Carolyn on Cam - 4p TCU

Carolyn on Cam

This Carolyn Fern deck is created for the first (and blind) playthrough of The Circle Undone in a 4-player setting. Together with Lily Chen, Joe Diamond and Agnes Baker (Bad Blood Front/Back), Carolyn will be leaning more towards investigating than fighting, and will be attempting to play her role in keeping the group mentally stable.

The development plan for the deck is to move into Close the Circle/Gang Up/Join the Caravan, or the synergistic cards from Edge of the Earth, becoming very powerful when all investigator factions are present. Through Shrewd Analysis, Down the Rabbit Hole, and later either (or both) Keen Eye/Stick to the Plan, three factions are permanently accessible. Liquid Courage and Peter Sylvestre are strong cards in the horror healing game, and will be representing the other two factions. The single copy of Astounding Revelation is a greedy pick assuming we'll be able to squeeze out sufficient XP for an early SttP upgrade. This was a last second change as our Agnes was bringing two copies of Delve Too Deep with her, making the required 7xp (increased cost for DtRH more plausible to be obtained.

Below I'll update the progress through the campaign and the decisions made. They'll be including spoilers, so keep that in mind.

The Circle Undone - Prologue

Kicking off with Disappearance at the Twilight Estate, the group picks the special investigators, and goes to town on the clues. 21 out of a maximum 24 evidence is left behind, and all only Valentino is claimed by the Spectres; the others are pulled into the spectral realm. Hopefully, that's a good outcome.

Scenario 1 - The Witching Hour

Carolyn is leading the team into the first scenario, and thus gets to make a choice. Putting all Logical Reasoning aside (at least figuratively), she accepts her fate, receiving an Ace of Rods and The Tower • XVI for her deck as well as two Runestone tokens to the chaos bag.

Finding an early Archive of Conduits and an Ancient Stone is promising, but no static intelligence boosts show up. The scenario makes rushing the Leylines complex because of the unique mechanics, but eventually opens it up. With a little help from Joe, Carolyn finds some unexpected courage to go for a 6 shroud Ancient Stone identification, and manages to collect all 4 leylines to identify the gateway.

It would probably have been better to include another St. Hubert's Key in the deck this early on, making it a little more reliable to find a nice stat boost; a lot of the checks would have been much, much better. A second copy of "I've got a plan!" or some other way to deal with enemies would have been good. A lot of our cards get payoffs later, and require to be in the deck for the Rabbit Hole to be worth it, and it made our role in the first scenario a little underwhelming. We accept our supporting role, and do manage to do our individual investigating objectives splendidly.

The rest team did most of the heavy lifting on fighting, and was quite effective on clueing as well, making the scenario feel quite easy. The Runestones in the bag instead of the Elder Thing tokens was very good for the scenario (though the two Tarots being added to our deck is a bit of a downer). A big meanie comes to play for two victory points, and the big witch goes down without ever becoming really scary. Only one non-exclusive victory point location is not cleared, both Delves Too Deep are played. Scenario 1 ends with a broken spell, two mementos, 11 xp, investigated Ancient Stones (6), investigated the Gateway, and no new trauma.

With such a bomb of xp, we can upgrade to Archive of Conduits, for 3xp, and we start Sticking to a Plan for 7xp. The last point goes to upgrading Emergency Cache, which will be part of the plan (together with "I've got a plan!" and Dynamite Blast). In the next scenario we'll be starting with a much thinner deck, as the three events of our plan as well as Astounding Revelation will be out of there. Archive of Conduits is just an insanely powerful card, especially in a 4 player game, and having it ready to go this early on feels very nice.

Scenario 2: At Deaths Doorstep

To be played in the near future.