Campaign Compendium: The Dunwich Legacy

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Overall Campaign Rating: Tier 4+
Scenarios: Average out at around Tier 3. That seems like a solid representation of the whole thing. The finale is really the only scenario that still sticks out to me as special when looking back and comparing Dunwich to what came after it. Essex Express is an important milestone for the game that provided a significant template for later scenarios, but again it’s not really something that i ache to replay. Undimensioned and Unseen is junk. The rest of the scenarios are just various shades of “fine”.
Campaign structure: Not particularly noteworthy either. A linear campaign, and while there’s nothing wrong with that, there’s also not much in the way of interesting decisions to make along the way. There is a cool choice around the Necronomicon, but it’s let down by its impact being minor and Essex Express being somewhat likely to just undo the choice anyway.
Campaign mechanics: Things happen when the player deck runs empty, things scale based on cards in player’s discard piles. So there’s a major theme in the encounter cards about discarding cards from the player decks into the discard, then doing things with that. This worked quite well when the Dunwich box was first released, but i feel like the mechanic didn’t age very well. With the range of investigators we have now, many of them are punished quite harshly by this, in particular anyone built around drawing a lot of cards by themselves already. While i do think that card draw is too powerful and could use a dampener, the way that Dunwich went about it (10 damage if your deck is empty being the prime offender, of course) is too binary and restrictive from today’s point of view. A theme of deck decay has some promise, but i feel like the way it’s been done in Dunwich doesn’t really hit the mark anymore.
The Return To: Doesn’t significantly change my opinion on the campaign. It fixes some bugs and mechanical weirdness, but the additions to the content itself don’t really turn any weak parts around. The most significant change probably happens to the Museum scenario, where the Hunting Horror does become much more likely to end up a credible threat.
More Yapping: The campaign rating there isn’t meant to say that this is an unenjoyable campaign to play through or anything. I mean… it’s fine, right? It’s the first campaign to the game and as such, it would be unfair to expect it to measure up with what the designers released later with years of experience under their belts. It does a good job of being the first campaign, pioneering ideas and establishing important templates for later. I applaud the designers for not playing it totally safe with the campaign either and instead trying out different things. But i also can’t deny that i don’t really see much reason to replay this one today either, newer campaigns just have more to offer in terms of replayability and how they engage or challenge me.

Extracurricular Activity

Rating: Tier 2-
Highlights: To this day this is the scenario that best executed player choice for objectives, giving them multiple angles to pursue right on the cards instead of having them go through yapping paragraphs of story text. The monster is scary and especially on the card pool of the time very difficult to defeat. The locations are varied and interesting, in many ways i like the MU Campus even more than the classic Arkham layout from Midnight Masks.
Low points: Like the Core Set, the first two scenarios of old campaigns suffered a bit from feeling obligated to use all (or close to all) of the encounter sets in the Deluxe Box they were released in. Extracurricular Activity maybe suffers from this the most, with its encounter cards being a pretty wild mix of things and often quite swingy.
Yapping: The relative simplicity of this scenario coupled with its stellar way of presenting the options that players are able to pursue make this one of the best introductions to the game in my opinion. I also like the range of enemies showcased in this one, including not just basic Thralls, but also chunkier enemies. And the brilliant Whippoorwills. While Gathering is excellent for how it does a tutorial when everyone at the table is still learning the rules, Extracurricular Activity arguably beats it as a way to introduce new players as long as one or two experienced players are at the table to guide the newbies as there is just so much on display here.

