Week in Review
Today marks the end of the breakneck schedule that aimed at catching up with the product cycle. The Innsmouth deluxe had two more encounter sets for us: Agents of Hydra is a set of four cards that rip cards out of the player’s hands and goes after their actions while it’s at it. Nasty stuff. Malfunction is a much easier pill to swallow, deactivating abilities on vehicles until a test succeeds… sure, that’s something we can deal with. Both are used in Devil Reef, a long trip around a couple of islands in a fisherboat. It tests not only the investigator’s stamina, but also the player’s.
Starting now, as announced two weeks ago, i will switch to a much slower update schedule. Depending on what new things there are to cover and what other ideas for articles i have, expect two, maybe three new articles per month. At least that’s the plan. We’ll see how it shakes out.
Soapbox
The Return to Circle Undone has finally been announced officially. And it looks quite promising. Three weeks ago i posted some wishes for what i want from the box, so let’s see…
For obvious reasons, the article is very light on spoilers regarding scenario changes, so talking about those will likely have to wait until we have this box in our hands in … 3 months or so? Should be around in June, going by previous timeframes between article and actual release.
What we can do however is deduce the replaced encounter sets from the picture on the top of the article. It’s all missing just a couple pixels to be really clear, but i’m pretty sure that Trapped Spirits, Inexorable Fate and Spectral Predators are visible on the Return to Death’s Doorstep scenario card. The fourth is less clear, but since it’s repeated on the Return to Union and Disillusion, it’s probably Realm of Death. Union and Disillusion also shows a replacement for Ancient Evils. Also, we can see another replacement set being shared by Greater Good, Witching Hour and Clutches of Chaos. City of Sins is the only one that fits that bill.
So in summary, that’s Trapped Spirits, Spectral Predators, Inexorable Fate, Ancient Evils, City of Sins, Realm of Death. Six sets, about in line with what we’ve gotten before. My wishes were Anette’s Coven, Inexorable Fate, Ancient Evils, Spectral Predators, Trapped Spirits. Four out of five, i’ll take it!
The article teases a good amount of player cards, which is especially interesting because for the first time, the Return To comes with completely new cards instead of “just” up- or downgrades. This is used to give us more tarot assets and an absolutely fantastic accessory to support that tarot playstyle. I was hoping for a revamped Anna Kaslow, but the new Moon Pendant is so much better than anything i hoped for in that department. And the two spoiled level 3 tarot cards, Star and Hierophant, are also really good. That is quite exciting, the 1011 tarot Lola deck basically builds itself 🙂
The picture shows Sign Magick, Trial by Fire and Well Connected as examples for cards we are getting new versions of. One of those, Sign Magick, was on my wishlist. The other two are cards i am already playing a whole lot, so i am looking forward to getting upgraded ones.
The article also previews a new story ally that is supposed to be at our side for certain scenarios. Now, i don’t know which ones those are, but with that ability to cancel Power treacheries, Erynn MacAoidh breaks Clutches of Chaos wide open. Fingers crossed we can use her there.
And then there’s the tarot deck. We are getting a major arcana with really pretty artwork that can be used to randomly assign modifiers (good and bad) to our plays. Sounds cool enough. This is the sort of thing i will likely use only rarely once i have done so a few times, but i like this sort of fun bonus stuff.
So yeah, gimme gimme gimme. Looks great.
One more thing
This was the final Weekly Evil, at least for now this series goes on hiatus. I contemplated doing a Monthly Evil instead, but settled on not tying myself to a schedule like that anymore. If i have something to talk about, i will just do so in a news post. I rewired the top menu a bit to reflect this. The News&Articles section is a bit barren right now (it’s the Weekly Evils and the Well Prepared series), but i got some things in the works … 😉
Thanks for all your work on reviewing all the encounter sets—it’s a great resource and is complementary to all the others available. It deserves to be the definitive go to site for encounter setts.
Not to push you now or anything, but do you intend to do the standalones too? There are some interesting encounter cards in them, but I appreciate they don’t have the same kind of interaction with other sets as the mythos packs.
Well, for the longest time i only owned one of the standalones (Excelsior). I recently also got Outer Gods (played it once since) and Rougarou (not played it yet). So i don’t actually have all that much to say about them yet.
To be honest, they just don’t interest me as much as the ones that are connected to a greater campaign. I could see putting up pages for them eventually, but that’d be very likely in a much more condensed form than the other reviews and would for sure have to wait until i played them more than just once or twice. Currently, Excelsior is the only one that even fits that bill because i played it three or four times.
So yeah, sadly i will have to go with a “if it ever happens, then not soon” on this one.