Hey everyone,

I'm a huge fan of Arkham and a long time lurker of these boards. I was wondering if anyone knew if there is any discernible meaning behind the symbols on the monster tokens or the colors for Other World Encounters? For example, Jim Culver has the following ability:

Strange Luck - Any Phase: Other Worlds are considered to have a green encounter symbol for you in addition to their normal encounter symbols.

Is there any benefit to this?

And with the Monster Tokens, I was wondering if certain symbols represent certain things, such as Hexagon is a tougher monster while crescents are more difficult in horror checks (just made-up examples).

Again, I was just wondering if there is any known or assumed meaning behind any of this. It's simple curiosity! Thanks for taking the time to read.

Ben

The colors indicate what kind of encounters you're more likely to have. Green encounters are more beneficial on average; yellow tends to attack your sanity, red attacks your stamina, blue attacks your items.

As for the monster shapes, their main purpose is to indicate where a monster is from; so, like, that's why closing a gate to Yuggoth (circle) clears all the Mi-Go off the board. Unfortunately, the expansions muddy the shape/world correspondence a bit, so closing a circle gate to Lost Carcosa also clears the Mi-Go for some reason. But yeah, + is Cthulhu's buddies in R'lyeh (edit: by God someday I will put that apostrophe in the right place), square is time-traveling/interdimensional oddities, hexagon is Shub's kids, who are apparently from the abyss?, and so on... Also note that the moon symbol doesn't appear on a gate marker. These are the mundane guys like maniacs, cultists, and zombies, whom you can't just make disappear by closing a gate.

Oh, and welcome!

That was exactly the kind of answer I was looking for! Thank you for all of that clarification! It's very appreciated. Now Jim Culver's ability makes more sense. My Arkham group and I figured that green had to have been more likely to be good, otherwise that would be a horrible ability, hence why I asked! Thanks again!

Yes, Jim is a good OW traveller (and an interesting solution against the strongest undead). Knowing the meaning of the color patterns in OWs is a good strategical guide to decide where to send who: a 1 Sanity character that must dive into a gate could have a better fate while travelling Leng rather than being sent to the City of the Great Race.

Just remember that the colors are an index of a tendency: you can have red Sanity damaging encounters, for instance.