My wife and I have been thinking about playing a game were a person is the game/ancient one, playing against the investigators. Has any one ever did this? Are there any rules about doing this?

Our ideas are.

The player being the ancient one/game would

1. Draw the mythos card.

2. Place a gate any where on the board he wants.

3. Place a clue tolken on the board, any where his choosing.

4. The mythos card would act normal, other than those two items.

5. Maybe once a turn control one monster on the board.

6. Maybe control all of the mosters movements each round.

What do you think?

Thanks for the feed back

It sounds kinda boring, no disrespect. Plus what about the final battle and Azathoth? If you work on it a little more it might add a new element that could add a new dimention to the game.

romfox said:

I think that'd actually work pretty well if you only had the base game. It'd be highly problematic if you were playing expansion boards for a number of reasons I won't get into here. I've been playing this game for a really long time, so let me make some suggestions how to make it work.

1. I think controlling *all* the monsters that move each round is a good idea (i.e. deciding if they move along the black arrows or the white arrows— that way you could form mobs— but at the same time, your monster movement will still be somewhat constrained, just ignore whether their movement is white or black).

2. Additionally, you can move one monster with its movement type (i.e. move a flyer like a flier, green border with special movement constraints, a red monster twice) as you would move an investigator (i.e. not following lines, and potentially into locations), regardless of whether its movement was shown.

3. Placing the gate is also a pretty good idea (although I'm a little worried that you'll flood the gate limit in eight turns simply by too much control, and players will have no respite). I think unless you're doing like eight players against one game master, you should make the gate placement control be die based (i.e. roll a die, on a 4-6 you may choose where to put the gate).

4. You can't control clue tokens— otherwise you can just shove them all into spots where there are already gates (clues don't appear on gates). What you might want to do is let the Ancient One player roll a die, and on a 1-2 destroy the clue token that would have appeared. Or you can allow for a certain monster, or a certain monster movement pattern (crescents let's say— it doesn't even have to be fixed, you can change it game by game to alter difficulty level) to remove clue tokens whenever it lands on them.

5. You can give the Ancient One player some additional powers, perhaps being able to draw three monsters and choose one, and send them to any location on the board a certain number of times a game (perhaps three times over the course of the game). And to be able to make "A Monster Appears" (same one out of three or one out of two draw) perhaps once a turn on investigators in Other Worlds on a die roll of one. You could also allow for a once per game instant devouring power. Where you just get to point a finger and someone dies (and needs to be replaced). That seems like the sort of power an Ancient One would have :'D (you could also make it dependent on a successful die roll if you think that's too brutal— but really I want the Ancient One to be able to kill Mandy if she ever rears up, and to prevent the development of a superfighter).

6. For final battle, you could give the Ancient One a little extra firepower by allowing either a random selection, or a choosing of specific monsters or monster types (you can choose to make it thematic, or monster symbol driven, or undead, or masks, or whatever, or mechanically driven— i.e. by the player controlling the Ancient One's skill level relative to the other players) that he forces the first player, or all investigators to confront either one or multiple monsters once, or once per round (I leave it to you to decide if they are evadable). In addition to the Ancient One's normal attack of course.

:') Unfortunately this will only work with the base game. Once you add in more unstable locations and more difficult monsters, I'd need to rethink this (and it'd be somewhat harder for me).

Anyways, I hope you find this new game variant helpful :'D I'm actually kindof envious that you'll get to try it (I'm unwilling to separate all my game components, or track down friends), so it'll probably be a long time before I give it a shot.

Thanks for your time in responding. You have some really great ideas and insights. I'll post and let you know how it goes after we try it. Thanks again...

romfox said:

You're welcome (well, I have been playing this game almost exclusively for four years— and I used to be a hardcore gamer, so even though I don't play this game with the intensity of some of the other games I've played in the past, I have a lot of gaming experience, particularly with strategy games). I'm actually really excited about trying it myself :') all I need is some other people to "play" with ;'D on?

Actually, I just realized I left one major loophole open. You need to stipulate that an Ancient One can not redirect a gate onto an investigator (it's fine if it happens by accident— but otherwise the game will be nearly impossible for investigators to win unless there's maybe 6 to 8 of them).

Also, I left the rules deliberately vague, because while I know *exactly* what *I* would like, I realize that there are lots of players who treat this game differently and enjoy it in different ways, so I wanted to make it so people can customize it to suit themselves (i.e. I know that most gamers play this game differently than I do— I like it difficult, and I can usually take it too).

We've played a few games where a 9th (yes, 9th) player played the Mythos deck picked two mythos cards and chose the one that triggered. I've also did some simple workups for a deck of cards similar to the Overlord cards from Descent. These were cards that the AO player could pay a cost for to have an effect trigger. Can't remember what many of them were stuff like add additional monsters, rasie the terror level, draw an extra mythos card, that kind of thing.

JerusalemJones said:

If you try my system, let me known how it turns out :') I'd be really curious. Although this thread went into a bit more detail in the main forum.

Btw, if you're GDJoe, I can't register on the Gamer's Den forum... I'm not sure entirely why. I sent you a private message through this. Did you not receive it?

Um, and regardless... You should *definitely* use all game components (personal stories, monsters, Injury/Madness, Epic Battles, except the ones specified. If you really want to narrow the encounter decks so they aren't full, you can ::shrug:: but that will leave them open to potential exploitation). Dunwich and Innsmouth will be used in every scenario (Kingsport will probably be added in in its entirety for the last four scenarios— although it probably won't be a big deal for one of them, I just don't want to force players to reweed out their Kingsport Mythos and Other World cards for that game).

I'd be really disappointed if you didn't use personal stories (not only because I take them into consideration while figuring out potential strategies for beating scenarios, but also because I'm having some of the scenarios auto-trigger them as part of the plot mechanisms (i.e. some of the personal stories will directly relate to the main story).

I'm not really sure why playing all encounters from all sets would make the game more convoluted. They'd prevent ally hunting (except for the basic 11), and hunting for certain broken encounters (i.e. remove doom token at the Church). They also make the Newspaper a little less powerful. Other than that ::shrug:: they just add more variety. If you want to hunt for specific encounters ;') you'll have to do it in Innsmouth or Dunwich.

::sigh:: I can't wait for tomorrow night... I want to post already :'D

Yes, I am GDjoe. And my email address for my FFG account is my yahoo account, which I havent' checked in a week. Sorry.

I can explain why you couldn't register I had banned both gmail and hotmail accounts from our website recently again as we have been inundated with spammers. Most of them use these two services, so I ban them from time to time. I think gmail has been banned most of this year, and forgot to unban it. I've done so, so you should be okay now.

Yes, I didn't post everything in our forums. I want people to do a little legwork and check out the original stuff as well. Everyone gave me a hard time when I didn't post there was a set of investigators we were supposed to use, but I told them the link to the entire league was posted in the first post. they stopped complaining after that.