Vitus_Prem said:

It's never come up, as it's usually just me and my fiancee' playing multiple investigators each. If there were a ever a 1-investigator each scenario with a bunch of people, that rule would be dropped, as that's just cruel.

kroen said:

(1) House Rules

At the beginning of any phase, if your Investigator is standing on a Clue Token, you can take it. (I didn't think this was a House Rule, but apparently it was.)

I also split the Ally Deck into the Ally Deck (the 11 Allies dealt out for Ma's) and the Citizen Deck (everyone else "living" in Arkham). If an Encounter names a specific Ally, you may search both decks for it; if you take it from the Citizen Deck, it switches decks to become an Ally, and you must take 1 card from the Ally Deck and place it in the Citizen Deck. Ma's Encounters (or any "random" Ally) must be selected or drawn from the Ally Deck. When the Terror Track increases, return 1 Ally and 2 Citizens to the box (at least until some expansion adds more Allies). Charlie may only recover cards from...uh...never mind.

If playing with Corruption Cards but not the Black Goat Herald, after defeating any Hexagon Monster, draw a Corruption Card.

Kingsport Rift Variant: use Shudde M'ell's Rubble Tokens (if not being used) as Rift Progress Markers.

The Ancient One is selected face down. For three turns, the unknown Ancient One is not in play. No Gates are played (unless Luke is in play, in which case the pre-game Gate is placed and a Doom Token placed on the AO's back), but Monsters are placed as if a Gate were opened. For those three turns, the Monster Cup consists of all Crescent Monsters, Witches, Warlocks, Ghouls, Children of the Goat, Mi-Go, Byakhee, Wizard Whateley, the Ghast, the Dark Druid, and the High Priest (if being used at all). Before starting Turn 4, flip Ancient One over (now fully active), add the rest of the Monsters being used to the Cup, make any necessary adjustments (Cthulhu, etc.), and begin normal play.

I also use the Bast Fix: it only costs $1 to gain a Bast Token, and if the First Player cannot become the Beloved of Bast, the next clockwise player with a Bast Token gets those cards.

One can "ride the train" (switch boards) without spending money by starting their Movement Phase on the Train Station or any Depot and spending all their movement points instead. If not playing with Dunwich, instead of having a regular encounter at the Train Station, you may spend $3 and 1 Clue for a Rail Pass. (The Clue is the information on where to find the guy with the Rail Pass.)

If Sister Mary rolls a 1 on her Blessing Upkeep, she may make a Will Check; if she passes, she may reroll the 1. If she rolls a 1 again, then God has completely aband...uh...then she discards her Blessing.

Any Maximum Stam/San losses from the red/yellow Gate Encounter Cthulhu Battle are recovered if the Investigator survives; current Stam/San remain unchanged until recovered normally. (I guess I must enjoy being a martyr on this one. )

(2) Selections

Usually, Investigators are drawn randomly (1, 2, or 4 depending on how many players). Absolute newbies get to choose their Investigators face-up from a "beginner's pile" (Amanda, Bob, Pete, Carolyn, Vincent, Gloria, Darrell, Joe, Kate, Rita) first. Rookies get to draw one extra Investigator and discard one. When introducing a new Board Expansion, I will generally split Investigators into two stacks (the new ones and the rest) and anyone can draw each sheet from whatever pile they want.

Ancient One is drawn randomly and face-down (as above). Once revealed: if it is an AH or DH AO, draw Herald randomly unless the group collectively wants to play the "related" Herald. If it is a DH or KH AO, group-decide if we wish to play with a Guardian (random). So far, I kinda like how this system is working.

-We use draw two, pick one for characters. Easy and simple.

-GOO depends. either a random draw, or a thematic GOO/herald combination.

-For fixed encounters, we have a similar house rule. You may choose to have a random encounter BEFORE the fixed one. If you get moved to the street, or die, too bad. It's a valid point that this makes things easier if you get a good random. One further limitation I thought to include would be, you only get to use the fixed encounter, if the random encounter didn't include the location's fixed symbol. I. e. if you get a unique item in the curiousity shop, you can't buy items. If you get a common, you can.

If anyone has an idea how to bring the stable locations without special abilities more into play, I'd like to hear about it.