The House Always Wins

Rating: Tier 3-
Highlights: The use of Aloof for the gangsters during the first couple rounds is really neat. The gambling mechanics on the locations are as well and give all of this scenario a rather unique touch.
Low points: The usual gameplay of AHLCG takes a bit of a backseat for most of the scenario as clues can’t be found the regular way and combat is discouraged. The encounter deck is basically Striking Fear and a stack of blanks thanks to the low impact of the gangsters, rats and Bad Luck cards in it.
Yapping: The House Always Wins is a very strong first, second and maybe even third play that does a great job of using the game’s mechanical frame to do some creative story telling. The mid-scenario twist of having the monsters spawn and fight the gang members is great – the gambling stuff is less so, but it’s at least unique. But i do find that House Always Wins relies a lot on the novelty of its gimmicks. On replays, there’s just not much here to interact with meaningfully. You try to do the stretch goal of rescuing Peter Clover once or twice and that’s kind of it. I don’t want to call this scenario overall boring, that would be a disservice to how good the first few plays of it are. But the lack of staying power makes me sort this to the lower end of what I’d still consider an average scenario.

The Miskatonic Museum

Rating: Tier 3
Highlights: The conceit of having only one enemy all scenario, but it returns repeatedly and gets stronger every time is a bold choice and very intriguing. I also like a lot that we actually do get our hands on the Necronomicon here (or at least a notable version of it) and get to keep it. Or burn it. Our choice. Good stuff.
Low points: This is one of the weaker scenarios in the game mechanically. Some of the things don’t strictly work correctly as written and require some fuzzy reading to fit together. Others are too easy to bypass or exploit from the player’s side. As a result, this scenario can leave fighters without much to do when the Hunting Shadow fails to become the threat it is intended to be.
Return To: The Return To patches some of the mechanical holes (like the front side of the agenda not being in play while it advances and spawns the Horror) and adds a couple extra venues for the thing to appear, re-appear and grow. This is a rather big step towards making this one go as intended most of the time.
Yapping: I like this scenario more than most in the community do. While the Horror’s mechanics are easy enough to exploit using evasion and similar strategies to keep the thing on the board, if you don’t do a concerted effort towards that the scenario will for the most part work as intended. And i find the Horror once it’s grown a bit quite formidable and threatening enough to carry the scenario. It’s a good hook to spin a scenario around and when it works, it works really well and has always given me an enjoyable experience. Going with a ranking right in the middle of the pack seems fair to me.

The Essex County Express

Rating: Tier 3+
Highlights: It’s pure adrenaline with no downtime, as every action counts. This scenario teaches about the folly of taking long setup turns and not being able to shift into high gear from the start. It’s simple and it’s effective, the Essex lesson is one that most players that went through it early in their Arkham gaming still vividly remember.
Low points: That being said, it is way too binary. Failing Essex is all too easy due to the harsh encounter cards and the very tight timer. And the penalty for it is losing much of the progress you made so far. The Necronomicon? Gone. Rescued story allies? Captured. Experience? Actually, you barely get any no matter if you fail or not.
Yapping: Like Midnight Masks, this scenario provides a template that has been iterated on many times throughout the years in other campaigns. And for good reason, the linear race against the clock provides a notably different experience from the free exploration that most Arkham maps allow for. Essex Express is a very memorable scenario for many, but if we put aside the rose-tinted glasses for just a second, there is certainly a thick layer of unfair junk that weighs it down. Bad draws that root your investigator in place in back to back turns can screw you over just as much as a glut of doom acceleration from the encounter deck can. Or just a Wizard of the Order spawning in a hard to reach place. Later executions on the concept may be less memorable than Essex, but they also tend to be a lot more fair and mechanically sound.

Blood on the Altar

Rating: Tier 2
Highlights: The location we are looking for can be anywhere in the town, and its position is randomized. The boss fight in the end can be handled in different ways and is one of the major branching outcomes of the Dunwich campaign.
The Kidnapped! treachery and the threat of losing story allies or even unique player allies for the rest of the campaign gives this scenario a lot of weight, way more than the otherwise fairly generous doom counter would suggest.
Low points: Very few, this is an all around solid scenario. The randomization can lead to a bit of an annoying variance, with the investigation either being over before it really started or taking very long (and thus leading to a sacrifice or two) just because of random chance.
Yapping: When i think of “good old Arkham” as a scenario description, this is one of the first scenarios i think of. We are given a grid of locations, we need to find clues, enemies are around. Standard fare, but elevated through the always looming threat of the story allies being in peril if we take too long and the Silas encounter.

