Played again tonight, against Eihort.

**** him, and his spawn, forever >=/

I wanted a particular theme for this game, so I semi-randomly drew mostly "crime" themed investigators, and used the Organized Crime institution. Game opened extremely well, I put the Neutralize the Yellow Sign card down at Devil's Reef and soon had two seals down. From there one I struggled a bit to put the next two seals down, due to the Environment card that doesn't let you seal lasting for at least 5 turns. Jacqueline became a true killing machine but succumbed to Eihort's brood when she used her Elder sign card to seal Dagon's Order and got her 2nd brood token…rolling a 1. Fortunately Marie was drawn as a replacement and she immediately removed one doom token. From there on it was a panic to keep the investigators one step ahead of the Old One. Two seals were broken at the dark cave AND the Order, which brought me back to three on the board. Unfortunately, since all the focus was on keeping gates closed and seal some with low-brood investigators. Skids did not risk a seal at the Science Dpt since he already had 2 brood tokens but he was forced to close since another open gate meant an awakening, and that proved a mistake. The next gate bounced harmlessly off the seal at Devil's Reef. From there until the end, two Rifts opened and once again I found myself on the brink: one more doom token was needed for Eihort's return and Skids tried and failed to roll a success to seal! The next Mythos did not open a gate but moved one Rift that was open on Devil's Reef…and the color matched. The final token was placed on the doom track.

The battle came VERY close to be won…by the investigators! Michael was devoured through Eihort's sinister plot, Skids did all the work by himself and I got to say that the new battle conditions helped a lot. From halfway on he was blessed and kept rolling a lot of sixes, which counted x2. Marie was also good since she had the ability that increased by 1 all her Fight throws, thus never rolling a 1 (minus one success). Unfortunately, Jim could not help at all since he had no magical weapons. And when he was devoured, he added 3 brood tokens on Eihort's sheet. Skids and Marie kept at it, with Skids rolling a 4 on his 4th brood token, and finally Eihort was down to 1 (ONE!) doom token after an exceptional throw by Skids. But then…with both of them having just 2 sanity and 2 stamina, the final green card reavealed was…anyone who wants to attack has to lose 2 sanity…Helpless, Marie received her 3rd brood token and promptly rolled a 1. She was devoured and as Skids was preparing for his final stand against a 4-doom Eihort, the first red card drawn was…the End of Everything.

I love this game =P

That's an amazing chronicle! Seems you had a lot of fun, even if you'were defeated!

In case you want some extra fun, you can use this Herald here . The poor Eihort needs a boost, after all

Julia said:

Tonight it's Miskatonic University vs Quachil. Starring a cast of appropriately-themed professors/students =) We'll see how this goes, but I have a baaad feeling…

That Herald is horrific. I was brutalized by the standard Eihort already, I don't need to be humiliated =P

Nice pictures on those custom heralds. Where did you find them?

Tox said:

Miskatonic vs Quachil… seems an interesting match! Quachil is one of my fave AOs of all time :-) I wanted to create a Herald for him as well, but the project has in some way… crumbled to dust ::laughter::

Just remember, with Eihort there is nothing against retirement. So whenever you have investigators filled with brood, you can gain a couple of Injuries and retire them, so no probs with the brood. You can prepare for the final battle in the very same way: gear up for war, retire investigators passing items to only one of them, enter new forces stockpiled with good stuff and erase the face of Eihort

As for the pictures… years of google searching, I guess. And sometimes deviantart.com is useful as well!

Julia said:

Retirement? I never retire investigators! Well, except when they are broke, without items and with at least 3 madness/injuries…I think I've done it maybe 5 times. Maybe that's why I lose so often…

A single magical weapon or spell would have made the difference in the last match, enabling Jim to actually attack instead of…doing nothing until devoured by the brood.

Reporting on the Quachil game.

I still list, but at least I know it was from sheer bad luck, not for doing anything wrong. I really moped the floor with Quachil for the whole game, he never went over the 4th doom token. The starting investigators were Kate (who was devoured during the final battle with 4 (!) skills), Amanda (devoured through the Dust deck), Rita and Mandy. Daisy replaced Amanda. At the end Kate AND Mandy were Alumnii, there was an Expedition at the beach of Innsmouth, I had already cleared the DOR track once just in time (at 5 DOR tokens) and once again, due to some unlucky gate openings, the DOR was at 5. I had 5 clues on the Feds track, missing just one on a green space…Daisy had put just one down on the green spaces during the last Upkeep, because that was all she had. There were 4 seals down (all on the Arkham board) aaaand…gate bounced on a seal. Blam, the Deep Ones rose, Quachil went from 3 doom tokens to 12, Epic Battle commenced, the first green card drawn instructed to draw a Plot, the Plot made me discard all green cards (you can see where this is going). Quachil was still without a scratch, but during the next few turns (in which Mandy and Rita were devoured and Daisy survived thanks to a Unique item) I managed to remove 1 doom token (thanks to Kate's clue pile and the Azure flame). Then 4 red battle conditions were drawn, and You Will Share Arkham's Fate brought the Old One down to 8 doom tokens. Kate was cursed after arranging the top 3 cards of the red deck, but there was no way for Daisy, after Kate was blown to dust, to avoid drawing the End of Everything.

