Before we can get to our next scenario, we have housekeeping to take care of. We must spend our 5 XP & then do a couple embarks to get to our next destination. Let’s resolve our XP first!

Kōhaku makes the following changes:

+1 Charisma, +1 Gabriel Carillo, +1 Four of Cups, -2 Guided by Faith

Charisma allows us to stack our unique allies which at the moment are one copy each of Alyssa, Gabriel and Ikiaq. Any combination of the two of them would be welcome. With our last XP, I’m going to buy a copy of Four of Cups, since our strategy here is to go all in on stacking up our stats. I will cut both Guided by Faith to make deck space for the new cards. I don’t think this event is needed at all for my deck to function since we already have Bless generation and clue discovery figured out just fine.

Next, Nathaniel makes the following changes:

+1 Boxing Gloves level 3, -1 Boxing Gloves level 0, +2 Radiant Smite, -1 Ofuda, -1 Clean Them Out

With our XP, we can upgrade our other copy of Boxing Gloves and finally pick up our 2 Radiant Smites! I’m happy to lose one Ofuda here as I have yet to even care enough to play this card despite holding it in hand for many rounds. Clean Them about can go because with the cheaper Boxing Gloves and one Ofuda down, the average cost of our deck has gone down. We’ve also never been struggling for money on Nathaniel so far because of Kōhaku helping with the team economy.

Minh makes the following changes:

+2 Deduction level 2, -2 Deduction level 0, +1 Esoteric Method, -1 Unexpected Courage

I wasn’t sure what to do with Minh’s XP, since a lot of the cards in this deck are already fine. I want to get Ancient Covenant but in practice I’m not seeing a massive benefit to getting it right now. Ancient Covenant would mostly help me pass tests, but I’m already passing tests without issue most of the time, so it doesn’t feel urgent to grab it. I decided to just put some XP towards the skill cards, with Deduction being an obvious upgrade. Esoteric Method felt great to use last scenario, so I was happy to pick up the second copy here.

Finally, Lily makes the following changes:

+1 Blessed Blade level 4, -1 Blessed Blade level 0, +1 Enchanted Blade level 3, -1 Enchanted Blade level 0

Lily does the exact same upgrade plan as the previous session. Now she has two copies of each of her fancy swords! With five more XP, she’ll get another discipline as well, so we have that to look forward to.

Embark

With that out of the way, it’s now time to use our Expedited Ticket to get to Hong Kong. We arrive at Hong Kong on Time #12, and we are now 2/7 Asian cities for our challenge. Because we arrived here so fast, we get to write in our campaign log that “Flint traveled to Kuala Lumpur”. That’s where we are going next, so we arrive in Kuala Lumpur at time #13, and mark Asian city number three! With that we can begin Shades of Suffering!

Shades of Suffering

Because Flint traveled to Kuala Lumpur, someone can add him to their deck! So at face value, it would make sense for this to be Kōhaku because he has Charisma. However, I’m going to actually give this to Lily. Lily is the hardest to get new allies for because of her Rabbit Hole — she won’t be buying better allies with XP. Lily is also someone who will likely be exposing a lot of cards as she fights with her blades, so she may get some value out of Flint’s ability. So the decision is made and Inspector Flint has found his way into Lily’s deck!

From here on out I started playing, and I have to apologize in advance because this was my first time playing this scenario. I didn’t take any notes because I was trying to focus on figuring out what was going on. And reporting from the future, I did forget a few rules a couple of times and wait several day to actually sit down and write this. Anyway, please bear with me as this report will be generally less detailed than previous ones.

The scenario opened with all the investigators on the Selangor Club. We have a fresh map with clues to discover and decoys to expose – the first order of business is to do a little bit of both as we need to have 4 clues and expose Tzu San Niang. Kōhaku got Ikiaq which is a great card to start building up his stats, and Lily mulliganed hard for a weapon and found an Enchanted Blade. That was about it for good starting cards. Nathaniel had an Ancestral Token and some events, which is fine but we really want the Boxing Gloves right away. Meanwhile, Minh had an incredibly awkward Dark Horse and Magnifying Glass opener. Minh was able to play those, but unfortunately, had no way of getting down to 0 resources. Also, reporting from the future — this was a huge problem for Minh this entire scenario as Minh never drew a single Mariner’s Compass or even a Dig Deep for that matter. Minh was forced to pivot to an alternative playstyle but more on that later.

Kōhaku and Minh were at least able to start picking up a few clues with their buffed Intellect, since that’s never been particularly hard for them to do. It was less than an ideal setup to start, but it was workable. Meanwhile, Lily and Flint began their mission to find Tzu San Niang. The first place they tried, Selangor Club Padang, was a decoy, but thankfully, Flint was able to convert that decoy exposure into a card draw for Lily. I’m already glad I gave Flint to Lily. It definitely seems like the right choice.

Nathaniel isn’t sure what he’s doing. There aren’t any immediate enemy threats to worry about, and Lily has an Enchanted Blade out and is handling exposures with Flint support. So, Nathaniel is just kind of also there. I decided to move Nathaniel up to join Lily since the cluevers had the starting location locked up. I realized this might be a little bit risky because what if I drew Unspeakable Oath while separated from Kōhaku’s Ikiaq? Well, I figured he wouldn’t be separated for long as surely the cluevers would be moving soon. Well, guess what happened? Nathaniel drew Unspeakable Oath while separated from Kōhaku’s Ikiaq! Fortunately, one of the benefits of drawing it earlier than later is it gives the team a chance to set up a situation where Nathaniel can get rid of it. Still, I was not looking forward to setting that up.

