1 minute ago, Carthoris said:

Ah. I had forgotten that. So in a way, it concentrates his weakness, since it goes in a smaller side deck.

It does mean that he is far less at risk when drawing cards, since he'll only have his basic weakness in his main deck (much the same as how Indebted is by far the least problematic weakness in the game partly for this reason). Depending on the basic weakness he draws, this also means that he can use Mr "Rook" with much more impunity.

Really, Mr "Rook" is going to be a real game-changer given how he interacts with weaknesses in general.

26 minutes ago, CSerpent said:

Moonlight Ritual is obviously the most reliable thing, but he doesn't have much soak, so just have a plan to off him. Take an AoO. Maybe run Painkillers (Dave-killers!) for that very purpose, mwahaha.

I also like Forbidden Knowledge as a Renfield Remover. Gets you another resource on top of what you got from David. Calling in Favors is another option if you have other allies in your deck you might want to get into play.

Of course, Sacrifice is the obvious choice for early upgrade, muahaha (Moonlight Ritual is still good to keep for removing doom from Blood Pact).

20 hours ago, Allonym said:

It does mean that he is far less at risk when drawing cards, since he'll only have his basic weakness in his main deck (much the same as how Indebted is by far the least problematic weakness in the game partly for this reason). Depending on the basic weakness he draws, this also means that he can use Mr "Rook" with much more impunity.

Really, Mr "Rook" is going to be a real game-changer given how he interacts with weaknesses in general.

Joe brings up a question for me: How do cards like Scrying work with his Hunch Deck? What's the verbiage with relation to his Hunch Deck; is it an Investigator's deck? That seems far too easy to manipulate.

21 minutes ago, Duciris said:

Joe brings up a question for me: How do cards like Scrying work with his Hunch Deck? What's the verbiage with relation to his Hunch Deck; is it an Investigator's deck? That seems far to easy to manipulate.

I assume not; Scrying specifies "Any investigator's deck, or the encounter deck", and "investigator deck" is defined in the RR as follows:

Quote

A player's "investigator deck" is the deck that contains that player's asset, event, skill, and weakness cards. A reference to "your deck" refers to the investigator deck under your control.

To me, this makes it clear that you can only target your normal deck with Scrying, not the Hunch deck; much like how you cannot Scry the Exploration deck despite it containing Encounter cards.

Edit: In addition, the rules for The Circle Undone specify:

Quote

With the exception of these setup instructions, all references to Joe’s “deck ” refer to Joe’s standard investigator deck and not his hunch deck.

20 hours ago, tsuruki said:

My hunch deck was:

Logical

Working on a hunch

Shortcut

Sketches

No stone

The least useful was no stone since Joe had all the draw he needed and really didnt afford actions to support others. I liked all the fast stuff, No stone(5) and Cryptic were great additions when I got xp.

Mine is now;

Shortcut

delay the inevitable (free soak - saved Zoey from 2 poltergeists whilst I dealt with them)

working a hunch

no stone

evidence x1

sketches x1

Fast is great here! I may have to aim for no stone (5) as I have amnesia for the second campaign in a row (grrrrr I hate that weakness.....)

17 hours ago, Allonym said:

With the exception of these setup instructions, all references to Joe’s “deck ” refer to Joe’s standard investigator deck and not his hunch deck.

I was expecting some foresight on their part like this. I just don't have my copy yet and didn't have the time to read the pdf yesterday.

Thanks.

Back to Marie killing Renfield: Blood Eclipse is another option that I'm considering.

On 2/7/2019 at 11:42 AM, Assussanni said:

With the warning that I have never played Carolyn and therefore probably have no idea what I'm talking about... I'd say replace Delay the Inevitable. It costs 2 resources to play, might continue to eat resources to stay in play, and could end up cancelling horror that Carolyn wants to heal so she can use her ability. Of course if you are using Delay the Inevitable because it is a new card and you want to test it out then you should probably ignore that suggestion! Maybe swap out the second copy of Connect the Dots instead? Or Thermos, unless you think your investigators will end up heavily traumatised.

Depending on how much investigating you are doing you could also maybe swap to 2x Dr. Milan and 1x Peter Sylvestre, unless you have a strategy that revolves around handing Peter off using Teamwork?

Best of luck identifying those stones in scenario 2!

Just a quick update, we played scenario 2, and I was able to identify the stones at a test of 7! And we picked up 5 xp, so I'll be able to get both copies with 7 uses each and an upgraded Peter for scenario 3. That's pretty good!

Surprisingly, the 'bad' cards, or cards that are atypical ended up saving Rita's life. Without spoilers, she essentially needed resources to prevent her from going insane. I was able to get to her, heal her for 2 with liquid courage, and drop a teamwork to give her Peter and 4 resources. She was more than fine after that. (I had already gotten a LOT out of Peter using Forbidden Knowledge early, and had also had Well-prepared, mag glass, fingerprint kit, true grit, and liquid courage out, plus already had the stone identified).

I was surprised, but teamwork and liquid courage saved the entire scenario; without Rita I would have been a sitting duck of sorts. Yes, we're playing on easy, so that helps less than optimal decks run more successfully, but boy was I glad to have those particular cards that scenario.

Liquid courage saved our entire campaign last time out, stopping Jenny from going insane during Black Stars Rise after Lola had been defeated by very unlucky back-to-back encounter card draws and chaos bag pulls... and possibly some less-than-optimal play by yours truly. I just find Victory locations so enticing!

