Do you always draw and resolve a reckoning card each time a new gate opens? That is, even when investigators haven't made any dark pacts with the Lurker?

2)Also, is the exhaust condition on the blood/soul pact mandatory or optional?

3)In order to spend power as Clues or money, does an investigator have to make at least one more pact with the Lurker, since it seems you can't gain power from bound ally pacts?

zealot12 said:

1. Yes, you always draw and resolve Reckoning cards, even if nobody has a Dark Pact. Some Reckoning Cards are meant for investigators that don't have any Dark Pacts. Namely, the cards entitled, "An Offer You Can't Refuse," "A Little Taste," and "Spread the Word," all deal with investigators who don't have any Dark Pacts, even if nobody has one.

2. The exhause condition is optional. You MAY gain power by sacrificing Stamina or Sanity.

3. Both Soul Pacts and Blood Pacts allow you to spend Power as Clue tokens, but you must have a Bound Ally in order to spend Power as money.

Thanks.

I'm playing my first game with the Lurker, and I don't quite see how the herald is exploitable yet, since you draw reckoning cards frequently. It's more of a risk-reward mechanic, I'd say.

Yeah, its fairly balanced for the most part. The "exploitations" come with certain combinations of certain Investigators and certain Ancient Ones where these Investigators become invincible.

Well, there are in fact some situation easily exploitable by every investigator, especially if you're good enough at controlling the game. Anyway, I won't spoil the game but yesterday we won thanks to the Lurker. He allowed us to seal a -4 gate to R'lyeh and a -5 double gate to the Abyss & R'lyeh, giving us the last two seals we needed for the victory. Sigill of Hermes Trismegistus automatically casted + power tokens instead of clues for the seals.

By the way, about the Lurker assisting an investigator to cast a spell:

what happens if he assists in casting a spell whose effectiveness depends on a number of successes(like Spectral Razor, Heal, etc) , do you get only 1 success?

Another question: do bound allies count as actual allies for every purpose? For instance, does Lola Hayes automatically pass her personal story if she gets a Bound Ally pact?

Can bound allies be discarded to gain their discard benefit(like Duke), or sacrificed to pass a certain mission? If so, do you rid yourself of the Bound Ally pact then?

zealot12 said:

My assumption for your first part is that "automatically pass" means "gain enough successes not to fail." For most spells, this means rolling 1 success. But for Bind Monster specifically, this would imply gaining enough successes to guarantee that you kill the monster you're casting it against. Is that too strong? Probably not, since Bind Monster is then discarded. What's ironic is that you can use the Lurker's help to kill the Dunwich Horror, but both entities are forms of Yog-Sothoth.

Bound Allies are still allies in all ways, yes. It's just that pact card that might cause trouble for the investigator down the line. However, when a bound ally leaves your possession, does the Bound pact get discarded? To me, the bound ally pact represents an unpaid debt to the Lurker. Just because you've given up or lost that ally shouldn't make the Lurker forget that you owe it. So when I lose control of that ally, the bound pact stays. A better question might be to ask what happens when the investigator is devoured or replaced. Does the Bound Ally pact transfer to the new investigator? Probably not, but it seems like we should seize all opportunities to toughen up the Lurker. Not allowing the replacement investigator to obtain a "free" ally, and not allowing the Lurker to forget about the prior investigator's debt are two ways.

Thanks for the replies.

I can see now how soul/blood pacts can be exploited by high stamina/sanity characters: it has to do with the timing of the pacts' exhaust condition and the timing of resolving a reckoning card.

Maybe a houserule that would limit/prevent pacts from refreshing every turn would fix this issue.

zealot12 said:

Yeah, you're right, the timing issue is the main problem with the Lurker. You can exhaust the card during Upkeep to gain Power, but there is nothing hindering you to spend that power during the very same turn. So, exhaust, spend 4 stamina, gain 4 power, use in the same round that 4 power + 1 clue token and you have a seal. The Reckoning card is resolved only during the Mythos Phase, and most of the cards create troubles only when investigators have power tokens. So, with a little tactics, you will (almost) never have power during the Mythos Phase.

I think a suggested house rule was not spending power in the round you gain it; this should be a little more dangerous, but nonetheless, in situation with some major locations sealed and something like 3 or 4 gates open, this should still not be an issue, since you have to read Reckoning only when gates open (or when you get a pact, but avoiding this condition is pretty easy), and in this situation is very likely to have a monster surge or a gate bouncing on a seal

The game breaker is the ability to gain clues from power and this gain is capped only by the investigators' stamina and sanity. What if you limit the gain further by say, the number of sealed gates. You may spend power as clue tokens, with 1 clue token per sealed gate.

Another problem is the ability to spend any amount of remaining power on money: resources like Clues and money are infinite, and their gain is usually not constrained.So you may never be penalized for gaining power. There should be a good way to balance this herald.

zealot12 said:

We did a whole thread on this in the fan creations section (or was it a subthread in the heralds section, I'm not sure). Possibly both.

Avi_dreader said:

There's various heralds in the fan creations section (start at about page 72) as well as at least one earlier thread in this forum: Lurker at the Threshold House Rules

Well, I played with some of the modified rules you guys proposed for the Lurker.

Namely, 1)can't use power if one of the pacts is exhausted.

2)each time an investigator gains power from a pact, he immediately draws a reckoning card.

3) power gained from a pact is tied to that specific pact

This seems to have fixed the herald quite well.

I also added two more houseruled restrictions: The total amount of power that investigators may spend as clues during their turn is equal to the number of sealed gates on the board.

Each time a gate is prevented from opening(in a sealed location), draw a reckoning card.

zealot12 said:

This can be an interesting point, even if I'd suggest you to play the other way round: you may spend a maximum of X power / turn as clues where X is equal to 6-N, being N the number of seals on the board. This should make more difficult exploing the herald for the last seal (5 seals on the board, with your rule you can spend 5 power tokens for the last seal; pretty an easy win), when usually everyone is short of clues or you have very little time before the AO awakens. And maybe... don't know, for every power token spent above this maximum, draw and resolve a reckoning card.

zealot12 said:

A stronger version of this should have been mentioned somewhere: draw and resolve two reckoning cards when a gate is prevented from being opened.

Julia said:

I like this a a lot ... diminishing returns! Couple this with unspent power going on the AO if it awakens and you can get in a real bind.

Hmm, I'll have to think about that, I , Julia-clues are plentiful at the start of the game, as are other resources, so it's not really tempting to take pacts in the beginning. We usually don't take Soul/Blood pacts unless we're low on Stamina/Sanity and don't take Bound Ally pacts unless it's really necessary.

In our session today at the end of the game we drew a reckoning card that forced us to take a pact, and if this kind of card is drawn in the beginning, things may get complicated right from the get-go- which is just fine with us-we're all for the game to offer more challenge.

We lost the game today to Eihort, with five sealed gates on the board. It was really fun.So far we're quite content with the fixed Lurker.

Oh, and I forgot one more rule: all blood/soul pacts are discarded at the start of final battle. No reason to make it easier.