Arkham Chronicles S2E8: Back in Arkham

The team is finally out of R'yleh, this means all danger is behind us, right? 😅 The end of the Drowned City campaign is divided into several parts, I will do my best to make it clear for you. It's probably going to be a two-posts summary to avoid hitting you with a huge wall of text. As usual, there will be many spoilers below.

Story

The team regroup on the boat, only to find at least one crew member died when pilgrims rushed the boat to steal rations. Thankfully the boat is intact, there's still enough food to get everyone back to Arkham. Andy deciphered the text on the original tablet and, obviously, it's absolutely ominous.

At this point, there's a fork in the story. If you have found the 5 artifacts and translated all 26 glyphs, you get a longer narrative text explaining the rise and fall of an ancient civilization and how a dead or sleeping ancient god, Cthulhu, is calling his followers here. You also get to choose whatever you want to leave this place at once or try to ensure this god never awakes, and play a scenario called Sepulcher of the Sleeper.

If you managed to this, congratulations! You're much better than me at this game. Since I wasn't perfect, I'm redirected to an interlude while also adding zero token in the chaos bag. That's a positive, and I find this highly suspicious.

As you have probably guessed, a gargantuan beast with 5 red eyes, many tentacles and bat-like gigantic wings appears at the city gates and wobbles towards the beach. Looking at him makes everyone unsteady, it's like he's in this world, but also part of an ethereal world. His mere presence is enough to force most of the crew into submission. Eventually, someone snaps out of it, rounds up the crew and the boat can leave the city. While everyone is convinced this alien god will jump into the water and sink the boat, it doesn't follow.

The interlude pauses here. You have to remove all cultist, tablet and elder thing tokens from the chaos bag and re-add some of them depending on the number of artifacts you recover. The net result for me was to remove one tablet, then add two cultists.

The team makes it to Arkham safely, Tillinghast is happy, providing you recovered at least one artifact, and erase your debt. Time to finally check your Tasks! Each investigator gains one XP for each progress of their task. If you have 5 marks, congratulations, you get to flip the card on its positive side! If not, well, though luck, you get an additional penalty for the last scenario.

Marion, 3 marks, received a physical trauma, her fourth (!), then I had to draw two numerical tokens from the chaos bag, and downgraded them by two. A 0 token became a -2, a -2 became a -4. Agatha, 2 marks, suffered a mental trauma and has now to consider any elder thing token to be an auto-fail. At this point, with so many traumas, I don't feel confident about the last scenario.

Onto the last scenario, The Doom of Arkham. For real, this time. Months have now passed, no sign of Cthulhu, but everything feels wrong. The team is haunted by nightmares, neither they can't find Ruby, Andy or Tillinghast. There are several reports of people in Arkham falling asleep and never waking up.

It's finally Ruby and Andy who find the team, flanked by a police inspector, John Raymond Legrasse. It is not explicitly said, but I assume Ruby and Andy have been cooperating with the investigation. He explains Tillinghast wasn't recovering his property, but stole the artifact. He's in town to investigate and interrogate Tillinghast. He already confronted him once, Ruby and Andy witnessed the tail end of it after looking for the shop for days, it's like it had moved around Arkham. Tillinghast weaseled his way out, when the other three left the shop, they were no longer in Arkham. It took them a month to make their way back! Something fishy is going on! Because we're suckers, I mean because we're good guys, we agree to help them find Tillinghast, confront him and get an explanation.

Gameplay

This scenario uses the Arkham locations found in the core box. There's an additional location, Tillinghast shop, with a treachery back. It is shuffled with other treachery cards from the Midnight Masks, one card is placed under the six non-starting locations. You need to spend clues to draw these cards, pretty standard affair. The twist here is, once you find the shop, you place the artifacts recovered in the campaign under it and use the same mechanic to recover them. All this within a rather tight doom count and with the flood mechanic.

Performance

Lady Luck wasn't on my side. I found the shop, but it was the sixth and last location I checked. By that time, I had one turn left to try to recover one of the artifacts, and even that was a total failure. Marion was able to handle the few monsters encountered, her deck is a well-oiled machine by now. Agatha, though... 🙁 No matter how well constructed your deck might be, if you don't draw the key cards, you'll underperform. That's what happened here, I drew a minimum of investigating help, slowing everything down a lot.

I assume I'll get an additional penalty for not having any artifact in the second part of the scenario. Meanwhile, everyone get one more basic weakness! I was also asked to note down the flood level of each location. On the positive side, you are given one last opportunity to spend your XP between the two parts.

Stay tuned for the second part of this scenario, where everything will be fine I'm sure. 😅

• Marion:
  • "If it bleeds" x2 ▶️Hunter Armor x2. This is not a switch I would make normally, but knowing this is the last scenario, that Marion has 4 physical traumas and 1 mental, I'm trying to increase her survival chances. I spent all my XP on the armor, choosing Enchanted (now a Relic, takes a arcane slot rather than a body), Durable (+2 health) and Lightweight (-1 cost, doesn't provoke an attack of opportunity).
• Agatha
  • Brand of Cthugha-1 ⏫Brand of Cthugha-4.
  • Guts ⏫Guts-2 After upgrading Brand, there isn't any key upgrade I could have done, so I went with a very basic one.