-We also use a composite of Dunwich's and the regular unconcious/insane penalties: draw a disability, heal one point, move to the hospital/sanatorium, and lose the rest of the turn. But you get to keep items and clues.

-For Sister Mary, we haven't used it yet, but our choice of a buff would be that she gets blessed whenever she ends her movement at the church.

-Joe Diamond's special ability: Whenever you spend any number of clues on a skill check, you recieve ONE additional die.

-Mandy's special ability is a plain reroll, not just losses.

(We don't have Kingsport yet, but Daisy will most likely be nerfed to only one free spell per turn.)

Other house rules I'm thinking about are tweaking sneak so it isn't an absolute dump stat 99% of the time. (Elusive monsters are a good start.) The way the stat system works, speed is hugely more important, at least until you have 5 movement points. I'm thinking about reducing the penalties for failing a check; if you try to sneak by and fail, the combat starts normally, but you don't automatically get hit. Something like that.

Has anyone tried some kind of house rule that removes the outskirts/monster limit? I've thought about having the terror level increase whenever an investigator goes unconcious/insane instead. Or increasing it straight with every monster surge.

Hannibal Rex said:

Arkham Inquiries

Bexarath said:

How does this variant work with Shudde M'ell's world cracking ability? Do you place a rubble token when you are instructed to place a gate on a location that already has an open gate, or do you place a rubble token only during a monster surge? If the latter, then Shudde M'ell would probably be much less dangerous when using this variant.

We houseruled that if anyone had the Sheldon Gang Membership then any negative cards dealing with them are discarded - just seemed odd

avec said:

The former. The same applies for the Children of Abhoth. Those AOs would be too boring otherwise.

jhaelen said:

Heh... I also prefer to minimize the use of house rules. Sometimes I'll customize the mythos decks or encounter decks if I want a more thematic game (I've even considered how to reduce the monster cups so it would seem more like one was fighting a faction representing a particular Ancient One). Typically though, I play three player games with randomly selected investigators and all the expansions. When I play with newbies, I tend to give them a choice of investigator out of several preselected ones (although I used to let them select one out of three randomly drawn characters— I eventually realized it was a bad idea because they don't know how to select well, for a first game, lacking prior experience). Really the only house rules I play are A)I've *still* never played Atlach Natcha or Shudde Mell. I hate their abilities and have never particularly wanted to play against them. Not to say that I don't think I can beat them :'D I just don't want to have to turn the game into a monster fighting fest (I don't think I can seal/close Atlach reliably with three investigators, and I hate the concept of closed locations— it's bad enough having to deal with Tsathoggua). I also have a tendency to veto other randomly selected AOs (weaker ones that I beat +90% of the time otherwise, sometimes I'll play them for fun and toss in a herald, but not usually).

The only weak AO I'm willing to play when I draw him is Nyarlethotep (although I use custom rules to make him stronger). I either substitute him out for Dkw's Nyarlethotep, or I play a more simple version in which all masks are treated as spawn monsters that (of course) are not affected by the monster limit, and that randomly appear whenever a gate opens, or on a gate when a monster surge occurs, in addition to the regularly appearing monsters. I like to pair that with Tulzscha. I've also been considering giving The Shadowy Figure fast movement also, but I haven't yet decided. If you have no more masks to spawn and a mask is supposed to spawn, put two clue tokens on Nyarlethotep (these count as extra doom tokens if he awakens— they also subtract from the total amount of doom tokens you can theoretically accumulate).

re: giant ally decks

Seriously? Are you guys *that* determined to be able to draw Professor Rice? Peculiar... If you really hate having random encounters without available allies (and personally I wouldn't do this) why not just make the ally deck the initial eleven, however, if you meet an ally in a random encounter (who hasn't been eliminated by terror), draw him from the non-included in game set up allies deck, and replace him with one randomly selected ally from the 11 allies deck (i.e. take them out of Ma's selection pool). Otherwise you're just breaking the game by making it very easy to draw the most powerful allies, provided you're fast and don't let the terror rise.

We didn't like the Monty Hall Monster draws & the fact they can parade all over town-nice for the game but just struck us non Lovecraft.Thus we created GOO Charts to make sure only the minions associated with the GOO in play would show up.

OD