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The Ghouls Hunger...
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.
And now, a call from James Hankerson. He claims to have found a dismembered body in his barn. Blaming the weather would be too easy. There is something wrong with this town, and not a whole lot this old soothsayer can do to stop the slide. My auguries indicate a small group of investigators will soon take note of these strange happenings and set forth to make things right. I’ll be watching their progress…but I won’t be holding my breath.
Night of the Zealot is the campaign that comes with the Core Set, and is most players' first introduction to the game. While it's something of a fossil by today's standards, it does a decent job of getting new players' feet wet and preparing them for what's to come.
We'll be heading in with two investigators. Arkham Horror scales much of its gameplay based on the number of characters, and playing with 2 will let us cover a wider range of bases without being too much to handle.
Our first investigator will be Roland Banks:
Roland had always taken comfort in procedure and rules. As an agent in the Bureau, he was relieved to have guidelines to follow in any given situation. But lately, his Federal Agent's Handbook had been entirely unhelpful given the cases he'd been assigned. Try as he might, Roland could find no mention of what to do when confronted with strange creatures, gates through time and space, or magic spells. If he hadn't seen it with his own eyes, he would never have believed it... and there's no way his superiors would understand. Roland knew he would have to handle this one himself.
Roland is a Guardian, one of five character archetypes in the game. As "The Fed", Roland is very versatile - he has a high Combat stat and can equip various weapons that will help him defeat most of the monsters he encounters. His special ability allows him to discover a clue after he defeats an enemy; in almost every scenario, gathering clues is what allows the investigators to progress, so this lets him kill two ghouls with one stone. And he has a lot of health, so he can take a lot of punishment and keep on going.
It's not all good news; Roland's Agility stat is pretty poor, so he's going to have a hard time dealing with anything that he can't kill. And his sanity is a meager 5, so he'll have to be very careful around anything that attacks the mind.
Backing up Roland will be young Wendy Adams:
Mama used to let Wendy play with her necklace when she was small. Mama would tell her stories, and Wendy would spin the necklace and watch as it glittered. Then, word came that her father had been lost at sea, and Mama started acting strange, drawing unusual symbols in chalk all over the house. They took Mama to the asylum, and Wendy went to the orphanage. Before they took her away, Mama gave her the necklace, to "protect her." Wendy stayed in the orphanage for several years before running away, deciding that she could take better care of herself on her own.
Wendy's archetype is the Survivor, a class centered around dealing with failure. You won't always manage to connect with your attacks, or find the clues you're looking for. Survivors have tools that let them either turn a failure into a success, or at least get something else out of it. And her signature ability is a good example of this, letting her turn any card into a "reroll" when she needs to pass an important test.
Her most glaring weakness is her abysmal Combat stat, meaning she's going to have real trouble killing anything. Thankfully, not only is she very good at running away from trouble, she'll have Roland nearby to take care of any serious threats.
Before we dive into this, a couple notes on how this is being put together. Arkham Horror is a massive game - to date, there have been eight full-size campaigns released (not counting this one) and a number of standalone scenarios and investigator packs. That is an overwhelming amount of content, and absolutely not something I want to front-load new players with. Therefore, I'll be running this intro campaign using only the cards that come in the core box, and adding new content as we go.
I've also decided to run the first campaign on Easy, rather than Standard difficulty. This probably isn't necessary, but again my goal with this first campaign is to show off how the game functions to anyone seeing it for the first time. Yes, yes, getting your ass kicked is a big part of the game, but as anyone who's familiar with this campaign can attest, we're probably going to get our fill of ass-kicks in the last scenario. Don't worry, we'll be scaling up to Standard in the next campaign, once our card collection has grown a bit.
Pictured: No Pun Included modeling this campaign's gentle difficulty curve.
With that all out of the way, let's jump in!
Part I: The Gathering
You and your partners have been investigating strange events taking place in your home city of Arkham, Massachusetts. Over the past few weeks, several townspeople have mysteriously gone missing. Recently, their corpses turned up in the woods, savaged and half-eaten. The police and newspapers have stated that wild animals are responsible, but you believe there is something else going on. You are gathered together at the lead investigator’s home to discuss these bizarre events.
