I've just begun a huge project: A stand alone expansion (it doesn't require any of the original game/expansions to play with; infact, it can't be played with them) in the theme of Fallout (mainly 3). No rules would change, excpet that insteald of dollars there would be bottle caps. The monsters would all be monsters from Fallout 3. The (fully-sized) game board would infact be The Capital Wasteland. The rest will stay the same: There will other worlds, alien-themed Ancient Ones, etc. There will also be street encounters (see this: new.fantasyflightgames.com/edge_foros_discusion.asp )

Would you play in such "expansion"? Would you like me to upload updates and samples when my work progresses and finally, the entire expansion?

I'm just getting started. ETA: At least a month I believe.

Here's a prototype version of the game board: (as you can see there are no monster movement and no other world. it's still in prgress. btw I chose the leave the money at dollars as it's more convinient)

click pic for a large, readable version

I'd be interested, sure. But good luck actually pulling it all off.

It'll take you way more than a month, believe me. I started my Shadowrun Horror stand alone back in October really, and I'm currently on schedule to finish by the time I get to the US in July. So a good portion of a year should be set aside to do a project of that magnitude. I mean, you have to do a LOT of tweaking, and those encounter cards don't write themselves.

Cool expansion mate.

And I do believer I'll finish it rather quickly; You see, I have no life

Wait wait, Shadowrun Horror is still in development? I only saw maybe two references to it on the old board, but I could never find anything about it. Where can I get access to your stuff? Please? Pretty please? I'll help test it! please?

Hadanelith said:

Yes it is. Currently the only hosting I have for it is a Flickr account, so there are really only some sample cards on the internet . It exists mostly on my hard drive and will continue to be there until I finish my year of medical school. Then I'm going to print it out and try to find someone with hosting space for a very large .zip file. But the state it's in now is as follows:

111 of 111 Karma cards finished. Karma cardback complete.

67 of 144 Location Encounter cards fnished. All 12 Location Encounter cardbacks complete.

58 of 100 Problem Encounter cards finished. Problem Encounter cardback still in clip art - not assembled.

20 of 20 Runners complete.

8 of 10 Threats complete. Threat cardback in clipart mode.

2 of 3 board segments complete. 3rd board segment missing only visual "frames" for Terror track.

20 Unique Skills Complete.

40 of 40 Allies complete.

31 Unique Contraband cards finished. Contraband cardback complete.

21 Common Items finished.

21 unique Talismans finished. Talisman cardback complete.

10 unique Augmentations finished. Augmentation cardback complete.

81 / 81 unique Enemy tokens finished. Spawn Enemies under development.

2 of 4 "Special" cards finished.

0 of 8 problem tokens finished.

0 of 3 Riot tokens finished.

5 of 18 Tension Markers finished. Tension Marker back complete.

3 Johnsons finished.

-----

I put one of the Karma cards up on Flickr, here it is:

But yeah, when you're doing a set that has ~650 cards in it - even if many of them are duplicates - it takes quite a while.

-Frank

I have finished all the streets and locations (11 streets and 32 locations) and I'll be now working on the other worlds. When I'm done I'll post the board here.

To answer the question in the OP, yes I would most certainly play this. To answer a question posed to myself (And my poor, poor ink cartridges), yes I will most certainly play both of these.

Carry on, good sirs.

I've finished most of my board and I'd like to upload it, but I have a problem: when I export it only a portion of it gets exported. how do I export it all?

edit: nvm found out

Here's a prototype version of the game board: (as you can see there are no monster movement and no other world. it's still in prgress. btw I chose the leave the money at dollars as it's more convinient)

Click pic for a large, readable version

A note on board construction: Order Matters. Remember that the last thing you place will be placed over everything else you placed. So the order you have to put it down as needs to be:

1. Background Picture
2. Movement Lines
3. Locations & Street Areas
4. Monster Movement Arrows

Which means that you'll be wanting to cut & repaste all the locations so that the movement lines pass smoothely under the locations and street areas. Also, you're going to want to put some sort of background picture. You could certainly do worse than just taking a space shot of the DC area and superimposing a junkyard. But you might want to get something that looks a bit more painted if you are going for a painted version. You could also use the actual map from Fallout 3's Pipboy as your backdrop. Good places to start for some clip art to use would be here:

fallout3tips.blogspot.com/2008/11/most-complete-fallout-3-map.html

www.conceptart.org/forums/forumdisplay.php

Frankly, I think that the provided border area is needed, and if you have to scrunch your locations up a bit to make room, that's OK. There really isn't anywhere else to put a Terror Track, and the LiTaS, Outskirts, and Sky boxes really should be "off board" if you can arrange that. And you can. If you fold up the Terror track enough, you even have room for some Rift tracks if you want to use them (SR Horror uses them as the constant threat of LA Riots).

Remember that with 11 Neighborhoods you're going to need 11 times as may encounter cards as you want to have depth of each card deck. To my liking, 8 is really the bare minimum number of cards in a location encounter deck, and that means 88 cards. If you add just one card to each deck that brings the total to 99 cards. Remember that with an 8 card deck if you have 3 encounters at a location durng the entire game you're going to get a duplicate encounter on the second or third pull 34% of the time.

