Functionally, they are no different that the acolytes of other factions.
To celebrate their tech-savvy nature, the Ancients Acolyte is dressed futuristically, rather than in hooded robes, and brandishes an ominous-looking eye-like device. She is based on the uniforms from one of my favorite science-fiction movies of the 60s – Planet of the Vampires, by the genius Mario Bava. (As a kid this movie scared me so much I tried to crawl under my chair at the theater.)
Acolytes are often accompanied by Reanimated, as those Mindless creatures cannot Move, Battle, or Capture unless someone is there to give them commands. These Reanimated are often worth killing off instead of your Acolytes, since a Reanimated pained off by itself is nigh-worthless.
When constructing Cathedrals, Ancients Acolytes need to be ware. Black Goat’s Avatar can be used to interrupt construction before it is complete. Strike first, as nothing is more frustrating that spending 2-3 Power to move to a potential Cathedral site, only to get bumped out again before the job is done.
One strategy… In the Doom phase, use Dematerialize to move your home area Monster, plus an Acolyte or two to an area with a new glyph, not adjacent to your current areas. You’ll probably be vulnerable to another faction, so point out they’ll WANT your Cathedral to stay after you leave. If you don’t have Worship Services yet, point out you may have it before next Doom phase.
One of the “missing pieces” of Cthulhu Wars has always been Nyarlathotep’s multiplicity of shapes. Of course, we give a shout-out to it in the Crawling Chaos spellbook of “Thousand Forms” which is supposed to work by Nyarlathotep using his forms to befuddle and confuse and spread insanity amongst his competitors. But … we didn’t actually HAVE the forms in model form.
I was interested in getting these into the game in some way, but how? I couldn’t just suddenly give Crawling Chaos a bunch of new models. It’s a well-balanced, popular, faction, and giving him a bunch of new abilities would throw off the game. As I pondered, I decided that perhaps the best choice was for me to let EVERYONE have access to the new Masks, but then let Crawling Chaos have a special relationship with them.
Introducing the Haunter of the Dark
In general, I am extremely excited about the quality of the sculpting and art for Onslaught 3. It is filled with figures that are just amazing – the new acolytes, the Yothan, Hound, Bloated Woman, etc. Every model is top-notch. And now we’ve nearly got the cash to produce the new Haunter of the Dark figure –even among the great Onslaught 3 figures, it’s one of my favorites.
The Haunter of the Dark is a full-on Great Old One. It is awakened as with most independent Great Old Ones – you need a Gate with your own Great Old One. In the Haunter’s case, you spend 6 Power to get the loyalty card, putting it in the same high-end category as game-changers such as Atlach-Nacha, Cthugha, or Daoloth. (Most Independent Great Old Ones only cost 4, or even 2.)
If you’re Crawling Chaos, you can awaken the Haunter for just 5 Power, and you don’t need a Great Old One, so obtaining it is a lot easier, BUT every other faction does get an Elder Sign when you do this.
The Haunter is explicitly a combat critter. It has a combat of 1 per enemy spellbook (so in theory 0-6, but in practice usually at the high end). I wanted to reflect the fact that one of the Haunter’s best-known characteristics is that it can’t survive well in the light. Therefore, it actually starts with a weakness, representing this disability – Fly The Light. This “ability” states that post-Battle, if the enemy scored only 1 Kill, it MUST be applied to the Haunter. If the enemy scored 2 or more kills though, you can target them normally.
The Haunter’s spellbook is really easy to get – just spend 1 Power as an action. Trivial. In fact, normally this is the first thing you’ll do after awakening the Haunter, which gives your enemies a one-turn window to try to take it out, before you get this frightful pre-Battle ability. It’s The Shining Trapezohedron. Before rolling combat dice, your enemy has to roll 1 die per unit he has in the battle. For each Kill he rolls, he must eliminate a unit (his choice).
You’ll notice that the Haunter is at its best when battling large armies. You see, a large enemy army is likelier to roll 2 kills when they attack (thus keeping the Haunter safer), AND they are likelier to roll some kills in the pre-battle Shining Trapezohedron. The Haunter is kind of expensive to move, since you typically want to keep some meat shields with him, but there are ways to mitigate this, and his lethality is worth it.
He is absolutely a problem for factions who like to mass big armies (like the Tcho-Tchos or Windwalker), which of course may encourage these factions to try to obtain the Haunter for themselves.
