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Monday 19 November 2018

Arkham Horror – The Forgotten Age – 4 Man Team Role Call



Very similar to what I wrote before my team started our Path to Carcosa campaign, I wanted to go into a little bit of depth about the next load of investigators we will be piloting when we boldly enter The Forgotten Age campaign.



My logic when I start a new campaign is how to fill all the real roles of the team, such as who will be our main fighter and who will be our main investigator primarily. I’ve always resigned two of us to be the inbetweener, those who may need to service both roles as we progress in the campaign and help the primary should things get touch and go.



This time however, I wanted to try and move away from our standard format, to make things a bit more interesting.  After taking our original choices for our next investigators for a test run using the Carnevale of Horrors scenario, a couple of us were not too happy with our choices of investigator. So with our Mystic and Guardian options now up in the air, it was back to the drawing board and time to review these options.



So originally I opted to go with Father Mateo, a couple of reasons really, him starting with 5xp in the bank before the first scenario would give Shaun (the player) a good lead going into the campaign and some excellent options off the bat for upgrades. However Shaun’s experience didn’t give him much faith (pun intended) on the good Father’s ability to really hit hard during the campaign. After a bit of a discussion about who we had left to chose from our stock of “unused” investigators there was only 1 mystic we had to use which was Akachi Onyele.



Now, I’m not a big fan of hers to be honest, with being limited to only 2 Arcane slots until you get some XP behind you limits her “adding charges” ability use early campaign. However, once she does get some XP behind her and gets some useful tools, her combat usefulness is up there with the Guardian class. There are some excellent spells and support tools, such as the Spirit Athame or Book of Shadows are easily useable in the deck. Upgrading to higher level versions of Shrivelling and Blinding Light can also boost the fight power of the deck, these will be searchable too with Arcane Initiate in the deck. This got me thinking that if we went ahead and made this switch, we could ditch the Guardian class altogether for this campaign and use her as our big heavy hitter instead, making a very drastic change to our group dynamic.





I had originally gone for Leo Anderson to fill the role of our Guardian class; my original though was to embrace the Guardian / Rogue crossover and try to focus on using my experience to build him into more of a Rogue than a Guardian by the end of the campaign. Utilising some of the sneaky tactics of the Rogue class while maintaining a heavy Guardian Ally front to serve as shields against any real danger I may encounter.  Sadly, during our test run of the Carnevale of Horrors, I did not really click with this character during any point of the game and I also opted to not continue with this investigator.



During the last campaign I got a taste for the Rogue class while playing as Wendy Adams, I liked it, a lot. When we played the Labyrinth of Lunacy scenario, Josh used Finn Edwards (Rogue character), to great effect in the combat role, utilising Finn’s signature card to attack bad guys attacking other people while using the Rogue weapons to make sure he could defend himself also. The ability to search for illicit cards using Finn’s other signature card really opens some doors too, especially if you have the Chicago Typewriter in the deck, the combat output can be massively boosted.





So onto Finn Edwards, his deck can only play up to level 3 Rogue cards, unless they have the Illicit trait, plus up to 15 Seeker &/or Survivor level 0 cards, also he gets to do a free “Evade” action each turn, which at first isn’t so good, but with the Rogue card pool at hand, it has loads of potential. His unique deck building inspired me to switch to a more full time Rogue character instead of a part time one. Although Finn loses a fair few of the Rogue Class cards with his deck requirements, the ones he does get are sufficient to build a solid deck. So I opted to ditch Leo Anderson for Finn Edwards as my character for the upcoming campaign, plus to try filling some of the combat functions of the group.





Our last remaining two investigators were fairly straightforward to select. Josh opted to take on the role of the Seeker this campaign, with only really 3 options left in my library to fill this role it came down to who would provide the most value to the team overall.  Out of Ursula, Norman and Minh, Ursula was the one which jumped out to me value wise. Her ability to have a free investigate action once per turn when she moves is awesome, also her ability to pack relics, gives her access to some massively useful cards once she picks up some XP. On top of the already massive array of Seeker cards, she has a lot of potential in the campaign. 





The last option was left in the hands of Stuart himself. He expressed an interest in playing as Calvin Wright, as a pretty out there character with no stat line to start with, this was a risky choice, but I feel this whole campaign will be a little risky in comparison to our safer plays previously. I like the potential for Calvin, when we played the Carnevale of Horrors, Stuart was hammering bad guys with Calvin and generally doing well at investigating too, the closer Calvin comes to being defeated, the more powerful he becomes. So I have faith that Stuart will be filling in nicely for the loss of the Guardian class as the campaign goes on. 





So the role call is Calvin Wright (Stuart), Ursula Downs (Josh), Akachi Onyele (Shaun) and Finn Edwards (Me – Tom). This rag tag collection of randoms will embark on a journey into the “Forgotten Age” come January 2019. I for one am really looking forward to seeing how these guys tackle this stage of the Mythos and what crazy crap this campaign will throw at us in comparison to the Path to Carcosa campaign.



I’m Big Boss.... I’m Out..... Peace








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