Yenreb said:

::Cough cough:: here's a *major* problem.... There are 32 corruption cards. 16 of them are green... Assume you're playing a three player game (odds are you might be playing more), that means you'll draw fifteen corruption cards just from sealing (assuming there are no gate bursts). Now, with creeping doom, endless greed, downward spiral, speak to your friend, jealous guardian, ruination, the skin crawls, you're going to be drawing considerably more corruption cards than this.... In fact, I'd say there's a pretty good chance that you'll run the deck out (which if I remember correctly wakes the Ancient One). And then there's a corruption from combat... You might want to do two things, make trophy gaining cause corruption on a roll of 1-2 (or else you're basically making an ancient one that will stongly discourage fighting— which might be your goal, I don't know). And second, don't make all investigators gain corruption from a gate sealing. If you still want to keep it tough, but not make it insane and unplayable for anything larger than the smallest of teams, make it so that a player when sealing a gate must draw two corruption cards. That way you can keep the level of corruption more balanced for different team sizes (otherwise you're penalizing the hell out of larger ones). I'm also not too sure about the cultist aspect... Let's see.... Four corruptions, and it would be a nine toughness monster. ::Cough cough:: Slightly problematic. For one thing, you might not want to change the combat modifier. And for another, would you want to make a ruling on how much it's worth as a trophy? Does its value change, or does it revert to one?

Oh, also, if you want to make the cultists more than an empty threat, make them (or all crescent monsters) immune to Call The Beast.

The Cultist modification was meant to be a flat increase of 2 toughness. There's a comma-conjunction there, but I guess it's still ambiguous.

As for giving the sealer 2 Corruptions, I think I'll go with that. And a little more:

And, yes, if the Corruption deck is empty, the Ancient One awakens. Against this guy, that's a really bad thing, because you get one turn before he eats you all.

Heh... I'm kindof disappointed, I was looking foward to supercultists ;'D as they are now, they're really not that tough (keep in mind, cultists only do one damage if you fail a combat check against them, and you don't need to put points against a horror check— you might want to bulk them up one more toughness). Btw, his final battle ability is pretty brutal. You realize that the odds of surviving two rounds of combat against him are pretty low, regardless (although I think he could pick off several investigators the first turn anyways)? Would you consider changing it to one sanity one stamina damage? He should still be able to kill pretty fast. Granted, I haven't playtested against him, but, assuming every player has two corruptions while fighting him (I think that's a conservative estimate btw), he'll kill all melee characters by the second turn (probabilistically speaking).

How about I change it from "for each failure" to "on a failure"? That way, one failure is enough to get the loss, without killing you more for further failures.

I also added 2 to Cultists' combat damage.

Here's one nasty, nasty Ancient One, for experienced players only:

Yenreb said:

Ooo for the combat damage, eh for the other part. As it is now, the more corruptions a player has, the less likely he is to take a hit. Heh... How about roll dice equal to your number of corruptions, on a failure, take sanity and stamina damage equal to that. ::shrug:: I'm not saying you should do that, but as it is now, he'll be a pushover for a very corrupt investigator. Roll five dice, get one success, take no damage. Bleh.

kroen said:

WTF?! I was looking at him and thinking, eh, hard, but doable. And then I saw his doom track and his attack. Seriously? That's crazy. I think the only way to take him out semi-consistently would be aiming for a combat victory (with clues and a shotgun— and preferably a fight skill).

Avi_dreader said:

I read it as a seperate, 1-die check for each card. If any of those fail, then you take the damage. If this isn't how it's currently intended, it would make a good fix.

Avi_dreader said:

What bugs me most is the typo in the worshipper ability, but I'm like that...

Avi_dreader said:

The Message said:

Eh... You're forgetting that despite his easy modifier and low doom track, having an entire team of cursed investigator essentially gives him a doom track equal to 20 as opposed to ten. Oh... And he kills a player every turn, guaranteed.

jhaelen said:

Not fun? "fun" is a relative factor. Some players would enjoy the challenge. Others that have found the game too easy even with all the expansions would bless the change.

I guess it depends what kind of player you are.

edit: regarding the typo, yes, I have noticed it.

The Message said:

That is the intention.

Dude you posted my Final Fantasy Ancient Ones! Awesome. How do I post characters though? Is there some kind of FAQ for people who think URL is an MTV show about top pop hits?

Lord of Squirrels said:

I think there is. But whenever I give the URL to someone, they get confused and ask why I'm talking about TV. [/joke]

To post a character that you've made in Strange Eons, you have to upload the image to an image host (such as ImageShack). Then you post a reply in the Custom [whatever] thread, click on the Insert Image button (It looks like a picture of a mountain), then enter the URL (the stuff in the address bar) of the image you uploaded.

