kroen said:

No bonuses for Fire Vampires? Really? The worshipper ability seems kind of odd... a straight stamina loss is thematic, but how can paying sanity reduce that? Also, Fires of Cthuga is fairly vanilla. It works, but doesn't seem to do anything flavorful.

I actually don't have an issue with the final battle. I can imagine that battling a massive, intelligent ball of fire would entail a great many injuries and mental breakdowns. However, the Glimpse of Hope Sinister Plot isn't... well, a Sinister Plot. Normally those cards are the GOOs big trump ability, where they really complicate things for the investigators. This is just a double blessing, both literally and in that by being devoured, all of the investigators cards go away so it's less likely someone will get a duplicate with them (Well, not less likely. Impossible).

Why impossible? I'm faily sure that discarded injuries and madnesses goes to the bottom of their decks.

kroen said:

Yes, but those that are in play on that investigator will no longer be... well, in play. Since Cthugha kills you if your cards even match anyone elses, the more cards you have amongst the group, the more likely people will be devoured. Thus, it becomes a sadistic sort of benefit to have a single person devoured, as it will likely save someone else (Or multiple someone elses) in the process. Plus it comes with that nifty blessing.

In any case, it's certainly not a negative and probably shouldn't be a Sinister Plot.

It doesn't really matter, guys; the final battle is absolutely fiendish anyway.

Here's how I think it shakes out: there are twelve different injuries and twelve different madnesses. With four players, on the first turn, you draw 4 Injury cards. My mental arithmetic might be a bit rusty, but I'm pretty sure the chance of a single duplication is 0.624, or a little over 60%. (I won't bother to factor in the chance of a double duplication since it's very small). The single duplication is certain to kill two players because they're only getting one card each. Then all you're doing is dumping the two duplicated cards to the bottom of the deck and drawing two more cards next turn. The fact that two of the total cards in play next turn definitely don't match each other is NOT enough to make up for the fact that you're drawing from a pool that's been reduced in size by one pair. And that's JUST with the Injury cards. The Madness cards offer the exact same odds, except that surviving one of the draws isn't enough to save you, whereas losing one of them is enough to devour you.

Using only Injury cards OR only Madness cards, this would still be one of the toughness final battles ever. While it might seem like losing a player (and therefore losing his as-yet-unduplicated cards as well as the duplicated pair) is going to help, for practical purposes it will almost never get that far. Maybe I've missed something, but as far as I can see, the investigators are very, very unlikely to be alive by the end of turn three. If three of your teammates are devoured and you carry on alone, you've got a 12% chance of dying next turn, a 20% chance the turn after that, then 33%, then 54%, and so on. The last survivor of the group has a much less than 1% chance of surviving three turns. I hope I've got that right. And the numbers get even worse the more players you have.

The sinister plots are also rendered a bit pointless by the difficulty of the overall effect. The 'Hungry are the Flames' one, for example, is not really any kind of respite. If we assume that the first player lets himself be devoured, then you're starting again from scratch, except that you've already 'filtered' the deck a bit (so the 'safe' cards you had are now on the bottom, thus rendering their counterparts also 'safe' for a while). But you're re-drawing a realistic minimum of five more cards (an average roll for the survivors of 3-player group). That's almost the FEWEST cards you'll be redrawing, and it still offers much worse odds of an instant double-devouring than the first turn for a four-player group (above).

Don't get me wrong, I think a final battle that uses Injury and Madness cards is long overdue, but this is waaaay too hard (and also a bit arbitrary). Some more sophisticated way of distributing the cards is needed.

EDITED TO ADD: Ok, most of my arithmetic there was wrong, but my basic conclusion is right. It's a beast.

Hmm. Maybe 2 Injury and 2 Madness per player, but without the rule of "two of the same injury/madness on two investigators are devoured"?

Edit: The modifier is -6, I forgot

Probably the most unpleasant Ancient One from my Golden Scarab expansion. Look on his works, ye mighty, and despair!

