Strange Eons adds Arkham Investigations support

For those of you that play Arkham Horror, Chris Jennings' excellent Strange Eons, a Java program for creating custom Arkham Horror material, has a new alpha build available which adds support for Arkham Investigations casebooks and foldable tomes. Ia! Ia! Chris Jennings fthagn!

New Arkham Investigations casebook: Whispers in Darkness

A new Arkham Investigations casebook is available on the Arkham Investigations web site.

Based on Lovecraft's story The Whisperer in Darkness, the case is called Whispers in Darkness. When a torrential rainstorm brings to light a deadly mystery, you will travel to the Vermont countryside to face otherworldly horrors that lurk around the Akeley farmhouse.

It was originally written in Italian by a fellow Arkham Horror fan named Jocularis. The English version is available from the casebook archive.

George W. Bush as an Arkham Horror Investigator

In honor of the release of King in Yellow, I figured I'd go ahead and release a custom investigator I designed that is strangely appropriate for the occasion. Introducing George W. Bush as an Arkham Horror investigator:

Click to Enlarge

Note that you will need both expansions to play with ol' George here. (I guess there just wasn't enough evil in the base game to accommodate him as a character.)

I didn't write the back story because, well, I think we sadly all know the back story by now, eh?

The King in Yellow rises

Hastu...

Whoops, don't say his name.

The "King in Yellow" has arrived. According to the online store, anyway, the latest expansion for Arkham Horror is hitting the streets as we speak.

According to the prereleased rules, this expansion adds some cool new mechanics, such as heralds (sort of a sidekick for the Ancient One) and blight (a mechanic to add some real teeth to the Terror Track, something that's been needed for a while).

Overall, it looks like a sweet expansion which will add interesting new challenges to the core gameplay. I'll be picking this one up as soon as I see it on the shelves.

New Arkham Nights version available

I've just uploaded a new version of Arkham Nights, my expansion for Arkham Horror which adds encounters to street locations.

This version changes the way the casebook is organized. Instead of having all the location encounters in a single casebook, there are now individual half-size booklets, one for each street location. This reduces the space needed on the table for them, allows multiple players to manage their encounters at once, and generally adds more fun and atmosphere to the game than the original, thanks to the stylized nature of the booklets. (They also match the Tomes expansion.)

This version also fixes a few typos and fixes the card sheet which was printing out at the wrong size.

You can get the new expansion at the Arkham Investigations site.

Foldable Tomes release

I've released the "foldables" version of Arkham Book Club, which gives you a cool foldable tome booklet to replace each tome in the core Arkham Horror game. These little babies are more fun, more atmospheric, and easier to use than the original casebook release, so be sure to check them out.

You can get them at the Arkham Investigations casebook page.

Foldable Tomes

It figures. Only after releasing the Arkham Book Club casebook do I really get an idea for replacing the tomes in Arkham Horror with a more fun mechanic.

These foldable tomes replace the tomes in the core Arkham Horror game. When you draw a tome during play, discard the tome card and pick up the foldable tome instead. The foldable tome allows your character to pore over its mysteries for days, learning spells and unique skills peculiar to the individual tome.

The link above shows the first draft of two tomes: Ludwig Prinn's terrible De Vermis Mysteriis, and the strange and alien Dhol Chants detailing a visit to the awful Plateau of Leng. More to follow.

Arkham Book Club

I've just released a new Arkham Investigations casebook called Arkham Book Club.

The idea for this casebook is to give the tomes in Arkham Horror a stature more in line with tomes in Lovecraft's literature. In the original stories, tomes were the source of dark spells for summoning awful creatures, and the source of knowledge for scholars opposing them. This casebook adds some mystery and power to tomes, giving a unique character and story for each one, and a set of new spells and skills that can be derived from them. You can get the new expansion from the Arkham Investigations casebook page.

Here are some teasers from the expansion:

New Arkham Investigations tidbits

The last few days have seen a few new items added to the Arkham Investigations site:

• Version 1.3 of the rules set has been uploaded. This version tweaks some of the multiplayer combat rules, and clarifies some other aspects of the game. (Thanks to Thelric, maker of Strange Eons, for the suggestions.)
• A new version of the Cthulhu casebook is available which fixes some minor bugs and typos. (Kudos to Thelric for this one, too.)
• The German version of Arkham Nights: Street Locations is now available (thanks again to Stefan).

