Dark Jco. said:

I wish I had a clever reason, but I don't! I just thought I could get away with it, and that it wouldn't matter much. The real power of most of these investigators is in their special abilities anyway. I took the view that if someone drew a random investigator, and got one they really didn't like, they ought to have at least a few dollars or clues, so that they had a leg-up in customizing the character during the game. In most cases, my design philosophy was that if I'd thought up a good idea for an ability or combination of items, I didn't mind bending the rules a bit in order to fit it on a playable investigator.

If you discover that the starting equipment/clues/money are a bit too much, just knock $2 off everyone's stuff. To be honest, the most likely way for a Golden Scarab investigator to be too powerful is if they draw a really good random Exhibit item. There are some Exhibit items in the deck whcih will instantly turn the investigator into a merciless invincible killing machine, but they only way to get rid of that possibility would be to have no random Exhibit items, which I thought would be a bit of a let-down in terms of theme.

The investigators are also mostly pretty powerful because some of the Golden Scarab AOs are lethally dangerous - Nyalath-Hotep and Baneb-Djedet are pretty bad, but I think Nephren-Ka is the daddy of them all.

Then again, none of these cards have been tested as much as I'd like, so if you do notice anything unbalanced, don't keep it to yourself.

I don't have a torrent program, so can you please upload a couple of pics of some random exhibit items, investigators, etc? (I can't play it anyway as I have no ink but I'm interested to see some of your custom stuff)

I downloaded this today - awesome expansion! Can't wait to try it out. The only thing I noticed was that some of the investigators back stories were missing, but thats no big deal. Great job!

For those who don't have a BitTorrent client, head to www.bittorrent.com/btusers/download/ for one.

kroen said:

I already did! There are some bits and pieces uploaded to a googlepage here: sites.google.com/site/cultofthegoldenscarab/

But really Kroen, I recommend just going and getting a torrent program. If you just hit 'refresh' on these forums a bit less often, you'll soon save up enough bandwidth to torrent the whole expansion.

the link of the items is broken...

kroen said:

Sorry! It should work now. It's only the Exhibits that are up at the moment anyway.

cool items, but how can one buy exhibits?

That's just one of the amazing things you'd discover if you downloaded the expansion instead of asking me about individual components of it!

[sigh]

There's a Guardian in the expansion which sets up an Exhibit shop at the Library. It works just like the Curiosity Shop or the General Store, except you only draw 2 items. Any Exhibit item without a list price (like the ones from CotDP) costs $6.

thecornithan -

Thank you for offering this and all your hard work.

Also thank you for kicking my ass to get a bit torrent. How you can download just want you want at any given time is fantastic.

trevlix thank.

lemmingsunday said:

Thanks - although I think "hard work" might be a bit of an exaggeration. I wouldn't do it if I didn't find it fun anyway.

BitTorrent is indeed great. But Just remember kids, music piracy is a crime. You don't want to end up being sent to the Big House, like those hardbitten villains from ThePirateBay.

Do you think Thecorinthian that the Elder Ones might twist your arm for Epic Battle Cards? Nephren_Ka is a mighty master-piece. I can't but wonder what his Epic cards might be.

The "whisper" cards that you listed, as works in progress, what where you considering?

Thanks

lemmingsunday said:

I'm glad you like Nephren-Ka! I always thought I might be over-complicating things a bit with him. Giving him Sinister Plot cards in addition to the Plagues might make things even more convoluted, but sooner or later I might get around to doing some. It depends on whether I can think up enough ideas. The same goes for the other AOs really. Messing about with the Baneb-Djedet final battle is particularly tricky and fiddly (*cough*sinceitbarelyworksanyway*cough*).

