Week in Review
Looping around after looking at Dream-Eaters the week before, this week went back to the Core Set. Checking out Rats first, and then The Gathering, i can’t help but admire once again how much the Core Set got right from the get go. The initial collection of encounter sets is just fantastic, and Gathering showcases this perfectly. But there’s no time to linger, and on Friday i already moved on to reviewing Bishop’s Thralls, the first stop towards next week’s Where Doom Awaits.
In terms of other content, i didn’t get much done to the point where i wanted to upload it already. I spent some time on fixing up several of the custom cards from ARES: Dunwich. The playtesting campaign was very insightful and triggered a couple changes, both small and big. Hopefully i find the time to but a bow on that next week and do a proper release with printer friendly PDFs and stuff. No promises, though.
Soapbox
The investigator starter decks appeared at my door step this week, so that’s been what’s on my mind Arkham-wise once i finished up my Alternate Dunwich playtest. The community has been busy and review articles and podcasts and playthrough videos have been popping up left and right as people give their first takes. Super interesting, been reading and watching a lot of that.
I’ve been playing Nate and Jackie through three scenarios so far and they appear to be great additions to the stable. Nathaniel’s focus on events puts a really fresh spin on the fighty Guardian, just as expected. And Jacqueline suprises me with how powerful her ability really is. It’s really difficult to fail tests when you routinely get to take skills at a modified value of 7 and get the pick the best of three icons from the bag.
But while many of us are already hard pressed to find the time to fully explore these five new investigators until Innsmouth releases with yet another handful of them, FFG decided to drop YET ANOTHER one on us. The Dark Revelations novella, featuring “The Writer” Gloria Goldberg, is set to release in November. She’s yet another Mystic with stats leaning heavily towards the non-physical skills, but her ability is something interesting for sure. I’ll reserve my full judgment until we know the full picture, but i do hope her deck building makes her more interesting than that super vanilla Mystic statline suggests.