Introducing Arkham Nights: Street Locations

The second casebook for Arkham Investigations, my custom expansion rules for Arkham Horror, has been released.

It's called Arkham Nights: Street Locations, and basically just provides encounters for the street locations, for those of you tired of sitting around in the streets while your buddies go having fun adventures in Arkham locations and other worlds.

It introduces some new cards, notably reputation cards, which are cards which track the town's knowledge of your investigator, and several new ally cards based on Lovecraft's (or Sandy Petersen's) writings. Here are some samples:

Check it out, and let me know what you think.

More work in Cocoa

I've been tinkering more with Xcode and Cocoa, working on making a utility to help people write casebooks for Arkham Investigations. Here's a screenie of progress so far:

(Click to enlarge)

Not all the controls you see here work yet, but it is letting you click back and forth between the table on the left and paragraphs on the right to edit. You can also shift-click on the table to automatically add a paragraph reference to the clicked-on paragraph to the currently-edited paragraph, something that took me quite a bit of reading to figure out how to do (and I'm pretty sure there are better ways to do it, but I'm just not familiar with the framework yet).

Arkham Horror Single-Player Rules available

In addition to the new rules release of Arkham Investigations, I've also put up the single-investigator house rules for Arkham Horror developed by my buddy Rich.

Rich has spent a lot of time trying to tweak the difficulty balance for the single-investigator game, and has come up with six rules to help give the lone investigator a fighting chance.

You can grab the new rules on the Arkham Investigations rules page. (Any other house rules and rules variants we produce will also go on that page.)

Arkham Investigations new version out

After lots of feedback, I've made some changes to the Arkham Investigations rules and uploaded them to the site. Go to the Arkham Investigations web site to grab the new versions. There are new versions of the rules set, token sheet, progress cards, and an updated version of the first casebook that is compatible with the new rules.

The major changes include:

Toughness Tokens

Because casebooks tend to focus on particular enemies, it's easy to run out of enemy chips when you take them as monster trophies. So now, instead of taking the monster as your trophy, you take one Toughness Token for each point of toughness the monster has and return the monster to the monster cup. Then, toughness tokens may be spent just like one-toughness monster tokens. This also provides a mechanism to reward players for accomplishing tasks in the case by granting them toughness tokens to spend.

Generic Investigation Progress Cards

The Vignette cards and Investigation Progress cards are now melded into single cards that track progress through the vignette and its state. And because they are generic - with labels like "A", "B", etc. - they may be used from game to game, and don't project the environments the players will face during the case like the old ones did.

Paragraph-based exposition

The game has now adopted a "read paragraph X..." mechanism for presenting the story. This not only helps hide the plot from being revealed prematurely, it also adds more dramatic tension to decisions, because you don't always know the ramifications of a decision you are about to make. Do you approach that stranger on the train station platform, or not? If so, read paragraph 12. If not, read paragraph 37.

Simpler timeline mechanic

We've done away with the doom track and simply made the endgame get triggered when the timeline runs out. This is not only simpler, but it also allows Arkham Investigations to be played as a stand-alone game or as an expansion for the core Arkham Horror game by removing the multiplicative impact the old timeline mechanism would have had on the Doom Track. You could even play multiple games of Arkham Investigations at once.

More author-friendly format

The sum total of the above changes makes creating casebooks much more fan-friendly. Whereas before, authors would have to produce Vignette cards, now authors need only provide text, which can be delivered easily and with little bandwidth. And because of the new timeline mechanism, fans can create short or long stories depending on their commitment to the effort.

Let me know what you think!

Introducing Arkham Investigations

Arkham Investigations is a fan-made expansion to the excellent Fantasy Flight game Arkham Horror.

Unlike other fan-based expansions, Arkham Investigations does not attempt to add a new locale, new characters, etc. Instead, it attempts to modify the gameplay to achieve a few goals:

• Add an exciting endgame sequence when the players do well, too, not just when they fail to close gates fast enough.
• Allow for more bibliographically faithful, plot-based investigations by limiting the monster pool and including staged encounters that follow a story.
• Allow players to cooperate against monsters and location challenges (but also allow monsters to cooperate against players!).
• Provide a mechanism that allows other fan-based expansions to be easily created by other fans.

Arkham Investigations is intended to be an alternate method for playing the game, not a complete replacement. This is primarily because in order to play, you need a casebook, which is probably only interesting for one or two playings. Hopefully, this will add value to your game, and give you and your gaming group a fun way to pass an evening.

Enjoy!