Hey all, about to crack open the rework of my fave campaign in Return to Forgotten Age...now just a matter of picking which investigator to go with.

I'm on a survivor kick at the moment, and someone's already picked Silas Marsh with Pete and Jessica as allies.

So this gives me a chance to build a survivor deck without mainstay Pete, just trying to figure out which one. It'll be Wendy Adams or Stella Clark.

Silas will be primary muscle and we have a rogue-seeker to be the main clue person, so best for me to be a flex. Wendy seems like the obvious choice with her evade ability etc., but Stella might be fun. Just concerned about her on the clue side, I guess the US postal service can't afford to hire observational people anymore due to those weird budget cuts before an election over there.

So curious to see what you folks think - Wendy or Stella, no Pete Sylvestre available!

Stella still has an agility of 4, so she's no pushover when it comes to evading. You can even slip on some track shoes. You just won't have the fancy rogue evasive maneuvers. You can, on the other hand, rack up some sweet failures. Look what I found, and dumb luck, can do quite a bit to mitigate while giving you extra actions.

Stella wants to fail, so it's just about turning those failures into success. Don't forget than any survivor can take Sharp Vision for a very solid way to pick up clues if you want to go that route. And Grimm's Fairy Tales is a pretty nice include for someone who is regularly failing to heal teammates without actually having to take an action to heal.

I say Stella. Wendy is absolutely fantastic and always will be, but try the noobie out!

You'll have so much fun 'oopsing' your way to chainsaw attacks that deal 3 damage, while not losing any supplies.

Are you playing easy/normal, or hard/expert?

If it's the former, I'd say whichever you prefer - possibly Stella would be more fun and her higher health/sanity total means that she is less bothered by trauma, and if she does end up poisoned, the various "auto-fail if poisoned" effects are not such a big problem for her. She can gather quite a lot of clues if built correctly, though likely not as many as Wendy would. If you make a beeline for 2x Quick Learner, you can get a lot of clues with 2 actions at -2 difficulty each round. That said, this is definitely more from a point of view of what might be fun rather than what's ideal. Stella is a bit more of an enemy manager than a clue-gatherer so you're likely to overlap with Silas (also, taking Pete and Jessica? How unoriginal...).

On the other hand, on hard/expert, there are some truly ruinous chaos token effects that really shift the needle towards Wendy - both because some of those tokens only kick in if you fail, which really punishes Stella for her playstyle, and because Wendy can redraw tokens more or less at will. You'll also have much less trouble investigating, and Wendy with her synergy with Winging It and Moonstone, and access to Lockpicks and rogue clue tools like Intel Report gives her far better clue-gathering potential. Wendy has always been an excellent investigator and has only gotten more and more useful as the game has gone on and more cards have been released that she can work with.

hey thanks both - it's gonna be on Normal. One of these days we'll move to hard/expert, but our family keeps thinking it's hard enough as it is:)

I must admit I'm curious about Stella and like that fact that she only gets Survivor and Neutral cards. Makes for a more focused upgrade path, if I can remember how to use her best. Never really played Wendy but she seems so good on the encounter deck in this one that it might be too much to hold back from...

I think I'll go Stella. I like having someone who can use Alter Fate in their deck and although Wendy could use it twice more, I'd be tempted to spend more on Rogue upgrades with her. Cheers gang.