So last night we decided to give scenario 1 a go, with our 8 investigator team. Things started out pretty good -- Amamde Walker got a Tome that if successfully read gave her another skill, I played Dexter (I'm pretty adamant about avoiding Joe Diamond this time around) and got an Elder Sign for my unique item, plus Shriveling and Bind Monster. A few other decent items were passed around to all the players, and we were ready to go.

Our first mythos card was an environment that gave all monsters +1 toughness. And the gate opened at the Silver Twilight Lodge. And a GuG and a Formless One (?) popped out. No good. Harvey managed to get through to the other side, and I decided to take a chance at the church to see if I could get Blessed. Guess what? It worked (sweet).

Turn two and out gate opens at the woods. No real tough monsters here, but the replacement Horror stats and the +2 toughness made even a cultist something to worry about. Plus, the Gug and Spawn decided to go for a walk. I figured being blessed I should make an attempt to beat up some monsters, so I took on the baddies. Since my max. will was 3 (auto fail on that Horror Check), I took the 2 sanity loss, succesfully cast Bind Monster and removed the Formless One from the Board. Then I failed my Evade check on the Gug, and after taking some stamina damage failed the Horror Check and went to the Asylum, where I was in good company with another investigator. Harvey gets delayed in the Outer Worlds,

Turn three we get a monster surge. And two monsters released in the South Side street, so the Terror Track goes up by 1. Dexter loses his faith in god, so his Blessing goes away. A few investigators try to get the monsters under control before they scare away the rest of the city, but all it really ends up doing is sending 2 more to the Asylum and one to the Hospital. Knowing I need to get back on the streets fast I pay my counseling fees and think about where to go next. Joe Diamond decided to make a dash for the Unvisted Isle, hoping to pick up a clue. instead, the new mythos card throws him through a gate.

Well, it could have been worse, but things are getting tough for the home team. Three gates, 11 monsters, and half the team insane or injured. Dexter makes a mad dash to try and take down some monsters, and ends up getting sent insane again. For a magician, this man has no willpower. Harvey makes it out of the gate, and seals it. A few monsters get sucked away as well, but we're still sitting too high on the monster level for my taste.

And, sure enough, we get another monster surge. It's a new environemnt, so only the cultists and another mosnter type get a +1 bonus in addition to Shubby. The Terror Level jumps up to 5, okay, that's not so bad, we can deal with that. Dexter spends another $2 getting his brain back in order, someone finally makes the mad dash to get into the gate at the woods, and makes it. Harvey, realizing that with Calvin by his side he can take on monsters starts to go monster hunting. He doesn't do a bad job of it, but he doesn't really have the best weapons in the world.

Next turn, a new gate opens at Hibbs. The monsters again are at 11, so Dexter trys to take down some. This time he keeps from going insane, and instead ends up at the hospital. Just because a guy has Shriveling doesn't mean he can beat down monsters, especailly if his spell casting fails him. This time I ditch my Elder sign; I figure the game will be over long before the doom track hits 12. Joe closes his gate.

Next turn, we get a monster surge. The Terror Track jumps up to 10, and the monsters are free to overrun Arkham. I don't want to waste a turn healing up, but I have to. Some of the team do their best to beat up monsters, but barely manage to take some down before going nuts.

Now there is a gate at the Unnameable. Okay, that's only 2 more monsters, we can deal with that. Both are Dark Young. That's no fun. But there are 2 clues at the Science Building, and only one monster between Dexter and hopefully some helpful experiement. On succesful Evade check later and Dexter meets up with some research students. Letting them know what I've learned about the creatures destroying Arkham, they get this strange device working. Sadly, it isn't effective enough to close any of those gates on the board.

Great, another gate opens up, at the Witch house. The monsters are swarming the board. I decide to stay put; there has to be something in this building that can help us. Maybe this professor with the weird relic -- hey, I'm blessed again! Maybe God hasn't deserted us at all.

