North Country Cycle

Hello, we are a French-speaking fan group and we are translating several screenplay of AH JCE. We have started to translate your script, first of all, I hope you do not mind and then is it possible to have information about the illustrations used? You have pixelated them to standardize your campaign? Thank you for the answers you will give us.

I played through the 3 scenarios and really enjoyed them. The first one, to be honest, actually seemed a bit simple and I saw no reason to deal with the Sheriff. I loved the final two, however. I especially enjoyed the element of losing locations to the flames. It added a nice touch. The third scenario was quite difficult, but that's what you'd like from a campaign. All in all, well done!

Hi everyone!

I've just finished a video playthrough of this campaign and it's up on YouTube. I had a great time!

Part 1 is here: https://youtu.be/pdwlhkZCHNw

We just played through the whole cycle and I would highly recommend.

It was very well thought-out and challenging. We managed to succeed in getting through all three, but our successes had to build through each campaign, and we made it by the skin of our teeth.

The mechanics in the middle campaign were particularly good. One of my favourite campaigns I’ve played. Don’t want to give spoilers or build up too much, but it was awesome.

A few notes:

A fair bit of printing, cutting, and folding to put the whole thing together. Well worth it in the end, and we now have everything sleeved and in a box ready to be gone through again with fresh characters.

Each campaign took a little longer than the average length of other Arkham campaigns up until now. I’d say that’s a plus. Just set aside a little extra time for each one.

As a three-campaign cycle, a great place to try out new characters and get a feel for them and how to use victory points to build them. Our success came with an Agnes Baker and William Yorick combo.

Well done and thanks for putting this together!

I played most of fan made scenarios and this one is the best. Great atmosphere, very goods mechanics and what is the most important to me adventure. Good job, looking forward for more.

I did want to chime in with a quick mini-review of this mini cycle. I do think North Country Cycle definitely contains some of the best fan made material in the greater Arkham Horror: TCG universe. The story is both unassuming - which is good because it is easily added to other campaigns - as well as well fleshed out into its own complete arc.

There is also a lot of love shown here as far as the mechanics and theme. The second scenario in particular reminds me a lot of what the second scenario in Night of the Zealot should have been, and even exceeds the professionally-made scenario by leaps and bounds.

That being said, I'm not sure I can recommend this cycle based almost solely on how unbalanced the last scenario, North Woods, is. There are some minor spoilers below, but let me see if I can explain my thoughts.

First, I do have to quickly state that for some reason in the fan community, there is the belief that scenarios must be 'really hard' to be good, and that the best way to make a scenario hard is to require a metric-ton of clues to be gathered to advance an act. Can we please stop doing this? Here, the first act requires a whopping 8 clues per investigator against an initial clock of 12 doom for the first agenda. I don't mind 'hard' scenarios, but requiring a ton of clues in an act is not the way to do it.

Dear fan-content making community: there are two things I need you to know. First. IF you use double 'Agenda/Acts' at '6 doom/4 clues' each, it is SIGNIFICANTLY more balanced than having 12 doom/8 clues, and retains a lot of the difficulty. Having those progression gates of flipping an act sooner (but having more of them) greatly mitigates the random luck events of the game. Second, STOP designing for the 'highest-common-denominator' of clue gatherers. I know you can have broken cluvers averaging 2 or more clues per turn, but this means you are leaving out anything but the most optimized investigators/teams.

Ok, back to North Woods.

Again, we have a first Agenda/Act of 12 doom vs. 8 clues. Normally this would mean 1 clue per investigator per turn which is doable. So far so good. However, we are also adding a token that adds doom. In a standard draw, that is a 1/17 chance to add doom and this does not scale in your favor if playing with multiple players, since more players means more tests means more doom, however while clues are increased, doom required to advance the agenda is not.

Each doom added reduces your clock so now 12/8 is looking a little more tight. Still doable. Then come the clue-removing factors and this is where the scenario starts to fall apart. There is a token which AUTOMATICALLY loses you a clue. No test, no 'on fail only,' just straight up gone. There are also encounter cards that can lose you clues. There also are locations that can lose you clues. This becomes ridiculous to the point where we've had a game where we lost 6 total clues in two rounds.

These elements on their own are not a big deal however when combined start to add up to a bit of a train wreak. Again, if we could advance the agenda half-way, we could 'bank' some of these clues, but every clue we held is just a few turns away from being re-captured by the game. But wait, it gets better.

There is no 'resign' really in the game, so you need to press on to a win or defeated condition. The encounter deck is extremely enemy heavy, at 16 out of 38 (almost half) cards being enemies, and a lot of them being heavy hitters with a lot of 3/4 health and 4 fight/evade stats mixed in. Also, unless you play in a very particular way, the only way to advance to a win condition is through combat with a boss/mini boss. Which makes a Guardian/Seeker combo almost manditory in two player.

Now we have beaten this scenario (Roland/Wendy) but after playing it a number of times, I can tell you that instead of a good build and good skill, this scenario really falls down to getting lucky. You need to draw less than average of the bad tokens, you need to draw the correct encounter cards, you need to reveal and find the hidden woods locations in a particular order (there are 12 of them and 1 you absolutely need to find), you need to defeat a TON of enemies and gather a TON of clues, and you need to do it all quickly.

Did you draw or mitigate encounter cards and tokens well? Too bad, the location you needed to find was one of the last ones revealed and tanked your game. Drew that location right away next game? Too bad, enemies and bad token draws advanced the doom too quickly before you could flip the act and it tanked your game. Did everything perfectly? Too bad, as you used up all your cards and couldn't save up enough to beat the final boss.

Unfortunately, this part of the cycle is not fun and since it is the climax of the cycle, it really kind of ruins the experience. Maybe there is someone who has played this and can comment, but I doubt there is anything that can be said to turn it around. I think there are a number of tweaks and house rules that can be made to 'fix' it but for now we will probably be moving on.

No scenario guide?