How Do I Stop the Haunter?
The best way is to launch a smallish spoiling attack – if you can inflict just ONE kill on the enemy, it’ll have to be taken on the Haunter of the Dark.
You can also react to its presence by spreading out your forces, instead of amassing a horde. This may slow you down somewhat, but the Haunter of the Dark is supposed to have an impact play after all. And it does!
The Azathoth “Faction” expansion has a truly unique feature – neutral spellbooks, that can replace any normal faction spellbook. But this obviously involves giving up a faction spellbook! When is this worthwhile?
Well, this is overall too complicated an answer to give in a simple design corner, because the truth is that you need to craft a strategy to take advantage of the neutral spellbook(s) you pick, and that strategy will be different with every faction!
Most people can easily see the advantages of The Stars are Right, Undimensioned, and Shrivelling. So let’s talk about the less-understood spellbooks and see how they can be handy.
RECRIMINATIONS
This spellbook lets you “throw away” an existing spellbook (including itself) and replace it with another. There are two basic uses for this ability:
1) THE EARLY GAME – you may not yet have settled on a firm strategy, or you might want to conceal your strategy from your foes. In this case, you can take Recriminations, then at an opportune moment, swap it out and embark on your real plan. This gives you flexibility.
2) THE LATE GAME – some spellbooks become less useful over time. For example, in many games, once Nyarlathotep is in play, Nightgaunts become more valuable as shields, and the Crawling Chaos rarely uses their Abduction ability. He may want to swap out Abduction for something else.
UMR AT’TAWIL
This spellbook lets you build gates for only 2 Power. This may not seem like much. Many players only build 3 gates in an entire game – so is it really useful to take Umr at’Tawil to save maybe 3 power? Plus you probably will later on use Recriminations to unload it later on, which means it is worth even less Power (since Recriminations costs 1 Power).
The advantage of Umr at Tawil is not so much the power savings in itself, but that it lets you get an extra action or two in during an early turn, and sometimes a late one. THIS is advantageous.
Here is an example:
It’s Action Phase 1, and you’re Sleeper. You spend 3 Power to get Umr at Tawil. You move a cultist, build a Gate, and summon two wizards. You now have two gates, a spellbook slot filled, and two wizards. Normally you can’t do all this in the first turn. In the Doom phase you get a serpent man.
Action Phase 2: start with 10 power. Sack 3 power on a spellbook requirement, get Cursed Slumber. Spend 1 Power to fire off a gate into space. Build a second gate. Summon two serpent men with your remaining 4 Power. Again, thanks to Umr at Tawil, you had just that tiny extra edge to get your last serpent man, so you can get a free Formless spawn at the start of the next turn, and probably awaken big T. You simply got just that little bit more done in the first two turns, and have a toe up on your enemies.
Here is another example:
A really common Action Phase 1 plan for Yellow Sign is his signature “Move a Cultist, awaken the King, build a Gate. End action phase.” But if your King awakening gives you Umr At Tawil, you’ll have 1 more Power left at the end of this sequence. You could, for example, summon an undead, starting your zombie horde a turn earlier. Or you could use that Power to move the King back to the start area, which means that you can start your next turn with 10 Power, and kick it off with a successful Desecrate, doing anything else.
THE MAO CEREMONY
This has two functions:
1) Ensure you go first, when it really matters, for example when you need to Ritual before anyone else. In some games this is literally the difference between victory and defeat.
2) Exploits.
Example: it’s the fifth Action Phase. You expect the game to end in the next Doom phase following this one. Sack ALL your cultists, get up to +6 Power, and seize the day.
Example Two: Yellow Sign use the extra Power to Third Eye his way to victory, and replacing his cultists with his Desecrates.
Example Three: Cthulhu uses the extra Power to awaken an independent GOO, not only scoring him an Elder Sign in the process, but having a Power left over to take advantage of his assets.
Example Four: you can sacrifice ANY cultist. This means you can (finally) get some Power out of that damn Dark Demon!
Here are some examples for use with expansions we are not currently offering on Onslaught 3, some of which may be available soon on our webstore:
Example Five: Glaaki doesn’t care if his cultists are dead. Suck up that Power.
Example Six: use Mother Hydra to restore all those dead cultists immediately for 1 Power. This approach may risk defenestration at the hands of your outraged opponents, though.
