In a bid to try to get the Dream-Eaters campaign finished before Christmas, today I breezed through both scenarios in stage three, which is probably not the best way to go but I was also on childcare duty, so didn’t have a great deal of spare time. I would have been back to this game sooner, but after getting a slew of Marvel Champions things for my birthday at the weekend, I have been once more obsessing with that game. I need more focus!!
The Dark Side of the Moon is a bit like a dungeon-crawl scenario, where we start with a small board and by paying clues at a certain location, we can see just a few more locations further ahead. We are up on the moon, so of course we’re battling moon-beasts while exploring the caverns and suchlike up there. I’ve said it before, but it’s remarkable how the designers have been able to take Lovecraft’s Dream-Quest novella and turn it into this campaign. I’ve been really impressed so far with the Dream side of things, for sure.
I enjoyed seeing more of the board on a stage-by-state basis, although there is a part of me that is fondly nostalgic for the more basic scenarios from earlier campaigns, where the map is just laid in front of you, and you get to explore it without trying to work out where the next pieces of the puzzle have to go. I can’t quite help but feel like this is a bit gimmicky now, though, and rather than just have everything out from the start, they’re trying to come up with new ways of staggering the laying-out of locations.
At any rate, once we explore the caverns and stuff, we make it to The White Ship and sail away, another one of Lovecraft’s dream stories ticked off as being incorporated into the storyline. There is a mechanic in this one which uses doom tokens to represent the ‘alert’ level, which seems to be linked with drawing attention to ourselves. I was a bit unsure on this, as surely if we the investigators are on high-alert, we’re being super stealthy? But no, bad things can happen the more alert we are, it seems!
I did treat this one very much like a rush job, it has to be said, and evaded monsters rather than trying to fight them.
In the waking world, we are now at the Point of No Return. We arrived in the Underworld of the Dreamlands last time, but rather than immediately set off after our friends, Randolph Carter thinks we have the opportunity here to discover what is making the barrier between the worlds weaken, so we’re off on a bit of a side-quest, it feels. Now, there’s nothing inherently wrong with this scenario, but it did very much feel like a rehash of Search for Kadath earlier in the campaign, as each location has a story side, and it’s only by exploring these locations that we can advance the Act.
Rather than there being four distinct other worlds to choose from, there are just two further stages – Vale of Pnath locations, and then the Sea of Pitch. Each area has four locations, and one of them will allow you to advance the act. It’s a bit samey, but I decided I wanted to think of it in terms of the internal rhyme or parallel between the dreaming and the waking worlds. Or something.
Something that I liked about the setup for this scenario was how different encounter sets would get shuffled into the deck as things progress. The pack actually features two additional small encounter sets, which help to stagger the reveals. One of them features the Dhole, a classic mythos monster that we finally get in the card game! I think we’ve had this before, where a mythos pack would come with more than just a single encounter set, but it remains to be seen if they’re used in any of the final scenarios.
As you can see above, the sun started to shine as my victory became apparent, although I’m not entirely sure if I can really say that I’m winning – in the next Interlude, the black cat has brought my investigators news of Nyarlathotep, which cannot be cause for celebration! I’m a bit bemused, though, because I had thought this cycle was going to be all about Atlach-Nacha, and indeed, we have encounter sets for his agents, plus there are spiders and webs everywhere, so I’m not really sure what’s going on! But I’ve got a hefty chunk of experience points to spend on the final deck upgrades, so hopefully I can get myself organised and find the time for the last two scenarios before the weekend.
Stay tuned!!
spalanz.com 