All in all a pretty fast (by my standards) game, quite thematic as in Kingsport people in encounters were aged away to dust and unfortunately once again lost due to the friggin' Deep Ones rising track.

Next game is the Bureau against Cthulhu. Yes, at this point, I have beef against him =P

What an incredible bad luck…

Hey everyone. So some of you may know that I've been interning at NRAO in West Virginia. Well, last night we got hit with a rather catastrophic storm, and power and internet were knocked out statewide. The estimates to restore power is 5 to 7 days from now.

My Arkham stats files are on my computer at WV so I won't be able to do an update until I'm back. Sorry for any inconvenience.

Hi everybody. We just got power back at the interns' cottage today, so I was able to do the report. Sorry about the delay.

Stats report for July 11, 2012

User mbhollman passed For the Greater Good , bringing the total times to six !

This month's report is up.

Give it a look!

Tibs,

Love the Contributors Page! Didn't realize I was in the mid-30s…especially since I haven't played the past few months with buying/settling into the new house. One more big push and the game room will be complete ~ and then it's time to continue the campaigns!

The Professor

The new report is up:

AHSR

I had high hopes for today's game…they were dashed like the waves striking the stone-lined shores of Innsmouth…

Having lived in the new house for 100 days, I settled into a game with Vincent Lee, Daisy Walker, Lola Hayes, and Bob Jenkins against…Cthulhu himself. Arranged on the recently built table for the game, measuring a spacious 7' x 3' I had placed the card holders and component trays which we shall soon present on Kickstarter and jumped-into a nearly 5-hour game (19 turns). While three of the Investigators manged to Pass their respective Personal Stories (Vincent, Daisy, and Bob), several gates in Dunwich , coupled with near- Rift openings in Kingsport kept half of the team busy, which the ladies attempted to defeat or evade a wide array of monsters and plunge into the Other Worlds via gates in Arkham . Despite Failing one Rumor , the team managed to seal five gates, while the Doom Track stalled at 11 for two turns. Then it happened…a Gate Burst appeared at the Witch House and the Investigators were left rushing for open gates…another opened at Hibb's Roadhouse, while nearly everyone was exploring the Dreamlands or Lost Carcosa . Finally, a gate appeared at the Historical Society …and the end…proved inevitable…

The prof had said something, before he skipped town, hadn't he? Ashcan raked his hands through his hair, struggling to recall . Before those men- those things - had driven him away, hadn't Armitage mentioned something about the Science Building? Some kid who had… who had dreamed a machine?

So Ashcan had made his way across town, through streets crowded with God only knew what, to that centuried, fabled Miskatonic campus. Duke had whined as they crossed the square, strange shadows flitting across the star-strewn heavens. The thing that had dropped its unthinkable, fetid mass down in front of them then still screamed in Pete's waking mind. And, there, in its twisted claws… he was almost certain… it had carried a human brain . No- it was too much to contemplate. That way lay madness.

It was enough that they had slipped past it, that convoluted, writhing, antennae-covered appendage straining after them, seeking, searching, always searching…

No! It was done! They had escaped its grasp, that was all that mattered. They had found their way to the recesses of the hall of science, the strange lights drawing them forward through the cluttered maze of apparati. The world was wrong then, wrong in the same way it had been wrong in the Black Caves, out of step, humming with noxious, violent colors, redolent of the horrid odors of the purples and greens. The machines, they were not right. They made his teeth itch.

Duke had barked then, and the kid, the student who Ashcan had nearly missed, stopped pounding on the device and turned to face them.

“Help me,” he had said, a febrile wildness keening in his eyes. “Help me, and we can stop it all.”

Ashcan had smiled then, he could see it, the wrongness and how to set it right. The star- the sign - that Drake had shown him, shown him how to lay down in chalk, to scrape into living stone, to paint with the black ichor the monstrosities themselves had bled- the sign that had put paid to those unholy and unwholesome gashes in the fabric of the world itself, the Elder Sign was the key!

