jhaelen said:

I always think of the Rue Morgue when I think of orangutans :'D

Frank said:

::Shrug:: well, who said his fight should be higher than a man with a rifle? But a man without a rifle? Why is he weaker than that? Especially since he can't use items (basically) ;'D

TY TY TY Avi, Jhaelen, Frank for your input

My reason for his two abilities ... he is a wild animal so will not know how to maintain a Tommy Gun, 38, 357, etc and will most likely loss interest in items that are not food and discard them.

plus not a street sweeper... most animals don't go out of their way to fight, etc

Give him Holy Water, Molotov Cocktail, etc!

No clues staring off because he's animal so really lives in the moment!

The Woods are his home so will want to protect the Woods from gates, monsters, etc... even though he won't be there all the time but still should have some effect on the Woods.

Note: Tried to make the Orangutan based from my Bear investigator, ie Orangutan is not as strong as the bear and can actually use items!

another Déjà Vu topic inspired investigator

Always wanted to Join the Winning Team? Well this is how you gonna do it:

MrsGamura said:

I see I'm going to have to make my own Orangutan investigator ;') C'mon seriously, you think this dinky chimp can beat an orangutan?! OO OO AA AA AA!!!

:'D ::sigh:: I would enjoy playing this one... But... The picture :'r I dislike B&W custom pictures (I don't feel they fit in with the aesthetics of the rest of the game).

I like the Joseph Smith idea (although I'm not really crazy about the name). It would be great if FFG designed an investigator with JTWT as a starting item with the intention that it could plausibly be used successfully. Sure, it wouldn't work so well for me since I tend to play solitaire ;') but, for gamer groups, I'm sure that would elicit great groans.

Join The Winning Team doesn't really work, even for this guy. I think that the item actually exists as a sort of 'trap' for selfish investigators: you spend the whole game trying to do it, but you'll never succeed, and you'll get eaten along with everyone else. Has anyone ever actually succeeded at Join The Winning Team?

Joseph Smith's alright, although he's a bit fiddly... his special abilities box reads like the bulletin board at a Bureau de Change.

Can he spend Clue tokens to prevent 1 Sanity lost or 1 Stamina lost, or does it have to be at least 2?

Also, Avi is right about the name. Wasn't Joseph Smith the Mormon prophet? There clearly should be a Mormom prophet character in Arkham Horror, but this ain't it.

No reason why he would have to prevent 2... ofcours you can prevent 1. Also I had no idea who Joseph Smith is... I still don't... just a random name I thought of. Btw, considering he starts with an ally, and that he doesn't need to seal gates, he can instead buy an ally with 1 gate+5 clues. He can also "exchange" 6 points of sanity/stamina divided to 3 clues. And if he manages to get the White Ship all he needs is 3 allies and he can do it. Shouldn't be too hard considering his abilities and starting equipment. I have faith in him!

Actually yeah, he does have a good chance of doing the mission.

That does create one other problem though: if this guy is entirely designed to make JTWT a serious possibility, shouldn't there be some way that the other investigators can try to stop him?

People have been trying to make 'traitor' investigators work since waaaay back on the old forums, and usually the problem is just that the rules don't really support the idea of investigators actively opposing each other. The only reason this doesn't matter when normal investigators try to JTWT is that they have bugger-all chance of success anyway, so it doesn't matter that no-one can try to stop them.

Is there some ability you could give Joseph Smith so that other investigators can try to thwart his evil plans? Stealing his clue tokens or something? I'll give it some thought.

Yes, Joseph Smith founded the Mormon religion.

anybody have any links to some of the non human characters that were on the last message board?

I loved the idea and portrait of Kroen's Victora Dra'jen the Vampire, a few pages back. Here is my version:

http://i640.photobucket.com/albums/uu127/makken123/Maya-Silvie-Knoop.jpg

.eon file:

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=4ZDICSDB

The story so far is OTT, but, hey, so what?

makken123 said:

That's quite good - I like the constant stamina or sanity loss. Having a starting Curse might be too much though. I think you'd be spending a lot of time in the hospital or asylum.

Determining day and night randomly is a bit clumsy. You could link the bonus to unstable locations instead (which would make a bit of sense) or you could link it to Environment mythos cards - nearly all the 'daytime' effects are on Weather cards and nearly all the 'nighttime' effects are on Mystic cards, so it would mostly work.

