Arkham Chronicles S2E1: Easing into the campaign

Jeff

Apr 29, 2025 — 3 min read

In this season of Arkham Chronicles, I'll be going over my blind run of the latest campaign, Drowned City. I will be using a different format in my last run, with more structure to make it easier to follow for you, and quite honestly easier to reuse for me. This won't be a full AAR as I don't think it's appropriate for this game. As a reminder, you can find the two decks I'm using for this run here and here.

This is your only spoiler warning. While I will not tell how to win any scenario, I will definitely spoil story elements and new gameplay mechanics.

Story

Drowned City begins slowly and tries to keep it grounded. Because of an unspecified debt, you are working for a shady character, Randall Tillinghast, described as a curio dealer, which we all know means he's a smuggler. He has lost one shipment, he believes it was probably caught in a crossfire in the turf war between two gangs in Arkham, the Sheldons and the O'Bannions. Tillinghast wants you to retrieve this shipment. The prelude also introduces two other collaborators, Ruby Standish, an infamous jewel thief, and Andy Van Nortwick, a reporter that I would guess is also indebted to Tillinghast.

Gameplay

This scenario only contains a few locations. Rather than having you kill gangsters, you have to collect clues then Parley them into discarding Criminal enemies. Do that enough times and you can advance the act. There are two variants of the Act card, you select one at random, each one represents one of the gangs. For the purpose of the story, I don't think it really matters, it just for flavor. You get to one's gang in Act Two, deal with their leader, then deal with the opposing gang trying to make a riot in Act Three.

It is much more about gathering clues and using them than fighting. After clearing a location of all its clues, you discard encounter cards and put any Criminals drawn into play, a mechanic I admit I completely forgot at first and had to restart the scenario when I realized my mistake.

A final side note. This scenario uses heavily treachery cards from the Core Set, it's really a slow intro to the campaign.

Performance

My aborted start was going well, I was gathering clues quickly, but didn't draw Criminals. You can see how I wondered what I missed. After restart, things were tighter. The performance of my Agatha deck is variable. The Mouse Mask really helps speed up clue gathering, as I can spend a charge and have a high probability of success. Without it, I have to rely on sealing or redrawing tokens, not the most reliable process. I still managed to gather enough clues in time, although I missed one victory point by not clearing one location.

A pure fighter deck wasn't useful. Marion can't get clues, she spent most of the scenario waiting for something to happen and killing the odd Rat. In the last act, I had to kill one elite enemy, it would have been easy enough if not for this horrible treachery:

A card that could negate damage done to the main enemy type in the scenario? Fun times!

And yes, both my characters had it! You could waste an entire attack by failing this check. Not cool. There's also a card in a treachery set reducing your hand limit by 3 which I found nasty with the type of deck used here. Unrelated to the success of this scenario, I translated my first glyph. Hopefully this could be useful in the future.

The scenario netted 4 XP. I don't feel like I've scratched the surface of each deck. Therefore, I went with two simple upgrades: