Intro
It took a bit, but after finally getting some more playtesting in and spending more time of cleaning up some rough edges, i am ready to call these five custom investigators ready for release.
You can find print&play files here:
With Bleed: https://derbk.com/ancientevils/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/Arkhams-Finest-S2-Bleed.rar
Without Bleed: https://derbk.com/ancientevils/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/Arkhams-Finest-S2-NoBleed.rar
Here’s a TTS object file for your digital tabletop:
TTS: https://derbk.com/ancientevils/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/Arkhams-Finest-S2-TTS.rar
And finally, here’s the Eon files which you can load into Strange Eons yourself if you want to make some changes of your own, no matter if it’s abilities, numbers or illustration choices you disagree with.
Strange Eons: https://derbk.com/ancientevils/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/Arkhams-Finest-S2-EON.rar
Since there were a good amount of changes to these since I’ve last shown them, i figure it’s best if i go over them one by one in full again. As a reminder, Arkham’s Finest is meant to be a series of custom investigators covering the “mainclass 5/subclass 2” style of deckbuilding, filling the gaps for where the official investigators might not really be able to use the available cardpool as well as we’d hope. For example, Series 1 had a new Rogue/Survivor that was able to use cards that Preston can’t. While Series 2 will have a Mystic/Guardian that is better able to use that Guardian splash than Diana is.
Sister Sofia – The Hand of God
Guardian with Survivor is represented by a pretty great investigator in the official cycle already, far be it from me to talk bad about Tommy. That being said, one niche i found that class pairing be particular good at that Tommy doesn’t specifically serve is Bless decks, so that’s what i latched onto with my custom investigator here. Sofia offers a decent alternate payoff for all the excellent bless generation that now exists in those two classes, but at only 1 max sealed token per Firearm she still leaves room for other payoffs alongside her thing.
She is of course heavily built upon the flavor bit we get to see from Sister Sofia across the cards that mention her (more on that here). Aside from Sofia herself, the two parts most heavily featured in that striking artwork by Gabrielle Portal are the shotgun and the bike, so those were the base for the signature and weakness. Penance, her gun, takes the level 5 sawed-off shotgun from the Rogue card pool and scales it back to be suitable as something to start with in your deck from scenario 1. The balance point i was trying to hit here was something that wasn’t overshadowing highlevel Guardian guns, but at the same time something one could build around like you can do with Tommy’s Becky. The weakness works somewhat like Sister Mary’s Crisis of Faith, but with the crucial difference that after her crisis is over, the blesses in the bag revert to being good for her. It never sat right with me how Mary’s weakness undoes all the work she did so far, so it was important to me that Sofia’s doesn’t. Notably, Sofia can still use her ability on revealed blesses to seal them as ammo when Lonely Path is in play, but the requirement to pass the skill test makes that at least more difficult.
Edwin Lemay – The Underworld Chemist
The official investigator for Seeker/Rogue ended up being about as open-ended as possible, so that left me with the opportunity to do something a bit more specialized here. Edwin Lemay is built around using Researched cards and Customizables, gaining bonuses for funneling his hard-earned points into these XP-hungry cards.
More than his investigator card, Edwin’s defining feature is his Permanent signature asset, a customizable card that can’t be improved through XP. Instead, he gains checkmarks on the Field Lab through playing other customizables and researchables. The Field Lab accumulates inspiration resources that can be spent to improve how well Edwin is able to use those expensive cards, gaining skill bonuses, extra charges or even allowing to swap different versions of a Researched card mid-scenario.
Edwin would love nothing more than being able to do his research in peace all day, however he is deeply in debt to the O’Bannions. And that comes with obligations. The mobsters can be placated but that will still take up some of Edwin’s time and focus, hindering him from using his abilities as usual for a turn. This weakness shuffles back into the deck automatically at the end of Edwin’s turn, which can severely disrupt him over the course of the scenario. Unless… unless he takes the rough deal of spending his whole turn doing the O’Bannions bidding, in which case he gets to discard the weakness only to be seen again if his deck reshuffles.
Leonard “Mace” Masters – The Hustler
Mace is “Sefina, but for assets”. He’s the gimmick investigator out of this batch of five, using a shellgame-like mechanic to randomize cards he is able to play at a discount and with various other benefits for committing to the bit. Like Sefina, Mace uses some additional setup where he draws extra cards and gets to jumpstart his Deck of Many Things at the cost of the ability to mulligan. One core thing to point out is that I wanted him to be able to use the combat assets from rogue which Sefina is usually unable to, so that combat value of 4 does a lot of heavy lifting there. Him pulling a Gatling Gun out of the Deck of Many Things is definitely part of the vision here.
