Hey everybody,
I am loving the Dunwich Legacy campaign at the moment, and today I want to talk about a couple of scenarios from the centre of the scenario: Blood on the Altar, and Undimensioned & Unseen. Both of these scenarios take place firmly in Dunwich village, and I can remember vividly the feeling of being back in the Dunwich Horror expansion for Arkham Horror, back when I played them for the first time in summer 2019!
Blood on the Altar sees the investigators trying to find those kidnapped folks from the earlier scenarios, exploring the environs of Dunwich in an effort to find the Hidden Chamber where they are thought to be held. This is represented by the Chamber card and the Key to said chamber being shuffled into some random cards from the encounter deck, and being placed beneath the locations: once those locations have been fully explored, you can flip the card underneath.
In possibly my fastest game to date, my first discovery was the key, and my second was the chamber itself! When revealed, the abomination Silas Bishop is spawned there, but with Roland Banks pretty tooled up for the job, he was able to dispatch him in fairly short order. Destroying Silas Bishop, I was able to rescue all of those kidnapped folks, after all!
Campaign Log
The investigators put Silas Bishop out of his misery. We also gained 4VP in total.
In the same manner as the deluxe box, there is then an interlude, where the rescued chaps then have a bit of screen time, as we all regroup and come up with a plan to deal with the supernatural terrors plaguing the Dunwich landscape.
Dr Henry Armitage survived the Dunwich Legacy
Professor Warren Rice survived the Dunwich Legacy
Dr Francis Morgan survived the Dunwich Legacy
Zebulon Whateley survived the Dunwich Legacy
Earl Sawyer survived the Dunwich Legacy
Each of these fine folks helps with the attributes of the investigators. Roland has gained the help of Professor Rice, Dr Morgan and Earl Sawyer, while Akachi has the help of Dr Armitage and Zebulon Whateley, as well as Armitage’s Powder of Ibn-Ghazi.
After a quick pit-stop to swap out some more cards, both of our intrepid heroes have run down their experience by trading for some (hopefully!) useful cards in their decks!
Undimensioned and Unseen is a great adventure, and quite possibly my favourite from the campaign so far. Basically, the game begins with a number of “Brood of Yog-Sothoth” enemies in play based on the number of folks who were rescued in the last scenario – in my case, five folks were rescued, so we start with the minimum of two. The encounter deck has got some more enemies, but it has quite a few attachments to make these Brood enemies tougher in different ways.
Furthermore, you can only defeat them with scenario-specific Esoteric Formula cards, which come into play when the Act deck has advanced by spending clues at a specific location – the ruins of the Whateley farm. Akachi was beginning the game with the Powder in play, though, which has a number of uses based on the number of rescued folks, too. This Powder allows you to exhaust a Brood enemy at your location, avoiding its attack for the turn.
The Brood monsters are fought with Willpower, not Strength, and the Esoteric Formula allows for a bonus to that attribute if you can place a clue on the monster. You do this through exploring the locations, but the Agenda deck will force the Brood to move to a random location each turn. It’s just incredible, the way the scenario plays out!
However, I had Akachi on my side – with base 5 Willpower, it wasn’t a huge task for her to overcome the combat check of 6+ to defeat these enemies, once the Formula was discovered.
I must say, though, that it was exhausting! Akachi managed to single-handedly defeat three of these things, two of them had attachments that increased their health to 4, meaning that she couldn’t dispatch them in a single turn – it was quite the nail-biter! Meanwhile, Roland was just chundering around like a spare wheel – he did some work when more regular enemies came out of the encounter deck, for sure, but on the whole, this scenario was all about Akachi. What a hero!
Campaign Log
No Brood escaped into the wild, a fact that I’m quite pleased with, and we each gained 3VP for the experience.
I’m having an absolute blast playing through this campaign once again, in case it wasn’t completely obvious! As I near the end of the campaign, though, I do find myself thinking about moving on to the next one in release order, Path to Carcosa, which is widely agreed to be the best campaign to date. I wonder, could it beat my beloved Dunwich? Time will tell – until then, though, I need to make my way to the next scenario, Where Doom Awaits!
spalanz.com 