Month: August 2024

Intro

The Arkham LCG has something that sets it apart from most other cardgames, even most board games in general. It is best played in a campaign setting where your deck evolves from game to game and you follow along a story to its conclusion… whatever that may be. Now, campaign games are a dime a dozen these days (although not really in the card game space…) but Arkham is special among them as well in that failing a scenario doesn’t mean the end of the campaign. In many campaign games like Gloomhaven, to name just one popular example, a failure to finish a scenario means you have to replay it until you pass. AHLCG avoids this repetition. Instead you just keep going, and have the consequences of your failing possibly matter for the rest of the campaign.
This is really quite cool and lends itself to great story telling. A campaign win is even more satisfying than usual if you stumbled a few times along the way, picked up trauma and experienced some hardships. Arkham even manages this without having to sacrifice replayability and become a fullblown Legacy game.
This does however require some thought in the design of the campaigns, as they need to enable a way to progress even when getting defeated, a way to “fail forward”. Let’s look at this in a general way first, then at examples from all the campaigns.

Experience

During the resolution of a scenario, investigators earn experience points (XP) which go towards new cards that can be used to upgrade your deck. The expectation is that scenarios get harder as the campaign progresses and that the investigators need to upgrade their decks to keep pace with the rising challenge.
A failed scenario will typically reward fewer XP than one that was won. The inverse is true as well, if the investigators ace a scenario and get everything done they need to win with lots of turns still left on the doom clock, they can afford to fish for more XP from locations or Victory enemies before they close out the game.
Either situation can snowball as coming out of a loss with a weaker deck might lead to more losses (or at least closer victories) down the line. While an overpowered deck might trivialize the game to a point where it only gets more powerful. Avoiding either of these feedback loops completely won’t be possible, but some effort should be devoted towards limiting them at least.

Story Assets and Weaknesses

The other way that campaigns can reward or punish players is by adding cards to their deck, either forced or optional. Often this is going to mean some sort of story asset, but nothing says it couldn’t be a story event or skill either. Maybe the investigators pick up a powerful relic or make the acquaintance of an influential ally that fights on their side.
They might also make new enemies, fall victim to curses, get poisoned, afflicted with madness or just plain injured. This sort of thing will often mean adding a weakness to the player’s deck.
Good or bad, the way to get these extra cards is usually determined by how well the investigators do in a given scenario. This can add to the feedback loop created by high or low experience as weaknesses will often be gained by investigators who already didn’t do great.
Again, this is something that would need to be kept in mind for campaign wide balancing.

Story consequences

Finally, there are less tangible rewards or punishments. Even when certain characters aren’t represented by story allies, the players might not be particularly happy to see them die or disappear. Story developments might lock or unlock access to different endings or interludes. While many of these consequences don’t have direct gameplay effects, they can still be a powerful motivator for players to do well.
Achievements also loosely fall into this category.

My take

Before we go over the campaigns and look at specific examples, I’d like to give a bit of a personal take on the whole matter.
The way I see it, upgrading and developing your deck is a huge part of the fun in the game. How we start with a relatively basic deck and get to spend XP to push it into many different directions is to me what gives the game replayability and makes it special. Accordingly, there is little worse than having a campaign starve players of XP. I equate it to witholding fun, something that no designer should consciously do.
So, in order to enable failing forward in a campaign, i expect to still get a reasonable amount of upgrades into my deck even when i struggle. And i mean actual upgrades decided by me and not story assets that i can use as a crutch. Even when doing well, i don’t want to get showered with story assets to the point where it overshadows my own deck. Because to me that feels like getting handed victory to me by the designers instead of having earned it as a result of my own gameplay and deckbuilding choices.
I am aware that this is a rather extreme stance on the matter and that not everyone agrees with it. There’s even people that play Arkham and don’t enjoy deckbuilding at all which is of course perfectly valid, too. Those probably enjoy getting swarmed with fancy story assets more than i do and mind less if they have fewer XP to agonize over between scenarios. That’s why i mention this now because this is going to inform my comments on the campaign mechanics that are coming up. So, just as a heads up, your mileage may vary.

Night of the Zealot

NotZ only has three scenarios. So if you were to faceplant Gathering or Midnight Mask really hard, that could mean going into the finale with half the expected XP, which seems pretty awful. That being said, the Core campaign does actually mitigate this risk really well. I really like that The Gathering offers players the chance to flee their house through the front door if the fight against the Ghoul Priest turns south. It means they have the option to just take all the XP they already earned from Victory enemies and locations and run. While suffering an appropriate consequence of seeing the Ghoul Priest again later. I think that’s really well done. Can’t also forget about Lita Chantler who is comically overpowered but works fine for new players to lean on. Midnight Masks is a scenario that you aren’t expected to fully solve, you do as much as possible before the time runs out. So the failing forward is already baked into the scenario mechanics because you are expected to fail to some degree. Now, obviously Devourer Below is still a shitshow, no matter how your first two scenarios went, but i won’t let that spoil all the good things i have to say about Gathering and Masks in this regard.

Dunwich Legacy

Much has been said about Dunwich and how little XP it pays out. Now, at least to some degree these complaints are somewhat exaggerated, the campaign was released at a time when there wasn’t much to upgrade into in the first place. It was a time of Dark Horse Ashcan and stabbing things as Zoey, neither of which really needs much in terms of upgrades. From today’s point of view, it does serve as a lesson to not nickle and dime the players too much, but i won’t hold that against it. In fact, Dunwich even does a thing where it hands out some “pity XP” specifically for when you lose which is neat.
That being said, the resolution of a failed Essex Express is a travesty and no pity XP will change that. Not only is that scenario remarkably easy to fail, but chances are you will do so without even earning a single XP. Or well, maybe one. To make matter worse, the resolution on fail will then have you lose all your story assets you gained until then, completely undoing any progress you made until then. I feel like that last part is pretty much unforgivable.
Players are able to earn a lot of different story assets that are all various degrees of useful. Most of them are allies which can cause a situation where it’s no longer worth to bring your own ally assets in your deck, but overall i wouldn’t call them overpowering.
Dunwich also alters the chaos bag as a result of not just the campaign progressing, but also related to player choices. This is a good thing in principle and much better executed in later campaigns, but doesn’t really work well here. The punishment from the extra token doesn’t match the rewards you gain from taking them on, leading to few viable choices when replaying the campaign with knowledge of what your choices entail.

