Mansions of Madness: The Pharaoh's Curse

Posted,Sep 4, 2013 (edited)

With the permission of MmarchHare (Randolph Carter) (who run the game as keeper and wrote the playtest report) I’ve posted his session report for an early version 1 of my fan based scenario

http://www.boardgamegeek.com/filepage/92828/the-curse-of-the…
It is both informative and amusing …

Objective 1B – drive everybody mad – was selected. The keeper decided to allow the named mummy to be summoned. The latest version for objective 1B plays similar but is a bit harder for the keeper as now only the named mummy can replace skin and its not available for that objective. In addition, the keeper is restricted to at most one mummy in play at any one time. Objective 1B is the hardest option for the keeper but it still came down to the last turn.

On to the game:
The 4 investigators assembled in the museum foyer – Harvey Walters with his statue, Jenny Barnes and her pistols, Michael McGlenn with his tommygun, and Carolyn Fern, armed with her Walther – a heavily-armed group to be sure. Jenny, the party scout, moved into the room past the disturbing sphinx statue to capture the item Startling Evidence… and the lights in the Foyer flared and all went out, leaving the room in Darkness (Mythos card on Jenny’s turn). Jenny failed a Willpower check against the Sphinx’s unwholesome power, and last her first Sanity point.
The party followed the blood trail up the stairs to the right, and opened the door into the eastern wing of the museum. Harvey and McGlenn led, and it was about then all hell broke loose – seemed to be a maniac running around in the dark behind them. The lunatic cut down a security guard and disappeared – only to appear a turn later (Maniac Attack) and lunge at Carolyn. Jenny, who had continued to take (and fail) Willpower tests each turn vs. the Sphinx, Panicked and ran across the Foyer towards the Exhibition Room.

Carolyn sustained a concussion in the fight with the maniac, but was fairly certain she had dropped him … still, they couldn’t find the body when Jenny returned. Meanwhile, the dead security guard had stood up in the center of the Foyer, and shuffled towards them. Not in the mood for another combat, Carolyn and Jenny moved through the door into the hallway and barricaded the door. Somehow the maniac came with them, but the zombie was trapped on the other side of the barricade, took 2 turns to break through it, and hurt himself in the process. The maniac Jack carved a piece off of Carolyn and ran for the altar, but was pursued and gunned down before he made it there – but not before a Cultist (mythos card) was revealed in the Gallery – who also went down, without inflicting anything but a Horror test, in a hail of bullets. The dead security guard injured Harvey Walters – 1 point only due to Harvey’s statue – but it was enough to jar the old professor’s vision, rendering him legally blind. Carolyn blew the zombie back into the Foyer with her Walther, and Jenny finished him off with another round from her firearms.

Jenny, however, apparently not satisfied with failing 3 Horror tests in the darkened Foyer because of the malign influence of the Sphinx, went out there again – actually, she was heading for the secret passage – and thought to detect something else in the large room … something moving. Failing another test, she cracked, decided her companions were suspect, and went to some lengths for the rest of the game to stay away from them, with varying success.

Jenny and Carolyn explored the secret passage while Harvey and Mike cleared out the eastern wing of the museum, culminating in the finding of the Exhibit Catalog in the study. Meanwhile, Jenny uncovered a clue and cleared a blocked door into the secret hallway, just in time for the thing that she had sensed in the Foyer to enter the secret passage behind them – the Dark Pharaoh Khefren, risen from his sarcophagus!
Just then, Mike McGlenn burst in through the newly opened door in the side of the secret passage … though Harvey, moving slowly, was a few rooms behind. A spray of bullets from multiple guns tore into Khefren or flew past him out into the Foyer; it didn’t much matter, as they seemed to do him little injury, and even that disappeared as the felled security guard zombie shriveled away to dust at his feet. Twice the Dark Pharaoh tried to take out Mike, the opponent with the greatest damage potential, and twice Mike managed to avoid the brunt of the damage. He charged the Dark Pharaoh with a torch he had found in the basement, and succeeded in setting fire to the top of the staircase where Khefren stood. The Dark Pharaoh sidestepped into Hallway 4 to force a Horror test on Harvey, ambling towards the sound of the conflict, and attacked him, again doing but a single point of damage due to Harvey’s statue.

