The following writing is part of a series detailing separate playthroughs of a variety of campaigns for Arkham Horror LCG.  Please note, there will be SPOILERS.  If you have not played these campaigns and want it to be a fresh experience when you do, please stop reading now.  

Night of the Zealot

“Friday, September 18, 1925.  Arkham, Massachusetts.  It is the end of a long and abnormally hot summer.  The first hints of autumn beckon, but a heavy heat persists, relentless.  A silent, unspoken anger grips the town.  Tempers are short, and in the last week alone there have been numerous reports of townspeople coming to heated, violent blows with one another over simple misunderstandings...”
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Introduction

The Arkham Horror LCG lives rent free in my head most of the year, but especially more at Halloween.  And it’s not like I own that much of the product (at the time of this writing): Revised Core Set (RCS), The Forgotten Age Campaign, The Feast of Hemlock Vale Campaign, and The Drowned City Investigator Expansion. Regardless though, I just think about the experience of playing this game… a lot.

With the nature of the system, I have never felt right about doing a normal “review” of the game. Instead, I’ve decided to play my way back through my collection, and put together a play-by-play of sorts for each Campaign.  Obviously, there will be spoilers but I am not going to regurgitate every piece of text from the Campaign guides, nor talk about every twist and turn.  I primarily want to put into writing how the general flow of the Campaign went to give other players an idea of my experiences.

I was going to skip the Revised Core Set’s Campaign as its only three scenarios but I decided to do it again.  I’m glad I did as I hadn’t played in about a year and I got some things wrong, especially a HUGE piece wrong in the last scenario, and I would rather have screwed up this play than a full Campaign.  Lastly, even though I played solo, I did “two-hand” the game, meaning I controlled two investigators and acted as if I had a partner player.  Additionally, the game is hard enough out of the box so I typically play where I can discard a card to affect the number of icons needed AFTER I’ve already seen the results of the skill test. Yes, this is not how the game was created, but I spent my money on it and can play it the way I want.

Deck Construction

Right before embarking on these playthroughs, I bought The Drowned City Investigator Expansion so I was excited to try the new investigators and cards out. Knowing I only had 3 scenarios to play in this first campaign, I decided to build my own decks, which had mixed results.

Marion Tavares – The Trawler

Marion is the Guardian found in The Drowned City (TDC) and as I always liked Roland from the core set, I chose her to start out with.  Her character ability deals with Event Cards and I can’t say I did a great job building the deck to capitalize here. Also, she only has one arm so she is down to only one hand slot and I don’t think I noticed this starting out either. Whoops.  On the other hand (get it?), Crowbar, Hunter’s Mark (1), and Remington Model 1858 (4) were all pretty excellent additions in the deck.

Gloria Goldberg – The Writer

Next, I needed someone to help with Clue collection.  I could have gone with a Seeker, but again, thought I would hold off until a full campaign. Instead I chose a Mystic who has quite a few ways to make successful Investigations.  On top of that, Gloria has a lot of power over controlling the Encounter Deck and I thought that would be fun to play with. Her deck was constructed way better than Marion’s and I highly recommend her if players only have the RCS and TDC. 

Scenario 1 – The Gathering

Our investigators find themselves in Marion’s (because I deemed her Lead Investigator every scenario) study when the door disappears and strange sounds start emitting from below the floorboards.  While Marion didn’t have much to do, I set out right away to see what Gloria had to offer.

First off, the combination of Scrying and her character ability made for potent mitigation of the Encounter Deck.  Exhausting Scrying and spending one of its charges allows Gloria to look at the top three cards of the Encounter Deck.  Triggering her ability then let’s you add a 4^th card to this viewing but that’s not all. You can then choose a Non-Elite card from the selection and discard it, put it on top of the deck, or place it underneath Gloria.  This was awesome, helping me to eliminate any enemies showing up, at least through Act 1.

I did quickly run into a problem fully understanding the ability of my Ally, Katarina Sojka.  Her text says, “When you reveal chaos tokens during a skill test you are performing, exhaust Katarina Sojka; reveal tokens from the chaos bag until a token with a symbol is revealed. Resolve that token and ignore the rest.”  I played it where when I pulled an Autofail Token from the bag, I could exhaust Katarina, pulling more tokens until I came across the first symbol token and ignore everything else, including the Autofail.  After some research, some people across the net agree with this reading, while others don’t. Oh well, that’s how I am doing it. On to Act 2 with no problems whatsoever, but what does the rest of the house have in store for me now that I’m out of the Study?