The Whisper cards were going to be a small deck that would be used by a herald called the 'Black Cat'. I never found a way to make it work. The idea was that the cards would appear throughout the game and form a story that you'd lay out alongside the board, and it would work as a sort of 'group mission'. It would start with something that looked like a 'mission' card, listing a few locations and a sacrifice, but not specifying the result. Then each turn you'd add another card, and some of them would make the mission harder (adding more locations to the list, or increasing the sacrifice) and some of them would define the 'end' (at which point you'd have a limited number of turns to visit all the places and claim a big reward before the whole deck got shuffled back together and started again). Basically it was like a small deck that randomly generated the elements of a 'rumor' - a time limit, a sacrifice, a 'pass' condition and a 'fail' condition.

The problem was that I couldn't get the proportions in the Whisper deck right. The deck would have needed to have very-carefully-chosen numbers of 'beginnings', 'middles' and 'ends' so that you'd usually get a satisfying sequence of cards, but without it ending too abruptly or being too easy. I could have made them into three seperate mini-decks, but this game has quite enough decks of small cards anyway, and in the end I concluded that it wasn't worth the bother. A few of the ideas did get recycled into Nephren-Ka's plagues, which are much better anyway.

Some of the ideas in the 'Clue cards' thread on this forum also sounded like they might be a bit similar to the Whispers.

Nephren-Ka is a bit complicated, but that is part of the charm of the plagues. He is a remorseless G.O.O., and is just so darn loveable.

Baneb-Djedet final combat rules are easy enough to follow. He reminds me of the Lovecraft story that takes place deep, and I mean deep under Egypt, where the unlucky lost man sees a parade of unholy minions feed themselves to an enormous horror that rises from the abyss. In the way you have constructed Baneb-Djedet the difference is the investigators now must fight these minions to prevent themselves from nourishing Baneb-Djedet's awakening. Your troglodytes won't be out of place here.

Your idea for the whisper cards has given me an idea about how clues might be used, to tell a story. It would be pretty simple actually. A set number of clues would have the ability to trigger an investigator story. This trigger might be a dice roll, or certain clues might have a dot or sticker. So once the clue trigger is drawn, then the investigator's story begins. The story would be composed of three chapters. The duration of each chapter would be listed as a number of clue tokens. Once, that number of new clue tokens had come into play then that chapter ends, and the investigators either have a pass or fail result. Depending if the first chapter was passed or failed th investigators would then draw the middle chapter card and play either the fail side or the pass side. Once, that chapter ends you have the conclusion with another pass or fail.

So, the investigators in some way determine how fast the story is told, which makes gathering of clues rather interesting.

I am sketching out an idea for story based around a fast approaching mammoth forest fire that might be natural or might not be.

Hello all,

I'm new to the forum, this is my first post. Greetings.

I recently downloaded 'Cult of the Golden Scarab' and it looks amazing. It looks really well thought out and fun to play. I am particularily intrigued by Azhu-Thoth's Judge of All Things power.

However, the plague cards were not included in the torrent (from PirateBay). Has anyone else had this problem? All the other files appear to be there. Just no plague folder. The torrent claimed it was complete with no problems.

Thanks in advance and thanks to thecorinthian for putting together sucah a wonderful package.

- placeboeffect

placeboeffect said:

Thank for downloading the expansion. Sorry to ask the obvious question, but are you sure the Plagues aren't there? They should be in a subdirectory in the 'Ancient One' directory, because they're only used by the Nephren-Ka ancient one.

If they genuinely are missing I'm not sure how that happened, but there were a few versions of the torrent in the early days, so it might just be that an older version still ended up being listed and that's what you downloaded. I'll put card images up on the website some time today or tomorrow (see my sig for the link).

Ah ha!

Thank you very much. Sorry I didn't notice the plague folder in the Ancient Ones folder. That makes total sense.

Thanks again.

Like everebody said: Awesome work!

I have a technical question: what image editing program did you use? The reason I ask is that I (with the help of many) am finishing a french translation (which was begun before the last version of your extension was avaible) and I'm trying to translate the nice cover picture you did create (not that it's really important, by I like the details). I was able to find the original scarab picture on DeviantArt and make it look golden (using PSP XII), I added "Horreur à Arkham" (Arkham Horror) but I can't figure how you wrote the 'Cult of the Golden Scarab Extension': what font was it? how did you make it look golden?

thank you and keep up the good work (which seems to be the case, judging by your otherposts on the forum...)