“Here, boy,” Ashcan had said. “Let me show you.”

And then, it had been over. To this day, Pete couldn't remember exactly what he had done, what minute adjustments he had made, but the machine- the dimensional beam machine the student had called it- the machine had sang then! The colors bled back to normal, sounds, phase-shifting and dopplered, ceased to grate at his ears. But more than that, more than anything, the haunting buzzing and rustling, the serpentine hissing had stopped.

It had stopped .

Yig, that father of serpents, that Ancient One, that quintessence of bad medicine, was finally silent.

Yeah, so, played my first AH game with another human being tonight (third game overall). It was just me and one other friend, as the rest of our gaming group didn't seem terribly interested and went to see “Finding Nemo in 3D” instead.

Philistines.

Anyway, we pulled random investigators and I got Ashcan Pete and my friend got Dexter Drake. I was a little sad not to have Sister Mary because I'd gotten used to having a Blessing right out of the gate. Sweet, wonderful and loyal Duke, however, more than made up for it.

We pulled Yig as our UberMonster (which seemed fortuitous, as a couple of folks had recommended him as a good starter), and proceeded to draw cultist after cultist from our monster cup. So we decided to try closing gates as a way to win, because killing off the Serpent-men cultists seemed like a fast track to waking up sleepy-time, nighty-night Yig.

We were very fortunate in our rumor mongering, as we drew a sum total of none. Our weather was also lucky in that the weather kept the Terror level from rising until almost the seventh doom token was laid. Tons of monster surges that did nothing to our overall score, plus some lucky encounters that sped us through our time off world, and a few more super lucky encounters that gifted us with extra Clue tokens and Blessings all around had us feeling pretty good about our chances.

But then our weather changed and we were at terror level two before we knew it. We had actually sealed three gates by then, and closed at least 3 more but Yig's count was up to 8, and we had no more Clue tokens and a near-full Outskirts.

And then I stopped off at the Science building to pick up two of the last Clue tokens on the board, and my encounter gave me a Lore (-2) check for a chance to close all the gates on the board! What the what? Blessed as Ashcan was, I used my two new Clue tokens and made my check, then proceeded to roll 4 successes in row to close off every last gate on the board. A 15 point victory! Hurray for us!

I'm not gonna lie, it felt a little like cheating.

We then made strawberry shakes and celebrated our victory in style!

I wish I had a sanity dog IRL, now.

Any-gol-darned-way, I can't wait to try this silly game when we can throw in a little Dunwich love! Thanks to those who have posted rules clarifications in either direct response to me or just in genreal. I felt more than prepared for this session tonight!

Nun of your business said:

Nicely written report!

Arkham is like that, sometimes you think you're going to win easy and you relax and then BAM!, it all goes downhill and you're trying to stay alive at the second-to-last doom token long enough to find a solution

Oh, and the feeling of cheating, forget it, it's rare to pull that encounter, rarer still to do it when Blessed, more so with a good Lore skill and enough clues and lastly you'll usually get it when closing ALL gates will not even win you the game You'll get the feeling of the GAME cheating (yeah, it's impossible) much more often, trust me.

The new stats report is up.

1200 games experienced at least one gate burst . Bummer!

Just missed the cut off with my latest game. Lost in final battle, Hastur at -4. Epic Battle card where the AO attacks first ruined my day. That and the MULTIPLE 9-die 0-success rolls. Ugh.

The new stats report is ready!

Boy, those Yig slots sure filled up quickly…

Dang it. Julia got my KiY slot!

Fenyx said:

::laughter:: I guess someone's about to take my (usual) Dagon & Hydra slot, unless I move my a** and start playing Arkham again (something that won't happen so soon, I'm afraid)

Julia said:

You're jut trying to lull me into a false sense of security.

Fenyx said:

Nope, darling, I swear I'm not ::rolling mysteriously some dice on the table::

It's a bit surprising that the new Yig has been beaten so often. I can only assume people aren't using all expansion boards with him. My one game with him with all expansion boards was a bloodbath. All of my investigators were cursed from very early on. I was only able to get 3 seals down before he was to awaken. I tried rushing everybody to the church to get blessed after I had 3 gate trophies and 5 toughness of monsters to spend, but a rift had opened and he woke up one turn too soon.

Tibs,

Discovered this little project a couple of weeks ago and am super excited to contribute! Thank you for keeping it updated!

The Dec 01 report is up and ready!

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AliZyklaTCWzdEszdXpoRVJQNGltTU5wMi1qWEJnQkE&hl=en#gid=2