Looks good and seems to fit okay. Although you may want to change "pay" to "lose" unless you intend the cost to be preventable by you-know-who.

The problem between pay and lose is that different abilities affect different things.

Paying bypasses the larger majority of "1 less" abilities, otherwise someone with Strong Mind/Body would just stand on it for everyone else and never lose anything and probably never be forced to leave.

I don't really care about a broken Investigator being able to break a Cursed Item seeing as that Investigator breaks half the game anyway.

hahaha, good point. Fair enough!

Here is a probably not very interesting Item of potentionally dangerous power.

Yes, Awareness was specificlly left off, and as always assume +0 (1).

Whoa that item would be so fun! Everyone has to get together and find a way to kill you in order to save you. They're minus one investigator until they do so! That would be awesome if the player had decent stats (though 6-7 toughness would be pretty much impossible to deal with). Too bad Greater Banishment wouldn't work. Better get a Red Sign and a LOT of dice...

Most of the time it would be doable though. Hopefully the player in question would not get bored waiting, but otherwise I think it would rock.

That mask looks like it could be very evil and the poor guy who becomes it. Maybe another way to ride yourself of it? Dimensional Symbol!

Mark with the mask gonna be a tough cookie to beat... if his fight is up.

Horror Rating 0

Sanity Damage 0

Combat Modifier -6

Stamina Damage 6

7 toughness

lol even make monster icons for every one

Sothis said:

The Librarian prefers to be called She-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named :')

dkw said:

Yikes... A little *too* tough I think. You can potentially get a seven toughness monster/character. No. Good idea, but bad idea. Set a base stamina, 4 or 5, and make it that for *all* investigators. Having a seven toughness monster who keeps a player out of thte game until it's dead :' bleh.

Avi_dreader said:

How about (half their maximum)+1. This leaves 3s at 3, 4s at 3, 5s at 4, 6s at 4 and 7s at 5.

More attention then what I expected, and as always, comments make it better. As for the player who gets stuck with this, to stay involved, they could take over the Mythos Phase, Encounter Draws, and Monster Movement.

It's a terrific idea, but it's going to create all kinds of rules snarl-ups. Do things that affect investigators still affect the Controlling Mask guy? What if 'Feds Raid Arkham!' causes him to be returned to the cup? In order to list all the special rules this will need, you'd need something at least the size of a Herald card, and you would probably still need a custom monster marker in order to make things clearer. The best way to make it work might be to make it a bit more generic, so the person is simply replaced by a special monster marker, and that monster marker's stats are easy to determine (for example, the toughness is based on the masked investigator's stamina, but the other stats are fixed).

I think you could easily intuit what should happen in any weird situations. Going with what works for your group is what AH is all about.

Here is another attempt at a Spell.

dkw said:

INTERESTING! Five clue tokens for a doom token... Hoom...

I am thinking of changing the Casting Modifier to -3 (2). It may be a bit overpowered as it is right now.

And for those people who have encountered such a thing in real life.

dkw said:

That would be heinous with Find Gate. You could seal a couple gates while two or three buddies closed others, and there'd be nothing left! Win by closing.

Decided that it was too powerful as is.

dkw said:

This version is nice, but extremely difficult to cast. I don't think it needs a difficulty of 2.

It might also be clearer if you list Sanity Cost as 0, then reword the "cost" section like this:
Effect: Cast after closing a gate to seal it. Add 1 doom token to the track.

It's a very cool spell though, for sure.

maybe -2(2) ?

too short, blah blah

Even a spellcaster with a Lore of 5 would have 3 dice and need two successes. That's a failure most of the time unless you have clues, and then it's still not likely. Since you're going to get a chance to cast this spell only once or twice per game (in the games where it is drawn at all), it would suck to have it fail.

Instead of making it so hard to cast, just increase the cost if it's too good. At least then it will actually succeed and have an effect.

::laughter:: I think it would be cool as a -1(2) noncursed spell.

Yeah that's true actually. Like the last one, there's nothing really cursed about that spell. Adding a doom token is just a cost you pay if you use it, which is entirely voluntary. That means the doom token will be well worth it.

Here's the Medal again. I just changed the phase to Mythos so it's obvious it won't waste your movement for the turn.

And here's one new one:

Sothis said:

My usual humble suggestion for card phrasing: the Dark Totem's ability should be expressed in terms of increasing the difficulty of the check. Something like "Any Phase: When you make a Skill check, the difficulty is increased by 1 for each 1 you roll." That has the exact same effect (I think).

Just when I think I've learned my lesson, you tweak my probability cortex again. For high numbers of dice, this effect is a teeny bit worse than an actual Curse.This is one of those things that penalizes small numbers of dice a lot less than it penalizes big numbers of them. Odds of getting a single success on two dice: about 0.55. Any rolls of a 1 mean that the check has certainly failed, but only a few of the possible '1' results included a success anyway, so you've only actually lowered your chances of getting the successes you need to about 0.44, which isn't that big a loss. On three dice, your ordinary odds of getting one or more valid successes would be about 0.70, and the Cursed Totem lowers that to about 0.50. As you add more dice, it gets worse and worse, but I think it'll level off at about the same point as a Curse. You have a significantly reduced chance of getting multiple successes, but most of the time you don't need them anyway. Either way, it's odd; you're still better off rolling more dice, but unlike with a Curse, each additional die is less effective than the one before it.

Personally I think that phrasing is less clear. (Of course this could just be because I thought of my version, so it's clearer to me. ) But people are always confusing what "difficulty" means so I hesitate to use it.

If you found trouble understanding the description, it probably does need rewording. Any other ideas?

dkw said:

This is just my nitpicky self talking, but difficulty is expressed as [x] not (x). Interesting spell though.