Welcome to the first installment of Weekly Evils. As the name implies, one of these will go up every week. There’s not a specific day set aside for it, it will just happen some time on the weekend. These posts will serve two purposes, each of them gets its own little sub-headline.
First, the week in review. This is a recap of developments on the Ancient Evils site itself. So, new posts on encounter sets, changes to layouts, additions made, etc. Basically everything related to this site itself. I’ll try to keep that part relatively short unless i actually did do a lot of changes.
Second, the soapbox. That’s where i look beyond the confines of this site at whatever else is happening in ArkhamLCG land that i feel like commenting on. I might not always have to say something, we’ll see.
But enough of the preambles, let’s get to it.
Week in Review
This week’s additions to the Main Content were the Serpents encounter set, a look at the Heart of the Elders #1 full encounter deck and then moving on to TCU’s Agents of Azathoth set. I added another replacement set to the custom content section: Monstrous Thralls is intended to replace Beast Thralls and has some nasty critters on display. More custom sets will be coming shortly, i have several mostly done that i only need to give the last bits of extra care.
Return to the Forgotten Age saw its release, so i also added my full and revised thoughts on three of the four sets to the pages of the sets they replace. The ones added are the Cult of Pnakotus, the Doomed Expedition and Temporal Hunters. I don’t have a page for Yig’s Venom yet, so the review on Venomous Hate will have to wait until then. In those pages i went into much more detailed thoughts than in the first impressions that i had posted a few weeks ago. Playing with the cards (and in two cases, actually reading the card properly) also changed my opinions on several of them quite a bit, so check that out if you are interested.
Soapbox
The two interesting things this week were the release of Return to The Forgotten Age and the release of the Print and Play alternate version of Skids O’Toole.
I managed to snatch up a copy of RtTFA and am currently in the middle of a campaign, playing two-handed with Silas and Carolyn, both investigators i never played before. It’s … a challenge! I really like the RtTFA box, it improves many of the mechanics in the campaign, adds a solid amount of variety and i do enjoy the new encounter sets quite a bit. Great product, i wholeheartedly recommend it to anyone who wants to replay TFA. Looking at what the rest of the community says, i do not seem to be alone with this opinion, general reception seems to have been excellent.
Parallel “Skids” O’Toole takes everything that made up “Skids” identity card, tossed all out the window, took a completely unrelated investigator with wildly different abilities and card access and called that thing “Skids”. Now everyone is losing their minds about how great the rework is and i just don’t get it 😀
Don’t get me wrong, i think this new investigator looks great fun. Those deck building options are amazing and make my head hurt with all the crazy stuff you can do with it. But how is this a rework of Skids? It’s completely new and the only thing remaining from the original is the stat line and the signature cards… signature cards that weren’t terribly exciting in the first place. Compare to the rework of Daisy Walker. Parallel Daisy is noticably different, but she is still very much Daisy, with the same themes as her original. It’s like telling me you know how to make a bland salad really tasty … and then replacing it with a steak. It’s an improvement, sure. But did you actually do what you said you would do? In the end my complaints are largely academic, though. We got new content, it’s good content, it’s free, so i am happy about it. I like steak. And for what it’s worth, the two Skids being so different from each other means that the option to mix and match their fronts and backs makes for some very fascinating combinations as well. That wasn’t really the case with Daisy and her shadow clone, so Skids got that going for him. Once i got through my first trip through the jungle, i will print up that shadow Skids and see what fun things can be done with him for sure.