Endurance Run with Ashcan and Agnes

Finally decided to post these decks up here for others to look at. Before the campaign recount, final notes for the deck makeup:

Pete is at 1 physical and 2 mental trauma. He will enter Lost in Time and Space with 7 XP to spend; we're going to wait to see the final cards available before investing that.

Our Chaos Bag is Dunwich Legacy Standard, to which we have added one Elder Thing token (for giving into the temptations of power), and the -3 and -5 tokens for increasing difficulty in Essex County Express and Where Doom Awaits. We've avoided every other token add to our bag this campaign, which also means that we don't have a single Tablet in our bag.

Anyway! Story time...

After Dunwich Legacy came out, me and a friend decided to try to replay the Night of the Zealot as a two-player experience (we played four player before). We had access to Dunwich and both Print on Demand scenarios at the time. He picked Pete mainly just to give Survivor a fair go (he usually prefers Guardians), and I picked Agnes pretty much at random (but also because she's a lot of fun to play with). You'll find my Agnes deck posted up pretty soon after this one.

With Pete and Agnes as our choices, it was pretty obvious that Pete would be the better investigator out of the gate, so he went down the clue-hunting route, while Agnes handled miscellaneous support, Scrying, and combat.

And we killed it. Sorry I don't have all iterations of the decks to show how things changed, but we did better that run through Zealot than we ever have before (or since). We marched through the Gathering, got the ever-elusive perfect score in Masks, and even prevented the ritual in The Devourer -- and even more impressively managed to pass that rather legendary Willpower test to avoid getting additional weaknesses added to our decks!

In fact, we were doing so well after Masks that my friend suggested we should detour into the PODs to see if we could handle them as well before we decided Lita's fate in Devourer. And we aced those as well. I'd like to think that our expert playskill and killer decks were the reason, but in a game with a Chaos Bag and a nasty encounter deck we got lucky as well. But we managed a perfect score in Carnevale, and then successfully got Pete bitten by the werewolf in Rougarou by design (Pete is first player).

With our only trauma being the mandatory trauma we took at the end of the Zealot campaign, my friend and I looked at our decks and went "OK, let's keep on going into Dunwich!" Which we did; by this time Blood on the Altar was out, so we zoomed through there, and otherwise have been progressing through the new scenarios as they have been released.

The trauma, plus the ol' Bag of Love, have been catching up to us in the longer Dunwich. We managed to defeat the Experiment, but Agnes got tripped up while gambling and Pete got greedy and thus the Clover Club fell on us, making us too late to save Armitage (that was also our first defeat ever). We rescued a really good book from the Museum, had zero trouble on the train, and saved everyone we had missed except poor Dr. Morgan from the bloody altar of Silas Bishop. We even restored Silas Bishop, which meant that the big showdown on top of Sentinel Hill with his brother was a bit of a letdown as Seth tripped over his own shoelaces to his death.

Toughest run for Agnes would have been Undimension & Unseen, where even burning through all her amulets and rosaries didn't save her from bad draws and lots of Broods jumping on her poor head like happy Goombas finding a sleeping Mario. Pete chose to cheese out of that one, as he couldn't defeat the Broods as the cheerful, charismatic, scrappy werewolf that he was, but even with that ending, only 2 Broods managed to escape into the wild.

Other generic notes on the campaign from our log was that we calmed the townsfolk, for whatever good that will do next pack.

Anyway. Pete saved the day with an awesome three turns of solid bare-stat investigating with the help of Dr. Rice and the good Abbess to clear us to a win in Where Doom Awaits, so we've managed to enter the gate, and we'll see what fun awaits us in Yog-Sothoth's Party Room with Lost in Time and Space.

One thing is for sure, if Dunwich Legacy hands out an appropriate number of post-campaign trauma or weaknesses, this endurance run of the Pete and Agnes roadshow will probably have to end. Agnes is just too scattered to do much more with any more trauma.

While this current build is at 38 XP, we've actually spent more than that. I know Pete's repurchased at least one Flare, and both of us have swapped in some Level 0 cards as they were released to better fit our builds.

I hope these advanced investigator decks, scarred by their encounters with ghouls, nightgaunts, and Italian party guests, are interesting and intriguing things to look at for your own games.