Path to Carcosa

The Carcosa campaign has a lot of elements that persist throught the campaign and are tracked between scenarios. But things like the Stranger, the Doubt/Conviction paths or even the weaknesses that are picked up along the way don’t actually relate to how well you do or not – you are getting those either way.
The Last King sets up a bunch of possible advantages down the line as interrogating the cast of the King in Yellow can yield all sorts of bonuses for later scenarios. At the same time, defeating the cast will make sure you don’t have to do so later either. So that creates a rather crucial scenario to do well at… but then the campaign actually does give you the nuclear option of burning down all of the cast during the resolution which can act as a catchup mechanic for those that had to leave the party early and didn’t get much done.
Alright then, let’s talk about Oath. Oath is a campaign ending scenario (at least for that set of investigators). And while that is actually fine for a scenario near the end of the campaign, it is much less fine on scenario 4. Actually, that’s pretty horrid from all objective standpoints. Luckily, Oath is one of the best scenarios, possibly THE best scenario, in the whole game. If this scenario was even remotely mediocre, we as a community would HATE the everliving crap out of losing our investigators to it. Just imagine if that loss condition was tied to Echoes of the Past instead. Makes my blood boil just thinking about it :D Somehow we ended up with a situation here where Oath is amazing and the knowledge of the high stakes even improves the scenario further. But make no mistake: That’s lightning in a bottle. If you are a custom creator, please do not try to copy this, it’s more than likely to feel incredibly bad.
Carcosa has more XP than usual hidden away in the encounter deck, in the form of VP enemies. This is both good and bad. Bad because it means that there is a random variance to how much XP a player can gain, especially in low player counts where the group is unlikely to go through the encounter deck completely even once. Good because it doesn’t tie the victory specifically to the result of the scenario.

Forgotten Age

The posterchild for “Too much XP”. It outclasses every other campaign in terms of what the players gain XP-wise by a good margin. As a result, many players get into a situation where they are five scenarios in and don’t really have anything notable to upgrade left. And while i do appreciate having a campaign around where you can be sure to get all Disciplines for Lily or the opportunity to play incredibly XP hungry decks like Sefina with Chuck Fergus, upgraded Tricks and a couple Exceptionals… it’s probably for the best that it isn’t the norm.
The campaign has one cool trick up its sleeve. By having a couple XP sources that also have Vengeance, it offers a trade-off that is actually pretty well balanced. I usually end up taking these XP, but there have been plenty times where i deliberately avoided to for example defeat Padma. This acts both as a catchup mechanic to claim some extra XP and as a reward for keeping your Vengeance low up to that point.
The two story allies require succeeding at certain scenarios and making the right decisions to keep them as allies. This does serve as quite motivating to do well if you plan on going a certain path through the campaign. I like how this is done in TFA quite a bit and it’s actually a main part of the appeal of the whole campaign to me. That being said, losing some scenarios (or not winning them good enough) does close off some story paths. I feel like that is a good way to do it. Even if you fumble Boundary Beyond, you can still finish the campaign with a win. Just not while being friends with Ichtaca.
City of Archives… is divisive. It’s a similar situation to Oath where the consequence for failing is outrageous on paper. I heavily dislike the priciples behind it, but since it’s near the end of the campaign i do at least tolerate it. There are others that mind it more. And some that mind it less. Like i mentioned, it’s divisive. I think it’s fair to say it’s nothing to emulate?

Circle Undone

The TCU campaign has a couple decisions that echo throughout the campaign, but nothing that really sticks out to me as a catchup mechanic or similar way of adjusting difficulty by how well you are doing. So instead i will take this space to point out something that also applied to some previous campaigns: The XP curve. TCU awards more experience for the first two scenarios than for the ones that are following afterwards (excluding the finale itself). This makes sure that players are able to get the important cornerstones for their decks right from the start. Not only does that mean that they get to play with their deck doing what its supposed to for longer, it also means that a failed resolution in a later scenario doesn’t hurt as much because their deck is already in a solid state after two or three scenarios. But what if they fail the first scenario? Well, in that case it’s at least easy to restart the campaign if that is what the players want.
I think this is a really good general practice to do, but looking at the Experience Overviews for the campaigns, this seems to have fallen a bit out of favor with recent campaigns. I wonder why. To put some number out and give a rule of thumb, i would say that most basic decks can be built around 20ish XP for the core of the deck (and then of course scaling upwards for power). I would expect to be able to gain those 20XP in the first three scenarios with half of it in the first one.

Dream-Eaters

As campaigns with only four scenarios, either side of Dream-Eaters suffers from the same effect as Night of the Zealot where a failed scenario will have huge consequences for how well you can develop your deck before going into the finale. And while i had only good things to say about how NotZ mitigated this factor, i can’t really do the same about TDE.
Notably, both sides also track something in the campaign log that feeds back earlier failure into a harder time with the finale: If the players don’t manage to gather enough Evidence of Kadath in the A side of the campaign, they will have a harder time passing a key location, costing them valuable time. And if they fail scenarios on the B side, this will potentially add multiple turns worth of doom to the finale on that side, also adding some time pressure.
These mechanics aren’t too oppressive, but they certainly lean towards making failing a scenario a bigger deal than it would be otherwise. Contrast this with Doubt/Conviction (which isn’t really about things getting more difficult or easier) and Vengeance (which makes things harder at a specific point, but also makes things easier beforehand… basically it offers a trade), either of which are a bit more interesting and interactive instead of just a row of checkboxes to track how well you did.

Innsmouth Conspiracy

The TIC campaign does something interesting in that it reframes its scaling. Instead of punishing you for doing subpar by adding bad tokens to the chaos bag, it starts out with a fully loaded bag and rewards you for doing well by removing some of those tokens. I am not sure this is all that different when you distill it down to its essentials, but it certainly feels better, more rewarding. That being said, missing the flashbacks in the first scenario that remove up to three bad tokens can really make the rest of the campaign a pain, so they feel a bit more mandatory than is comfortable.
For the majority of the flashbacks, these optional goals work really well. Finishing a scenario in the Innsmouth campaign usually isn’t all that difficult. But most scenarios have one or more bonus objectives that are rewarded through flashbacks. Rewards can range from campaign-wide alteration of the chaos bag to story assets that are just around for that scenario. This is pretty neat as it means that even when you go into a scenario slightly behind the curve because you failed an earlier scenario, you might not get any of the bonus goals… but you are still likely to succeed, so you can at least continue without a harsh downward spiral.
The XP curve in this campaign is notably different, creating an environment that starves you of XP for the first few scenarios before it dumps a truckload on you. This doesn’t work particularly well for me and that the campaign expects you to skip some of the upgrade opportunities doesn’t help either.
Innsmouth does have some very powerful story assets. While the two allies are easy to gain access to, the Relics and the Teachings can more easily be missed. Especially missing the Teachings can be a huge deal and make things a lot worse down the road. I’d point at Innsmouth as a reference for how powerful i would like story assets to be at their maximum.

