Well, apparently, it’s been nearly a year since I’ve last posted, but I’m back because I’ve finally got something I’ve been very excited to share. Yes, there will be more posts coming but for now I wanted to share with you what I call Special Campaigns, which is very simply campaigns with additional lore or thematic restrictions. I will be posting about my experience progressing through Special Campaigns as I work through them, and you all can feel free to play along and share your own experiences if you’d like.

Here are the rules for Blessings of Asia, a Special Campaign for TSK.

Main Premise: The Foundation has devised a special undercover mission for the cell, and they require Arkham’s top Asian investigators to go on a special journey across Asia for them. They may encounter some unexpected yet welcome blessings along the way as they journey through the lands of their ancestors, blessings which will hopefully be used to their advantage throughout their mission.

Special Rules:

  • Only the following investigators are eligible for this campaign:
    • Kōhaku Narukami
    • Lily Chen
    • Minh Thi Phan
    • Nathaniel Cho
  • You must play The Scarlet Keys on any difficulty setting with any player count.
  • All player decks must include
    • At least one player card which adds Bless tokens to the chaos bag
    • At least one player card with an effect that triggers when a Bless token is drawn from the chaos bag
  • Through the course of the campaign, investigators may travel freely but they must visit at least seven of the following locations in order to complete their mandatory journey throughout Asia
    • Constantinople
    • Kabul
    • Bombay
    • Kathmandu
    • Shanghai
    • Hong Kong
    • Kuala Lumpur
    • Tokyo
    • Manokwari
    • Tunguska

Commentary:

I designed this challenge because I’ve been wanting to do an all Asian team across the Asian side of the TSK map for a while. Truthfully, I’ve hardly ever gone to that side of the map when I’ve played, so this seems like a good opportunity to actually play a campaign where I head that direction. Also, for a very long time, the Arkham Files series had very little in the way of Asian representation with Minh & Lily being the only Asians amongst dozens of investigators. Nathaniel Cho and Kōhaku Narukami are very new characters, and it’s exciting to see there now being enough investigators to field a full Asian foursome.

Furthermore, the opportunities for Bless synergies across these four investigators are very exciting. Kōhaku’s Bless synergy is fairly obvious, but the other three investigators cover the Guardian and Survivor card pool which are the natural domains for Bless cards. Minh’s Seeker 0-5 also allows for interesting Curse choices which can add a new dimension to the team’s synergy.

I’ll be working on decklists for each investigator and sharing the thought process for each one here. Once each decklist is individually published, I’ll be sharing a campaign report as I progress through this campaign.