The Deck of Many Things is what powers Mace’s abilities. Cards that are placed underneath it can’t be looked at to ensure they stay randomized. A maximum of 7 cards can be placed here and there need to be at least 3 here for Mace to be able to use his investigator ability. To make it more enticing to put more than just the bare minimum of 3 here to keep randomness down, there is a payoff for having 5 or more cards under the Deck in the form of an additional free asset slot. So together with his ability translating to potentially a free action and resource every turn, there is a lot of raw value to be gained out of giving up some control over what you can play and when.
His second signature, All Your Dreams is shuffled in his normal deck from the start. When he draws it for the first time, it does nothing else than go beneath the Deck of Many Things, basically costing him a draw. However, from then on All Your Dreams will give Mace a crapload of resources whenever its drawn, then place itself back under the Deck of Many Things again. Of course, drawing this over and over means you don’t draw cards that actually do anything from your Deck of Many Things… It also potentially turns Mace’s Elder Sign into an autofail.
His weakness is comparatively simple: One by one, Mace has to pay resources for the cards under the Deck or discard them. This means he’ll need to either keep a healthy stack of cash in his backpocket or risk a mid-scenario reset to his special deck.
Imani Chande – The Lionheart
Even more than with Mace, i wanted the Mystic/Guardian to be able to use the weapons in their card pool, as the inability to do that (in a way that makes sense) is something i was often lamenting about Diana. Imani is the final result of what became of my thoughts on alternatives to doomplay, attempting to give an investigator the ability to take on extra challenges from the encounter deck for risk, but also profit. The end result is an investigator that conveniently also mirrors Diana: Where Diana is all about canceling and making the encounter deck uneffective, Imani is about taking more encounter cards on her than usual. She gets resources and cards for doing so. Her regular encounter card per round will give her a payoff that is somewhere between Jenny’s bonus resource and Harvey’s bonus card. It’s weighed towards the resource in most encounter decks which we’d usually consider the weaker option. It can be further ramped up from there using specialised player cards like Delve To Deep or Let me handle this. That makes her dependent on a fairly narrow part of the card pool and if she were to be released in a proper set, she’d likely be accompanied by a few planted cards in the investigator expansion that can trigger her ability. That being said, there is a couple really nice cards around in the full card pool already and some of them, like Deliverance, can make a real good impression here. There is also an interaction with Surge here that can allow her to gain some extra benefits from the encounter deck trying to combo out on her. I pushed some parts of her pretty far in terms of power, if she did come in a set with support cards dedicated to her, i’d probably have toned down some of them. The way i made her now, she can even see play as just a Mystic that uses their combat stat with just some minor lean into extra encounter cards and still do well, she doesn’t need to fully commit to the bit.
Imani is yet another investigator in this group with a Permanent signature. An important part of her backstory and identity is the Lion Mask that gives her the powers she is harnessing and the motivation to do what she does. So it had to be something that is in play all the time. Obviously, this is modeled in functionality after the Masks from Hemlock Vale. Its main function is making sure that she is actually able to face treachery tests without having to worry overly much.
With her mask mostly being fixated on treachery support, i wanted to also give her a second signature that gives her an edge against enemies. Pounce is a variant on William Yorrick’s signature, able to take a non-Elite enemy out of the game completely by moving it to the victory display. It is more expensive, invites an attack by the enemy and requires a more exact timing point, but in exchange it can outright defeat that non-Elite when it shows up. With a signature that has Victory and being heavily enticed to play Delve Too Deep, the benefit for the whole group is significant.
Every now and then, Imani will have to prove to the spirits inhabiting the mask that she is still worthy of carrying it. To do so, she faces Sauti ya Kundi, the Voice of the Pride. Usually, you will draw this enemy in your upkeep, which is after Imani’s investigator ability will trigger, so you won’t get a card. But you do at least get a charge for the Mask, which you can use to hopefully defeat the enemy right away. Even then it is probably still going to take two or more actions, which can be a problem for an investigator whose express purpose is to take on extra challenges and might already have things to handle in her threat area.
Felix Keenan – The Salvager
Felix is fairly straightforward. So is Darrell, the official representative for Survivor/Seeker, to be fair. I figured a good way of providing a replacement here is to keep the investigative flavor, but go into a more open ended recursion theme. Darrell is pretty closely tied to the “zero difficulty” archetype that is mostly available in just one set, while recursion is an evergreen part of Survivor from the Core Set till today. Adding a “Eureka”-like card draw effect to recursion is a very strong ability for sure, but since he’s going to stand next to Darrell i didn’t feel like playing it too safe here. There is one restriction i had to give him however. During playtesting, it became apparent that his investigator ability needs to be restricted to triggering on whenever you recur an asset. Otherwise, cards like Glimmer of Hope were just too crazy. Fits better with his his flavor of restoring trinkets, documents and camera films anyways, so that was an easy concession to make.