In each scenario, the group chooses a player to take the role of the "lead investigator". Their job is to break ties: if the group needs to make a decision and can't come to an agreement, the lead investigator has the final say. Also, some game effects happen in "player order"; when that happens, the lead investigator goes first, followed by everyone else in clockwise order.
In our game we'll have Wendy be in charge; she wouldn't have it any other way.
The game next gives us some setup instructions, but before we get to that, let's find out what our current objective is.
Every scenario has an Act Deck, a set of story cards that give the players instructions on what they need to do next. In this case, our guide is the number "2" with the hat inside the magnifying glass. That icon means we need to collect 2 clue tokens, per investigator, in order to advance to the next Act card. Finishing all the cards in the Act deck is usually what leads to the best resolution, so it's a good thing to work towards.
However, we don't have all night to get this done. The game is working against us in many ways, most notably with the Agenda Deck:
That number "3" in the bottom is our clock. Each round, a doom token will be placed on the agenda. Once three tokens are there, the agenda will advance, and bad stuff will happen, including advancing to the next Agenda card. Once the last card fills up, it's game over for the scenario.
Both the Act and Agenda decks fill us in on more of the story. Here we can see that there are strange noises in our house, as if someone or something is in here with us (spoiler alert, it's ghouls). And as we try to leave, the doorway to our study disappears, trapping us in the room.
Now let's take a look at the play area. Each scenario in Arkham is divided into multiple locations, though in our case we only have the Study. The character cards show where each investigator is located, and the location card gives a bit of flavor. Location cards start out "unrevealed", as this one is, and is flipped to its "revealed" side once any investigators goes there for the first time. Since we start here, let's reveal the Study!
There's a few things of interest here. The number on the right might look familiar - that tells us how many clue tokens are placed on this location. That little hat icon means "per investigator", so we've placed 2 clues, times 2 players, for a total of 4. The other number on the left side is the Shroud value of the location. This represents how difficult it is to collect those clues, with a bigger number being more difficult. A shroud of 2 should be no problem for our investigators to handle.
And with that, we're all set up! Time to actually start playing the game.
Round 1
Each round, every investigator gets to take a turn. There's no set turn order - players can decide who should go next however they want (though one investigator must finish their turn before the next one goes). On their turn, an investigator may take three actions, and there are a bunch to choose from. We'll go over all the actions in due time, but for now, let's start with Roland taking his first turn.
quote:
> Roland plays Flashlight.
Roland's first action is playing a card from his hand. At the start of each scenario, players draw a hand of five cards to give them some tools to start with (and may mulligan any of them away if they want more options). The Flashlight is one such tool, which will help Roland gather those clues. It's an Asset, which means it will stay in play, and that icon in the bottom-right corner means it takes up a hand slot. Two hands means two hand slots max.
Roland also has to pay an amount of resources equal to the number in the top-left corner; each investigator starts with 5 resources, so he can easily afford it. Resources are the "money" of Arkham Horror, and most cards have a resource cost to play them. You'll collect a small trickle of resources naturally, and while you can gather more, it's a slow process, so resources should be spent carefully.
As for what the Flashlight actually does, you'll see it has an arrow and a description of its ability. That arrow means that using the Flashlight's ability costs one of Roland's three actions for the turn. When used, the Flashlight temporarily reduces the shroud value of the location - as mentioned before, the shroud represents how hard it is to pick up clues, and this tool makes it easier. Finally, it has a certain number of uses - 3, in this case. Each activation of the Flashlight's ability costs one of those supplies, and once they're spent, it can no longer be used.
Now, a Flashlight is useful, but what Roland really wants is a weapon. And he's packing heat.
quote:
> Roland plays Roland's .38 Special.
The .38 Special is Roland's signature card - every deck built around Roland includes this card, and it's designed to take advantage of his strengths. In this case, it's a decent weapon that's even stronger when there's clues around, to help him kill monsters and pick up those clues automatically. However, it doesn't have a lot of ammo, so we want to make sure it's fired only when it's needed.
With those two cards played, Roland is out of resources. He could spend an action to gain one resource, but we've got a better option.
quote:
> Roland plays Emergency Cache.
Emergency Cache is an Event card - unlike assets, this is a one-and-done that does what it says and is then discarded. In this case it's a simple effect, gaining Roland three resources at once.
With those three cards played, Roland's turn ends, so let's move on to Wendy.
quote:
> Wendy plays Rabbit's Foot.