Oh wait, nope, monster surge. That's more than enough to hit 22 monsters on the board. What IS that thing crashing over the town! It's horrible, its...eating half our investigators! No. Wait, I'm blessed, we've got some good spells, let's see what we can do. Apparently, not enough. We can't hold out against Shub, and pretty soon he'll be moving on to destroy the rest of the east coast.

Not even 2 hours of game time. On the plus side, I slipped on some ice and pulled some muscles around my knee, so I have three days off from work. We're going to get together on Saturday afternoon and see if we can stop the ugly monster. This scenario was worse than I expected, but our environments were no help at all.

That sounds painful.... both the game and the leg injury! Good luck on the second go-round.

We lost this scenario in a 4 person when we had a solar eclipse that lasted 14 turns and prevented any spells from being cast. Ugly, but not as bad as your 8 person game. In the game we won last night, Michael McGlenn was flat on his back pretty much throughout the game - arrested at the train station, encouraged to go after a Cthonian with a shotgun and a +1 fight - and getting stomped on by it, being driven insane by a couple of Bhyakees... he was not much help until he was able to jump through and close that last gate. There's something aggravating when one of your characters doesn't contribute. It makes me cranky. We should've sent him gate-hopping from the get-go. On the other hand, Harvey and his buddy Calvin were the good monster whackers - Harvey ended with 15 monster trophies!

There were a few "bright spots" in our otherwise terrible game. Our favorite was when a Nightgaunt showed up and the investigators went to encounter it, and deliberately avoided using their items to fail the combat check so we could get sucked through gates. Funny, in a way. But it still didn't help. We knew the game was a loss within a half hour of starting (that initial environment was the worst), but we're too stubborn to quit.

Nightgaunts are useful that way, no? We did that, too in our 4 person game, and it got us around a Dhole into a gate that would remove the Dhole. (I think it was a Dhole, it may have been onother "hit it 4 times physically immune" thingamabob.)

Our bright spot was a rumor. "The Terrible Experiment" showed up just after halfway through the game. Nothing too terrible showed up on the card - a couple of ones that needed to be hit 3 times with a -2, but that was OK. We sent Harvey & his allies Calvin & whatshisname (ally whose name i forget, but who gives +1 lore, +1 fight) after that. With Harvey's two .45's and marksmanship, he got 'em all. (Hence 15 monster trophies!)

Very nice. Harvey can be a real monster hunter, if you can get him the right gear.

IIRC correctly the game was a total of 9-10 turns from start until Shub woke up. The mythos deck just hated us. I did find a little satisfaction realizing that Shub hadn't woken up yet when the first player marker got back to the starting player. Here's hoping for better luck tomorrow. I'd hope for more luck, but what we had was all bad, I think it would be heartbreaking to have even more of that.

never played an 8 person game, so I can't even imagine the horror!

The game tonight wasn't much better. We thought we were doing well, then had a monster surge that jumped the terror track from 1 directly to 6, followed by another surge a couple turns later taking it the rest of the way to 10. We successfully closed 7 gates, then stalled out a bit as eaveryone tried to heal or pile into the church. We had 8 tokens on the doom track when we ended up having 5 gates open waking Shub. Dexter was immediately devoured as he had no monster trophies. I was devoured on the Shub's second attack becasue I failed my sneak check after rolling 13 dice. I didn't even have the excuse of being cursed, I just couldn't roll above a 4 to save my life. Combat proceded slowly as noone was rolling well, we still had 56 hits to go when Shub devoured the last investigator.

Has anyone passed this scenario with an 8 investigator team?

We had two attempts at this scenario (2 players). The first was brutal with 2 characters being devoured (the student and Joe Diamond). Michael McGlen was our monster killer but he eventually went insane and unconscious. The Terrible Experiment unleashed all kinds of horror on us - for 2 players it was too much.

2nd attempt today went much, much smoother. Beat the scenario with Harvey Walters having Calvin Wright as his ally. Michael McGlen made a repeat performance. 16 turns and victory. 2 players - 20 points.