The Restoration Kit allows fixing one card by using up another, removing the spent card from the game. I also used this opportunity to introduce some team-play potential by allowing the Kit to restory cards from any investigator (still spending your own card of course). The use of supplies and having to match traits for it to work hopefully stops most of the shenanigans one could do with this card to reduce the own deck to just a few cards. It’s still possible, i suppose. But it’s difficult enough that it at least doesn’t happen accidentally, one would have to put some concerted effort towards abusing the card.
I was looking for a way that would disable recursion without having to resort to the somewhat obvious “reshuffle your discard into your deck” or having to go as nuclear as Wendy’s weakness does. This is what i came up with, a card that discards itself when drawn and makes any card below it in the discard pile unavailable until the whole pile reshuffles. This works out really well and is worth having to care about the order of cards in the discard pile. It’s slightly annoying to see this discarded as part of Short Supply (which you are almost guaranteed to want for Felix) when it disables only three cards or so. But to be fair, any weakness discarded by Short Supply ends up being disabled, so that’s not much of a strike against the design of Treasure to Trash.
Overall thoughts
I think the first five were slightly better designs, but I am overall pretty happy with these. As an aside, i will note that the “Arkham’s Finest” name was chosen for series 1 because they all happened to have academic or wealthy (or unknown) backgrounds… something that isn’t true for this set at all. Sofia’s origin is unknown, Edwin is the only one who is an academic. Mace is former carnival folk. Imani is just a regular girl who found her calling through an artifact. And Felix is a street rat, so basically the opposite of an Arkham’s Finest… It is what it is, the name is set now and it’s what i am going with!
Sofia: Not terribly powerful, but certainly competent enough. I particularly like her unique shotgun, i think it fits the bill of a weapon you can build around in a similar way to Becky. She ended up a good deal weaker than Tommy, but her unique niche gives her a reason to exist next to him, too.
Edwin: Stronger than he looks, thanks to the Researched and Customizable cards available to him being actually quite powerful and varied in their effects. His signature asset looks gimmicky, but i found it to be fairly simple in practice. The weakness required some tinkering until i was happy with it. It ended up a bit wordy in the end, but still acceptable.
Mace: I’ll allow myself one somewhat over-engineered gimmick per set of five investigators. For series 1 it was Mara who didn’t have a discard pile. This time it’s the guy with a second deck. He’s on the far edge of what i am still comfortable with, but i think with the many parallels to Sefina that i kept in the design he works well enough. In terms of playing him, he’s definitely a snowflake. The raw value gained for committing to his thing is huge, but not seeing a certain asset for five or six turns because random chance decides to keep it under the Deck of Many Things is absolutely something one needs to be ready for.
Imani: Easily the character here that i spent the most time on tweaking. For the longest time, her investigator ability would only trigger and pay her off if she drew 2 or more encounter cards during the turn. Only after making her activate on the first encounter card already she started to become an investigator that was really doing well. I had quite a good time with her in the Drowned City after that change. She’s powerful, but in a way that (at least to me) feels earned. I am slightly worried about that extra XP on the victory signature for an investigator that is already heavily enticed to play Delve Too Deep. That probably wouldn’t fly on an official investigator. But we are here to have fun, right? XP is fun and Imani is meant to boost the whole team with her presence.
Felix: If Darrell didn’t exist and put the bar up as high as he does, I’d probably tone down Felix a bit. He really is quite powerful in a very generic way. Focusing on one of the strongest mechanics in a card game (recursion) and combining it with the strongest one (card draw) was never going to be weak, of course. Still, i believe that Felix isn’t as inherently broken as Darrell is and i think i am fine with just leaving it in the hands of the one building the deck to decide how far they want to take Felix’s potential.
Next up
The next set of five is already underway. I will probably be willing to share some initial designs and concepts soon enough. Of course it’s anyone’s guess how long it’ll take until they are actually done… there were eight months between Series 1 and Series 2, after all.
In any case, coming up in series 3 of Arkham’s Finest are:
– Arabella Freeman, the Inquisitor.
Guardian/Mystic. A zealot working for the bureau who, frustrated by red tape, recently decided to take things in her own hands. Using both mystical and physical weapons, she turns the enemy’s tools against them.
– Clara Alden, the Conspiracy Theorist.
Seeker/Survivor. Who needs proof, when the truth is obvious? If she can’t find any clues, she’ll just make them up.
– Nikolai Velikanov, the Collector.
Rogue/Seeker. “The Eye behind the Ruby Lens” is an aristocrat and longtime member of the Red Coterie. His life’s passion is getting his hands on unique and exceptional items of significance.
– Elias Parker, the Pragmatist
Mystic/Rogue. Elias believes that everything in life has one of two outcomes, it either happens or it doesn’t. Good or Bad. Bless or Curse. And it all balances out in the end. Thus, a flip of a coin is a more potent way of scrying than any chicken bone or tarot card.
– Margaret Grady, the Railroad Worker
Survivor/Guardian. Growing up in harsh conditions and living a rough life, Maggie learned to use anything she could find on scrapyards and trashheaps to her advantage.