Week in Review
We’re almost done with the Innsmouth Conspiracy deluxe box now, as another two encounter sets and a scenario get their page on the site. Fog over Innsmouth is a miniset that cares about shroud values and adds a big critter with victory points to the deck. Agents of Dagon is this cycle’s obligatory cultist set, with a little twist that makes these cultists a lot more threatening than the Acolytes from the Core. Both of these sets feature in The Vanishing of Elina Harper, a set that put me into a bit of an awkward spot when putting together the page for it. On the one hand, it is one of my favorite scenarios in the game, on the other hand i don’t have many remarkable things to observe about its encounter deck. “The magic” all happens between agenda, act, lead deck and setup, which makes this one of the very few cases where my strategy for these reviews basically fails to capture what makes the scenario tick. Oh well.
Soapbox
Recently, there has been some chatter in the community (both on reddit and on Discord) about the Return to The Circle Undone box. It has not been officially announced yet, but that shouldn’t probably take too long now that all of the Mythos packs from the Innsmouth cycle have been.
I thought i would take this spot here today to post some wishes, things i would like to see int that box. Some of it might be out of scope, but you never know… the excellent Return to The Forgotten Age also had a bunch of goodies in it that i never would have expected.
I don’t actually have many major scenario specific gripes that i would target. Wages of Sin and Before the Black Throne are the two that i think are in the most dire need of being improved. Not sure how that’d look though. The doom mechanics from BtBT are baked into the root of the scenario, arguably they are the whole point of it. And Wages is broken enough that it’d need a complete overhaul. Personally i have no idea where even to start there, but as mentioned RtTFA has shown that MJ and Jeremy are willing to make sweeping changes as well. It worked for Return to Doom of Eztli, i hope they figure out Return to Wages.
Throughout the campaign we collect all kinds of mementos. Sadly these end up mattering very little. Something that RtTFA did is add a lot of locations that care about certain underused supply items. Maybe something similar could be done here?
My nominations for replacement encounter sets are:
Anette’s Coven. The base set is just completely unimpressive and their abilities barely fire at all. Let’s have something with a stronger interaction with Hexes and/or encounter deck depletion, something that actually matters.
Inexorable Fate. As it is, it fights with other mechanics from the cycle and has trouble mattering in low player counts. These cards are really good in principle, but only really get to do their thing in full groups. There must be a way to fix that, these deserve to be campaign centerpiece like Beyond the Veil is.
Ancient Evils. It’s used four times throughout the campaign. Let’s give us a new version of this, that might actually be a part of fixing BtBT.
Spectral Predators and/or Trapped Spirits. Except for the Mist enemy, these two sets are really forgettable. Only being used twice doesn’t help, of course. But still. Meh. These sets could have some more punch.
In terms of player cards, a few things come to mind that i could make good use of. Some people are talking about new tarot cards or upgrades to the existing ones, but the thing that i would much rather see is a better Anna Kaslow. Now, sadly the base version is already level 4, so there is not much room upwards. Maybe downwards could be an idea? In any case, the base version’s ratio of cost to rewards is very off and i would like to see a more playable version that would get me to actually do something fancy and gimmicky with it.
Other cards i would be interested in seeing upgrades for: Alice Luxley (on the cusp of playability, but not quite there to muscle past Grete and Beat Cop), Fingerprint Kit (similar case here), Sign Magic (make it 1 resource and i would probably pay XP for it), Deny Existence (level 0 to 5 is a big jump, how about a stepping stone at 2 or 3 XP?) and Act of Desperation (gimme a version that ditches the restriction to Items and lets me sacrifice *anything*…). I also wouldn’t mind upgrades for the cycle of threshold skills, maybe they could offer some return according to what their threshold cares about? (Steadfast heals, Curiosity draws, Cunning gives money. Not sure what Prophesy and Able Bodied would do…) Eh, we probably got enough skills lately.
That’s it for my wishlist. Not a whole lot, actually. TCU is not really in need of much fixing, except for those two scenarios i mentioned, i like it … kinda. It’s a campaign that i initially was very high on due to the theme. With every replay, i soured a bit on it, kinda the opposite of what happened with TFA which i liked more and more with each revisit. I have hopes that RtTCU can put some of that initial hype i had for it back into the campaign.
Cheers o/