Undimensioned and Unseen

Rating: Tier 5
Highlights: As has been the case for all of this campaign, there are some really interesting locations in this one with abilities that tell stories and are worth interacting with. I also like parts of the encounter deck, especially the presence of both the Whippoorwills and the Beast Thralls.
Low points: Almost everything else is profoundly cursed. The random movement of the Broods is often frustrating, the location effects that can get around it do help but aren’t quite enough to make this part interactive enough. The Broods can’t be fought with conventional means, instead rely purely on the willpower skill – which depending on the investigators present can mean that the Broods are almost untouchable. The Broods aren’t the only thing hungry for willpower, as the encounter deck also focuses on it way more than the rest of the campaign, only amplifying the issue.
Even encountering the Broods in the first place requires drawing the right cards from the encounter deck or having enough time pass, which can lead to long pauses in gameplay where everyone is just spinning their wheels. The scenario also takes forever, if you want to commit to defeating all of the Broods.
Yapping: Genuinely one of the low points of the game in my opinion. Sure, you can tech for it and if you do, it’s not even particularly difficult. But even then it’s just not particularly fun to follow randomly moving thingies around. This is one of only two scenarios in the game where i consider the first turn resign on the starting location (and effectively not even care to set the thing up on the table).

Where Doom Awaits

Rating: Tier 4+
Highlights: Regrettably, this scenario doesn’t really do something specific better than the other scenarios around it, making it hard for me to point at something here.
Low points: Arguably a bug in the location/scenario design, Where Doom Awaits is notoriously hard to progress if you aren’t able to pass unassisted intellect tests. So groups that had their clue getting solved by for example a Mystic with spell assets or Ashcan Pete with Duke can suddenly find themselves in front of a campaign-ending wall.
More generally speaking, this scenario lacks focus. It has a huge encounter deck filled with random effects that barely support each other, leading to high variance and more often than not, a lack of interesting challenges.
Yapping: That i don’t really have any highlights to point towards doesn’t mean that everything is bad, it’s just that large swaths of the scenario are just … unremarkable. If the encounter deck swings the wrong way, it can be downright boring. Which is not where you want your penultimate scenario of the campaign to be.
It’s not a scenario that i dread playing, it’s still a member of the “good old Arkham” group, just not a particularly remarkable one. When also considering that this campaign has done the sort of generic romp through locations for clues twice already (Extracurricular Activities and Blood on the Altar) and better both times… Where Doom Awaits is just lingering there as another thing to go past before finally being able to play the real finale.

Lost in Time and Space

Rating: Tier 1
Highlights: The big flashy focal point of LiTaS is of course the fact that locations are shuffled into the encounter deck at the start of the game and we have to reveal them from there to make our path towards key locations that allow us to progress. Location connections are unclear, paths open up and close down as locations get revealed and discarded again. It’s all very different and manages to perfectly communicate the idea that we are in another dimension where things work in weird ways.
The scenario is also quite tough, with some very rough enemies around and the Beyond the Veil treachery constantly looming over our heads.
Low points: Technically, we can beat up Yog-Sothoth with a baseball bat. It’s not super easy to do, but that one of the big players in the pantheon of Great Old Ones appears here with regular stats and health is a bit of weirdness that later campaigns would not repeat (at least not this blatantly).
Yapping: This still is the best finale to a campaign. I attribute this to a suitably high level of challenge (but in a fair and interactive way) coupled with how well the location mechanics bring theme and gameplay together. Lost in Time and Space not only plays well, it also feels right. It’s epic and it’s special. It takes the mechanics and monsters we fought all campaign and puts their greatest hits together to ask the players to perform at their peak for one last time before the campaign ends in either well-earned triumph or world-shattering defeat.
The designers returned to the idea of sending the players to another dimension for the finale a couple more times, with different mechanics that attempt to make things work different and weird. Some of those were definitely good efforts, but i’d argue that none of them come close to how well LiTaS does it. And LiTaS does it without having to employ vast paragraphs of extra rules or diagrams outlining how to set things up.