Edge of the Earth

I have some serious issues with Edge of the Earth in this regard. Failing scenarios in Edge is usually horrible and can even be a complete showstopper. The campaign does play around with the concept of having persisting consequences for your actions, which by itself is a really good thing. But while some of it works very well, there are some bits that are just too punishing if you slip up.
Ice and Death is a three part scenario where you continue the exploration of the map from one part to the next. You set up shelter in the first part which has echoing consequences for the following two. Not managing to get a good shelter value will lead to having a worse starting position and fewer resources for the next two scenarios, both of which are already reasonably tight and difficult. During Ice and Death, the players also recover very powerful story assets and failing the first scenario will put a huge dampener on the ability to gain those. The ability to skip part 2 and 3 can be seen as a way to mitigate the dangers that come from going into those scenarios from a weak position. But that will in turn also mean that the players skip the opportunity to gain the experience needed to set themselves up for later scenarios while also forfeiting the chance to gain the supply assets.
This is already pretty bad, but it gets worse. The campaign uses NPC followers that lend their help to the players. A defeat on a scenario means that those partners are also defeated permanently, depriving the team of powerful abilities and setting them up for further failure down the road. To be fair, the defeat of a partner ally comes with unlocking a special “memento” card and those are at least a solid attempt of making a partner’s defeat less crushing.
All comes to a head during Forbidden Peaks. Winning this scenario showers the group in XP while handing them the recovered assets as additions to their deck. Failing it will make them lose all of that, lose the partner assets they had with them and giving them the usual trauma. It’s a huge gulf between results, failing Forbidden Peaks means that whatever you did is pretty much completely undone while you are sent with a single digit total of XP into the back half of the campaign. This is not acceptable design in my opinion. This is even worse than Essex Express. Unspeakable Oath at least had the decency of killing you off.
That being said, the two campaign mechanics that add a level of persistent payoff for your actions to the game are pretty great: There is a group of weakness cards, called Tekeli-li, which can be added to a players deck through a variety of effects and will remove itself once drawn. So the game sometimes delays the aftershocks of an attack or treachery for a long time, even possibly into the next scenario. Frost tokens are a special type of chaos token that gets added or removed depending on what happens. There’s enough ways to interact with them to make them interesting, too. I think what enables these two mechanics to be so good is that they are often not directly tied to winning or losing a scenario. So you get a more finely tuned consequence from your scenario than just a binary pass or fail. That’s neat.
Overall, Edge is the campaign where i like the structure the least. For a big part that is because failing forward is just not something that is well enabled here. All the rewards and a huge clump of XP is dependent on passing one single scenario (Peaks) and failing to do so is way too much of a setback. The campaign also relies way too much on more than two dozens of story assets to make up for its failings.

Scarlet Keys

As a non-linear campaign, Scarlet Keys was pretty much guaranteed to face problems with enabling a proper player progression. When you don’t know which scenarios the players are actually going to end up playing, and in which order, then how are you going to make sure that your scenarios are playable at various XP counts? Is your scenario going to be able to be playable as the second scenario as well as the sixth and still be reasonably balanced in either case?
In Scarlet Keys, everything you do takes some amount of time which is tracked in the campaign log. Scaling often refers to this track. Failing a scenario (or resigning early) will often take less time away from this track than getting the full resolution which is actually a neat way of giving just a slight edge to players that are struggling. It’s not really enough to make a huge difference, but it may just be enough to fit an additional visit somewhere into your route that can help you catch up.
The campaign is all about the Keys, a group of artifacts that the non-player factions and the players try to gain for themselves. They are represented as story assets that can be earned and some of them are tremendously powerful. Depending on how well you do, they can completely overtake the gameplay of your deck. I had plays of the finale that were basically playing themselves without much agency of my own. Just moving around and using the keys. While one could point to these powerful story assets as something that can mitigate failure (and thus a weaker deck) in the back half of the campaign, i feel like it went too far in Scarlet Keys.

Feast of Hemlock Vale

Hemlock Vale also has some non-linear elements in it, but not to the same extent as Scarlet Keys. It does avoid a lot of the scaling problems that TSK has through several means. The most important one is that a good chunk of the earnable XP is moved from the scenario to the inter- and preludes that players go through between scenarios. That means that even if you were to completely fail a scenario, you might still end up with enough XP from the prelude to buy several upgrades for your deck and prepare for the next scenario. The playable preludes are something that is unique to FHV and i don’t think that just any campaign should have them. But more generally speaking, moving some of the XP from the scenario into the resolutions or interludes could be a way of ensuring at least a token amount of progression even on a failure to complete the scenario.
The campaign also uses an above average number of story assets and allies, but in a more controlled fashion than Edge and Keys do. In turn they feel less overpowering despite some of them certainly being plenty powerful.

Takeaways

So, what did we learn? Here’s a summary of lessons to take away from the official campaigns that relate to enabling Failing Forward or more generally, to having a solid progression of player power throughout the campaign:

• Resign locations allow players to cut their losses and secure whatever they already won. Resigning can (and probably should) come with some costs, but should be considerably more forgiving than straight up dooming out or being defeated.
• Open-ended scenarios assume failure as the default and task the players to get as much done as they can. Rewards need to appropriately scale with the degree of failure/success.
• “Pity XP” that are earned on fail can make sure that players have something to work with even after a complete crash and burn.
• Wiping progress completely is to be avoided. Consequences are fine and a failure can certainly undo something that was gained earlier. But having one failure undo multiple scenarios worth of progress is too much.
• Changing the Chaos Bag following the player’s results and decisions is a great tool to introduce lasting consequences, but the influence of another bad token in the bag is rather huge and should be balanced well.
• Victory in the encounter deck, usually on enemies, can offer a way to inject an XP source to a scenario that isn’t directly tied to scenario progress. While the inherent randomness can feel bad to some, it also means that someone might be defeated on turn 5 but still end up with 4XP from clearing two VP locations and defeating two VP enemies.
• Campaign-ending resolutions are thematically super appropriate for the setting (after all, we are often trying to prevent the end of the world) but should be used with much caution. Making the players demonstrate their abilities before letting them into the proper finale is fine, but an early game over can be very frustrating.
• You can offer Tradeoffs where players are presented with the opportunity to gain some extra experience or a story asset, but for a price. Examples are the Vengeance + Victory locations in TFA and the Necronomicon in Dunwich.
• Frontloading XP in the early scenarios makes sure that a fail in a later one doesn’t leave someone crippled because their deck is already in a working state. As a suggested rule of thumb, i would shoot for 8-10XP in the first scenario and an expected total of 20XP earned over the course of the first three.
• Scaling finale difficulty by how well the players did has to be handled carefully. Having things be more difficult if the players bumbled through the campaign is absolutely appropriate (desirable, even) but it does make the finale more difficult to balance. Do the players still have a chance if they did badly before? Is the scenario still challenging if they did well? Just showing up for a foregone conclusion isn’t fun either way.
• Story Assets can be used to give players an edge against the challenges and/or to make up for falling behind. However, one should make sure that the players still get to play their own decks. Too many handouts can railroad the experience to a point where the game just plays itself.
• Moving XP or other rewards to Interludes or other out-of-scenario areas can allow you to set a floor for what can be earned, ensuring at least some progression.

