Week in Review
The main content advanced as usual with three more pages on encounter sets and decks. The first two were dedicated to Dunwich Legacy’s Where Doom Awaits and the one encounter set from that scenario that was still missing from this site, Beast Thralls. Moving on from Dunwich, the Inhabitants of Carcosa were next. Next week is going to lead into Dim Carcosa, then move on to Forgotten Age.
I released downloadable Word documents with the custom cards from ARES: Core and ARES: Dunwich, which should allow for convenient printing of those if you should wish to try them for yourself. They went through some last minute changes as results from my playtesting, you can find more details in the comments of the card pages. If you want to download the Word documents, please follow the links at the bottom of the ARES: Core and ARES: Dunwich main pages.
Soapbox
Spoiler season for the Innsmouth Conspiracy continues, with a couple new cards spoiled. In a preview stream by the Miskatonic University Radio channel, we got to see three cards:
The Blessed Blade, a slightly expensive weapon that is mediocre at fighting and slow at adding tokens to the bag. Let’s hope there’s an upgrade for that in a later mythos pack, because this one failed to impress me at all.
There’s Obfuscation which lets rogues avoid attacks of opportunity, clearly a plant for Trish Scarborough to investigate and evade enemies without any care. Not sure i see a place for that card in any other of my decks, but it’s a fair and well-costed card that just needs a role to play.
And finally the mystic skill Promise of Power which offers four (4!) wild icons in exchange for adding a single(1!) curse to the bag. Seems super powerful to me, a future mystic staple unless i am severely underestimating how much of a deal a single curse token is.
Personally, I’ve been trucking on with my own first campaign with the new starter investigators. Nate and Jackie are making short work of the Carcosa campaign. The highlight so far was killing every single person and grabbing every single clue in Last King. That was super satisfying. Nate is a beast in combat and i think i got a really good and tight deck going on. Tweaking the last few cards for that has been fun. For Jacqueline, i was at first skeptical about how much of a “starter” she really is as the first look made her seem quite complicated. Turns out, she’s anything but. No real token synergy needed, you can just use her ability to cheat the chaos bag which is super powerful. I am not a huge fan of the generic “Shrivel/Rites of Seeking” mystic, but Jacqueline does that particular archetype really well.