Good evening everyone.

I have a question regarding Scenario 4 - Classroom Curses and the corresponding objective 1B, where the Hound of Tindalos must be kept from fleeing the Science Building.

When finding clue 1B, it says 'reveal objective' as per normal, and then says 'The Keeper moves the Hound of Tindalos 1 space'.

But - if the situation occurs that event card Nr. 4 is not yet revealed and no Hound of Tindalos is placed yet, then finding clue 1 before revealing event card #4 kind of makes no sense to me, does it? Because the only text stating that the Hound should be placed is the 4th event card of this scenario.

So if the players find clue 1 before this event card, then there isn't even a Hound and players that are fast enough to find clue 1 before event card 4 doesn't get them any benefit upon winning the game in my opinion... and if they were too slow to find clue 1 before revealing event card 4, they wouldn't have a reason to go for clue 1, since they already know that they need to kill the Hound.

So at the end of the line - for this scenario - finding clue 1 obviously never makes any sense, and if finding it pretty early, players do not even know where they should position themselves, since they don't know where the Hound will 'spawn'.

Do I understand something wrong / overlook something there, or is scenario 4 1-B just badly composed at all?

Wouldn't it make much more sense to state on the actual objective card where to place the Hound, so that players who find clue 1 early instantly know where they can await the spawn of the Hound? And why should the Keeper move the Hound one space upon finding clue 1? Shouldn't the players maybe move the Hound one space rather - if he is there already - to have a benefit of finding clue 1?

Many thanks in advance for any contructive answers :-)

Drizzt

Good question. There are 14 turns before the hound comes out. Using my setup (1B, 2A, 3A, 4B) and with absolutely NO keeper slowdowns (like making the freezer room dark or searching for good freezer/lab mythos cards), the heroes need more than fourteen turns to grab the requisite keys and move them to the right places. If your heroes ran in perfect unison like a relay team, they could make it in 13 turns, but only if they solved every puzzle in one turn, had no interaction, and weren't distracted by shiny objects, witches, or trauma. I believe it is impossible to get there before the hound drops.

I think the keeper getting to move the hound is a BONUS for him for the players getting so far. Some clues help the keeper instead.

I have a question of my own. I have six turns (marked by the six on the clock card) to get my hound out of the gallery. no matter how I count it, I can only move the hound twelve spaces (1 for creature of the night, plus the bonus beast move for the same card). It takes 14 to get to the gallery and 16 to get out the door, depending on how you interpret "escape through the gallery". How was that supposed to work?

We both lost. Sad face.

Thanks for the reply!

I am also beginning to think that it is somehow not intended to reach clue 1B before the Hound spawns... but then why whould anyone bother to find the last clue if the objective is revealed already?

I don't know anymore what choices our Keeper made last evening, but we had two gameturns left before the Hound would've spawnd... must be some other choices than the ones you mentioned above.

To answer your question: The Hound is considered a 'Beast' creature, and is able to use the vent feature to get from the tower to the corridor near the exit!

Best wishes,

Drizzt

Compare to Story 1, 1C: Reveal the objective + spawn three zombies.
The objective is to escape.

If they wait for the Event, they have a limited amount of time to escape. If they manage to be faster, reaching Clue 1 before Event 4, they have more time but due to the Keeper's treat on the Clue card, are slowed down.

I guess it's the same with the Hound there. If they reach Clue 1 before Event 4, yeah, there is no Hound, but they know they should stop him as soon as he appears. Valuable information!
But if it's already there (meaning, they know the objective and know it's not related to Clue 1 AT ALL), they should know what to do. Stop the Hound, not search for Clues. If they DO still search, the Keeper gets an additional treat with the 1 move.

... Come to think of it, I'd better tell my players that "Finding Clue 1 is, sometimes, only important if you DON'T know the Objective yet. If the Objective tells you to do X, then doing X is much more important than finding Clue 1."

PS: They were pretty annoyed about the fact that the Keeper got something when they found Clue 1, while they didn't gain new insight...

/Drizzt/ said:

Played this story last night but with Objective 1A. From last nights game and your comments I think this story weights itself depending on how fast the players uncover the clues.

1. If your players discover the Objective before the Event card reveals it, it gives the players extra rounds to move to a location. In 1B it means they know to get to the Science Building. It also robs the Keeper of a potential extra move for his Hound.