[2025-02-08: The set is released, the spoiler is all complete now!]

Guardian

Seeker

Rogue

Mystic

Survivor

Neutral

Specialist

Weaknesses

Intro

Alright, we did treacheries, let’s get to enemies. What are relevant traits that may or may not have special considerations. Now, enemy traits do work a bit different than treachery traits in that they are often less abstract. The Scheme trait can be interpreted in several different ways, but a Nightgaunt is a Nightgaunt. Still, let’s see what expectations are tied to a bunch of enemy traits.
(EDIT: Oops, this got longer and a bit more opinionated in parts than i aimed for.)

Elite

And we’ll start right with the big one. The Elite trait is given to anything that is meant to be immune to certain player card effects. There are around 90ish player cards that interact with the trait (usually through only working against non-Elites), so clearly this is important. The important things that an enemy gets protection from just through getting the Elite trait are the following:
– forcefully moving the enemy
– instantly discarding/defeating the enemy
– blanking the enemy’s textbox
These are safeguards that stop cards like Mind Wipe or Banish from breaking scenarios that require specific enemies in specific places. It also keeps players from trivializing boss encounters through cards such as Waylay or Disk of Itzamna. Give the Elite trait to any key enemies in your design to proof the scenario against collapsing from a particular player card interaction.
In addition to these mechanical concerns, there is of course a component of flavor and theme here as well. Similar to putting Omen or Power on the trait line of your treachery, an Elite tag does signal to the player that this enemy is important and above the rank and file.
It can be alluring to put Elite on most mythos encounters, but do not just consider physical strength, but the importance of the enemy to the story, too. A shoggoth is an incredibly fearsome foe in the lore and very imposing enemy… but if it’s just a big dude in the encounter deck, it might not need the Elite tag. On the other hand, if it’s meant to be a story beat that the players encounter that thing, definitely make it Elite. As an early example, check out Dunwich’s The House Always Wins. It’s a scenario in which a casino is overrun by huge honking monsters with oodles of life and that the players are unlikely to meet on equal footing yet. And still, the only Elite trait in the scenario is the one on the Pit Boss who is ultimately just a guy. A tough guy, but still…
On a related note, i would argue that having one or two big enemies in the encounter decks that are non-Elite is a very good thing as it allows players to have satisfying plays for their good cards. The enemy that does enable this sort of satisfaction best in an official campaign is probably the Deep One Bull. It’s a chunky threat with severe board presence that would be worth an Elite tag, but since it comes out randomly and doesn’t have any story significance, it doesn’t have one. In turn, it creates interesting gameplay that rewards players that held onto their Handcuffs, Slip Aways or whatever else they are packing. Make too many enemies Elite and you are only rewarding those that pack your basic weapons and combat spells.

Humanoid

To be honest, i am not really happy with this trait. It just doesn’t mean a whole lot. The early game, particularly Dunwich, tried making a distinction between Humanoids like Ghouls, Deep Ones or Goat Spawns and Humans like the O’Bannion Thug. The Core didn’t make that distinction, the Dark Cult etc are just traited Humanoid. Now this all got errata’d to be consistent, all the human enemies in Dunwich are also to be considered Humanoid now. Including those like the Pit Boss that didn’t get either trait. But i do think that they had the right idea there with making that distinction. After all, there is a notable difference between a goon with a blackjack and a Thrall under the influence of Yog-Sothoth and i feel like the trait should reflect that. Now sure, the Thrall has Monster and Abomination added as well and that kind of does the job… but at this point, what does Humanoid really still do? It just encompasses too much to have any value, for either gameplay or flavor. But putting my misgivings aside for a moment, let’s look at what we have here. There’s around 200+ Humanoid traited enemies in the official game right now including:
– humans
– ghouls and ghasts
– fishpeople
– goatpeople
– snakepeople
If the humanoid rides on a Nazgul or in a car, it still counts for the trait and the whole thing can thus be handcuffed. Scarlet Keys also established through Ancient Raider that skeletal undead still count.
So, what does this mean for us? Well, it doesn’t have much of a mechanical connotation either, humanoid enemies rank from your lowest cultists and ghoul up to Elites with dozens of hit points. Player cards that care about the trait are far and between and half of them are already taboo’d to no longer care about it. Honestly, i wouldn’t mind the other ones to follow suit. So basically, if your enemy has two arms and (optionally) two legs, it’s a Humanoid. Unless it also has wings.
Meh. Sorry that this turned into a bit more of a rant than i initially planned. I suppose this is something that can only be fixed with a massive set of Errata to everything, so it’s probably not worth getting that annoyed about, but oh well.

Monster

This is a very wide trait that gets attached to basically everything that is supernatural. Monster is the most common trait among enemies, there are even more of these than Humanoids or Elites. There’s even more Monster traited enemies than there are enemies that are NOT traited Monster. It is applied very consistently and works well to make distinctions between enemies that are just common humans or animals and those that originate in the mythos.
Actually, the list of enemies that do not have the Monster trait is quite interesting as it almost fulfills the job i wanted the Human(oid) trait to do, of making a distinction between something that’s just a guy and something that’s a horror from beneath the floorboards. Looking at that list, the following does NOT have a Monster trait:
– humans
– animals
– Great Old Ones
Yeah, the Ancient Ones are their own trait and they don’t get to count as a Monster. Famously, this becomes very relevant when Lita Chantler meets Umordoth in the Devourer Below and her ability won’t give you extra damage against the pinnacle enemy of the campaign. Other than Lita, there are only very few cards that actively care about the trait, but it’s been applied consistently and broadly enough that one could easily imagine there being some in the future. So while this trait is mostly flavordriven for now, there is some untapped potential there to make more cards like Custom Ammunition.
If you are doing your own custom content, then applying the Monster trait shouldn’t be too difficult. Just put it on everything that’s not common or an Old One. This includes spirits, the undead and whatever an Eidolon is.
For some interesting distinctions made through the trait, check out the Hemlock Vale campaign: The big Horseshoe Crab in Lost Sister crossed the line into Monster territory, while the smaller Lobster Hybrid didn’t do so (yet). The ants in The Silent Heath are only Insect. Mutated. while the animals that attack the farmstead in The Longest Night are fully corrupted into being Monsters. You can certainly read a few things into the trait lines of enemies in that campaign.