Eventually, Lily checked a second concealed mini card — this one was also a decoy, meaning that it had to be the last place. I could see the map had some interesting locations with tests that made you remember things happen. I was sure they would be important, but with no context for what was going on, I decided to not do them. Instead, I hurried to advance the act and see what happened next. Lily was able to find Tzu San Niang and the team spent the clues they had collected and the act advanced to the next part of the game.

At this point, everyone teleported to Melati’s Shop, which I didn’t know would happen and was not excited about. I wanted to pick up all the clues at the victory point locations on the other side of the map! Now we got flung far away from them. That part was unfortunate. Still, the team decided to take it on the chin and learn what happened next. Three geists were scattered across the map – all of them fairly near to Melati’s Shop though. The team would try to release as many of them as we could before Tzu San Niang could absorb them with her parasol. My team’s asset setups were still not very good, but I figured how bad could this be?

Kōhaku, who now had Living Ink support as well, hopped off on his own to get to Wayang Kulit Theatre. The geist here required a Will test, so I figured our Mystic with Ikiaq and Living Ink should be able to take care of that. After discarding some stuff I knew I would never be able to afford to play anyway, I was able to Parley with the Uncanny Shadow right away as Kōhaku’s last action. I was very fortunate to learn that all we needed was for an investigator to have “peered beyond” to add this to the victory display — fortunate because Minh was already positioned to do this. She still held some clues from running around the map earlier, so taking care of this would be no trouble. The only downside was Kōhaku would be forced to take one hit from the Uncanny Shadow as he couldn’t evade it. It was alright as though by the next round, the Uncanny Shadow was put to rest thanks to Minh and Kōhaku’s quick efforst. At least the team was resolved one of the Geists quickly, which seemed pretty good given I had never played this scenario before.

With a plan for one Geist in action, I decided to let Nathaniel and Lily move towards handling a second one. Dividing the team up with both cluevers handling one task and both fighters handling another was certainly unusual, but it seemed promising and no one was really that far away from each other. So it seemed like maybe this time the strategy would work out. After reviewing the choices available, I ended up choosing to send Lily towards the Slain Foreman at Kuala Lumpur Station for kind of an odd reason: I wanted to go for this one because I knew Nathaniel might be able to evade it. In hindsight, the Buried Miner, who had a lower fight value and a Combat Parley test, was possibly a better choice if I wanted to go for the Geist that was easier to flip over at face value. Still, I was hellbent on getting rid of Unspeakable Oath so this was our choice.

Also at some point, Randall finally decided to show up and help Nathaniel get his Boxing Gloves. Meanwhile, Lily – who was already at Kuala Lumpur Station – tried to expose and see if Tzu San Niang was here. She was not!

After all of that, the agenda had to advance. Hopefully Tzu San Niang was at the theatre were the Geist was cleared and not at the Buried Miner’s location. It was 50/50 and naturally given this is Arkham Horror, the worst possible thing happened and Tzu San Niang ran away with a Geist. Well, at least we were making progress towards getting this second Geist cleared.

With a new round upon us, it was time for Kōhaku to be helpful yet again. (And I do mean Kōhaku because Minh was just barely functioning this whole scenario.) Kōhaku zoomed over to join Lily, who had already evaded the Slain Foreman and started to pre-emptively smack it a little bit. A doom had been placed on Ikiaq earlier and strangely enough, the Parley on Slain Foreman gave us a way to get rid of it. Kōhaku discarded Ikiaq to attempt the Parley and was successful. In doing so, we learned that we needed to “trade for a kitten” and then flip this Geist over again. Once again, I felt I had come across a moment of good luck! Nathaniel could easily trade for a kitten before moving over. But what would he trade for? He couldn’t give up his Boxing Gloves, and the Wolf Mask seemed necessary to pass the Agility test that was coming up. Thankfully there was one other option! Nathaniel traded his brother in for a kitten and moved over to the Slain Miner. With a charge of the Wolf Mask and some commits, Nathaniel was able to clear the Unspeakable Oath for the first time in the campaign! The whole team (and by that, I mean me) celebrated this incredible event. But then it was time to get back to work. Eventually, we would defeat the Slain Foreman with damage from Nathaniel and Lily, allowing us to collect our second Geist.

This then brought us to the finale, where we had to fight a buffed up Tzu San Niang. Hitting her was no problem at all. We had strong Combat stats from Nathaniel and Lily against a low combat stat from Tzu San Niang. The issue was our oversucceeds turned into damage and horror because of the outrageous number of parasol charges. We had a few clues to cancel some of this, but eventually those ran out, leading to Nathaniel and Lily taking big hits from the parasol charges. And then we had among the WORST treachery pulls I’ve ever seen, as everyone lost an action and took 2 damage and 2 horror to make everyone approaching death during a single Mythos. Nathaniel was forced to sacrifice himself, being eliminated by damage from parasol charges while doing the attack we needed to close out the scenario. However, it was for the greater good, as Nathaniel was able to defeat Tzu San Niang. Those left standing then used the parasol on her to get her under our sway! With that, the scenario was completed.

In the end, our efforts earned us 5 XP! Unfortunately, everyone took 1 physical trauma from our choice of resolution and Nathaniel took an additional physical trauma from being defeated. Still, I’ll take it and move on to the next adventure.

MVP

I have to say Lily is my MVP again. Not only did she expose so much, she also was the sturdiest team member by far and outpaced Nathaniel this time for combat reliablity. She was for sure about to be the last person standing if the scenario went on longer, thanks to soak from Li Flint, Holy Rosary, Olive McBride, and Hunter’s Armor. A very close runner up would be Kōhaku as he played an instrumental role in flipping over both of the Geists the team collected, which is a huge part of the scenario.

Conclusion

Up next, our team will take another interlude episode to gather their bearings and start heading towards heading towards Constantinople! Tune in next time for more adventures where I will hopefully have better notes. Thanks for reading!