Based on an old RPG villain I ran, more for a heroic fantasy game, but I figured I could make it work as an odd great old one. Not playtested (I just came up with it last night, and frankly I haven't even played against all the default AOs yet!) and indeed not even actually complete at this point (heck, may be such a bad idea it should never be used, but I'm just playing around with Strange Eons for fun ). Don't have the image or Eon file at the moment, so apologies on that.

The character concerned had chaotic powers, and spread confusion and disorientation among his enemies. Therefore, the idea here was to make his powers strongly random.

Barganon, Chaos Lord

Combat mod: -3

Doom track: 10

Worshippers: Barganon aids randomly. On each Mythos Phase, monsters whose symbols show up gain -1 to their combat modifier and +1 to their toughness until the next Mythos phase. This also affects trophies.

Power: Chaos Theory: At each Mythos phase, before the Gate step, all gates with symbols matching one of the symbols on the card are discarded and a new gate is drawn for those locations. This does not impact trophies. Any explored markers for those gates are discarded unless the new gate has the same destination as the old. This does not add to the doom track and does not count as "closing" a gate for purposes of eliminating monsters. In addition, if any encounter tells the player to search the deck and pick a specific card, he draws the top card on that deck and keeps it instead (this does not impact the initial investigator setup).

Start of Battle: After discarding any items which must be discarded when the Ancient One awakens, count each investigator's total items by type (unique items, common items, and spells). Discard all items, shuffle the decks, and draw an equivalent number of each type of item.

Attack: Each Investigator rolls 1 die. The result determines what Barganon attacks for that investigator this round. 1: Stamina. 2: Sanity. 3: Clue Token. 4: Monster Trophy. 5: Gate Trophy. 6: Nothing. Roll a Luck +1 check to avoid damage, and on a failure, lose 1 of whatever was attacked. This check's modifier decreases by 1 each round, even if Barganon attacks Nothing that round.

The general idea with this was to make an Ancient One that was quite hard to plan against for battle purposes. Since he can attack almost anything, you either have to go in with a decent collection of everything or trust in luck. He only takes 1 token/trophy no matter what damage type he does as a bit of a mercy point, since this allows characters who can negate sanity or stamina damage to get lucky and ignore damage one round. The "nothing" result is in there for the same reason (sometimes chaos helps you), but could probably be replaced by a 1 Stamina + 1 Sanity result if someone feels this is too easy.

The pre-battle "item switch" idea is to make it impossible to absolutely trust that you'll have, for instance, the Sword of Glory, but isn't quite as bad as Ithaqua's "item drop" ability..and could actually even help you. (Chaos cannot be completely controlled by anyone, after all.)

The "gate" power is based off of Daoloth's, but with a different trigger. Rather than every gate being triggered to swap during a monster surge, gates matching the symbols on the card are swapped. This means that less gates will be swapped at one time, but probably more often, likely causing more than a few LiTaS effects.

The "no specific items" power I just added now. O_O Investigators should still draw their standard fixed items, but any card that otherwise tells them to draw a set item (such as "search for William Brinton") instead gives him a random one (whatever is atop the deck).

The short doom track was designed partially to make the final battle shorter if it happens, but also partially to increase the chance of awakening. Because the likelihood of the awakening diminishes on doom tracks of 12 or above (since they can't awaken just from doom track points due to gate openings unless you're closing the wrong gates), I kept it shorter.

Anyway, that's the general concept. I think I've probably overdone it on the chaotic aspects here, to be honest, and this may be really overcomplicated to play against, but I just liked playing around with the ideas.

(And yes, if anyone is wondering, the name is partially due to the fact that I was a huge Legend of Zelda fan when this character was made (I still am, of course).)

Hm. Edit marker went away, so I had to add this here. Realized I forgot to say this in his attack, but hopefully it is pretty obvious: if you don't have any clue tokens/monster trophies/gate trophies left and that is the loss you would take, you are devoured .

Sdrolion said:

Hmm... very interesting. I like it a lot! Even though I'm not a Legend of Zelda fan, you do portray Barganon's chaotic powers very well. A few criticisms about it though:

It's attack is a bit slow, and quite weak. Also it's quite easy to get away failing with minimal loss (even though losing a gate trophy is pretty brutal). To make it stronger, you could have each investigator roll a die, and the loss is inflicted automatically without rolling for a Luck check.

Does it have any defenses such as physical or magical resistance/ immunities? It would be quite inventive and unusual if you maybe roll a die at the start of battle to determine it's immunities or resistances. For example: Roll a die. On a 1, he gains Physical Resistance. On a 2, he gains Magical Resistance. On a 3, he gains Physical Immunity. On a 4, he gains Magical Immunity. On a 5, he gains Physical and Magical Resistance. On a 6, he gains Physical and Magical Immunity. Adding something like that would make the investigator's totally unknowing of Barganon's strengths and weaknesses.

Also a question: does his ability that affects encounters affect items as well? If a item allowed you to search for any spell in the spell deck, would you be able to do so?

Other than that, I think this AO is definitely would be fun to play against! Once you create this AO using Strange Eons, you might want to post it at the Custom Great Old Ones thread above.

Yeah, I'll post it there once I've made a version in that. I just didn't want to post the initial text version in there since it seemed like that was for things closer to completion.

To be clear, the "Ganon" part of the game is the Zelda tribute, after its primary villain. The character itself isn't intended to actually be Ganon.

I suppose that eliminating the Luck check might be an interesting idea, though I wonder if that might make him too strong (Barganon isn't exactly top of the pantheon of evil in my RPG campaign, not that that should matter here). Would certainly make things interesting, though, and require you to do the prep a lot more. I wonder if simply starting the Luck check off in the negatives might be a better option, though.

I can see the resistances/immunities roll. That would definitely be interesting. If I wanted to go really overboard with it, I could have him roll every round to make it a constantly-changing battle. I'm not sure I entirely like the idea of him randomly turning out totally magically and physically immune and that lasting for the complete battle, so if I didn't have you roll every round I'd probably do this instead: 1-2 Physical Resist, 3 Magical Resist, 4 Physical Immune, 5 Magical Immune, 6 Magical + Physical Resist. Slightly greater chance of the Physical Resistance result than any of the others. Alternately, I could just do it with the resistances: 1-2 Physical Resist, 3-4 Magical Resist, 5-6 Both.

As far as the items that let you pick a specific item, I'm torn (hadn't thought about those). I'm inclined to say that the ability, to properly reflect the chaos, is universalanything that allows you to either look through the deck for a particular item, or search for whatever item you want, is now randomized and results in a draw from the top of the deck. At the same time, I'm not sure I like the idea of really negating a particularly notable (and rare) item...but then, this is the Mythos. It's not supposed to be nice.

I've posted this one to the Custom GOOs thread.

Sdrolion said:

I'll help you with this later (there's a lot to work with here, so, I may not be able to get to it for a while, but hopefully sometime today or on the weekend). I will say this in the meanwhile, it needs a better picture ;'D

The card severely needs editing and possibly trimming. If someone wanted to print it out, it would have to be jumbo sized, but, hopefully you'll be amenable to editing, because I think there are some cool ideas here (possibly it would be better if they were broken down into two cards, perhaps giving this a herald would allow that). I need to think about it later. Not enough time now.