Now, on to writing Encounters. Three words: Planning, Planning, Planning!

The total encounters are going to want to provide a mixture of good and bad results, but they are also going to want to provide a mixtur of different skill uses. After all, if one skill or another is used all the time or never, it will heavily influence peoples' slider choices and undermine a key part of the game. What I do is kind of a cheat - I define a "key skill" for each location and make sure that key skill is used on a thir of the encounters there and that any other skill is used on less than 4 of the cards. Also, each location promises something on the left and right side of its map icon. I make sure that there is at least a chance of getting those rewards on at least 3 of the 12 cards. And yes, that means that for a location with two promises (say Common Items and Clues), that you'll get at least a chance to get one of the promised rewards on half the cards. Many of those might be contingent on you making a difficult skill check or on selling off some other item in trade, but the chance should be there so that people going to a location based solely on what they need and the promises of the board are making a reasonable choice.

Secondly, a special shoutout needs to go to the delayed condition. It is quite frankly frustrating. When it comes up it throws the player off their game tempo. And that's good . To a point. The point it stops being cool is when you are re-delayed . To limit the chances of that happening, all locations should delay you less than 25% of the time.

Also remember that you can play around with Arkham Encounters quite a bit. For example: in SR Horror there are no outworld locations and you don't leave the map when you are on one of the Problems (gates). Instead what happens is that a straight 40% of Problem encounters allow you to roll to solve a problem. This means that Runners average 2.5 encounters to get a chance to close - which is about what people get normal Arkham rules (except for the part where failure to close is really bad because in SR Horror you then have to start over and hope you get lucky). You can also play with the character skills some. For example, here's an SR Horror Runner card:

-Frank

Thanx for the tips, just one question: How exactly do I add a terror track in Strange Eons?

p.s. there are no flying monsters in the game

kroen said:

You are not going to like this:

You start by making 11 "tokens" using the terror track oval that each have a number on them (0-10), and possibly the color of a neighborhood if you have scripted events when Terror tracks hit certain values. Then you take those tokens and place them on the board in some artistic arrangement. I suggest keeping very close track of the decimal centimeters of your x and y coordinates so that it ends up pixel perfect semetrical.

Personally, I chumped out and made the terror track into a three layer 4-3-4 box. Because it's easier that way and uses up less horizontal space.

-Frank

Txh.

Updates: I'm working right now on making the background look like the pip boy map.

Work plan:

1.0: Background

1.1: Terror Track

1.2: Other worlds

Eta: 24 hours

Then I'll be approaching the cards. Here's an estimation:

Mythos: ~40

Location Encounters: ~10 per neighberhood

Street Encounters: ~15 (one deck for all streets; no street names are specified)

Gate Encounters: ~30

Common/Unique/Spell/Skill: ~20 per deck

Ally: ~10

I...WANT. Want access to the SR Horror Flickr page, want access to .eons of everything. My group is voraciously interested in custom expansions (no less myself), and I'd love to see this stuff. Several other people we room with (college students, you understand) would play AH, but don't really care for the setting. But Shadowrun? They'd be all over that like a 'Runner on free bandwidth. Please, if you can, keep us updated on what's happening - we'd dearly love to grab some of this stuff - though we're going to need to buy a beat up old copy of AH to glue the boards to...

Here's the new board: (the missing board piece [for terror track, outskirts etc.] and other worlds is soon to be added)

click pic for a larger version

criticism is always welcom

kroen said:

Problem: You have 20 Unstable Locations. This means that you'll need a lot more Mythos if you want a statistically significant number of Monster Surges and/or to have sealing gates mean much of anything. To put that in perspective, that means that the average number of times an unstable location is represented on a Mythos card is just two. If you have any location show up on more than 5% of locations or have any mythos cards dedicated to Terror raises, or double Doom or in any other manner not opening gates, you're going to be having unstable locations that literally only appear once in the entire deck. Maybe not even that.

You need to do a fair amount of spreadsheet work to make the Mythos cards come out correctly. You're going to have target goals of how frequently you want environments to change over, and how frequently you want each location to get a gate or a clue. So you need to balance all that out before you actually start writing cards. For example: in SR Horror there are 16 unstable locations. Of those locations, 5 of them are "high threat" (meaning that they show up on 10/111 Karma cards for Problems and 7 for clues), 6 of them are "medium threat" (meaning that they get 6 Problems and 6 Clues), and 5 of them are "low threat" (meaning that they get 4 Problems and 6 Clues). There are also 61 Headlines, 40 Environments, and 10 Rumors. All the rumors give zero clues, and five of them hand out 2 Doom tokes instead of a problem.