The Rabbit's Foot is also an asset, this time taking up her lone accessory slot. Unlike Roland's items, this doesn't have an action ability. Instead, here we have a reaction ability, which has an effect when Wendy fails a skill test. We'll cover skill tests soon, but here we can see that the Rabbit's Foot lets Wendy draw a card when she fails a test, once per round. More cards is always good, but it's especially useful for Wendy - remember that her ability let her use cards to get a second chance at her tests.
Since Wendy wants to draw cards, let's give her another tool to do that.
quote:
> Wendy plays Pickpocketing.
Pickpocketing is another asset, though this one doesn't have a slot icon, so it's not competing with other assets for space. This also has a reaction ability, this time that activates when Wendy evades an enemy. Wendy is not good at fighting, preferring to run away if possible, and this will give her a reward for it.
(You might also notice that it has a different class icon - Pickpocketing is a Rogue class card, not a Survivor card. Each investigator has their own deckbuilding options, and Wendy is allowed to take lower-level Rogue cards in her deck, so we've brought a few that help her get away from enemies).
All right, enough putting it off - let's start grabbing those clues.
quote:
> Wendy investigates.
The Investigate action is how players collect clues from locations. To investigate, we first compare the Intellect (book) stat of the investigator against the shroud value of the location. Wendy has 3 Intellect, and the Study has a shroud of 2, so we're good! Right?
Not quite. Investigating is a skill test, one of many, and skill tests are the meat and potatoes of the game. Even if you are ahead of your target, there's an element of randomness that gives you a chance of failure. This is where our friend the Chaos Bag comes into play.
The Chaos Bag holds a bunch of tokens, some good, most bad. Every time you take a skill test, you draw a random token out of the bag, which will have a modifier. Apply that modifier to your skill, and that's your result! If your final skill value is equal or greater than the target value, you pass the test. Otherwise, you fail. Either way, the token goes back in the bag, so every test has the same odds as the last.
This is also where our difficulty level comes in. Since we're playing on Easy, the worst number in the bag is a -2 (minus two), so as long as we're ahead of the target by at least two, we'll be pretty confident of success. Higher difficulties mean worse tokens in the bag, meaning you need higher skill to have a good chance of success.
Of course, it's not all up to luck. Investigators do have a way to increase their skill value, to improve their odds of passing skill tests. You might have noticed that most of the cards that were played had skill icons along their left border. Here's the Flashlight again, for example:
That Intellect icon below the cost means that this card can be used during an Intellect skill test, but in a different way than before. If Roland kept that card in his hand, rather than playing it, he could "commit" it to a skill test instead. Committing cards is different than playing them; you ignore all the text on the cards, and it doesn't cost any resources. Each card that is committed to a test adds its icons to the investigator's skill for that test. Adding that Flashlight to Wendy's skill test would boost her Intellect up from a 3 to a 4, giving her a better chance of passing the test and picking up a clue.
The catch is if you wan to commit any cards to a test, you have to do so before you draw the token out of the bag. So committing cards improves your odds, but you can't add more after the fact if you pull a bad token. Also, once a card is committed, it's discarded, so be careful using up your cards too quickly!
So let's get back to Wendy's turn. She's investigating the Study, and her Intellect is 3 against the shroud of 2. We could commit cards to this test, but she's already ahead, and there's no penalty for failure aside from a wasted action, so let's draw that chaos token.
Bad luck! That -2 means that Wendy's final skill value is 1, which is lower than the shroud, so we fail that test. But Wendy came prepared!
quote:
Wendy plays "Look what I found!"
"Look what I found" is an event card, though it's not played in the same way as Emergency Cache was. As it says, it can only be played after Wendy tries to investigate, but fails by 2 or less. It also has the "Fast" keyword, which means it doesn't cost an action to play, though it still costs the two resources. It's well worth it, though - Wendy's turned her failure into profit, picking up two clues for just one action!
And lest we forget, Wendy also has a Rabbit's Foot:
quote:
Wendy exhausts Rabbit's Foot and draws a card.
All in all, a pretty good first turn!
Now that both investigators have finished their turns, we move on to the next phase in the round, the Enemy Phase. Here, any monsters in the room would attack the players, dealing damage to their health and/or sanity. Since there aren't any monsters here, we'll skip this and move on to Upkeep.