What the house had in store was a combination of Agenda 1’s Resolution giving Marion two Horror (thanks Beat Cop for soaking up one of these), a Ghoul Minion and a Swarm of Rats appearing, not to mention rooms in the house actively trying to kill me.  I made quick work of the enemies and continued searching the house.  Eventually, Gloria drew her Basic Weakness, Disruptive Poltergeist.  This weakness is a real pain in the ass for any Investigator who blows at Evading, which Gloria does with her Agility being a whopping value of… one.  The Disruptive Poltergeist causes one Damage and gets shuffled back into the player’s deck if they didn’t Evade an enemy this turn.  You can discard the card by using its Evade Action but you get -2 skill value for that Evasion and for Gloria, that is basically an Autofail. 

Eventually, I found my way into the Parlor by destroying a force field or something, and met my first NPC, Lita Chantler.  Rarely does Arkham Horror give you anything good without doling out a whole lot of pain so of course a new baddie spawned, right into the location where my Investigators stood.  This monster was the Ghoul Priest, an Elite Hunter with Retaliate, which basically means his HP scales with the number of Investigators, and he will move around the locations, stalking his Prey, while also getting to attack any Investigator who fails a skill test against him.

Marion was not ready for this and didn’t even have a firearm out yet so I was basically forced to throw Lita to the wolves, and let her soak up the Ghoul Priest’s blows while Marion used actions to play her .45 Automatic with four charges to the table.  Not wanting to be left out of the ghoul killing, Gloria used her Whispers of Doom and Breath of the Sleeper to help deal some important damage.  Both of these cards were really cool as they let Gloria capitalize on her high-valued Willpower for damaging skill tests.  Between this and Marion blazing away with her .45, I made quick work of the Ghoul Priest.

I had to make a choice after the scenario whether or not I wanted to burn my house down you know, because of all the ghouls and stuff.  I took the safe bet and torched it though I don’t know what that will do for me other than Marion suffered one Mental Trauma having to burn her childhood home down.  Both Marion and Gloria ended up with six Experience Points to use for card upgrades.  Marion added the Remington Model 1858 (4) and Hunter’s Mark (1), while tossing away a single Beat Cop and Unexpected Courage.  For Gloria, I added Sword Cane (2), Enraptured (2), and Eye of Ghatanothoa (2).  She put two copies of Holy Rosaries and one Breath of the Sleepless back into the box.

Scenario 2 – The Midnight Masks

For this scenario, I had to put out eight Location Cards to create the town of Arkham.  There would have been a ninth card but it ended up being my house which I chose to turn into a fiery mess so the guide had me put that card back in the box.  We grabbed the clues at Rivertown and headed to Southside to dispatch the Acolyte who spawned there.  The Acolyte’s spawn with Doom Tokens on them so if you don’t want to fly through the Agenda Deck, you better get rid of them quick. 

The first, of a possible six, Cultist spawned in Downtown which was basically as far away as you could get from where my Investigators were.  All in all, it took me way longer to capture this Cultist, “Wolf Man” Drew, than it needed to.  By the time I got up there and captured him, the Agenda had four Doom Tokens on it, and it was scheduled to resolve at six Doom Tokens.

Another Cultist, Victoria Devereux, spawned and then Agenda 1 resolved, bringing another Cultist to the table, The Masked Hunter.  This Cultist was hiding on the backside of the Agenda 1 card and immediately started hunting the Investigator with the most Clues.  Not only is The Masked Hunter fairly stacked, he causes the Investigator he is Engaged with to not be able to discover or spend Clues.    This put a real damper on me moving forward in this scenario as I just couldn’t get anything going. 

I did eventually capture both Devereux and The Masked Hunter but Agenda 2 was about to resolve and honestly, I was scared what Agenda 3 was going to add to the mix.  I decided to tuck my tail and Resign the scenario, leaving the town behind with three Cultists still at large.  This time my Investigators earned five Experience Points with Marion still having one left over from the previous scenario.  She discarded Book of War, Overpower, Guard Dog, and Hardboiled, picking up two Extra Ammunition and another Hunter’s Mark (1).  I really liked what Gloria was doing with Scrying so I replaced a Scrying (1) with a Scrying (3) and picked up another Enraptured (2) in place of an Emergency Cache.