Frankly, I think that 20 Unstable Locations is too many, especially if you only intend to make 40 cards. You'd be better off putting in a separate mechanic to make visiting some of the locations both dangerous and necessary. The Kingsport Rift mechanic is a good way to mandate people to visit locations on a regular basis, and if you had the Rift locations have a lot of Monsters in their encounters you'd get a similar effect without diluting the Mythos deck. Remember, even if your High Threat/Med Threat/Low Threat is just 6 cards/4 cards/2 cards, then 40 cards can only support 3 high threat locations, 3 medium threat locations, 4 low threat locations, one Story Continues and one Double Doom Token Rumor. And to keep a decent ratio, you'd only have 3 Rumors with gate openings to go with that (as well as 14 Environments and 21 Headlines).

Hadanelith said:

Uh... sure. I warn you, I'm not really hosting the game on my Flickr account, I literally just have some pictures of board elements and card backs. Also, there are pictures of me hanging out in my apartment and the bone church and stuff. Also there are some physics diagrams describing elements about how levitation works in a fantasy RPG I am writing on. That's just a nonsequitur.

www.flickr.com/photos/14424697@N04/

-Frank

Yeah, I did the math wrong (infact, I haven't done any math at all) but now that you mention it I believe the mythos deck will have approxmally approximately 80 cards, as follow:

3x10 low threat locations

4x5 medium threat locations

5x5 high threat locations

3xdouble doom token

2xdouble terror track

Total: 80, distributed approximately as follow:

60 headlines

15 enviroments

5 rumors

Is that about right?

Btw, how do you like the new board? (remeber it's still in work)

Updates:

*Finished the common items deck

*Finished the unique items deck

*Finished the skill deck

Next to be worked on:

*Spell deck

*Other worlds

*Gates

*Monsters

And after that I will get to the final and most long process:

*Mythos deck

*Location deck

*Street deck

*Gate deck

In the meantime I would love more replies about the board.

Tommorow I may post a few items.

Cheers.

The board is complete:

Vortex rules:

Players can't move in Vortexs.
Whenever a monster moves to a Vortex, move it to the Vortex special location.
Monsters in the Vortex are considered to be adjacent to every street and location
in the Capital Wasteland.
When a monster in the Vortex moves, it moves to the investigator with the least
Sneak value.
If two or more investigatos are tied, the first player decides.
If there are more than one monster in the Vortex that moves, one of the monsters
moves to the investigator with the least Sneak value, another monster moves to
the investigator with the second least Sneak value and so on and son forth.
Monsters in the Vortex count for the monster limit.
Only blue monsters can get into a Vortex.

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

And here's a taste of some cards:

("magical spells" should actually be "energy spells" but I can't edit it in strage eons)

Updates:

Finished all investigator cards

Finished all gate tokens

Finished all special cards

Next up:

Monsters

No good. You have to have a unique black arrow and a unique white arrow moving out of each location and street area. It's fine for a location or street area to receive black and white arrows from many different sources, but there has to be one and only one outflux.

-Frank

I'm not sure I get you. Are you referring to the streets that has both white, black and multicolored? In that case it's perfectly fine: As I said in the Vortex rules, only blue monsters can enter vortexes, so if a blue monster is on a street leading to a vortex and should move (no matter black or right) it moves to the vortex. Other monsters ignores the way leading to the vortex. But maybe I need to be more specific about this, I'll edit the rules.

What you have is a way too complicated version of Flight that doesn't even make logical sense. For example, why would your flyers move into vortices at all considering that they still have normal black and white arrows to move down. If you want to use the flight mechanics, just use the flight mechanics, because they work fine. Just call the box something other than "The Sky" and you're golden.

For example: you could call those monsters "Hunting Monsters." Then the box could be called "Hunting" or soemthing. Then when hunting monsters moved they would either move like stalkers or, if there were no adjacent Investigators they would go off to the Hunting box and then if they moved again they would attack a player in the street.

What you have now adds nothing to the game except confusion. Get those stupid vortices off the board because they do not belong.

-Frank

Hmm you might have a point there. I'll see what I can do.

Alright, I followed you advices, made some adjustments, added a few things and here's the result:

Stalking monsters rules:
When Stalking (purple) monsters move, they move to the nearest investigator in a location or a street area adjacent to them.
If there's moe than one investigator near them, they move to the one with the least Sneak value.
In case of a tie, the first player decides.
In no investigator is adjacent to a stalking monster while it moves, it moves to the Stalking special location.
The Stalking special location is considered to be adjacent to ALL locations and streets.
When more than one stalking monster move from the Stalking special location,
one moves to the investigator with the least sneak,
the second moves to the investigator with the second least sneak, and so on and so forth.

Vortex rules:
When a monster moves to a vortex, move it to the Vortex special location. It no longer counts for the monster limit.
When the terror level rises, all the monsters in the Vortex special location are returned to the cup,
and a number of doom tracks are added to the ancient one's doom track
equal to half the monsters returned to the cup this way, rounded up.
Investigators can move into vortexes. If an investigator does, put him in the Vortex special location.
Then, that investigator must choose to fight or flee of each of the monsters.
Whenever an investigator kills a monster in the Vortex, he gains a clue token,
In an investigator is knocked unconcious or is driven insane while in the Vorte, he is lost in time and space.
In the capital encounters phase, if the investigator is still in the vortex,
he moves to any stree or location in the capital wasteland, have an encounter there, and is delayed.