The Upkeep Phase is the end of the round, and a few things happen. Any exhausted cards, such as Wendy's Rabbit's Foot, are readied to be used again next round. Each player also draws one card, and gains one resource. Finally, each player checks to see if they have more than eight cards in their hand, and discards down if necessary.
So with that out of the way, let's move on to round 2, when the game starts getting mean-
quote:
Wendy draws Abandoned and Alone.
Oh. Oh jeez. I swear this wasn't planned, but I guess it's time to show off the dark side of the investigator decks: weaknesses.
An investigator's deck of cards represent who they are: what equipment and abilities they bring to the table, what allies they have, their experience and training, and so on. A Weakness card represents a personal struggle or trauma the investigator is dealing with, and each investigator has two weaknesses in their deck: a random "basic" weakness, and their signature weakness, such as this one for Wendy. In practical terms, this means that whenever you draw a card, there's a chance that something bad might happen.
In Wendy's case, that means she does two things. First, she takes two direct horror. Horror represents damage to the mind, and if an investigator ever has horror equal or greater than their max sanity, they're defeated. The "direct" keyword won't make much sense yet, but it means it has to be dealt directly to the investigator, and can't be soaked by equipment or other cards. The second thing Wendy does is remove her discard pile from the game (just a single card, in this case). Removing cards from the game doesn't mean they're permanently out of her deck, just that she can't use them for the rest of this scenario.
The horror sucks, but it's honestly best that she got this out of the way now and doesn't have to worry about it later. Now, let's move on to round 2 for real.
Round 2
At the start of every round, except the first, the Mythos Phase takes place. This is where all the bad stuff happens. First, we add a doom to the agenda:
As mentioned before, doom is our clock, and each doom on the agenda brings us one step closer to a bad ending. Since this agenda card isn't full yet, we move on to the last step of the Mythos Phase, where each player draws a card from the Encounter Deck. This thing is chock-full of trouble, and failing to deal with it will lead to our early demise.
These cards are always drawn in player order, so we'll start with Wendy's:
A treachery card! These represent some kind of hazard or unfortunate event. Each treachery card has a "Revelation" ability, which tells you what to do with it. Most treacheries are discarded once they're done, but this one says to put it into play in Wendy's "threat area" (a space in her play area for bad cards like this) where it will stick around. In this case we kind of lucked out - this card can be crippling in different circumstances, but here, where there's nothing to fight or evade and nowhere to move to, it's not a problem at all! As long as we can pass a Willpower test we can ditch this card before it slows us down, and Wendy has an excellent Willpower stat.
Less good. This requires an immediate skill test, and here Roland's testing his Agility stat, which is only 2. This card also has different results depending on how badly you fail by. Fail by one, and you only take one damage, but fail by three and it hurts a lot more. It's worth noting that the lowest your final skill value can be is zero - even if you draw a -8 token out of the bag, you'll never fail this test by more than 3.
Here, we're down by one, and while Roland does have a lot of health, there's no reason for him to take damage when he doesn't need to. So let's commit a card to this test!
Here we have the final type of player card, a Skill. Skill cards, unlike assets or events, don't have a cost and can't be played as an action. Their only purpose is to be added to skill tests, which there's very useful for. Many skill cards will have some ability which can be used if you pass the test, but Unexpected Courage is different. This card is special for its skill icons - those two question marks are wild icons, and can be used for any kind of skill test.
Now we're ahead of the target value by 1, so we should avoid taking too much damage from this treachery. Time to draw that chaos token.
Not too bad - we fail the test, but only by one, so Roland takes one damage. Could have been a lot worse!
With the Mythos Phase over, we now move on to the Investigation Phase, where players take actions. We'll have Wendy go first, so she can hopefully clean up the rest of the clues and not have to worry about that Frozen in Fear card.
quote:
> Wendy investigates.
As before, we won't commit any skill cards. She's one ahead of the target and there's not much downside to failing right now.
A positive token! There's a few of these in the bag, though we definitely can't rely on drawing them. Wendy passes her test and gains a clue.
quote:
> Wendy investigates. Chaos token is a -1. Success!