2. If they discover the clue after the Event card, it causes them pain!

K xx

Spoiler for 4 1B of course:

We played the 1B objective yesterday, it was a little hard for the Keeper, one of the player had a binding spell (obtained with a tome) with an 7 lore investigator and with the free casting stone. He had no chance to escape with his hound. Every bind monster spell stun the monster he could'nt do anything.

Don't you find this strange? We had a draw because we were unable to kill it before the last event (my nun lost her last HP with a bad fall in the stairs ).

With the spell it is impossible for the keeper to win and very very (almost impossible i think) hard to stop the keeper with it. This scenario is the less interesting one we played.

Hello all!

First time poster but long time follower of all things FFG. I wanted to share my experience as a keeper, particularly with Story 4-Objective 1B as this is the topic here. So far I ran stories 1 through 4 with different experiences in terms of fun and investigator success (2 wins, 2 losses, 1 Draw - ran Story 1 twice). Stories 2 and 3 were a blast to run, but story 1 felt a little awkward, and story 4 was downright disappointing both for me as a keeper and for the investigators.

To leprejuan: my setup was 1B/2B/3B/4A , and I can tell you that in this variant 4 players that coordinate and split up on the map to find clues can easily get all clues before Event 4 resolves, at least under the variant I choose. Especially when you have Ashcan Pete that can send his dog to carry keys around to other players... That was a big issue for the enjoyment of the Story, but not the only one.

----------SPOILER ALERT----------------------

Same basic experience as Endevor: my investigators found all clues way before the Hound of Tidalos showed up (3 turns before at least from memory)!!! So they were ready for it, with the objective revealed they ganged up and waited for it by the vent near the exit. The problem is that the Hound moves slowly (2 spaces per keeper turn) so by the time it made it to the vent near the exit there were only a few turns left. Cant blame them for making that choice though. They were in the middle of the map when it appeared, would have taken them a couple of turns to reach it anyway.

My investigators got really close to killing it, but starting the fight with something like 23 health (4 player game, +4 health per player, base health 7), they did not get him to 0 health by the time the last event resolved and we ended on a draw (keeper lost because the Hound did not make it to the exit, investigators lost because they did not kill the Hound by event V).

This made for a very anticlimactic ending!!! Worst thing is my investigators were quite bored for most of the game without any monster on the board!!! Sure I threw a few mythos cards at them, and a few Darkness cards... But that's another problem with the Story... With so many rooms going dark through events etc, there are less and less opportunities for the keeper to use his Darkness action card as the Story unfolds - at least that's they way I interpreted it, it did not make any sense to use a Darkness card on a room that would already have a darkness token...

When the 2 witches appeared (first monsters), my team basically wiped the floor with the poor girls. Had Michael McGlenn, Prof Harvey Walters, Sister Mary and Ashcan Pete as players. Sister Mary is a stunning machine with her holy water, and so is Prof Walters with a Bind Monster spell. Add Michael and his tommy gun and Ashcan Pete with a shot gun to that, and none of my monsters even had a chance to throw an attack!!!

So that made the big finale with the Hound even worse... The Hound was stunned every turn, and getting lots of damage from the tommy gun and the shotgun, and still the investigators lost. As for me the keeper, the Story did not give me much to scare the players, with no ability to spawn any monsters...

Had a completely different experience with Story 3 and lots of zombies. Players got a satisfying win at the end but I had a blast as a keeper because they were really scared and felt outnumbered/in danger most of the time with a few zombies and mi-go on the board most of the time - I did manage to get one investigator killed by a swarm of zombies, and the others kept running away after that...

-----------------------------------------------------------

So overall I feel like this Story is unbalanced, at least this variant... Interested to hear other players experience!

My general experience so far is that the clock usually works against investigators and that they really have to split on the map to find all the clues in time. Which of course makes it fun for the keeper when investigators start splitting up and you have that lone investigator begging to be victimized.

At the same time it is very hard for the keeper to strategize and "plan" his game, either from a storytelling or competing "crush the investigators" point of view, at least not until you know all the variants and clue placement by heart. The game does not even allow the keeper to read event cards in advance so in theory the keeper does not know how the story will unfold anymore than the other players. This makes the game a little awkward in that respect.

Still loving it though, and am really looking forward to seeing community-developped stories and what FFG will make of the game with future extensions, hoping that the follow up will be as impressive as that of Arkham Horror.

SPOILER ALERT ------------MORE COMMENTS ON RUNNING STORY 4/OBJECTIVE 1B -------------

Just a follow up to my previous post and experience running this Story. The more I look at it, the more I believe this variant needs to be fixed.