Ancient One

If the Elite trait is the enemy equivalent to Power on a treachery, then Ancient One is your equivalent to Endtimes. This should be reserved for only the big guys, the ones that the mythos evolves around. Defeating them should be pretty much out of the question. This is the trait the game uses when it needs to represent Yog-Sothoth, Nyarlathothep or any of the rest of the gang through cards.
Accordingly, this goes on the final boss of your campaign, whoever is behind everything that is happening up until that final confrontation. I would usually not expect to see this trait early on but if you want to create a reaction through the trait, it might be an option. Personally, i do dislike TCU’s Spectral Watcher quite a bit, so maybe keep it to a glimpse? Having an Ancient One appear several times per campaign and just allowing your players to bully it by hitting it repeatedly with a Machete kinda cheapens the whole thing and lets the trait have the opposite effect of what you probably intended.
Notably, the Hemlock Vale campaign is the first one that doesn’t feature an Ancient One. Even the Cosmic Emissary is “only” Colour traited.

Creature

Alright, one more general trait before we get started on the more “monster type” specific ones. Creature is ArkhamLCG’s word for animals and it’s used on the trait lines of both player cards and encounter cards. This is fairly self-explanatory, it includes everything from rats over birds to dogs, cats and grizzly bears.
It is also used on mutated animals (at least on some of them) like the Lupine Thrall and on many of the examples from Hemlock Vale that i linked earlier.
This is a straight-forward trait to use, but one neat bit i would like to point out is how it’s used on the Zoogs without the addition of any other traits like Monster. This tells us that Zoogs are nothing particularly dangerous or special in the dream-lands, they are just normal animals there.
Occasionally, animals will have another identifying trait in addition to Creature. This is only done when mechanically and/or thematically relevant. For example, The Forgotten Age makes sure that through the Serpent trait, there is an actual trait overlap between common snakes and the serpentfolk of Yig despite one of them being a Creature and the other a Humanoid Monster. Insects got the extra trait in Hemlock Vale because it was mechanically relevant, but not in Carcosa because nothing cared about the trait. As we’ve already seen, Zoogs get that extra trait as well.

Cultist

A cult is unlikely to be your primary antagonist, its members are going to be henchmen for whatever higher power they devoted themselves to. Most of them will be working towards goals that align with that higher power and need to actively be stopped by the players from doing so. What that means in mechanical terms is:
– Cultists will often put doom into play. Doom represents progress towards the Old One’s agenda and that is exactly what cultists will provide.
– Cultists will often be weak in combat. The vast majority of them will be human or at least humanoid.
– Related to the last point, cultists will often spawn away from investigators and/or have defensive keywords like Aloof.
These guidelines are exemplified by the Dark Cult set from the Core, with both the Acolyte and the Wizard of the Order being high priority targets to take out before they advance the agenda earlier than planned.
While these are general expectations that pop into mind when thinking about cultists in this game, they are of course like all things not without their exceptions. Agent of the King from Path to Carcosa adds a dangerous enemy to the encounter deck right from scenario one. This cultist doesn’t care about collecting doom, it goes straight for the throat. Similarly tough is the Rift Seeker that is encounter later in the same campaign. It also serves as one of the handful of examples for Cultists that aren’t Humanoid.
In terms of flavor, Cultist is a great catch-all for any human (or previously human) followers to an Ancient One, no matter their mechanical gameplay. To stay with Path to Carcosa, this is how you get weird stuff like High Priest of Hastur.

Monster Types

There are plenty of different monsters in the wider Mythos and many of them have appeared in the card game by now. Enemies of the same caste, species or whatever you want to group your extraplanar entities by often share common abilities or design templates. When adding to the bestiary with your own campaign, it makes sense to consider if other enemies of that monster type already exist. That way you can make them fit in with the official content and make everything feel more consistent.
Since there are so many, i’ll go over the notable ones campaign by campaign:

Night of the Zealot: Ghouls

Features Ghouls as the main monster type. There’s not really much of a mechanical identity to them unless you want to count “simple, without any weird abilities at all” as a mechanic. Which would be fair enough, actually. When i see a Ghoul in a new campaign i would expect it to be a simple enemy that doesn’t do much beyond hunting, attacking and maybe retaliating. Return to NotZ introduces some discard elements to the Ghoul cards in it, but they are not limited to the ghouls, so i’d argue that they aren’t really part of the monster identity. Ghouls are both Monsters and a subset of Humanoid.

Dunwich Legacy: Abominations

The thralls that result from Yog-Sothoth’s influence on people and animals alike share the Abomination trait. Most of these are rather chunky and are major enemies able to put up a fight. But it also includes human thralls that don’t play any different from a ghoul. The trait pops up a few more times in later campaigns, but only very rarely. It signifies that something has been seriously warped by eldritch forces like the Amalgam in Innsmouth. So the trait is overall flavordriven, but it isn’t strictly tied to Yog-Sothoth. Abominations are Monsters.

Path to Carcosa: Byakhees

The Byakhees are winged enemies that are closely associated with Hastur and can be summoned by Hastur’s followers to act on their behalf. So of course we have a couple of them in the Carcosa campaign. Over the course of the game, another one was added in Dream-Eaters, but a rather atypical one that is tied closely to the scenario specific mechanics of Dark Side of the Moon. Since there are overall so few of them, it is hard to make generalized statements about them. I would expect any Byakhees that appear to be Hunters, but there are exceptions to that too. Half of the ones that exist are interacting with the investigator’s sanity in some way (flipping their stats, preying on low sanity), which reflects their affiliation with Hastur mechanically.

Forgotten Age: Serpentfolk, Yithians

The serpentfolk of Yig actually do not get their own enemy trait. Instead they are all traited as Humanoid. Monster. Serpent. as covered before. So lets take this opportunity to look at the Yithians instead. While they only get one scenario, they are one of the major lovecraftian races and represented in the card game in a couple places. And they do get their own trait. Actually, the trait was already introduced in the Core Set on the Yithian Observer. Looking at the Yithians in City of Archives, two things stand out: They often have Aloof. And they care about cards in your hand. Both things are tied to the scenario mechanics, so again they have to be taken with a grain of salt. While the Aloof thing doesn’t extend beyond that scenario, the Yithians that can be found outside of that scenario do mostly carry the theme of caring about cards in hand (or discard, in one case) further. In the lore, the Great Race of Yith is notable for being observers and collectors of knowledge, so both mechanics (Aloof, Hand Size) are well rooted in the theme.