Example Seven: if you control Yuggoth’s Laboratory, transform your cultists into Brain Cylinders, then double-dip by sacrificing the Cylinders using Mao Ceremony in the Gather Power phase.
Everyone loved Dire Cthulhu. SO… I started brooding on Dire Azathoth. Why? Well, even as I was concerned that our former Cthulhu was so svelte, I was never fully happy with our Azathoth. For me (I realize this is subjective) Azathoth was one of our weaker Great Old One designs. He looks a little too much like a fatter Nyarlathotep, or maybe an interstellar starfish. He certainly doesn’t (to me) seem to be literally the most terrifying entity in the universe. So a new Azathoth seemed like a good idea, IF we could fund it. Since it would be a large, detailed, and expensive figure, this was tough to figure out.
Anyway, this week Kent Hamilton (our Onslaught 3 artist) was visiting me – (we were actually discussing a future project), and I broached the subject of Dire Azathoth to him. He loved it and we started beating our brains out on what this entity should look like. He has already begun! We have a sculptor lined up (one of our best) and we are going to have this puppy put together and good to go by the end of the campaign (because we don’t want to violate our China-ready ideal).
Anyway, we are really proud of what this looks like, and I’m excited to improve upon a sculpt that now might be an “earlier stage” of Azathoth’s development. However, Petersen Games has a confession to make. We did not plan for, nor allow for, the construction of this impressive new model (it’s big, too – one of my issues with the old Azathoth model was that it was only middling in size). So how could we handle the cost? It became even harder, because we had just made the decision to add the gigantic $30 6-8 Player Shaggai map to most pledge levels (Yothan, Hound of Tindalos and Great Old One), unexpectedly. Again this was done at your feedback. You the backers talked us into it.
The Shaggai map was birthed from my desire to create a map which is destroyed over time. I already dabbled with this idea in the Primeval Map, but of course Shaggai feels and plays VERY differently from Primeval.
Every map needs a particular theme. The two things we knew about Shaggai were that (A) it was inhabited by a species of intelligent insect-things and (B) it was destroyed. A map which dissolves presents some interesting design problems, plus I wanted to pay homage to the insectoid aspects of this world.
When I design maps for Cthulhu Wars, The Gods War, or other games, the first thing I concern myself with is which areas are going to have the highest population. For instance, on the core game Earth map for Cthulhu Wars, it was clear that the North Atlantic was a major crossroads. Hence it is one of the largest areas on the map (might even be THE largest). On the other hand, Australia is a less-visited hinterland, so it (and its subdivision) are comparatively small.
But on the Shaggai map, in which areas are semi-randomly eradicated, I had no way of predicting which areas were most-used. In the many tests of this map, we saw lots of different configurations. I had two choices:
First choice – determine which areas are likeliest to survive till game’s end, and make them somewhat larger. Problem – in some percentage of games, these large areas will be destroyed nonetheless, and only small areas will remain.
Second choice – make all the areas equally large, so no matter what happens, the players will always have decently-sized spots to build gates & fight over.
I went with the second choice. Make the areas all equal (at least roughly so).
Now, this led to another choice. If I am making the areas equal in size, I can do this with geometric shapes; triangles, squares, or hexagons being the most useful. Squares and triangles have the problem that in Cthulhu Wars areas that touch only at corners have undefined adjacency. (In the Library at Celaeno, for instance, I painstakingly jiggled around every single room so none touched at a corner.)
Hexagons, in addition to lacking corner connections, have another advantage. They look like insect hives – honeycombs or the interior of wasp nests, and that made thematic sense for an insect-riddled planet.
And that’s why Shaggai looks the way it does. My theory, by the way, is that the insects themselves built massive walls around each of the hexagon areas as part of their dominion and planning for their homeworld. Of course the monstrous beings that you play in Cthulhu Wars can ignore or smash through these walls trivially.
What about the Worms of Ghroth?
What are the worms of Ghroth? Another of J. Ramsey Campbell’s creations is the living planet Ghroth, a sort of harbinger of the end of the world. When Ghroth approaches by a solar system, something terrible happens to the worlds there. J. Ramsey Campbell did not fully explain exactly what Ghroth does in his short story “The Tugging”. The good news is this means that I get to figure some stuff out.
