the additional fights will most likely result in many, many trips to the hospital and asylum. And of course an increased atmosphere of paranoia and despair, which is the idea.

In order to really exploit it, you need to make some serious sacrifices: you can 'attract' the monster surge by having only one person in a location during the Mythos phase - but he'll be getting three or four or five random monsters, so he'd better be pretty tough. And of course, if people need to not be in Arkham locations during the Mythos phase, that means you can't go shopping, you can't have Newspaper encounters to get money, and yes, you can't heal or get your sanity back. There won't be many monsters guarding gates - but in my view, you have to have a hell of a lot of monsters sitting on gates before they're as much of a problem as even a single monster sitting in the waiting room at St. Mary's Hospital!

Avi_dreader said:

Oh, bollocks! Good point. I forget about the vortices. They're tranquil enough already. Ho-hum. I could just resign myself to the fact that some cards always diminish the impact of other cards. But I'll try to think of something. I haven't got space to add "except for in Dunwich!" to the end of every sentence on the AO.

Raising the monster limit is not a bad idea either, but I have about three words of space left on the AO. If I add a clause about removing the monster limit, I have to remove something, and I really don't want to cut the card's only 'theme' sentence (the bit about spontaneous growth). Alternatively, i could just scrap the whole monster surge ability and bring out one of my other ideas for an AO ability: "There is no monster limit." That'd get the investigators moving. I'll save that for someone else, I think.

Also... maybe I'm being thick, but... what would make the terror track go crazy? (If it's an Innsmouth thing, I don't have that expansion yet, but hopefully it'll arrive soon and I will then think about how to make this AO compatible with the new board etc.)

Anyway, thanks for the help Avi, you spotted some very important issues there. I haven't found ways of dealing with them yet, but for now, here's the latest version. Ia ia Baneb-Djedet, Goat of Mendes, Black Ram with a Million Spawn!

@ thecorinthian: too wordy too many rules!! i like the attack part but why all the rest? why not attack the ao as normal with weapons and such i see no reason for the monster toughness attack? i like him spawning monsters to attack investigators but why not use spawn monsters? and then u dont need the extra words and rules at the bottom of the attack part. i like simple elegant rules and this is not it! seems a lot to do over nothing. keep the ao attack get rid of the final battle stuff and the worshippers part is just a pain and not needed.

pittplayer said:

I agree it's too wordy. I've been trying to make it simpler and easier to explain, but I don't want to cut any of the actual effects, and as soon as I cut some of the explanation, it stops making sense.

The reason for not using spawn monsters is that I'd have to design a bunch of spawn monsters. And the reason this battle is interesting (for me, anyway) is that it uses the whole variety of the game's monsters, and you can't be sure what you're going to get. You have to be ready for anything.

If the investigators could attack the AO directly, that it would leave them with no incentive to fight the monsters which appeared when the AO attacked - they could just evade all the monsters instead. The monsters would become an overly-complex form of sneak test. I'm much more interested in a marathon battle with monsters if the players actually have something to gain, rather than just trying to mimimize loss.

I'm surprised you think the worshippers part is a pain - I was quite proud of that, in a sadistic kind of way! It's meant to be a pain. It's the only thing the AO actually does during the main game, so if I'm going to get rid of it, I'm going to have to replace it with something else.

Thanks for your input, but I'm dead set on making this concept work!

easy fixes:

attack: all monster the ao spawns can not be evaded.

monster trophies add +1 each to combat checks.

worshipers: if there is a monster surge each investigator at a unstable location gets a monster instead of normal placement.

how about that?

pittplayer said:

I thought about the non-evade thing, but it reduces the tactical options significantly... I like the idea that the investigators can ignore some of the monsters but won't gain anything by doing it. This is why the 'discard-a-trophy' way of attacking the AO is important. In both the games I've played against the early versions of this AO, we had one guy on the team who had high Sneak but not very good Fight/weapons. Each round, we gave him the hardest monster that had a low Awareness... and he just evaded it. I don't think he managed to kill a single monster during the final battle, but without him being able to evade some of the nastier monsters, we'd have had to fight them, and we'd have lost. Which is how I always wanted it to work.

