I bought the Black Goat of the Woods expansion today and after looking through the possible cards you may draw when a member of the One of the Thousand I seriously ask myself why anyone would be interrested in joining this cult. There is nearly any good cards/encounters and you often end up with curroption-cards. Am I missing the point behind this expansion?

Edit: I noticed that this partly was discussed here: http://new.fantasyflightgames.com/edge_foros_discusion.asp?efid=5&efcid=1&efidt=33231 but did not feel it was discussed enough so I'm bringing it up again.

Well, not sure what you are after that wasn't in that thread, but I'll reiterate what I said there: the point of joining the cult is it is in the theme of the expansion.

Don't think of Black Goat as an expansion that adds new cards, it is an expansion that adds a new theme to the game. If you read the flavour text at the start of the rulebook, it says that a cult is active in Arkham, kidnapping people and sacrificing them to the AO, and it is your job to infiltrate the cult and figure out what is going on.

While I do like a number of the corruptions and cult encounters, I would have liked to have seen a few more encounter cards that integrate the theme with the game, to give you a choice, something along the lines of "You are trusted to tie up the victim for the next sacrifice. If you choose to help them escape, make a sneak -2 check. If you pass draw an ally. If you fail discard your Cult Membership, your Stamina becomes 0 and you are knocked unconscious. If you choose to not help them, draw a corruption." or "You are introduced to the high priest of the cult. if you choose to kill him remove one Doom Token from the Doom Track but you are devoured. If you choose to talk to him, draw two corruptions.

thorgrim said:

I'll agree. As of now there is very little options in investigating the cult and I would really like some great reward for doing so. Perhaps the option to kill the high-priest as you suggested or send some of the members to jail. Currently you might infiltrate the cult but preventing a terrible creature from entering our world take up all of the investigators time. To the defense of the expansion I havn't had the time of playing it yet so I might feel different later on.

Currenty it seem like the cult is something an investigator would join only late in the game in order to make one final chanse of changing the outcome of the game with great risks of his personal health, maybe highly in the spirit of Lovecraft but also something not many players would consider.

I'm not sure what to make of the cult cards. None of the encounters seem to justify joining, and there's no "reward" beyond getting corrupted.

So...I'm really at a loss to explain to someone (a new player at my game especially) as to why they'd want to do it.

Why does everything have to be about rewards? This is a game about evil things going bump in the night, so every once in a while something bad is going to happen. Black Goat just adds a couple more ways.

Personally I really like the expansion, much more so than KiY, but I haven't seen much of a complaint thrown around about KiY's Act cards, which affect everyone, so why the complaints about Cult Encounters and Corruptions, which only affect certain investigators (until the corruptions run out, that is)?

There is a single encounter that rewards you for being a Cult member. I agree that the motivation to join is a bit lacking. I also understand the main motivation is to get into the theme. But there should have been more risk-reward situations. As of right now, if it doesn't look like it will help you win the game, and it is optional to join, why join? They could have tied the cards into the decks a lot more - give me a few rewards that make it worth it and throw in a few penalties to offset the goodies.

Some thoughts on why to use it:

• The Cults encounters can help a little bit.
• The Cult encounters are slightly better than the 3 locations they replace
• The Cult encounters is the main way to access the corruption cards if you do not play with the Herald. (Of the 108 specific encounters, only 3 give you corruption cards).
• The corruption cards also slightly help so you may want to go after them.

thorgrim said:

Because I offered the choice between shooting yourself in the foot for no benefit or not shooting yourself, which would you choose.As was stated by a previous poster there are some rewards for the joining the Cult of One Thousand but they are fairly meagre.

Whenever we've used the Black Goat herald, we've use the house rule that the abundant hordes of monsters from the hexagon cup are default Elusive to members of the cult, meaning they don't necessarily have to fight them. This bestows a small tactical benefit that serves to make cult membership appealing and doesn't throw the game hugely out of balance.

Criswell said:

Neat idea: after all, if you're a member of the cult, then the monsters aren't going to want to fight you.

Criswell said:

I like this as well, but I'd want to play BG a few more times before tweaking with it.

The only really bad green corruption card IMO, is Nightmarish Visions: lose 2 sanity and gain 2 clue tokens, and even it might be good in some situations. The others tend to restrict cooperation but give good abilities and benefits in exchange. Most of the penalties are drawing more corruption or discarding corruption which bring you closer to drawing Red Corruption cards. Now if you get to the Red corruption cards, the are almost universally bad. I think the set is quite well designed.

The cult encounters, however, are quite dangerous. But you don't have to go into the woods, etc so those are easily avoided. I've always joined the cult when I have an opportunity (3 times) and its mostly benefitted me and the group.

However, the herald is very tough, IMO. Especially with monster surges bring on doom tokens and the extra tougher than average monsters. I haven't yet beaten it when I follow all the rules. But I haven't lost because of the Green corruption cards.

The last time we played, we didn't use the Pagan Rites, ie doom tokens on monster surges and we won. In a normal game, we usually have 3 or 4 surges and adding that many doom tokens alone would probably cause us to be unable to seal most of the GOOs.

It was the surges-cause-doom rule alone that made me assume that Black Goat was the hardest herald. Those other abilities were just nasty, congealed icing.

Criswell said:

I like this as well. It makes sense contextually and I think balances the poor encounters better.