Bootlegger Rita (Sour Mash Guide)

For a thematic breakdown of the character and a short fiction vignette, check out the companion article here: https://strengthinnumbersarkham.wordpress.com/2023/08/27/character-concept-bootlegger-rita/

Intro

It's that time again! The time where I get into a discussion on the Mythos Busters discord about how a card isn't good and then become incredibly obsessed with finding a way to make it work because the core concept is cool.

Not every card can be saved, of course (Grievous Wound, my darling, I'm sorry, your day has not yet come). But today we'll be seeing if my mad science laboratory can bring Tennessee Sour Mash back from the brink–and I'm pleased to say, within a certain tolerance of "good", I do believe I have succeeded!

This deck actually starts a very long time ago, around the Innsmouth Conspiracy, with the release of Breaking and Entering.

Now some time previously to that, I had made the unexpected (to me) yet obvious discovery that Rita's ability does not require you to evade someone using an actual evade action. Automatic and incidental evasions are fair game.

At the time, this produced a True Survivor Rita who looped Stunning Blow over and over again as a repeatable Vicious Blow with autoevading upside. This was my era of nonstop TS decks, but I have left that era behind. Now that I am grown I have put away childish things and build nonstop Scavenging decks instead!

So when B&E came out, it was immediately clear to me that Rita had just gained the ability to join the hallowed halls of Scavenging Survivors–or rather, that she WOULD gain that ability as soon as the level 2 version was released, assuming it followed the model of the rest of its internal cycle. I built several versions of B&E (2) Rita through the two years before the card actually released, and had a blast.

So when Sour Mash and its many unfortunate failings came up, my thought immediately jumped to Rita, in memory of my old Stunning Blow TS loop and my more recent B&E Scavenger. If I fused them together, I had a tool to recur Sour Mash as often as I needed to, and Rita's ability would make it a 2-dmg weapon (or a free move) along with the automatic evasion.

Bam! Deck. Let's roll.

Deck Breakdown

Teenage bootlegger Rita Young is living on the edge, running a small business/criminal enterprise on the gang-ridden streets of Arkham, Massachusetts. She's independent, beholden to nobody, and paying her way through college by defying Prohibition.

This is most prominently represented by her moonshine, a few bottles of which she always keeps on hand to show off to potential buyers, shore up her psyche in the face of horrors beyond comprehension, or (when things go bad) use as lethal improvised weapons!

To make sure she never runs out of bottles, Scavenging replenishes her supply after every crime she commits. The automatic evasions she gets by smashing Sour Mash over someone's head combo well with Dirty Fighting (which she's certainly doing!), allowing her to follow up a Sour Mash attack with one from Fire Extinguisher, which gets her stat up to a base 6 thanks to the enemy being evaded.

To further improve her looping, Crafty pays for the reuse of her Trick events, as well as the cost of replaying Ice Pick off of spare Scavenging uses. The Picks then improve the damage output of her Mash, or the clue rate of her Tricks, making her an efficient flex.

And last but not least, her Cherished Keepsake, a fond memory of her childhood in Dunwich, shores up her shaky sanity, again being returned to play by spare Scavenging uses.

In action, Rita typically has one good Sour Mash attack per turn, and one good Trick investigate. So she'll spend her Mash knocking out (or, more often, outright killing) an enemy, her Trick (usually Breaking and Entering) to reset her board and maybe pick up another evasion, and her last action for an easy fight, an extra investigate (if she can spare the cash), or moving. And in an emergency, her 5-6 agility means she is always well-equipped to evade, so even if her entire setup gets wiped by effects like Crypt Chill she can still make a meaningful impact on the game.

Variants

I'm sure there are plenty of interesting directions this shell can be taken if you want to scrap the Sour Mash. the most obvious is probably Hyperphysical Shotcaster, and in fact I've been drawing that concept up for a while now as a modern version of my Mi-Go-altered Cyborg Rita. But for this section today, I'll stick to ways you can personalize this specific version of Scavenging Rita, assuming the goal is still to retain the bootlegger thematics and Sour Mash focus.

• First of all, the ally slot. I went back and forth a lot on this in development, ending up on Jessica for that precious extra point of Combat. But (as you may have gleaned if you read my accompanying article) the original plan was to use Professor William Webb for an extra Scavenging trigger per turn. This is absolutely still a good option, and if you're comfortable at 6 fight, I would say absolutely feel free to swap him (and some Leather Coats back in.

• Another possible direction here would be Synergy. We're already at three classes, and the solid Talisman of Protection can easily bump us to four for Strength in Numbers (hey, it's the namesake!) and Cheat the System. It's a small change, but it would alter your economic engine in an interesting way that could have larger implications.

• Stunning Blow may not have made it into the final version, but I still think it's absolutely AMAZING on Rita. You can use it yourself, or commit it to your friends' attacks, and either way it will still allow you to trigger your ability. Heck, there's probably a Rita deck out there that never fights herself, but still TS loops Stunning Blow to toss over to the party's dedicated fighter, triggering her ability remotely for free moves or extra damage off of their actions.

• If you want a more impactful secondary weapon than Fire Extinguisher, Dirty Fighting has a super interesting interaction with Sledgehammer where it reduces the action cost of the second ability by one. So you could stun someone with Sour Mash, then cave their skull with the massive swing from Sledgehammer. This would turn Rita into a bit of a bosskiller, losing some flexibility and committing her whole turn just to an attack, but WHAT an ATTACK!

Conclusion

And that's a wrap! We've kept Rita long enough–she's got moonshining and bootlegging to get back to, and Arkham needs a regular supply of the finest in drinks that make you go blind!

I hope you've enjoyed, and in the spirit of the deck, I strongly encourage people to share in the comments your favorite Sour Mash experiences! I'd love to hear where and when it has snuck its way into a campaign and made something happen.

Thanks for reading!