Argonel: we did finish an 8 investigator game last week, and won by closing 12 gates. I posted a fairly longwinded description of it earlier, because we were kind of shocked we won. A lot of things broke our way, and even then it came down to needing some good rolling and lucky draws on the last turn.

8 investigators is winable, but you definitely need either elder signs or lots of luck in encounters. The scenario was a lot of fun, but I am definitely not replaying it with 8. My guess is it would take another 5+ tries to win it again by sealing gates (though I have a few new ideas that might be worth trying.)

I've been part of 2, 4, and 8 investigator teams with this scenario, and 8 was much much harder.

JJ: Are you trying again? I think you are do for a luckier game!

Twilight said:

It's not that hard to win with eight players. Just camp several of them in South Church and alternate them between there, the asylum, and the newspaper (for cash). Use a bunch of your cash to cycle through the common item deck for good weapons and two crosses so that two or three of your characters are actually capable of fighting (you could for instance give Calvin to Sister Mary and put her fight on max and just make it so she absorbs 5 or 6 combats before having to spend a turn and 2 dollars to get it back— the same with Harvey). Then you give the double crosses either to Ashcan Pete or Michael, and if you have enough spare clues (you can get them by having pete reshop for an old journal every turn) you can afford to have other players get clues (for the south church) and Joe Diamond, clues for passing will checks while being on max fight. Then you use the scads of money to buy some skills for some of your fighting characters. (Aiming for Bravery, Will, Fight, and Marksman). Anyways... It's not too difficult to do, just requires a little bit of strategy :')

That definitely sounds doable Seriously, it's all good advice, but the main problem I had was getting divine intervention. If you are not blessed, each character in the church has only a 1/21 chance of getting help. Even with a couple of characters suddenly become devout, it seems luck plays a big factor.

A couple of your strategy ideas we tried, and overall they work well, but we did have trouble getting people back and forth across the board (this would be a lot easier if the church was at the top of the board). A trip to the asylum for most of the characters meant 4 turns round trip (not counting trying to raise money). A motorcycle helped, but after a certain point it became pretty difficult to ferry characters around the board.

Turn order started tying things up, once things like Formless Spawn and Dhole started ending up on the board. I guess that is part of strategy we didn't think about. We ended up with our two best fighers close to eachother in turn order, so that when Fist Player moved past them, monsters became road blocks that were hard to get around. We actually started running Dexter Drake on suicide runs just to get him to the asylum.

So, did you win an 8 investigator game yet? How many successful prayers did you get? Maybe I just had lots of bad luck, but the church seemed to require so much luck, that it seems hard to get enough out of it make things easy. It definitely makes the scenario winnable, but it was still hard for us. (We probably need to use Ashcan better...)

Do you think there is any point in sending a few investigators to patrol the train station for lost luggage instead (or a few other similar locations where people tend to leave unique items lying around)? We played around a little with trying to get unique items through encounters, to try and get some elder signs... that was slow going, but it did end up getting us a few good weapons. It probably isn't as useful as praying, but it was a little more interesting

Anyway, I hope it is easier than it seemed for us, as I am hoping scenario 1 doesn't end up a road block for the 8 investigator teams.

Twilight said:

Heh... I sort of took it for granted that you wouldn't cluster your fighters. I mean, isn't that obvious? ;') I didn't play this scenario with eight players, but I've played other games with eight players, and I know that persistence at the church will remove doom tokens for you. It's long and annoying and usually wasteful, but it °will° work.

Argonel and I are on the same team. And, yeah, we've got to give the scenario another go. I don't care if we get a score of 4, so long as we beat the **** thing,

Exactly, I accept that there are some scenarios that you just have to be happy with a win. Like the Black Cave from last time.

The Tsathogua one? That one was crazy, but we did pretty well against it. The worst one for us, IIRC, was the Abhoth scenario. We lost against it twice in a 3-1/2 hour play session. It was all those extra monsters jumping out at us. Some scenarios are just more difficult for the 8 investigator team.