Thanks!

I can't remember exactly what I did, but I do all my image editing in the GIMP ( www.gimp.org ) and I think the font was Baskerville, although it could be something else similar.

A question about an Arkham encounter card. In the Library it says:

Make a speed test. if you pass, or it is <b>day</b>, draw 1 Unique item. If you fail, or it is <b>night</b>, you are <i>cursed</i>.

Does it mean that you can get two effects. For example: it is night and I pass the check: do I get the Unique Item and the curse?

pvdlinde said:

Hmmm. I can't see any reason why you can't get both results. A strict reading of the card text is that you'd get both, although that's pretty much a coincidence because I didn't think of this when I wrote the card.

For the moment, I say you get the item and the curse. I'm probably going to completely overhaul the Day/Night concept in the next version of the expansion anyway.

Thanks for asking, anyway; this is exactly the kind of thing I need people to point out. I do keep a running list of 'errata and clarifications' on the expansion googlepage, but there's not much there are the moment.

"next version"? You're actually going to update your expansion after you release it? Color me surprised, but very, very pleased. Now if only we could get FFG to do that...

I wouldn't hold your breath for my 'next version' either.... but yes, sooner or later I may update the version in the torrent.

(I'll tell you this, though: as much as I like to slag off and pick holes in official cards, the official expansions are still a lot more consistent than anything I've managed so far. I thought Golden Scarab was ****-near perfect when I first posted it online; now, I reckon there's something wrong with nearly every set of cards I made. So, obviously FFG are doing something right. Fair play to 'em.)

On the Northside 3 card (Arkham Encounter deck), at the train station, the text reads: "if it's neither " i.e. if it's not day nor night.....

It doesn't seem possible: if it's not day then it's night... (and vice versa), or maybe I missed something...

On the Northside 4 card: Curiosities Shoppe: when halving the price, do I round the price up? i.e. when price list is 3$ then I pay 2$, when it's 2 or 1$, I pay 1$.

pvdlinde said:

You didn't miss anything, but I think you're the latest victim of my over-pedantic approach to card phrasing. Sorry! It can be neither. Day' and 'Night' are continuous states which are created by the Day/Night card. You don't have to use the Day/Night card; it's part of the Egyptian Exhibit guardian (although it pretty much works on its own). So if you weren't using the guardian, it is neither 'Day' nor 'Night'. I wanted to make encounters which used the Day/Night idea, but I didn't want to make them unusable if you weren't using that guardian, so I always tried to include a clause which explained what happened if the Day/Night card was not in play. In retrospect this was a stupid idea on my part, because it led to crazy card phrases like "If it's not Day...." , which meant "If it's Night, or if the Day/Night card is not in use..." . Yeesh! What was I thinking?

In light of this and several other questions, I have come to the conclusion that the Day/Night card is, in technical terms, "a really rubbish idea".

I thought it was a good idea at the time; now, I think it would need completely changing in order to be interesting. So I heartily recommend that you ignore the Day/Night card completely until I come up with a revised version. Of course, if you do want to keep using it, it should work, it's just that some of the encounters are written in quite a perverse way in order to make it work.

Regarding rounding prices: I guess I was assuming there's a game 'standard' for this sort of thing, when of course there isn't. I think you should round the price up . But if you want to do it differently, go nuts. It's only a fan expansion, after all.

Thanks for using the cards, anyway - I don't think I'd have ever found all these problems on my own.

It occurs to me that the easiest way to do Day/Night would be to label every environment either Day or Night. There are, big surprise, big problems with this approach, the least of which being creating a list of environment card names with their Day/Night status, and referencing it every few Mythos phases. For that matter, certain headlines also require a Day/Night label.

Alternatively, separate into multiple Mythos decks, drawing alternately from the Day deck and the Night deck. Environments don't work that well for this one either, but they work better.