I just purchsed AH, I have played tons of times with multiple expansions, but that was several years and several thousand miles ago. As an early X-mas gift I got AH and aKiY, I picked that expac because it seemed to have added the most difficulty as I remember it. I have a small group of players where I live and too many games to play. I was wondering if anyone has put together a set of simple (10 pages, few new tokens needed) way to give XP to either a player or investigator and still maintain or increase the difficulty of the overall game.I'm introducing new players to AH that I know will love the challenge and even fear of the game but it always felt a bit too easy. If there a a few simple house rules to put the difficulty up to about the LotR game and yet still have XP rewards I would welcome any ideas

I'm afraid I can't offer anything near 10 pages. But I would like to offer a few suggestions.

#1: Use your Herald and use it well. I wouldn't consider KiY to be the most difficult expansion, but it has a lot of very dangerous aspects to it.

#2: Take Elder Signs out of the Unique Item deck. This forces investigators to work together to decide who is picking up clues for the next seal.

#3: Give your new investigators a few extra clue tokens, or start them out with a Blessing. If you've removed the Elder Signs from the Unique Item deck then you've essentially taken the randomness of getting an ES out of the Unique Item deck and put it into the hands of your investigators directly with clue tokens.

#4: I've never tried this and my gaming group would likely kill me if they read this but; stack the Mythos Deck. You could try doing a few turns of this which would allow you to controll the difficulty for a few cards throughout the game (obviously don't stack the entire deck). You could make sure a nasty rumor gets into the game early on or make sure that gates open at all low prob (teir 3 locations, instead of tier 1 (Woods, Witch House, Indy Square & Unvisited Isle)). If you keep gates off of those locations for a few turns you can slip your investigators some clues without it looking like you're buffing their investigators too much.

#5: Give the newer investigators an item set from the Unique and Common decks and remove their random draws. This allows you to give one of your new players a "kit" to be a monster killer (and who doesn't like rolling tons of dice and killing monsters?) or a gate diver.

#6: Make sure that powerful investigators get into the game. It's common knowledge that the most powerful ones are in the base set (with a few exceptions), so instead of randomly drawing, just make sure investigators like Mandy Thompson, Carolyn Fern and Darrell Simmons are dealt to players.

#7: During every Mythos Phase resolve a Mythos card and then draw a second card placing a Clue Token in the indicated location. Then discard the Mythos card without using any of the other text, monster spawns or gate openings.

That's all I can think of for the time being. I'm sure there are a few other clever modifications that you can make to the rules given you have KiY along with the base set that will make things particularly 'black' without making them too black. Sometimes following the rules to the letter and not helping your team with playthrough advice makes the game hard enough as long as everyone playing is OK with that.

Thanks for reading and I hope this helps.

I agree with FullDoomTrack 's comments ~ only adding that if you can print a copy of the Guardian , Hypnos , he places a Clue Token every turn on the board in both stable and unstable locations. Or, as a gamer, roll a d20 and place them yourself based on some schema you've developed

Did this answer your question? What I thought I read was that you wanted to increase the abilities of the investigators (or players) but in doing so not make the game too easy?

What do the XP do for the investigators/players? What kinds of bonuses are you thinking of giving them for their XP?

If you give XP to players, then do they lose XP when they are devoured and/or lose a game?

Your question is actually a very complicated question. The abilities of the investigators vary widely to begin with. The danger posed by the Old Ones vary even more widely.

Have you referenced the statistics reports put together by Tibs. This might give you some ideas on rating them.

I attempted such a campaign system early on but my group really didn't seem interested. They were more interested in playing the different investigators then pumping up one particular investigator.

How I do it now, mostly unbeknownst to my group, is when an investigator is devoured or retired s/he goes into a devoured file never to be seen again until almost all the other investigators are retired. I do the same thing with the Old Ones. Once one is defeated, it goes into a defeated file so what happens is the best investigators end up fighting the toughest Old Ones until one side or the other is no more. Usually the Old Ones win.

To pump up the invesitgators who defeated an Old one, I'd either give them an extra item or allow them to draw additional items and choose from among them. Giving them one extra choice per their victory, for example. This would take a measure of bookkeeping however.

In my mind the experience should be with the investigator not the player.

Whoops. I guess I should have read the OP a 4th or 5th time. I understood the question to be; What can I do to make the game easier for my new players but maintain all of the extra 'hard stuff' that is in the game? I have never tried to implement an experience system for investigators. Please disregard my post.