About the worshippers ability - is the idea that monsters wouldn't appear in stable locations? Am I the only person who doesn't have a problem with monsters occasionally appear at stable places?

What do you mean about monster trophies adding +1? Do you mean investigators can spend monster trophies like clues?

I like the thing the way it is ::shrug:: I'm not saying that I wouldn't like changes, but as it is, I would probably print it out and play it. (My only worry is that it's just going to be nonstop monster fighting the whole game). There's an easy trick to making the terror track go crazy ;') (I used to do this wrong so now let it be right), instead of dividing monsters from surges evenly between the gates with no more than the monsters on the gate it appeared on able to appear anywhere (excess going in outskirts), make it so that gate surges in Innsmouth and Dunwich place *all* of their monsters on that gate. Or make it so that instead of the extra monsters going into the outskirts, have them distributed on gates in a town without a monster limit. Either of those should cause a bit of trouble ;'D

I did some Sinister Plots for this AO, also, although I'm not sure they're that great.

Full-size versions available on my Flickr page here: www.flickr.com/photos/30396818@N08/

Fighting his monsters wasn't normally done with random assignations? It didn't even occur to me when reading it before ::laughter:: that makes this guy *alot* easier. And here I thought he'd be fairly tough ;'D

'How to assign the monsters' was one of the big things I couldn't decide about.

In both the games we played against Baneb-Djedet, my group thought we were going to have a fairly easy time of it - but then we very nearly got killed in the final battle, both times. And that was with us deciding how the monsters are assigned. So I decided that randomizing the monsters might simply be too difficult. But if you think it's too easy, I feel like I should change it back...

A bigger problem is that randomized monsters might be too arbitrary - I quite like the idea that there's some group decision-making involved, and it'd be a shame to lose that. I could make it so that the investigators choose who fights what, but monsters can't be evaded? That might be a good balance.

It also depends heavily on the composition of the monster cup. If you've got all the monsters from other expansions, it's a lot less predictable.

for each monster trophy ass +1 to combat checks, if you have 2 trophies then add +2 to your combat. i dont care if you want them to appear at stable locations i am saying that if have them appear at certain locations then you can use strategy, if you have them appear everywhere u better be playing a monster fighter!!! and that sucks cause its forcing you to play certain characters!

thecorinthian said:

I'm not sure if it would actually be too easy, that's the sort of thing I'd actually want playtested. It certainly is much easier than I thought it was before ;'D and assuming your investigators were well stocked with weapons (and blessed?), perhaps it's fine as it is.

I like the idea that if you pick your monster you can't run from it.

Arg... Need sleep... G'night.

Hey all,

Here's a GOO I've been working on recently. The picture and name have been changed to protect the innocent -- it's meant to be a big bad from another IP, and I wasn't sure if that was kosher or not.

Quite good - it's a 'mixed bag' though. I quite like the idea that the AO has its own Horror check.

The second part of 'Ascension' is similar to what I've been trying to get to work on one of my AOs, but if you've got the luxury of space on the card you can probably explain it more clearly:

"Whenever a monster surge occurs, draw monsters as normal, then distribute those monsters among locations in Arkham which contain investigators, instead of among locations with open gates." (Something like that, anyway. The problem is that it's quite a high-level change to the Monster Surge rules: you're changing where the monsters go, but every other rule governing monster distribution has to still apply to the new destinations, whcih is a very difficult thing to fit on the card.)

Consider simplifying the cultists. Making them powerful is fine, but in my experience, it's a bit of a pain to fight cultists if all their stats have changed, as you keep having to refer to the AO sheet. You could just make a few significant changes - for example, give them a -2 Horror check, 2 Sanity damage, and make them Physically Immune. Phys Immunity (or high toughness) is a good quick way of making things annoying to fight against. Alternatively, you could just make half a dozen custom Vampire markers and 'replace' the cultists entirely.