Somewhere out there, Ruth Turner, Herman Collins, and Peter Warren are still on the loose and I wonder if I’ll encounter them in Scenario Three.  Only one way to find out…

Scenario 3 – The Devourer Below

The setup for The Devourer Below deviated from the last two scenarios slightly in that it has the player randomly select one small set (out of a possible four) of cards to mix into the Encounter Deck.  Instead of randomly selecting, I just straight chose the cards themed after The King in Yellow, as I had just finished reading the work of the same name by Robert W. Chambers.  Then the Campaign Guide informed me that because I had only captured three Cultists in Scenario Two, I was to start this scenario with two Doom Tokens on Agenda 1.  Guess I should have tried to capture a few more of those masked fellows.  After throwing one extra Chaos Token (that kind of looks like purple tentacles?) into the bag, I was ready to begin.

This scenario has you traipsing through different Arkham Woods locations, attempting to find the Ritual Site.  I would need a total of six Clues to advance to Act 2.  It wasn’t long before the first monster, a Screeching Byahkee from The King in Yellow deck, reared its ugly head, engaging with Gloria.  This thing was super annoying, doing a lot of mental damage and then gaining bonuses to both Fight and Evade once the Investigator goes below four Sanity.  And to top it all off, this thing only spawned because I had to advance to Agenda 2 in only the SECOND Mythos Phase!  Stupid runaway cultists…

Honestly, I don’t even have notes about the next few turns as I was so ineffective in doing anything.  Before I knew it, Agenda 2 resolved into Agenda 3 and I still had two more Clues to gather before I could even advance to Act 2.  And now, is where I had the huge screw-up I mentioned in the introduction.

See Agenda 3 reads like this: “[a bunch of flavor text I’m not going to type out] Forced – When this agenda advances: A.) If the Investigators are at Act 1, put the set-aside Ritual Site into play and spawn the set-aside Umordhoth there. B.) If the Investigators are at Act 2 or 3, discard all enemies at the Ritual Site and spawn the set-aside Umordhoth there.”

The operative piece of that writing is the “when this agenda advances” which I totally ignored.  I followed the directions to part A as soon as I flipped over to Agenda 3, meaning that the big ugly spawned rounds ahead of when it was supposed to.  No, this didn’t feel right during the actual game.  I even wrote down in my notes, in all caps, “…AND HERE COMES UMORDHOTH!”  Not only did this huge idiot show up, but those three escaped Cultists are back and standing in my way of success!  Needless to say, the rest of this scenario was total Hell and I was mad the whole time about how hard the whole thing was.  But for the sake of completion, let’s keep going.

My plan of action was decided: I would throw Marion at the Cultists and the huge beast, and hope Gloria could get to the Ritual Site and at least advance to Act 3.  Marion acted like a champ, even defeating the Cultist Peter Warren, but eventually succumbed to her injuries and died at the Main Path.  At least this bought time for Gloria to reach the Ritual Site and advance.  Let’s see what the game can throw at me now…

Oh look, more bad guys spawning right into my location.  Additionally, the requirements to end this Act are impossibly hefty, requiring Gloria to not only collect four Clues but pass four Skill Tests!  Well, that ain’t happening Gloria especially because within a turn or two Agenda 3 resolved, stating that now the only way to win the scenario was going to be to defeat Umordhoth.  This Ancient One has 14 health, five Fight, six Evade, readies every turn, and does three Physical and three Mental damage every time it strikes.  Like I said, it ain’t happening!  I did my best (well except for that whole not reading the cards correctly) but it looks like Arkham is in for a bad weekend.

Conclusion

Even though I suffered a bad ending to my campaign, I’m glad I played through these three scenarios to tune up my skills for a real campaign.  This also showed me that I probably don’t have the depth of cards to build decks from scratch.  I did find instructions for a Seeker Deck and a Rogue Deck that can be constructed just using Core and The Drowned City.  I will be using those as I go through my The Forgotten Age playthrough so please join me in that write-up, as soon as it’s posted!

¹Arkham Horror: Night of the Zealot published by Fantasy Flight Games.