Arkham Chronicles S2E3: Going to the bottom of this

As usual, there will be spoilers in this post.

The campaign is cruising nicely so far, I know I play on Easy, but I like the experience of this game more than having a rough time. This scenario is called Court of the Ancients

Story

After traversing the Obsidian Canyon, the team made its way to the dome-like structure. We reached it by finding an entrance to the top-level catwalk. From what I understand, we would have made it through lower tunnels if we were coming from the West. The walls are covered in alien symbols, a sign that only bad things can happen here. A few steps in, we stumbled a fresh corpse in a pool a blood, someone was here not long ago. This factored in adding cultists to the enemy pool, but not in the story.

Gameplay

Before the scenario, I was told to add a tablet token in the chaos bag. Absolutely not ominous! 😉 The location in this scenario are stacked into two columns and for once, adjacency doesn't mean anything. Between the two columns, there's an inactive lift, the only mean to move up or down. Coming from the East, the Lift is at the top where we start, while from the West it would have been at the bottom. The lower locations are flooded, which could be an issue if we were starting at the bottom. The lift becomes active after it is cleared from clues. Afterward, you have to investigate the lift to move it, doing so you can spend clues to move than one level.

A few glyphs can be found on the Treachery cards. Therefore, there's a mechanic to discard cards from the deck until a glyph can be added to your location. Obviously, some of the cards discarded will still take effect, it would be too easy otherwise.

Once again, investigators can choose a card from the Expedition set or an Artifact previously discovered. I kept it simple, went with the same setup as in the Canyons.

Performance

Reactivating the lift was simple enough. Doing so spawns a strong monster in the lift that can't move elsewhere, and you better be there by the end of the round, else everyone gets mental damage. Marion had here trusty Machete, a Guard Dog and a Vicious Blow in hand; she made short order of this monster.

I was a bit lucky by drawing early the two monsters with a glyph on them. They are not particularly strong, and you translate the glyph by killing them. One question I had in setting up Marion's deck was if there would be enough Monster to use regularly If it bleeds, thus far the answer is positive.

Getting to the resign-location is easy, but if you're curious like me, there's another location nearby with an entry requirement: minimum 3 translated Glyphs in the Victory Display and 4 clues per investigator. While the scenario seems tight on Doom, I had enough time to use location actions to discover more glyphs and clues. I was rewarded by discovering my first artifact, the Shard of Y'ch'lecth !

The way these artifacts work, and presumably other cards in the campaign, is that you don't resolve or can't use what written under the glyph unless you have translated all of them during the campaign. I have only translated two out of the four necessary glyphs to fully use the Shard.

I missed one glyph that I wasn't able to translate, since there are also Treachery cards forcing glyphs in play to be discarded. With both Marion and Agatha being able to mark a progress on their Task, I consider this scenario to be a success.

The flooded sections were not a factor, especially since water rescinded after the first Agenda. I think this is the advantage of coming from the East. I assume I will be penalized in other scenarios.

Another 6 XP was earned. They were spent as follow:

• Marion:
  • Oops! ▶️Fang of Tyr'thrha
  • Grievous Wound ▶️Enchant Weapon. I'm betting on Enchant Weapon to be a more reliable source of additional damage.
• Agatha:
  • Sixth Sense ⏫Sixth Sense-4
  • Oculus Mortuum ▶️Lost Arcana. The Oculus hasn't been useful so far, the trigger condition might be too narrow. Lost Arcana seems like a good way to keep pace with the Spell events.