Circle Undone: Geists

While TCU was mostly about the conflict of two groups of human sorcerers, it nonetheless managed to lay a deep foundation for everything related to Geist enemies. A Geist is the haunting afterimage of a dead person. And specifically of a person, not of something lower. if it’s a ghost with animal-like appearance like the Shadow Hound or Spectral Raven, the trait is notably absent. Ghostly enemies can sometimes only be harmed with non-worldly weapons, specifically calling out the Spell and Relic traits on player assets. Otherwise they are diverse in appearance, theme and gameplay.
On that note, a word about Spectral. Spectral is used exclusively during the Circle Undone campaign to facilitate some of its scenario mechanics. It’s not exclusively used on enemies either. I wouldn’t use it for a custom enemy unless i had a mechanical reason and/or specifically wanted to allude to the Circle Undone.

Dream-Eaters: Gugs, Ghasts, Spiders and Zoogs. Oh my!

Dream-Eaters is a bit of a melting pot of various one-of enemy traits. There’s a bunch of spiders and zoogs of course, but those are just subtypes of Creature and we already covered that. Notably, both of them are however associated with the Swarming keyword.
We have both Gug and Ghast as new monster races, but they aren’t terribly spectacular. They are similarly simple as the Ghouls are. The only thing that jumps out to me is that all Gugs do hit pretty hard with their attacks. Yeah, sorry. I don’t find the enemies in this one particularly coherent or interesting.

Innsmouth Conspiracy: Deep Ones and Hybrids

The presence of Dagon and Hydra is corrupting the fine people of Innsmouth, turning them from regular folk into fishmonsters. This process can be followed quite nicely on the trait lines of the enemies in this campaign as they sport various combinations of Humanoid, Monster, Hybrid and Deep One. For some of them, like the Priest of Dagon, the changes didn’t go far enough yet to affect their traits at all. Others, like the Initiate from the same encounter set, do already count as Hybrids. But notably, they do not count as Monster yet. Once the transformation is complete, they no longer count as Hybrid, but instead gain the Deep One and Monster traits while retaining their Humanoid tag. Ravager from the Deep is an example for such a fully grown Deep One. The next evolution is hinted at in Light in the Fog: The Deep One Hatchling is not in fact the result of a human growing gills. Instead, they are purebread Deep Ones, hatching from eggs. As such, they lose Humanoid completely and are just straight up Monster. Deep One.
This is all some really nice story telling using only four words and if you plan on using Deep Ones in your campaign i would heavily encourage you to hook into this.
The traits aren’t purely flavor-driven either, in fact Deep One has one of the most clearly defined mechanics associated with it. All Deep Ones do something when the investigator engages them. This goes all the way back to the Core Set, even. The types of effects triggered are very varied, just as long as there is something Forced happening on engaging.
There are a few special cases worth adressing real quick. The Poleman from Carnivale of Horrors can be safely ignored for our purposes here. It’s a one-off enemy in a side scenario that is older than Innsmouth, so the Deep One mechanics weren’t codified into the game yet. Something similar goes for Tony’s Quarry. Oceiros Marsh is the only card that is both a Hybrid and a Deep One, which makes him a bit of an oddity. Especially so since this makes him the only Innsmouth Deep One without an engagement effect. I believe the Deep One trait is only on Oceiros for mechanical reasons, to make him interact with the Hatchlings, Nurses and treacheries that specifically call out Deep Ones. From a theme and flavor point, it probably shouldn’t be there. Finally, there’s The Amalgam. While it’s created from people and not purebred, it is so far away from the source that it traded in its Humanoid trait for Abomination. Which… is fair enough. That makes a lot of sense. And again, tells a bit of a story using very few words.
In case it isn’t obvious by now, the Deep Ones are by far my favorite enemy design in the LCG. I absolutely love what the designers did with them. A homerun on all fronts, no matter if we talk mechanics or theme.

Edge of the Earth: Eidolons and Elder Things. Also, Shoggoths.

I am not a Lovecraft scholar at all, so forgive if I am wrong, but as far as i can tell the Eidolons are an original creation for the LCG. They are the primary antagonist for most of the campaign and accordingly there is a good number of them in the cards. I am not really clear on what they are actually supposed to be, they are manifested fears and madness i guess? Something like that? As fuzzy as i find their identity, i also see their mechanical representation as largely undefined. A good portion of them interacts with the Tekeli-li weaknesses from this campaign, but to be fair so do even the Shoggoths. So we can probably call that a campaign feature and not really tied to the enemy trait itself? The things also come in various forms from the small (and appropriately named) Skittering Nonsense to the towering Terror of the Stars. And even its own Eidolon. Ancient One. that somehow takes up 15 cards. Meh. If there is a sort of line through all of this that lets it make sense, then i am not seeing it.
Now, while the Eidolons are canon foreigners, the Elder Thing is a very notable Mythos creature. Notable enough to even make it on one of the chaos tokens for the game. This campaign is the only one that featured them so far. Sadly, they are again not really showing much of a common ground among them that would help us give the trait some mechanical meaning. There’s five of them in the campaign with wildly different effects. If I squint, i can point out that four of them have Hunter. And that two of them fish for weaknesses in the player decks.
Another canon heavyweight, the Shoggoths in the mythos are huge shapeshifting monsters that mimic the creatures around them. Despite there being a solid amount of Shoggoths across multiple campaigns, this shapeshifting aspect has not been explored by the LCG so far. Shoggoths in the LCG have pretty much just been big piles of health that hit hard. Bit of a missed opportunity? In Edge of the Earth, they interact with the Tekeli-li deck. But unlike the Eidolons that add them to your deck, the Shoggoths immediately resolve them. This is a well-done distinction in how these two enemy groups relate to one of the main campaign mechanics.

Scarlet Keys: Outsiders

The Outsiders are another FFG original creation, but this one works a lot better for me than the Eidolons do. They are an otherworldly force that disappears and, in some cases, replaces things from our world, eventually aiming to gobble up everything. Mechanically this is represented through the “hollowing” mechanic, which places cards from player’s hands, decks and/or play areas in a special set aside area from which they are hard to access again. Like the Eidolons, Outsiders appear in all sizes from the relatively unspectacular Paracausal Entity to the Mimetic Nemesis which even sports the Ancient One trait.
Two of the Outsiders do also dabble in the other Scarlet Keys campaign mechanic, Concealment. Personally, I would liked a harder mechanical separation here between the Outsiders and the Coterie, having the former strictly deal with hollowing and the latter deal with Concealment only. There are flavor justifications for this overlap, so it’s not a huge deal. But i just have a preference for more cleanly defined borders. Especially the big Ancient One should have been the embodiment and pinnacle of the Outsider mechanics… instead it ends up being the one for the signature Coterie mechanic. Bit of a mistep in my opinion.

Feast of Hemlock Vale: Flora, Colour

The Flora trait did appear on a single enemy back in Forgotten Age before, but it gets some campaign specific relevance in Hemlock Vale as it appears on many of the enemies and is interacted with by several treacheries. Aside from those treacheries, the Flora trait is flavordriven.
This is also the first campaign to not feature an Ancient One. Sort of replacing it is the Colour trait, but it is not only applied to the Big Bad itself, but also to a few closely aligned enemies that are also appropriately powerful. Unlike Ancient One, the Colour trait also has mechanical relevance on a solid amount of treacheries and other encounter effects.
In general, Feast of Hemlock Vale does a good job of caring about how its enemies are traited. The Silent Heath is a great example for how to take a relatively minor trait (Insect) and making it impactful. I also enjoy how in The Thing in the Depths, the Thing is isolated from everything around it by being an Abomination. Everything else in that scenario is a Creature. That scenario also does mechanically revolve around the traits on the locations in the scenario. Just generally speaking, the design for Hemlock Vale seems to be a lot more conscious towards the traitline than previous ones, using them for more than “just” flavor. The previous highlights in this regard are TCU and Innsmouth.

Coming to a close

There’s a bunch more enemy types around of course. But instead of going over every single one of them and losing myself in trying to read something into the couple Nightgaunts that exist all over the place or the Mi-Go that are only present in standalones so far, i think i will come to an end here.
I think i went far enough here to illustrate possible things that have been done with the enemy trait line in existing content. And hopefully have given an inspiration or three on what could be done with it in any custom content as well.
The thing i want to highlight with this article (and the one on treacheries that came before) is that being conscious of the encounter traits can go a long way to add either more flavor to your creation or more mechanical relevance. Ideally even both. So that is definitely worth spending some extra time on, there’s some great payoff to be had in just a few bold italic words.

Intro

Following my recent post about persistent treacheries, i asked about other topics that could be of interest for homebrew creators. Something that was suggested twice was covering traits of encounter cards. That’s an interesting idea and one where i expect to find some things that i didn’t think of myself before, so let’s do that. I won’t be listing every trait you can find on a treachery or enemy here, but i do want to touch those that carry some expectations with them, either mechanically or thematically. I’ll be starting with the traits on treacheries and then, depending on how long this article got by then, either continue with enemy traits or save those for the next article. (EDIT: Next article it is!)

Encounter traits on Player cards

There are two big traits that are universal enough to even specifically be called out on player card effects. Terror. Hazard. Oh, and there’s Omen as well. Kinda.

There are also a couple of player cards that allow choosing a trait, but these three are the ones (i could think of…) that reference a treachery trait by name. Since player cards are meant to be playable in any campaign context, this suggests that these traits are relevant everywhere. And indeed they are. There are of course degrees of usefulness. For example, Scarlet Keys has four different campaign specific Terror cards. Carcosa has thirteen. So your Logical Reasoning is probably going to get better mileage in Carcosa than in Scarlet Keys, but it will at least not be dead in any of them. On the other hand, Carcosa has only four Hazard treacheries, while Edge of the Earth has seventeen. I suppose there is a reason for Logical Reasoning being in the Carcosa player cards while Protective Gear was in Edge.
Scrying is a different beast and the Omen trait isn’t necessary for it to work, because a) it also references Terror which is universal and b) Scrying actually works best when those treacheries aren’t around.

Hazard

So, let’s look at the Hazard trait then. Thematically, Hazards are environmental dangers that put the investigator in harm’s way in a physical sense. Looking over the Hazards on arkhamdb, a few things stick out:

– If they have a test, they tend to test agility.
– They often deal damage.
– If they are persistent, they attach to locations
– Even if they are not persistent, many of them do refer to locations in their effect.

This does make sense of course, it’s pretty much the flavor of an environmental danger translated into the game mechanics.

Terror

As a trait, Terrors are pretty much is the opposite of Hazards, the two traits complement each other exceptionally well. Terrors represent dangers to your investigator’s mental health as a result of what they experience. To use the same format as before, these are common things that we can find while looking over the Terror cards in arkhamdb:

– If they have a test, they usually test willpower
– Many of them deal horror
– Persistent ones often enter the player’s threat area…
– …or even their hand, through the Hidden keyword.

Again, the thematic link between the flavor and the mechanisms is obvious enough that we don’t need to dwell on it.

What that means for us

These two traits, Terror and Hazard, are sort of unique in that they give us a neat tool to set a base flavor for our campaign. I do believe that each campaign should have a couple of each of them, but depending on the theme of the campaign you’ll want more of one or the other. For an expedition into the jungle of Forgotten Age or the icey wastes at the Edge of the Earth i’d expect Hazards to be more plentiful. In a more atmospheric campaign like Carcosa or Circle Undone i’d expect Terrors to be more present.

I’d also like to make the point here that mechanics are just a part of the consideration when picking a trait for your cards. Much of it is also just pure flavor and it’s important as well. The official content itself has examples that deviate a lot from what i said above. Trapped Spirits is a Terror card that asks for an agility test and deals damage. So is Horrors from the Deep. Meanwhile, Feast of Locusts is a Hazard that tests willpower for horror. Going by what i wrote before, we’d expect these cards to have their traits swapped around. Some other cards, like Glimpse the Unspeakable or Outbreak live just completely outside of the boundaries set up above and are purely traited the way they are by flavor.

Similar disclaimers go for every other trait-related thing, even if i don’t explicitly mention it. Arkham LCG is a game that is carried not just by gameplay but also has a huge theme and flavor component. As a result, flavor can override mechanical concerns when picking traits because theme and trait are very closely linked.

So what about Omen then?