There is a plugin for Strange Eons which will upload a file to ImageShack so you don't have to. It then pops up a dialog telling you the URL (the link) of the image. Click on the link, copy the contents of the address bar, and paste that into this forum's Insert Image dialog.

I hope that helps you.

Wanna know more? visit the thread of my custom expansion, the Sea of Horror: new.fantasyflightgames.com/edge_foros_discusion.asp (and no, there's no mistake on him. I do mean gate burst rather than gate surge. if you're really interested you'll find all the answers in my thread.)

And here's one that doesn't require my expansion in order to play or even understand:

Good job I like AO's that attack money.

It makes people Greedy but has them spend more on items? Greedy people would spend less.

kroen said:

It's kindof cool, I like the general idea and the worshippers idea. But a little weak (in my opinion due to combat) due to combat ability. Everyone can just get bank loans prior to the final battle (during which they will be discarded), and survive three rounds minimum (or more like 9 rounds for any investigator with focus three). It's good that he has a high combat modifier, but I'm afraid he'll get the hell beaten out of him anyways by one or two surviving high focus investigators. You should bump up the discard money to 5 minus focus, and have him regain a doom token for every 4 dollars removed. I would say three but, um, that could get a little unmanagable. Anyways, my basic complaint is that it's ridiculous to have an AO that a 3 focus investigator can survive against for nine rounds (and more really, if they did some advance preparation). Actually, I still think he'd be too easy to take in combat if you incorporated my suggestions, but as things stand, he'd be laughably easy to beat in a fight (easier than Nyarlethotep who at least requires a clue token per turn, cash is much easier to get than clues). Perhaps if you had a second attack, perhaps a decreasing will check that caused additional money losses on a failure...

MrsGamura said:

They would, they would horde their cash to fight the ancient one, perhaps. The reason for increased costs is because the storekeepers want more money. It's not just the investigators who're getting greedy :')

MrsGamura said:

Excatly what Avi said- the shopkeepers are greedy too.

Alright, I revised Zebulark to make him more powerful. I didn't only changed the attack, but also his power (last 3 lines). Here it is:

kroen said:

Oh he's definitely tougher now. Especially pre-battle, since he basically forces investigators to not operate as a team. Although the final battle combat still isn't entirely fixed. The same problem still exists. If you have a three focus investigator with good equipment and a horde of cash (which isn't *that* hard to get, especially if they prep for it), they can survive 5 rounds on a bank loan (and of course, with a few trades at the river docks, they could still go for ten to fifteen rounds. A simple suggestion (that'd also work thematically). Attach a die roll to the money discard. Perhaps have investigators roll a die and lose a sanity on a failure (i.e. they're going insane from losing their money). This would keep the battle length down to approximately six or seven turns at maximum (although, if you added this, you might want to adjust the combat rating by one and maybe move the 4$ back to 5$.

Anyways, I like him, if you fix him, I think I'll add him to my printout list.

I want to keep his attack simple, but I've made one adjustment:

Now his final battle is about the same difficulty as Cthulhu's, if not more difficult; against Cthulhu, EVERY investigator can survive seven whole rounds. Against Zebulark, only a few investigators would survive that long, and even if they does Zebulark still regains a minimum of 1 doom token per turn.

kroen said:

That would definitely be a quite challenging AO, wouldn't you agree?

Now the question is: Do you believe you'd enjoy playing against such an AO? I mean, you'll certainly agree that it's beatable.

The way I see it (and this is of course where opinions may vary), if everyone is cursed for the entire game without any chance to get rid of it, you'll routinely fail at everything. With only a one in six chance to get a single success you'll have a difficult time to succeed at any skill check, regardless if you have to make one due to encounters or combat. Anything requiring two or more successes will become pretty much impossible.

This is worse than having all skills halved (since you usually can get a blessing). The only way to win against the AO would be an incredible streak of luck. Where's the challenge? There's no strategy involved. You can't hoard clue markers since you won't survive encounters, you can't trade monster markers for anything since you can't beat them and you can't trade gate markers since you won't succeed at closing gates. Did I miss something?

If you'd allow for the possibility to get blessed, thus lowering the difficulty for the blessed investigator to the level of a normal game, it would be a lot better. You'd have something to look forward to, a potential strategy to avoid eternal suckage.

As it is, I can only imagine one strategy: get all of your investigators devoured as fast as you can.