With her second action, Wendy pulls the final clue token off the Study. We now have enough clues to advance to the next Act card, but let's wait for just a moment. Unless otherwise stated, advancing the act is a free action that can be done anytime during the Investigation Phase. We want to make sure Wendy is prepared, in case there's any surprises in the next part of the scenario.
quote:
> Wendy plays Stray Cat.
Stray Cat is an Ally asset card, and each investigator may only have one ally at a time. The cat will help Wendy do what she does best - get away from any monsters until Roland can dispatch them. It's a one-time use, but it's automatically successful, and the squiggly line means it's a free effect, not an action.
Wendy's turn is over, so now she takes the Willpower test on Frozen in Fear. Neither investigator has any cards in hand to contribute to this test, so she'll just go at it with her 4 Will.
That's a bit unusual! While most of the chaos tokens are numbers, there's a few with special symbols, such as this "tablet" token. When drawing a token with one of these symbols, we check the Scenario Reference Card to see what effect it has.
So a -2, in this case. Good thing there weren't any Ghouls around or we'd have gotten hurt! The reference card lets the designers do all sorts of different things with the special tokens, rather than just a flat numerical modifier. Well, in our case it was just a -2, which means we fail the test and don't get rid of Frozen in Fear. But hey, a failed test means an extra card from the Rabbit's Foot!
Now before Roland starts his turn, let's spend those clues and see what happens.
quote:
Investigators spend 4 clues. Advance to Act 1b!
The "b" side of Act and Agenda cards is on the reverse of the "a" side, and give the players directions on making any necessary changes to the game. Here, we've got a few new locations in play, and we're automatically dumped in the Hallway.
Starting to get some more choices! We're currently in the Hallway, which is connected to the Attic, the Parlor, and the Cellar. You can tell which locations are connected by their symbols - the ones in the top-left represent that location, and the ones along the bottom tell you where that location is linked to (those grey lines are part of the mod I'm using, and let you easily see the connections at a glance). From here we can move to the Attic or Cellar, but take a look at the Parlor - there's a barrier in place that's stopping us from moving there. We'll need to keep investigating to learn more.
Speaking of investigating, we're in a new location, so let's reveal it:
Disappointing - only 1 shroud means it's trivial to investigate here, but with no clue tokens to find, it'd be pointless. Looks like we'll need to find answers elsewhere.
Now that we're done with the first Act card, let's take a look at Act 2:
New goal acquired: find six clues, and we'll need to gather them from the locations we can get to right now. This Act also has a restriction on advancing it - rather than doing so anytime, we can only advance this one at the end of the round, and only if we've brought enough clues to the Hallway.
Let's get to it! Roland will spend his first action moving. Moving between two locations which are directly connected costs one action (so it would take us two actions to move from the Attic to the Cellar, for example).
quote:
> Roland moves to the Cellar.
And as usual, entering a new location flips it to its revealed side.
Yikes! That 1 damage is scary, and the 4 shroud is even worse. It's a good thing Roland brought that Flashlight, or else he'd have almost no chance of picking up these clues. You'll also notice the "Victory 1" on the location. Since Arkham Horror is a campaign game, a big part of the campaign is giving players the chance to upgrade their decks with new and better cards. Upgrades cost experience, and experience is collected by earning victory points. Killing some particularly nasty monsters earns victory points, and completely clearing some locations of clues does, too.
We want that victory point, so let's get to investigating. Roland's got his Flashlight, but that's not his only trick.
quote:
> Roland spends one supply to activate Flashlight and investigate. Commits Deduction.
Deduction is another skill card, with a very useful ability. In addition to adding 1 to Roland's Intellect, if he passes this test, he'll grab an extra clue. Very strong when these clues are hard to come by!
We draw our chaos token and it's a...
Tablet! A -2, but we're fine. Roland's base skill is 3, and Deduction boosted that to a 4. The Flashlight lowered the shroud to a 2, so with the tablet's modifier we barely pass the test and collect our two clues.
Now we could investigate again, but Roland's down to one card in hand, so let's do a little something to remedy that.
quote:
> Roland draws a card.
Like gaining a resource, an investigator may spend an action to draw a card. Since we live or die by our cards (literally), it can be worth taking a little time to draw more when we're getting low.
With that, the Investigation Phase ends. No enemies means we go straight to Upkeep and the end of round 2.
And the end of this update! Next time, we'll continue exploring our house, and find some answers before trouble comes knocking.