I just played a Carcosa campaign with the "new" Carolyn Fern and I'm ever so slightly less negative about Hypnotic Therapy now, much like Foolishness I put it into play to make Well Prepared work, but it did end up doing some work together with Ancient Stone, or on the rare occasion that I had a spare action. Helped us bounce back from heavy horror damage early on in A Phantom of Truth, where we basically had unlimited time to get our stuff sorted out, but realistically we would have been completely fine with just the healing from Ancient Stone by itself, I ended up just healing all the horror from everyone purely to show off (we ended with 0 horror on everyone, so essentially I'd wasted about 15 points of healing - with a handful of exceptions, the only point of horror that truly matters is the last one). Ultimately it reinforces my view of playing Carolyn - it's still your teammates' responsibility to avoid recklessly taking horror, because even with Carolyn's resource-granting ability, healing is less efficient than horror. However, it does mean that they can afford to pay less attention to horror if they would otherwise have to significantly alter their deck to compensate for a vulnerability to it, at least once you've gotten the actually worthwhile horror healing cards to patch them up. The heal+draw+resource from Hypnotic Therapy is actually quite nice support if someone's had a rough early game and is running on empty, but you're spending 2 actions, 2 resources to put it into play and an extra action for the healing so it's a bit of a false economy unless Hypnotic Therapy is doing lots of other useful work for you.

Quickly learned that the correct approach to Rational Thought is mostly to ignore it unless you can easily clear it (i.e. unless you have Ancient Stone or I guess Moment of Respite), it's mainly not worth the wasted actions to heal it - if I had Peter S out I would mostly just use Calling in Favours to trade him out for another ally or kill him with Forbidden Knowledge for the 2 resources if Rational Thought came up, and especially if I was already mainly set up and so didn't absolutely need the resource engine. It's a really harsh and annoying weakness - without Ancient Stone it will take you several actions' worth of healing to clear it, and it's in that really annoying space where it can completely wreck your game plan, but it's not so harsh (e.g. To Fight The Black Wind, Crisis of Identity, Baron Samedi) that you want to build specifically to counter it. Hypnotic Therapy kind of works to heal it off, but only if you're otherwise going to be spending actions drawing cards anyway and you have Hypnotic Therapy already in play, might as well make the Hypnotic Therapy tests to start clearing off Rational Thought as long as you have a decent amount of intellect bonuses and there's no chaos tokens in the bag with particularly nasty side-effects - but that's still 4 draw actions over 4 turns just to now be able to do your main special job again. I don't know if I'd bother buying Moment of Respite just to counter the weakness.

Ancient Stone (with Shrewd Analysis) is absolutely fantastic and is the "missing piece" to make Carolyn actually work - I'd played with it previously but only had Ancient Stone in the last couple of scenarios because I only got the pack late during the campaign. I'm definitely convinced with starting with Working a Hunch and Premonition, not only because they're great cards in general, but also to guarantee you'll get a really big Ancient Stone identification.

Tried out Alice Luxley (via proxying) and she's pretty good, her response ability is situationally very effective and combos nicely with testless clue discovery, particularly useful against rats, or to help out with someone else dealing with an enemy, particularly because early in a campaign Carolyn can't really hit with Shrivelling too well as she doesn't have many Willpower boosters yet. When using her normal Signature cards I think I'll be using Alice instead of Alyssa Graham, and I might do the same using the Replacements if I can get Mr "Rook" to counter her weakness. I'm really hoping there'll someday be some kind of card that works really well to give Carolyn a repeatable backup combat ability, since she finds it hard getting enough accuracy with Shrivelling without a substantial amount of exp, and she doesn't have much else except for like Dynamite Blast.

Still definitely all about ally swarm with Carolyn, allies are generally the most powerful assets and Carolyn can draw from 3 different classes, it just makes sense.

On 2/7/2019 at 10:36 PM, Duciris said:

Joe brings up a question for me: How do cards like Scrying work with his Hunch Deck? What's the verbiage with relation to his Hunch Deck; is it an Investigator's deck? That seems far too easy to manipulate.

Cards that interact with "your deck" or "an investigator's deck" do not work on his hunch deck. Only cards that explicitly state "hunch deck" do. So no Cryptic Research, no Old Book of Lore, not even any Scrying!

We made a video explaining Joe if you want to know more.

https://youtu.be/pSRAT6Gc_tI

The Arkham Chronicle Gang

Has anyone noticed that the updated pdf of the rules includes 25 pages so far (include campaign log) but that the last page is number 60?

Dunwich had 32, Cacosa had 44, & TFA had 56.

ow ... the more developped cycle on the narative aspect ?? Perhaps each memento have a page for explain what it mean for the story ??

Leaving space for the complete explanation of multi-class cards, with a full example for every single investigator?

On 3/15/2019 at 3:44 PM, phorcys12 said:

ow ... the more developped cycle on the narative aspect ?? Perhaps each memento have a page for explain what it mean for the story ??

Don't forget we have four different missing persons with four possible fates apiece. That's bound to up the pagecount a little.

On ‎3‎/‎20‎/‎2019 at 12:06 PM, rsdockery said:

Don't forget we have four different missing persons with four possible fates apiece. That's bound to up the pagecount a little.

And that extra prologue scenario at the front, plus both TFA & TCU have a bonus scenario at the end.

There also seems to be more "if you have a ________, read this" options. I think it's just more fluff experimenting with narrative choices.

I've always found Dunwich to have enough story, but that doesn't stop me from being excited about more story!

I really hope the mementos will have a story explication. I would be deceived if they just don't speak about what each of them mean, like if they do that " if you find " gagnam style " memento, you start with +1 clue, or if you find it, add a doom " ... I want them to have a real explanation, a fluffy text.