Arkham Horror LCG Session Report: Union and Disillusion (The Circle Undone Part 6)

By Chris Renshaw

Disclaimer: If you haven't heard about Arkham Horror: The Card Game, you might have trouble with this post. Also, potential spoilers ahead. 

Last Time...

A long time ago...I used to put this out in a regular fashion. Sorry, it has been a low energy couple of weeks/months. But luckily I’ve still been playing Arkham Horror! Last time, we broke into the Silver Twilight Lodge (several times) and eventually put a stop to some rituals that the Lodge was doing, and managed to grab a puzzle box in the process. A puzzle box that in no way looks like a ghost trap from Ghostbusters. 

Just as a reminder of what investigators we are playing as again:

Myself: Diana Stanley
Cory: Rex Murphy
Jimmy: Mark Harrigan
Mike: Tony Morgan

You Must Choose…

This scenario makes it very clear from the beginning that we finally have to pick a side: between the Silver Twilight Lodge and the Coven of Witches. In fact, in the opening narration, you have to decide whether you help the Lodge complete its ritual, or help the Coven stop the ritual. Based on what decision you make determines what the victory/failure condition is for the scenario: the lodge wants a bunch of “braziers” lit, the coven wants them extinguished.

In this scenario, we also finally get back to the investigators/characters that we played during the Prologue. During the setup, we are told to add story cards for each character to be set aside (based on if each character was played in a less than 4 player game).

In our group, we decided to help out the coven, as the rich well to do Silver Twilight Lodge seemed a bit too illuminati-esque to us. Therefore, the first half of the game was spent with us uncovering paths to find the different braziers (which I kept trying to pronounce as brasserie) and then putting out those braziers. Of course this meant that we had to complete various “Circle” actions to put out those fires. As you can see from the pics above, these tasks had to be done for certain locations in order to uncover more of them. We definitely spent a little bit of time trying to figure out who would be the best person to attempt these tasks, as the rest of us were usually preoccupied with the standard Arkham issues.

About those standard issues…

What standard issues, you might be thinking. Well, I mean all the normal encounter card business that the game loves to throw at you while you are trying to focus on something else. Specifically, these two cards above were nasty to us, as this is over halfway through the campaign, so pretty much everyone had some sort of traumas. This meant that they already weren’t working with a full set of sanity and health, and knowing that the next time you are taking 2 times the damage/horror is not a pretty site, especially when you start getting close to death.

Then there are these things. I thought I had encountered them in the past, so I went and looked them up and sure enough they popped up previously in the solo runthrough of “The Dunwich Legacy” campaign I had done. When you are trying to get people in the right spot to complete skill challenges, having a -1 to all of your skills is not exactly helpful. Also, it makes it hard to kill these things, as the skills you would be using to fight are also hampered. Typically, someone drawing a Whippoorwill meant that it had to be taken out quickly by someone as it was going to prevent any progress that we were attempting to make.

Back to life...back to reality...?

Eventually, we got through and got to a plot point that we had been wondering about since the beginning of the campaign: when were we going to find out the connection with the prologue investigators? As the act/agenda cards were flipped over, the game was affected by what had happened in that prologue scenario. Characters that were “taken by the watcher” boosted the spectral watcher’s stats. When the act flipped, all of the story cards for each investigator were dealt out, and we read their fate:

At this point, if they had been taken by specters, the investigators became ghosts and attacked us. If they had been taken by the mist, then the mist returned, bringing the characters back as well. Luckily for us, only 1 of the characters ended up becoming ghosts, which meant the rest of us got new ally cards! These cards represented the surviving prologue investigators and stayed with us through the rest of the campaign.

Weird fact: even though the “returned” investigators were thrown out randomly, two of us (one being myself) ended up with the same investigator as the one we played in the prequel. This meant that I got Penny White, which worked great for me as it gave me +1 willpower for my various spell cards. However, she also had the ability to get a clue when I succeeded at a skill test on an encounter card. This effect was worthless to me: my build meant I was trying to negate all of the effects of encounter cards, and any time I had Penny out and *no* way to negate the effects, it was always a monster card that didn’t have a revelation effect. Sigh.

Oh hey look, it's the title...

It’s always a “neat” moment when you realize why a scenario is called something specific. I use neat in quotations, because often it means that the clock has tolled and the *really* bad stuff is now about to begin. In our case, by siding with the Coven, we prevented the Silver Twilight Lodge from completing the ritual that it had planned. However, it was revealed that the “Spectral Watcher” that had been plaguing us was what was left of Keziah, the witch we investigated earlier in the campaign. Then, of course, the leader of the coven absorbed the essence of Keziah, who then possessed the leader’s body and was full of excitement.

It’s at this point that everyone *not* possessed by a spirit hundreds of years old realized that it was time to skedaddle…

This scenario was a mind trip, even for Arkham. Based on the two previous campaigns I had played, I would have thought that this type of ending would be more suited for the Seventh part of the story, but we still have 2 scenarios left?!? Yikes!

What did you think of this Session Report? What monster have you hated trying to defeat? Let me know in the comments, or you can hit me up on twitter or facebook. Also, did you know we have a Patreon? Go check it out if you want to join our community and get cool dice!