One commonly agreed effect is that the living planet wakes up sleeping great old ones and other horrors. Well we have that covered because that’s what Cthulhu Wars is all about. I have posited the seeding or implanting of these beings in larval form as part of Ghroth’s nimbus – a sort of dark inversion of the Panspermia hypothesis.
Anyway, my idea is that these creatures, which I’ve termed the Worms of Ghroth, infest planets and their burrowing in and out of hyperspace and real space opens destructive breaks in the space-time continuum and eventually leads to the world breaking up and dissolving.
Now you know!
WHY ISN’T IT MODULAR?
A few backers have wondered why, since it’s hexagons anyway, I didn’t just make the map modular. Well here is my answer – the map is in fact not randomly thrown together. It features two continents, and an ocean belt around the equator. The location of the Worm Who Gnaws in the Night is planned. The starting locations for the factions are planned. The locations of the Yellow Sign/Ancients glyphs are planned.
The effect I wanted on Shaggai was of an organized, planned world sinking into the abyss. A modular map would produce a chaotic disorganized world falling prey to into more chaos, which isn’t my desire in this case.
And also, with randomly placed hexagons, this map can be set up with terrible game imbalances. Even if I had special rules for how to place the hexagons, then instead I end up with the game’s focus being on the lengthy set-up sequence instead of having fun trying to interact with Shaggai’s destruction.
Modular just wasn’t a fit for me for any part of this map.
One of Nyarlathotep’s best-known attributes is his multiplicity of shapes . There is a shout-out to it in the core game (his Thousand Forms spellbook), but he doesn’t actually utilize this ability. Players have remarked on this, and it always bugged me a little too. However, I couldn’t justify doing a whole bunch of different Nyarlathotep models just to benefit a single faction. I mean, if the new shapes are useful, then only Crawling Chaos gets the benefit, and it throws off the game’s balance. And if the new shapes aren’t useful, why do them in the first place?
This time around I hit upon a way to incorporate these shapes without ruining balance. In this campaign, we are introducing the new Masks of Nyarlathotep expansion, which incorporates 3 different forms of Nyarlathotep (a fourth Form is waiting in the wings, if and when we hit the stretch goal). I decided that since Nyarlathotep is the servant and messenger of the Outer Gods, he is not totally subject to his own whims, and therefore it is plausible, even likely, that at times one or more of his forms is under the thrall of another entity.
The result? Each of Nyarlathotep’s forms can be taken by ANY faction. To represent Crawling Chaos’ special relationship with the forms, he is able to get them more easily than the others. However, because increasing the presence of Nyarlathotep in this way is a burden on the cosmos (and presumably, Nyarlathotep’s actual focus), all other factions get an Elder Sign when he does this.
Let’s talk about the three forms I’ve included. One is a Cultist, one a Terror, and the third a Great Old One.
The Dark Demon (Cultist)
This entity is based upon the eponymous story by Robert Bloch, published in 1936, when he was only 19 years old! He became a much better writer later on, but he had to start somewhere! He also had the amazing gift of being able to correspond directly with Lovecraft as a teenager, which no doubt affected his skills and his career.
In the story, the dark demon is a form of Nyarlathotep which manifests itself by literally engulfing and transforming his summoner. When the avatar departs, the victim’s body is left transformed, forever a hideous monster. In the box, we provide Dark Demons in every faction color: nine total figures! When you recruit the Dark Demon, all the enemy factions also get one, but theirs is a burden and weakness to them, while yours is more of an asset.
The Shadow Pharaoh (Terror)
This manifestation is Nyarlathotep’s Egyptian connection, well-known from many stories. The figure itself is a sort of combination of sphinx, scorpion, mummy, pharaoh, and tentacled horror. I really like it, and I think you will too. It has an especially nasty ability which drives cultists off gates, making the gates vulnerable to be captured once the Pharaoh leaves.
The Bloated Woman (Great Old One)
First popularized in the well-known adventure Masks of Nyarlathotep for the Call of Cthulhu system, the Bloated Woman is Nyarlathotep in a rather repulsive female form. She steals killed enemies, and later transforms your gates so they produce Elder Signs rather than Power.
Functionally, they are no different that the acolytes of other factions.
When constructing Cathedrals, Ancients Acolytes need to be ware. Black Goat’s Avatar can be used to interrupt construction before it is complete. Strike first, as nothing is more frustrating that spending 2-3 Power to move to a potential Cathedral site, only to get bumped out again before the job is done.