It's a very odd picture. Was this meant to be Mayor Wilkins from Buffy, by any chance? If so, I wouldn't worry about the IP - you'd certainly get away with it. People have posted all sorts of TV and movie-inspired cards on here, using names and artwork and everything.

Yeah, I suppose "The Ascension" gave it away. The picture is a close-up of a Chinese wall hanging, actually.

You're right, the change to the monster surge rules is quite a large one. I'll fiddle with it, we'll try it out and see what kinds of issues we run into.

As for the Cultists, I do think it's too many rules. I was trying to figure out a way to make vampires play a prominent role -- perhaps we'll just take the lone Vampire out of the box when we're testing him to swap them in for the Cultist profile when we have to fight one.

Tested Wilkins/Goqua today. Monster surges were a bit less harrowing seeing as how one of us was playing the Scientist, which reduced the number of monsters that showed up (assuming that I'm reading her power correctly when it comes to surges). It came down to a final battle, but nobody was devoured by the horror check and we won due to Skids and the Mask Exhibit item which grants the Researcher's power for a few turns. Consensus was that he wasn't too tough, but I feel like the final battle might be a bit too easy (of note is that Skids took him down with a flamethrower). Maybe I'll make some epic battle cards.

Only odd bit was when we ran into a few Children of the Goat, or whatever that monster from BG is that delays if you fail a check against it. We ended up deciding it would just get the vampire profile but still delay you if you failed a check -- never happened though.

Here's a new Ancient One, inspired by the story "The Long Road Home" by Paul Melniczek (can be found in Chaosium's "Frontier Cthulhu"). As always, input is greatly appreciated:

I haven't made Grab Tokens yet, just substitute anythign else if you want to try it out.

Everyone getting Lost in Time and Space is great, but the first part of 'Grey Realm' needs rewordint. What it probably needs to say is: "Whenver an investigator in Arkham goes insane or unconscious, that investigator does not move to St. Mary's Hospital or Arkham Asylum, but is Lost in Time and Space instead. Items, clues and retainers are discarded as normal. Sanity and Stamina are restored to a minimum of 1 as normal."

You could skip the last two parts (about things being done "as normal") if you like, since it's pretty obvious anyway. An alternate and slightly quicker way of wording the ability would be: "Whenever an investigator in Arkham goes insane or unconscious, follow the rules for 'Insane and Unconscious in an Other World' instead."

Not sure about this business of fighting Yggdrasil while LiTas, though...

Those 'mini-AO' battles create all sorts of rules ambiguities. Plus, it's a bit repetitive, which is especially annoying if you have no chance of beating the thing. It seems like the equivalent of sending people to St. Mary's Hospital, then making them fight a really tough monster or be devoured. It reinforces the already bad event, so that investigators who are weak will not get a chance to recover.

So what I'd do is this: create a single Spawn monster which investigators have to fight if they're LiTaS, but which has an unusual ability that doesn't cause damage. For example: -2 Awareness, +0 Horror modifier, +0 Combat modifier, two Toughness. If investigators fail the Horror check, they discard all their remaining Clue tokens (this is after losing half) instead of taking San damage. If an investigator fails the Combat chech, he or she discards 1 item (this is also after discarding half) instead of Stam damage.

Of course it is possible for that to create an 'endless loop', and exactly when the fight happens is unclear, so it might not be that great an idea...

I know this isn't necessarily the place, but I have searched the forums and am not able to find any relevant information.

In the final battle with Cthulhu, he drains your MAX sanity/stamina. Does that mean that you can go into the battle with 1 sanity and 1 stamina and go 10 rounds with him? That's how it seems to me.

Again, sorry to post it here, but I know there is a lot of expertise in the fan creations section, so I thought it would be a good place to ask.