Right, so since Omen was called out on a player card as well, i should probably take a look at that one too. It’s also the trait on Ancient Evils, so it must be important. Taking yet another look at arkhamdb, the first thing we see is that there’s way fewer of them than Hazards and Terrors, about 30 of them in total (while there were 90ish Terrors and 100ish Hazards). More so than Hazard and Terror, this trait is very closely tied to flavor, mechanically these are quite diverse without much of a thread between them. A solid amount of them deals with Doom, but aside from that i can’t really see anything that sticks out mechanically.
That’s fine of course. As an example for flavordriven traits, i very much enjoy that the treacheries related to Whippoorwills (Eager for Death, Psychopomp’s Song) are traited Omen instead of Terror, to tie into the lore and superstition around those birds.
It’s no big surprise that Carcosa and Circle Undone are the two campaigns that feature this trait the most as they most lean into it thematically as well. Notably, Omen seems to have fallen out of favor. Looking over the campaigns, the recent ones do not use Omen at all (or only one card with that trait) in campaign specific treacheries, leaving only Ancient Evils to represent the trait.

Power. Pact. Endtimes.

Since we are on that topic, there’s a few other traits that are used similar to Omen, to signify the importance of a particular card. Power often signifies a Great Old One or at least a major supernatural being influencing something directly. You aren’t just confronted with the aftermath of something (like finding Rotten Remains) or the actions of a minor follower like a ghoul. Something powerful is lashing out at the investigator, empowering a minion or influencing events. Looking at the full list of Power treacheries, most entries fall into those categories, but two things stand out to me: The Dream-Eaters cycle seems to have used the Power trait a bit more liberally than other campaigns. And Scarlet Keys uses the trait to tie treacheries to the Outsiders (as opposed to treacheries tied to the Coterie which are mostly Schemes).
Pact is a good deal more rare than Power and the bulk of what little there is appears in Path to Carcosa, where it’s tied to everything that has to do with the Man in the Pallid Mask and/or Hastur. Actually, Pact pretty much replaces Power in Path to Carcosa, the only Power card the campaign has is added only through the Return To … and it has both the Power and Pact trait. Pact traited treacheries can also offer the player a choice where they get something in return for something bad … but those bargains can also be very one-sided.
Finally, there’s the Endtimes trait. At the time of writing, there are only two treacheries with this trait in campaigns, both in the Circle Undone finale and appropriately named “The End is Nigh” and “A World in Darkness”. The significance and impact from the trait is pretty self-explanatory. What makes this trait even worth mentioning despite it only appearing twice on a treachery is that it’s actually used a couple of times on player weaknesses. This trait is purely flavor of course, but seriously now… how cool is “Omen. Endtimes.” as a trait line?

All of these four traits (Omen, Power, Pact, Endtimes) are great tools to use if you want to signal to players that a particular treachery is worth paying attention to.

Hex and Curse

Well, i got to be honest, i am not fully sure what the distinction is between these two. They are both fairly prominent traits, each with about 60 treacheries carrying their trait. Mechanically, both traits feature cards that go into your threat area, those that enter the board in other places or that just have revelation effects. There’s also no real mechanical hook to either of them as far as i can tell. Flavorwise, hexes and curses are long-lasting effects that are put onto someone or something. This lends itself to persistent treacheries that attach to a location or are put into a player area, but there are plenty curses and hexes that don’t do that and have one-shot effects instead.
My best attempt at trying to make a distinction between these two is that a Curse originates from something supernatural, while a Hex is put on something by a human like a witch or a cultist. For what it’s worth, this doesn’t check out completely. For example Dunwich uses Hex for things relating to “The Beyond” and Scarlet Keys has the Hex trait loosely tied to treacheries which affect the keys. And that the Return To Circle Undone gave us our first and only “Curse. Hex.” doesn’t really make things clearer, either…
But as an approximation, that distinction is the best that i can offer from looking at the cards.

Scheme and Obstacle

Not everything our investigators have to face is deeply supernatural in nature, there’s plenty challenges around that are rather worldly but don’t quite fit the Hazard trait. For such things, these are the traits to consider.
Obstacles are roadblocks to overcome that aren’t necessarily dangerous by themselves. If there was immediate danger to them, then Hazard would probably be the more relevant trait. There aren’t a whole lot of Obstacle traited cards around, probably because Hazard does actually cover a lot of its ground. The line between those two is rather blurred. What makes Sickening Webs an Obstacle, but No Turning Back a Hazard? Creative freedom, i suppose.
A Scheme is something that threatens the player through worldly means. Being shot with arrows, being followed by strangers or hunted by pirates. Notably, whatever does this to you doesn’t have to be strictly human, as shown by cards like Deep One Assault, Endless Weaving or Serpent’s Ire. Again, there is some considerable overlap with the Hazard trait. Notably, it took until Forgotten Age before the Scheme trait was used the first time. I wonder if Grasping Hands would be Scheme traited instead of Hazard if it got released today. Similar things go for Dunwich’s Hunted Down and Stalked in the Dark which experimented with the Tactic trait instead. Or Carcosa’s Hunted by Byakhee which curiously sports the Pact trait instead. Since its introduction in TFA, the Scheme trait has seen decent use however, with 50ish appearances across campaigns. Innsmouth and Scarlet Keys in particular use the trait a lot, which makes sense considering the nature of their antagonists.

Player card traits on encounter cards

Since i just mentioned Hunted Down and Stalked in the Dark: Avoid this like the plague. All it takes is one badly templated player card that refers to “Item cards” instead of “Item assets” and you are going to have people do weird stuff with your Straitjacket. And even if the cards are templated correctly, it still creates an opportunity for misunderstandings and rule errors on the players side… and suddenly you see people put Hidden Pockets in their restraints. While hilarious, probably not what you are going for!
After Dunwich, the Tactic trait was rightly abandoned as an encounter trait and only kept appearing on player cards from then on. Even if it’s not a problem right now, it can always become one later on. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the only examples i can find for this in the official content come from the first two expansions.

In conclusion

That’s already all the major traits appearing on treacheries throughout the ten campaigns. There are of course a few other traits that exist, but they are mostly insular to a campaign-specific purpose (like Flora in Hemlock Vale) or niche (Blunder, Injury, Madness) enough that they could probably just be Hazards, Schemes or Terrors instead.
It should be pointed out that this low number of traits to care about is a good thing. It allows player cards to interact with these traits without having to worry about being useless in certain campaigns. It allows making educated picks for cards like Grizzled even on a blind play. It also serves as neat shorthands to capture the flavor of what’s going on. To end this little overview, let me illustrate what i mean with this beautiful showcase:

These two treacheries even have the same name! But while the Rougarou card represents the dangers of the swamp the investigators move through, the Innsmouth card paints the picture of something purposefully grabbing you and pulling you into the water. That’s just neat and this sort of little touches of theme and flavor everywhere is frankly what sets the Arkham LCG apart from other card games.

Next up: Enemy traits

Alright, that’s it for today. Enemy traits are going to go into their own article.

Cheers o/