If anyone doesn't get how this works, here it is: you draw two plagues per turn and put one back, so the investigators have some choice of what happens first. Plagues then remain in play, causing all kinds of problems in Arkham and making Nephren-Ka more powerful when he awakens. During the final battle, investigators can give up their attacks in order to try to destroy plagues - but obviously they have a lot of options and they'll have to make the tradeoff carefully. This one has been playtested and it does make for a pretty in-depth final battle. It's also very, very difficult.

MrsGamura said:

It looks like it was created using Apophysis - a very cool tool!

kroen said:

Pretty interesting. The only problem I can see is the odd wording of the final battle. The start of battle moves all doom tokens from the sheet to the terror track, but the second half of the attack references doom tokens on the sheet. I think I understand what was meant, but as written it is extremely vague and non-functional. It might be easier just to remove the Start of Battle ability altogether, as it doesn't contribute anything.

The Message said:

No, it does work - it's quite interesting in a way. The Terror level is increased by Doom tokens and nothing else. The consequences of the terror level rising are (I assume) the same as ever, so in effect you lose an ally whenever a gate opens and so forth. Other game effects that increase the terror level (for example, the outskirts overflowing) put special tokens on Nyogtha that don't matter until the final battle. Then, during the final battle, those spare tokens become doom tokens that count as 'hit points' in the normal way. Nyogtha will have 10 tokens (from his raising of the terror level) plus one for every event that would have risen the terror level had this been a normal game. Basically, the number of tokens will be [what you'd expect the Terror level to be at the end of a normal game]+10. It's a bit of a re-wiring but it would work. It's in desperate need of re-phrasing though.

Three problems though:

- Even if the 'extra' tokens don't technically increase the Terror level above 10, Nyogha will still be rolling 10 dice as his first attack, and devouring one investigator per failure. The expectation is that six or seven investigators would be devoured on turn 1 of the final battle, and unless about ninety percent of the required successes were inflicted on turn one, the entire group would almost certainly be dead on turn 2.

- It's a bit arbitrary - the investigators can't do anything to save themselves, except by (presumably) deciding on the order in which they die. Several of the official AOs have this problem too, though, so it's not that big a deal.

- In a way, it gets easier as it goes along, because Nyogtha's attack is rolling fewer dice. The fact that there are fewer investigators left is not much compensation (see the first point, above).

thecorinthian said:

My point (Though the image has vanished, making referencing this difficult) was that in the second half of the attack where it talks about doom tokens on the sheet, there aren't any. The paragraph literally has no effect because it can never have any tokens (Unless some are added after the start of battle somehow. Epic Battle?). The start of battle ability removes all of them before any such effect occurs.

Yes, that was a mistake on my behalf.

The problem is actually in the 'start of battle' ability, because it implies that the 'spare' doom tokens are removed from the sheet and added to the terror track (whcih is on the board). Actually it only means they're added to the end of the terror track in the figurative sense (I think), so that they function as eleventh, twelfth, thirteenth stops on the terror track, thus requiring more successes.

Here's how I think it ought to be phrased:

Nyogtha

Combat modifier: -6

Resistance s/Immunities: None (not 'special', because the fact that the attack works a different way isn't the same as there being resistances)

Worshippers: Whenever an Investigator defeats a Cultist, he or she loses 1 Sanity.

Slumbering Terror: Every time a Doom token would be added to the Doom track, raise the Terror level by 1 instead. If the Terror level reaches 10, Nyogtha awakens.

Feeding Paranoia: Effects that remove Doom tokens from Nyogtha are ignored. Whenever another card or rule would cause the Terror level to rise, place 1 Clue token on Nyogtha instead.

Start of Battle: Raise the Terror level to 10.

Final Battle: When the investigators accumulate X successes against Nyogtha (where X is the number of players), they can lower the Terror level by 1 or remove 1 Clue token from this sheet. When there are no Clue tokens on Nyogtha and the Terror level is 0, the investigators win.

