In honor of the Curse being rereleased, I have spend a couple of weeks writing and playtesting Nephren Ka. I'm not quite sure whether he's a Herald or a Scenario, so I've posted in neither.

The basic idea is that something nasty is going on at the museum - as is I think you will agree somewhat the theme of the expansion . The cultists and forces of the mythos are attempting to awaken Nephren Ka, which the players have to prevent while also taking care of gates and such. Should they fail, the Pharaoh awakens and rains down magical horror in a Dunwich Horror like fashion, until either the game ends or the players manage to get rid of him.

There are three prophecies that foretell him rising from his tomb. Each can become Fated by a certain event, and the investigators can Foil it by doing something else. Note, a prophecy can only be Fated or Foiled, doom tokens do NOT stack up on a prophecy if the Fated condition is met multiple times.

If all three are fated at once then he awakes and trouble happens, so it becomes a game of trying to keep at least ONE foiled at any given time with a MINIMUM of time and resources. Usually the easiest way to do this is to focus on just one prophecy and make sure it is always Foiled. Keeping all three foiled is pretty much impossible AND a massive waste of resources.

The Prophecy of Shifting Stars is very easy early game, but as more and more seals are up towards the end it becomes pretty much impossible to keep Foiled, so this adds tension late game.

The Prophecy of the Tainted Blood is one that can, with a lot of work, be prevented from ever becoming Fated. If you do let it happen (again, often early game) then it is expensive to Foil both in time and resources.

Conversely, the Prophecy of the Black Pyramid becomes Fated very easily and unpredictably, but can be quite easily foiled, especially with the Ancient Whispers. (As the prophecy becomes fated during the Mythos Phase, and Nephren Ka awakes at the end of the Other World phase, you do have a player turn to Foil this before it wakes him up.)

Generally, the best strategy we've found is to just ignore them in the early part of the game, as Shifting Stars will hardly ever be Fated, and if it is quickly foiling the Black Pyramid prophecy will keep him from rising. Then in the late game we sacrifice an ally to foil Tainted Blood and become hell bent on keeping monsters away from the University, and keep him from waking that way.

If the Pharaoh does wake up he is unkillable by any means, no matter what devious abuse of the rules might be concocted - I messed with having Dunwich horror type cards to make him simply very very lethal, but he isn't the sort of entity that can be beaten by brute force, his magics are simply too powerful (although he can be sneaked past). The only way to get rid of him is to foil all three prophecies (rather than foiling just the one that would have stopped him from waking). As well as making the streets quite dangerous, he also uses his own magic once per turn. I'm not that happy with the graphical design of the cards, but they are all quite nasty without being totally game ending if he is alive for a turn or two. Also, as there are six they work nicely with a D6 roll rather than actually printing them out

Note-For the record, I'm aware that the Dark Pharaoh is NOT Nephren Ka, it's just easier to use a somewhat appropriate monster token for him. As I understand it, the Dark Pharaoh is a mask, an aspect of Nyarlathotep. Nephren Ka, however, was a human who found the Haunter in the Dark and became an incredibly magically powerful worshipper of the Outer Gods, and eventually an incredibly evil Pharaoh. He was eventually killed by most of Egypt and many of their gods, and sealed in a pyramid to keep his evil away. Till now

Second note-Since obviously we've only been using our old version of Curse, we didn't have Ancient Whispers to use, which made Prophecy of the Black Pyramid MUCH harder to foil. So we've been playing that it works when you gain a unique item as well at the moment, as that is also a fairly sure thing with the Curiosity Shop.

You might want to make a separate monster marker to act as Nephren-Ka. This way you can combine Nephren-Ka and the Dark Pharaoh heralds if you want, mch like you can combine Dagon and Hydra.

I like the fate and foil conditions. Did you play test it ?

I think Jake's suggestion is nice. allowing both herald is a clever move.

FYI, in the stories, Nephren-Ka IS the dark pharaoh. It is a character designed by Robert Block (read his several egyptians stories), that has been re-used by HPL in his story where he actually kills Robert Block (that he renamed Robert Blake :-). These back and forth writings between Block and Lovecraft were common (e.g. The Haunter is a reply to The Shambler from the Sky ; Block wrote the follow-up of the Haunter of the Dark --The Shadow from the Steeple-- where HPL and RB were central characters, etc).

Huh.... I guess I wasn't as well read as I thought, I'd only read Haunter of the Dark Thanks for continuing my Lovecraftian education

Yeah, me and my group has done a fair bit of testing. With the current version of the rules we've done three games. First one we had good fighters and kept drawing cultists, so we managed to keep Tainted Blood from ever being Fated and won easily.

Second game we were trying to keep Black Pyramid from being Fated by having someone in Arkham buy items every time a pyramid symbol came up, but he failed a sneak check on an important turn and Nephren Ka returned. We did manage to banish him, but he blew up a seal and gained a doom while he was alive, so we were too far behind to win.

Last game we sacrificed an ally (Anna, specifically, who we only wanted for her clues) to Foil Tainted Blood and then again concentrated on keeping monsters away, but we had a gate open in the Science building and a monster walk out. We only had one seal to go, so we didn't bother trying to get rid of him, and just pushed through to a sealing victory, and he only cursed us and summoned monsters.

Jake makes a good point. Now that I think about it, given that you need Exhibit items to foil the Black Pyramid prophecy, the Dark Pharaoh would make it a very lethal combo! So, here is Nephren Ka's monster token.