On our yesterday's gaming session we encountered a possible problem which we couldn't solve with reading the manual. One investigator entered the Chapel in Dunwich (i think it was scenario 2) and was overwhelmed by cultists. Literally! Our keeper moved four cultists into the space with the investigator so that there were five creatures in one space and evading was a really difficult task. Even though the chapel has five spaces (if i remember correctly) only one was occupied with this heap.

Have we overlooked something in the manual or isn't there a rule that explanes this matter?

Cheers,

nv

Offhand, that sounds perfectly legal. I can't recall anything that would restrict the number of monsters or Investigators occupying a space.

K xx

Nope, ain't such a thing. Perfectly legal to swarm a since space with all investigators and all monsters is the box, although you'd better get creative on how to place the miniatures there
Ask a football / rugby player after a "Pile on" why he didn't manage to evade

That´s the answer I hoped for, being the keeper of the named session! (Hi n_v! )

new_vision said:

As we've just debated in another thread, on the Investigators turn, as long as the Investigator attacks ONE monster in his space, he's is not required to Evade other monsters in his space.

Just a heads-up.

Of course, if you've got four monsters on you when it's the Keeper's turn, you could be in a tight spot.

K xx

Mr. K said:

I can only assume your scenario involves the investigator not leaving the space after attacking?

I also found this a bit strange and unbalanced..

I was thinking about house rules for limiting the amount of monsters in the same space depending on the size of the monsters base.

When we were playing scenario #2 the keeper spawned two shoggoths and the board was filled with cultists.

Luckily he didn't want to stack them in one single space, but instead each space of the chapel was filled with cultists and shoggoths.

thought it was a bit unbalanced to be able to get shoggoths so fast, although they were quite easy to avoid.

But the only reason we were able to was because our characters had high will and high dexterity, otherwise we would have lost really quickly.

We joked a bit about the bathroom being filled with all the mobs on the board, and that would be quite absurd.

So unless we hear about any official/very important reason to able able to stack several mobs, we'll probably use a limit.

I personally feel there should be a limit of 4 small bases or one large in a single space. With cthonians counting as 3 or 2.

I just go with "If there is no more - literal - space in the room, the room's full". I don't want to stack any miniatures, just because I'm not told not to

(Still means a ton of Monsters in a single room.)

We ran into this with scenario 2, in that we had 4 investigators, a cthonian, a shoggoth, and a zombie charging into a hallway to escape a flaming chapel. We decided there were a couple of ways ways to handle this, but here's what we came up with.

Investigators and zombie filled one space, shoggoth and cthonian took adjoining spaces. In this case it was assumed that due to the event triggered growth of the cthonian, the place was getting torn apart. The shoggoth was left in the chapel and attacked through the door, taking fire damage. The cthonian was actually outside the map area, attacking through the wall. Obviously this doesn't work in all cases, but it did inspire us to make a house rule.

For us, Large tile mobs do not 'need' to be in the same space as an investigator and can attack from an adjacent space. The same applies in reverse to melee attacks and special abilities by investigators. If there's more minis than can fit in a space, they don't fit.

Obviously this can be abused, so we followed up with a couple of modifiers.

If a monster "must" be placed in a specific space as directed by a card, but there is not enough room, enough investigators or minions may be moved one space by their respective players to accomodate. This cannot be used to bypass a lock card, and if this forces a player past a barrier, the barrier is not displaced.

Secondly, because doorways come up fairly often in this situation, large tile mobs can use monster vs barrier cards to attack via doorway. (haven't used this much yet, may be more trouble than its worth)

And Thirdly, to avoid a cthonian pushing an entire space full of investigators along as it moves, interesting as that is for the keeper, a large tile creature can move past investigators as normal, and vice versa, but cannot displace them unless again, it's being specificaly placed there by a card effect.

In this case the cthonian outside the map tile worked for story purposes (big enough to swallow the chapel in four turns), but next time I think we would have just moved it further down the hall.

Another solution to this would be to use tokens to represent monsters if they won't all fit into the same space (just keep track of which tokens represent which monsters, and set their miniatures aside until there is room for them on the board again). As for evading multiple monsters, I've come up with a house rule that allows you to evade all monsters in your space with only one roll: Make an Evade check as usual, using the highest (worst) Awareness modifier of any monster in the group. If this Evade check works, the investigator evades all monsters and can continue his turn as normal. If the Evade check fails, he takes damage from the most damaging monster in the group before continuing his turn.

... or just remove the monster tokens from their bases and place those on the board (since they can easily be stacked).