Rational Thought

“I think it started when I burnt down my house. But a woman with a torch told me to. You see, the rooms were all changing places...”

Carolyn looked down at her yellow legal pad, where her notes were simply “cult psycho“ and a doodle of a cat.

——

I don’t think there’s a signature weakness in this LCG that goes from “game threatening” to “not a big deal” between scenarios one and three. It’s amazing.

In your first scenario, you’re likely clearing one horror per action. That’s four actions this card eats up, four bucks you don’t get, and four horror teammates whine at you about. When you get ancient stones: minds in harmony, you can heal horror passively. You’ll delete this weakness automatically after a while, or by actively drawing cards. By scenario 3, your draw engine should be better, which means hypnotic therapy may be in your tableau... Someone could play deep knowledge on you and automatically get rid of your weakness.

——

“The dreams are getting stranger, and I can’t focus on finals at all. It’s an undersea kingdom...”

Carolyn handed over a flier. “You’re distressed because you’re a horrific mermaid. I need you to see this magician tonight and head over to a city that’s even worse than Arkham. You’ll also want a shirtless pirate and a spy. Before you go, there should be a bible right over by your lounger...”

MrGoldbee · 1505
How are you listening in to my therapy sessions?!? — LivefromBenefitSt · 1093
If someone else has solemn vow, you can move the horror off of rational thought from scenario 1. If Carolyn also has it, move it that horror to peter after Rational thought is gone. — Django · 5179
If i have 2 Mental Trauma can i heal 2 at a time with a Thermos? If so it's pretty great starting with "In the Thick of it" (of course with the 2 mental trauma choice) and a couple of Thermos. — Masnonet · 4
Solemn Vow doesn't work because it moves horror off of "a card you control" and treacheries in your threat area are not cards under your control. — Death by Chocolate · 1495
Silas's Net

Silas’s net is tricky. You’re not likely to be engaged to more than one enemy unless you’re doing that on purpose or facing a boss. But the secondary ability, to recover your skills after successful test, is extremely useful. Nimble, manual dexterity(2), quick thinking... Evades can now give you tons and tons of supplemental actions, far and above what it would take to play the net again.

Playing resourceful multiple times a game means not having to invest in cards that get it back, like scrounge for supplies or true survivor. But the net, like the harpoon, needs to be built around. If you don’t have many agility or wild icons in your deck, then the net is meh.

UPDATE: Taking another look at Silas’s net, it can evade massive enemies, especially ones that have alert. That makes fighting bosses as a team much much easier, as the catch of the day becomes “elder gods“. It also lets you tank enemies in larger teams, and the Innsmouth conspiracy definitely doles out more than one enemy per player in many circumstances. Plus, you can take the net back into your hand with quick thinking, and put down your chainsaw.

MrGoldbee · 1505
Solemn Vow

With the recent release of the Winifred Habbamock pack, this card can be added to a combat-oriented rogue / guardian (Skids, Jenny, Leo, Zoey or someone else using Versatile) to be played in combination with Lonnie Ritter and Leather jacket: the fighter play Solemn vow under the control of an other investigator and then this investigator can transfer damage / horror to Leather jacket / Lonnie Ritter respectively and then for 1 resource the fighter heals both his assets.

AlexP · 300
Lonnie can already heal off of allies' jackets. — MrGoldbee · 1505
But she can't heal off their faces, which this can transfer from. It's a bit techy, but it gives your allies a little freedom to run off on their own. — SGPrometheus · 856
Lonnie requires your allies to have armor with 2+ health, that's not everyone's thing. Seeker doesn't even have one. So Solemn vow it to your own armor or Jessica is a good alternative. — Django · 5179
Return to The Devourer Below

I have expend all the morning fighting Umordoth in the Vault of Earthly Demise. We wanted to play the Return to the Night of the Zealot without sacrificing Lita Chandler in hard mode. 2 players. We arrived to the conclusion that the Vault is a card too powerful that makes this impossible. We need more characters or an easiest difficulty. But even with more dakka increasing the combat stat of Umordoth seems a bit unbalanced. Maybe we can fight once or two times against a 6-8 combat stat, but to defeat it we need many combat rounds. Is impossible to sustain many fights againts these numbers. So basically my review of this card is that we need to read the text as: "Kill Lita Chandler, don't even try to challange me, you weak humans." Has been fun though.

Matamagos · 4
Or maybe the point is that you actually have to go for R1? R2 is famously easy in the original scenario! Have a plan; R1 is possible! — Death by Chocolate · 1495
R2 is also possible in the "Return to", but you need to build your deck specifically for this one task. One cheesy strategy is to play Renfield and amass ridiculous amounts of resources (since you don't really care about doom in this scenario after Umordoth already appears, you can gain lots and lots of resources with Renfield). Then use these resources to boost your skill values in order to successfully attack. Supplement this with some testless damage options and some soak/damage and horror cancellation to stay alive long enough and it is possible to beat this 8/20 (given two players) stat monstrosity. — PowLee · 15
I did it with Tony in Hard last week. There is a deck for it. I took Dynamite, Marksmanship, Dodge and his Colts with a lot of ammo cards. It would have been a lot easier if Ursula hadn't perished since she had the Bow and Blood-Rite. Tony had to do all 18 damage. The deck name is - Tony Morgan - The Devourer Meets Its Match. — The Lynx · 1011
You could advance the act to reduce the vault's bonus. Or spend a few XP as guardian to get cheap fight boosts, like ace of sword, 2x reliable. Also take 1-2 beat cop and/or grete (2x charisma). With base fight 4, you should have around 10 combat as most XP weapons grant +2 or more. — Django · 5179
Jim Culver

Jim’s weakness, Final Rhapsody, used to be a rough setback. Now, with the Innsmouth Conspiracy, you can mitigate it. Fill the bag with blessings and curses, draw five tokens, and take much less damage than before.

There’s not much else to say, except that Jim’s Trumpet scales well with more players. More players means more tokens, with four people out it’s likely that you’ll trigger every turn, especially if you bring Olive McBride on the road.

MrGoldbee · 1505