Attack: The first player rolls dice equal to the current Terror level. For each failure, that player chooses 1 investigator to be devoured .

Even without the 'flavour text', that's a lot of words to fit on an AO. You could cut the 'additional doom tokens' thing - because tbh, getting rid of ten points of Terror level is going to be difficult enough given that the attack is so nasty. With Basil Elton and a bunch of really fighty investigators, it might be possible.

I still think the attack is too devastating as it can essentialy kill all the investigators in one attack. And ideas?

Make them loss Sanity/ Stamina equal the number of successes / failures... like Yig's epic battle card. Not just right out kill them but bring them to near death or take their items away, etc

kroen said:

This guy is nearly impossible. His doom track is 10 and his attack is likely to kill alll the investigators on the first round of combat.

edit: hmmm, I see that complaint has already been made several times. Miss Gamura's suggestion sounds fairly reasonable. Except it might be a bit weak.... Perhaps if you made it so that *one* investigator had to lose sanity/stamina equal to the number of failures rolled per round.

wow great "old one " i use this one at my last game and it is a great creation .

Here is another AO for you all to enjoy. Once again this comes from the minds of my playgroup and me.

Glath En’qun
This is a cool idea (although potentially very, very difficult). Rummaging through the Mythos deck is a bit of a pain though. An easier way of doing it might be to separate out the Rumor cards at the start of the game and have a ‘Rumor deck’. After all, this guy creates so many rumours that it’s not like you need to be drawing random ones from the Mythos deck too.

X’chll’at-aa
‘Strengthening Fear’ and the Start of Battle ability don’t interact that well. They make it a good idea to let the Terror level rise so that the AO gains normal Doom tokens quickly and awakens very soon, because if he awakens with a Terror level of 10 he’s much much easier to defeat (no extra Doom tokens appear when the battle starts).

The attack: if someone has two skills that the same value, does he or she choose which one to use? Also bear in mind that the highest ‘lowest skill’ that almost any investigator will be able to manage is probably 2.

I think the ‘number of successes’ ability is irrelevant. The number of successes required to remove a Doom token doesn’t reduce during the final battle anyway – it’s ‘locked’ at the number of players who were present when the AO woke up (see p.22 of the main rules). Sounds like you might have been playing easier final battles that the rest of us...

Ah right now I remember... it's just that I returned to play this after about a year I haven't and I forgot some of the rules. "easier final battles"? for maybe 2 games.

Anyway, I have an idea of to how to make the start of battle interact with the power: instead to icnrease to terror to 10, reduce it to 0 and he gains a doom token for every point of terror that decreased.

That works.

I've gotta say, I also not that crazy about Worshipper rules that list all the stats and how they increase (or what they change to). This isn't a particular problem with X'chll'at-aa. It's also a problem with plenty of the official AOs. If there are more than a couple of changes, my player group quite often forgets what Cultists' stats are, and there's no easy visual reference for what Cultists do (it's the main problem with the standard AO sheet layout imho). If you want to make the Monster cup have a higher proportion of more difficult monsters, you can always do what Abhoth does and just cut the Cultists completely.

(As a side note, what the 'Worshippers' column of all AO sheets ought to do is show a picture of the back of a monster marker, to show what the Cultists rules are, then cultists just have the words 'see AO sheet' on the back. Certainly that's how I'd like mine to work. I'm tinkering with Strange Eons to see how easy that would be)

(Edited to add: it's dead easy, if all you want to do is show the back of a single monster marker. If the AO affects multiple types of monster, there's not enough room. So, it would be a good idea in some cases, I guess, but not others).

thecorinthian said:

I don't mind complicated worshipper abilities, it adds to the fun of the game. My only complaint is that there's a +1 horror check on the cultists. That's soooo easy.

yeah, but they're also nightmarish

kroen said:

Well, I liked *that* part about them ;'D I still don't see why they should have a laughably easy horror check though (if you really want the players to almost definitely pass it, just don't have it).