Love this game, but one of the things that always seemed to be missing was the fact you knew who the Big Bad was from the get go. Mythos stories were always stories of investigation.

Here's a scenario that makes the Ancient One an unknown factor. I'll playtest it out some, this is the first draft.

There's 10 Slumber Cards (basically the random affects the hidden Ancient One has on the game) and 10 Worshippers cards (how they affect the Cultists and monsters). Those are all done, I'll post them as I have time.

Please excuse the formatting issues, still getting used to working with the limitations of this site.

A link to the whole image for printing or ease of reading:

http://yfrog.com/b9topiercetheveilfrontfacj

Basic Concept - you take all the Ancient Ones (taking out the few that have affects that build over the course of the game and therefore would'nt work in this manner), shuffle them, and draw five. The players can see the five, then shuffle that as a deck and place them face down.

There's a deck for Worshippers, draw a card from that. It stays in place until the current Ancient One (face down) is discarded, or an Envrionment (Urban) takes place.

There's a deck for Slumber, which works the same way, except it changes on Environment (Mystic) cards.

Gates no longer wipe out clues - instead you can pick up clues at a gate location if you have the Explored marker.

You can narrow down who the Ancient One is that you might have to face by 3 methods.

One, discard 3 monster trophies, 3 clue tokens, and make a Will(-2)[2] roll. This represents the investigators deducing who the monster may be. If it works, discard an Ancient One (until you get to the last card, who is your big bad).

Two, when closing a gate, make a Luck(-2) check. If it works, you get a glimpse of the ancient one. Make a Will (-2), if it fails, draw a madness and get 2 clue tokens. If it succeeds, discard the Ancient One and get 2 clue tokens.

Three, sacrifice a spell to cast a ritual to try to percieve the Ancient One. Make a Lore(-2) check. If it succeeds, you must keep the Ancient One from seeing you. Make a Sneak (-2) check. If it fails, draw a Gate, add a doom token, and proceed. If it succeeds, discard the Ancient One, and gain 2 clue tokens.

Also there is a separate Nameless One Doom Track. If it gets to 12, the Ancient One awakens and you transfer over the tokens there.

Needless to say, this adds difficulty to the game, and you may have to face an Ancient One who you are completely unprepared for. The bonus is you get more clues on the board as Gates don't wipe out clues.

If the difficulty proves too high, I've considered delaying the first Mythos card, or giving the investigators +1 sanity to start the game (reflecting the fact that the Ancient One is hidden).

Thoughts and comments welcome. There's other ways to do it obiously, but I wanted to make a focal point of the game getting finding out who you are facing.

An example of Slumber and Worshippers:

Here's the default Nameless Horror Ancient One card that you would use as a proxy until the Ancient One is revealed. Still working on exactly the mechanics I want, as of now you would put this Card on top of the Ancient One Deck, and when you remove Ancient Ones you'd discard them from the bottom of the deck (until only 1 is left).

As you'll notice most of those are already existing mechanism for the Ancient One, just randomized through the card process. There's a few new ones in there just to shake things up a bit. But the advantage is most are already well tested.

I think I'm going to do the Investigation of the Nameless Horror slightly differently. Instead of explicitly stating the mechanic, I'll use a card draw system on that as well. So you'll have a trigger (trading in monster trophies and clues, discarding a spell, or closing a gate) that you can then draw a card to determine the mechanism of your investigation.

Plus I can put some more flavor into that then just a straight die roll. In many ways the card will read like Arkham encounter cards - three options (Deduction, Glimpse of Madness, or Ritual) and flavor text with mechanic for each.

Here's the first Investigation cards.

To draw a card and consult the Deduction area, discard 2 toughness of monsters and 2 clue tokens during the Arkham Encounter phase. This takes place instead of your encounter.

To draw a card and consult the Other World area, close a gate.

To draw a card and consult the Ritual area, be in a street location and discard 1 spell.

4 more, without the back.

The new Scenario Card with rules including the Investigations deck:

I'm planning on doing 6 more Investigation cards to round out the deck.

Any thoughts, comments welcome.

I too have lamented the fact that the investigators don't really investigate. I too recently came up with a solution suprisingly similar but not quite as complicated. I too have Old One Environments (all 24 Old Ones, which include the worshipper portion) essentially using the descriptions on each Old One card as is. Its sort of like Clue (the game) and the Old one is in a little envelope and as each Clue token is picked up there is a good chance of eliminating one of the Old One suspects (and its environment card). Eventually the investigators may (certainly will) deduce who the actual Old One is, can meet together, call out It's name and on a die roll of 2+ banish him. Though it sounds almost too easy, there is a 17% chance of immediately summoning the Old One and games where there is a chance of winning normally play out normally. The Banishing ritual is usually a last ditch effort (or has been so far).

Interesting, Jkeifer. So what determines what effect the Ancient One has during play?

I decided I wanted to cycle mine so they have an effect, but the fact that they were facades and not the true power meant that each one wouldn't stay in place that long due to the environment cards.

demiurgex said:

That's the problem, they are facades. But each Old One Environment card (Old One Power) remains in effect until it is determined he is not the one, so usually is is a false Old One power that effects the game. But I am OK with that in that the over balance remains the same since there can be from 0-3 different Old One powers (Environments) in effect at the same time.

The first environment/power drawn then tends to remain in effect for quite a while because subsequent powers are placed behind the first drawn one and only appear once the earlier ones are deducted.

Of the six games we've played so far, there has never been three in at the same time and only for a few turns were there no powers in effect.

At first I wanted to cycle the powers too, but decided that with up to 3 powers possibly in play at once, that might be enough information and to change them each turn would probably be too much.

Demiurgex: I like your ideas, they are really cool

I have been thinking that there should be more gameplay involved in getting clue tokens. Now they are just some cheap "pickup" of sorts without any real backstory to how they were acquired or what they represent (except clue tokens gained from Arkham Encounters). I wonder if a "Clue Deck" would be interesting. Draw one when you acquire a clue token.. but I don't really know how important it would feel in the end if the deck had no bigger impact on gameplay other than giving substance.