(replaces Inexorable Fate from Circle Undone)
Goal of this replacement set: With this replacement set, i am doing things a bit different than with the other sets. Instead of doing somewhat different cards that offer variety from the standard set, this time around i want to take the original cards and fix what i think is worth improving upon with them.
This is because i actually quite like Inexorable Fate, but it is kept back by some shortcomings. The most important one is bad scaling with player counts. Fate of All Fools is a much stronger card in full parties than it is in one or two player games. At the same time, Terror in the Night is basically a non-entity in low player counts.
My other big problem with Inexorable Fate is that its set collection aspect clashes with the deck discard subtheme that a couple of cards in Circle Undone have. I adressed some of this already with my Anette’s Favored replacement set, but i think i can do some more towards that goal here.
About this card: Fool’s Choice keeps much of how the original card plays out. The first one drawn can be a free card, simply being put into play with no immediate repercussions. Further ones make you choose between damage or doom. The difference is that at higher player counts, the option to take doom will lead to a reshuffle/discard of the cards, allowing for another “free” Fool’s Choice next. Managing when to take damage and when to take doom (hopefully) becomes more interesting, as both options have their merits. 2 damage is objectively the lesser punishment than 1 doom, but can not be sustained forever and since it doesn’t discard the first Fool’s Choice, the relative gap in value between the two is closed.
About this card: I never liked that Terror in the Night only gets attached to the agenda if the player fails a test. This made it very unlikely to fire the global horror effect, as any success on a Terror in the Night test would mean that it can’t be assembled before the encounter deck reshuffles. And that is before even considering that some card like Centuries of Secrets might just dump a copy of Terror into the discard pile and defuse it for the players. To make this card matter more in low player counts, i pulled the horror effect to the front of the card and tied it to the willpower test. The amount of horror scales with the number of Night Terrors to conserve the set collection aspect. Since the main effect is now frontloaded, the Forced effect for collecting all three is now milder. It discards all but 5 cards from the deck, setting up a wide variety of other encounter cards while shortening the time before the next reshuffle resets the Night Terrors back into the deck. So now the set collection of this card no longer clashes with the other TCU subtheme, but actually even sets it up. Note that Night Terrors is of course traited “Terror”, so it interacts with the Anette’s Favored replacement set to go full circle on this back and forth between the two subthemes.