It was the final action of the Pharaoh Khefren’s unlife, as it turned out – Harvey cast Shrivelling, and it disassembled the risen mummy at the molecular level, destroying him instantly and completely. Harvey, now both hard of seeing and pathologically afraid of being separated from his companions, rejoined them as they pushed through Hallways 1 and 2 towards the NW corner of the museum.

Making it to the corner hallway, they encountered a lone cultist, who wisely fell back before the heavily armed intruders, to be joined just outside the Exhibition hall by two more mummies! Reinforced, the cultist then pressed his attack. In the midst of the fray that followed, Michael McGlenn lost his last Sanity point – and up until now having served as Harvey Walter’s bodyguard, suddenly turned on the professor yelling something crazy about “Harvey’s slimy tail”, and tried to brain him with a sledgehammer he’d picked up a few rooms back. Carolyn, who’d been using Hypnosis to keep the other party members’ Horror to a tolerable level, now found it necessary to put a couple rounds in her erstwhile patient, and another Shrivel spell from Harvey finished off the lunatic mobster.

The 3 remaining investigators pushed into the Exhibition Hall, encountering another two mummies there. With Event 5 now in play, and terrifying denizens of the crypt every which way they turned, Carolyn had already absorbed so much Horror from the others she dared take on no more. They finished off the last of the mummies, found Clue 1, and began to make a drive for the Foyer and the Sphinx – only to have Harvey unaccountably run back towards the Corner Hall with the Exhibition Catalog … old coot probably couldn’t see where he was going (or Uncontrollable Urges was in effect).

They made it to the Foyer with no more than 2 Sanity left on any given investigator – indeed, Carolyn was down to just 1 of her starting 14. What happened at this point is still a bit unclear to the players … some rules questions. What seemed to happen was that Harvey made it to the Sphinx and set up the puzzle – only to fail to even attempt to solve the Sphinx’s riddle. Jenny shoved him aside, and managed to solve the puzzle in a single take; she’d had done pretty well with another puzzle or two during the course of the game as well. Thing is, while there was some suggestion that she’d acquired the Exhibit Catalog from Harvey, there was no available Action – I think – to allow this, and from the rules, it appeared that to win the investigator working the puzzle also needed to be holding the Exhibit Catalog. In any case, the Sphinx cracked apart, the investigators staggered out of the museum with their lives and not very much of their minds intact, and the game felt, due to a few rule errors and the general muddle at the end, like a draw.

Either way, it was a close one, it played out pretty well, made sense, and the overall flow was good. I was glad I’d strengthened the monsters some – though it did the Dark Pharaoh named mummy little good, due to a couple poor attack rolls and the draw Harvey got on his Shrivelling spell. I got to use the Keeper Action to heal a damaged mummy twice (the second time was by using the corpse of a fallen cultist, during the fight in the corner hall).

Because 2 members had only played one other MoM game, and a general hiatus in play opportunities, we had to reference the rules a bit, so I was glad the game was designed to be shorter, as it still took us longer than expected to get through – not the scenario’s fault at all.
Even though the scenario I chose did not require me to take samples, I did one anyway with the named maniac just to throw off the investigation – which it did rather nicely, as it resulted immediately in a pell-mell pursuit in the eastern wing of the museum, ending predictably in the aggravated death of Jack Roberts. Still, it helped ensure that the Exhibition Hall was literally the last room they explored, which gave me enough time to build up a full contingent of mummies there, which were used effectively to contest and generally delay their exploration of the west wing of the museum, resulting in Event 5 turning as they were standing in the corner hallway space just outside the Exhibition Hall door. The characters they chose, with the exception of Mike McGlenn, had substantial Sanity scores – notably Carolyn and Harvey, and Carolyn was able to effectively shore up Jenny’s middling Sanity for much of the game … definitely made Objective 1b I’d chosen a real challenge, but the balance seemed about right. A party of less generally sane individuals might have fared less well, as the scenario does not provide any items to heal Horror – though, my group was also moving a bit slow, so a faster, better coordinated investigator team might have avoided some of the mental issues by covering ground quicker.