As mentioned before, it seems to be a challenge for any group of investigators to get to kill the hound within 6 turns (shows up on Event 4 at the end of turn 14, investigators must kill it before Event 5 at the end of turn 20). You have to consider that investigators most likely DO NOT have 6 turns of attacks on the monster as they do not know where it appears unless they already played the Story before. Assuming they are a few spaces away they already need a few turns to catch up with the monster, or they are lucky enough that they start close but eventually the hound makes it to the first vent and then the investigators need to run to catch up with him by the second vent. Then some will miss with their attack and damage output may vary. Other groups (like the one I ran) may opt to have one of them stun the monster every turn, which is good for stopping the monster in its tracks and prevent him from escaping, but reduces the damage output and their chances of killing it before turn 20. So for investigators, it is possible to win BUT in my opinion difficult and very unlikely at least on the first run at the Story...

As for the keeper, it just seems almost impossible to win this objective. I double checked the map, with a maximum move of 2 spaces per turn, the hound needs 5 turns to get out!!!! Ok, sure if the keeper gets lucky and the investigators do find clue 1 only after the hound popped up on the map, he gets one free move, great. Most likely will never happen based on combined experiences reported on this thread... As the keeper has 6 turns only to get the hound out, he has only one "extra turn". This means that if players block the hound for more than 1 turn, the keeper cannot win!! Taking into account that several players have the ability to stun the hound (Sister Mary and her holy water, anyone with the Bind Monster spell, anyone with a lucky attack, particularly melee) AND the possibility to block the door separating the second vent area from the Gallery, it seems very likely that investigators can delay the hound 2+ turns.

My conclusion: very high chances that this story will end up in a draw most of the time, at least on the first try. That seems bad to me, as a draw in my opinion is not a desirable outcome, leaving both keeper and investigators frustrated.

I am not sure what the best fix would be. I would maybe suggest as a first thought to shorten the time before Event 4 to give more time (an extra turn or 2) for both sides to attempt to fulfill their objective.

I am curious to hear if anybody achieves something other than a draw on a first try on this Story...

We played only once and the investigators killed the hound (stunned him each turn using the bind monster spell that is in the whateley's diary).

I don't have the cards in front of me to check, but is it possible that there is an error on the cards, and that the text on Clue 1B and the text on Event 4 should be swapped (or something similar)?

It seems to make more sense that the Keeper should get a bonus move if the investigators haven't revealed Clue 1 by the time Event 4 is turned over.

We just played this scenario for the first time, set up was 1B-2A-3B-4B. The investigators split up a few times and managed to find clue 1 long before the hound of tindalos spawned. After that we discontinued the game, since it had not been too exciting for the investigators (main problem was darkness) and very frustrating for the keeper (2 human players - 4 investigators). At first we thought the keeper made a mistake, but everything was set up correctly.

The arrival of the 2 witches was of no consequence at all, but admittedly might get interesting again once the hound actually spawned tried to escape. I like the suggestion that maybe the text from the objective card and event 4 should be swapped. This might make a bit more sense.

The are a few minor other things which bothered us throughout this scenario:

Clue 3B requests the keeper to place the padlocked door lock on an adjacent room. We found clue 3 in the freezer, adjacent only to the operating room. At that point one investigator was in the freezer, one in the operating room. How does it affect the investigator to suddenly be in a locked room? We interpreted the situation as follows: the door between freezer/operating room is locked, getting out/in requires to solve the puzzle, but the investigator in the operation room could just leave again (or try to get into the freezer). Still this was not an issue in our case, Joe Diamond had discovered the clue carrying his magnifying glass and used its ability to instantly reopen the door.

One of the mythos cards ("Whats for dinner?", little cage symbol) requires investigators to be in a kitchen or dining room. Such a room is not featured! Maybe this card should be excluded from scenario 4, as it has absolutely no function except of annoying the keeper.

There is a ladder leading from the library to the tower room. Within the library the investigators find the magical phrase, in our setup needed to get into the tower room. When the library is accesible, can any investigator just climb the ladder, even without carrying the magical phrase? Or is this ladder considered to just leading to a locked door?

This did not directly concern our game: on eventcard no. 3 it says for option 1C: "The keeper places Helena in the Library. Helena is a witch with +4 wounds per investigator." Should this read health points?

We will definitely replay this scenario soon, but maybe with a different set up..