Tood good/too bad/balanced?

Edit: Mistake- he's 5/5 not 7/3

He's fine except that the 'Strain' ability might make him unplayable in some games. Two ways of solving this:

Either: give him abnormally high stats to begin with. I think Strange Eons would let you do this. 7/5 would probably be about right. That way, even if something raised the Terror level to 10, he would still be alive on 1/1. That would be interesting....

Or: give him a difficult choice when the Terror level goes up - so he can lower his max san/stam OR he can...do something else bad. I dunno. Discard all his clue tokens?

SInce for some reason there seems to be demand for more freaks, frauds and wackos around here:

Also, someone a bit more down-to-earth:

Usual question: can anyone think of any items whcih are completely 'broken' if the Engineer has them? I've looked through the Common Item deck and it looks like it'd mostly be balanced (extremely good, but not broken), but I might be missing something.

The first one is a bit too weak. A clue token for sanity or stamina? bad deal. His second ability doesn't make sense- how can someone be devoured while litas? if someone is reduced to both 0 sanity and staimna while in an other world he's simply devoured. he doesn't get sent to liats and then devoured. The second one is alright, I guess, although .357 gives +10 to combat checks...

kroen said:

Yog and the not delayed part will not really help you much unless you draw Missing People Return.

Clue for Sanity or Stamina is a situational thing... some times it good/ some times not... could be helpful in final battle vs certain AO though.

Can't think of anything either... I'm not sure but don't items stop granting their bonus when you unexhaust them? so no +10 from a one .357!

The 'can't be devoured while LiTaS' bit is nothing to do with losing sanity and stamina - it is only there to protect against Yog-Sothoth. As far as I'm aware, nothing else will devour you out there. It just seemed easier to put the words "or devoured" into the ability text than to add a whole sentence explaining that he's except from Yog's ability on turn one yadda yadda yadda. On the other hand maybe it is the sort of thing that might make people think they don't understand the ability (when actually they do).

Items do indeed stop granting their abilities when you stop using them. However the real advantage of the Engineer's ability is one-use-only items like the flamethrower; the Engineer could keep refreshing them as long as he had other useless items to exhaust. There are also other uses for his ability, like making several attempts at Tomes in the same turn, although that's a bit unlikely to come in handy.

Edited to add: Also, with the Imposter character, I hope that the real intention of the LiTaS ability is obvious: he can't be delayed, so he comes back during the movement phase of the next turn, not the turn after. The LiTaS rules in the rulebook are very clumsily written, in that they seem to say that lost investigators are delayed and miss their next turn (which is nearly redundant, since those two things are very nearly the same thing anyway). I haven't bothered to repeal both because it's a very confused rule anyway.

Here is one that I've been working on. No background story yet though.

He's pretty good, but hopefully not too good. I wanted to give him the pocket watch item, but I would also like him to be useable for people who don't use custom expansions, or any expansions at all. Constructive criticism is welcome!

I like both of these guys! I have been planning to make an engineer for my "Price of Progress" expansion. I may just have to steal your guy though.

Out of curiosity, does anyone know if FF ever publishes out of these forums, or if they use the ideas from the forums for new cards/sets? I know I would if I were them, there is a lot of good stuff here. Just curious to see if anyone knew their policy on that.

Admiral142 said:

I haven't playtested the Engineer yet, and there might be combinations of items which make him too good. I am itching to playtest him soon, however; I can't believe I didn't think of the ability until now. If his ability proves to not be broadly useful, I might give him the ability to also refresh common items of other investigators in the same location, so that he can help out teammates.

I assume that FFG would be very wary of 'borrowing' ideas from the boards, although they'd be within their rights to do whatever they wanted in that regard. But it would be a bit of an odd move: it might even generate negative publicity (exploiting fan creativity and not sharing the profits). If they did do it, it'd probably be in the form of a competition or something: "design a card and we'll put it in the next expansion". WotC did that with MtG a few times I think.

I was about to say that most of the stuff on the boards doesn't quite come up to FFG's professional standards, but then I suddenly and inexplicably burst out laughing

Took me a while to make these two, hope they're not broken:

What- too good? I knew it!