2007.09.03

Arkham Horror Ideas

Posted in Board Games at 11:00 am by Jeremiah Wittevrongel

I really enjoy playing games like Arkham Horror, partly because it offers an experience similar to an RPG in board game form. There’s another reason, though. Arkham Horror is like Roleplaying without a Game Master (GM). For various reasons (which will be the subject of my next post), I tend to prefer this to games where someone has to play the role of GM.

One of the problems I sometimes have with Arkham Horror, though, is that the incredibly rich theme can sometimes get lost in the zillions of details that you have to keep track of on every turn. There’s no active narrator besides the cards in the game that provide the theme, and since no one character is the GM, nobody has the responsibility to keep the game in theme and the players in character.

As a way to re-balance the tables in favour of theme, and give the game a more RPG-like feel, I’d like to try the game with the following two changes:

  1. When you’re revealing a Mythos Card, you have to read it to all of the players as though you’re narrating a story, embellishing it appropriately. This will require some creativity, but I think the overall effect would be a lot of fun. For instance, for a Headline card, you could pretend to be a young hawker selling papers on the street, shouting “Extra! Extra!”. For a Rumour card, you could say something like “As you sit down to enjoy a quick bite at Velma’s, you can’t help but overhear a young couple at the next table…” Of course, the idea is to be inventive each time a new card comes out, and not re-use the same types of constructs too often.
  2. When you are having an Arkham encounter or an Other World encounter that requires drawing a card, the player to your left is the one who draws the card and reads it aloud to you. It’s your encounter, but someone else is narrating. The interesting twist to this (which I really like) comes with cards that give the player a choice. In this case, the person reading the card would pose the choice as a question to the current player, and the player would have to make their decision without knowing the consequences ahead of time. In other words, more like you would have to in a traditional pen-and-paper role-playing game.

The idea behind these changes is to build in the themes in the game without altering the rules. Because of the way the game flows, each player would in essence take turns being the voice of the GM, without actually having to be the GM. The game already does a good job of that.

I do see two possible pitfalls with this approach to Arkham Horror:

  1. I don’t know if these rules modifications would work for all players. In particular, players new to the game or unfamilliar with the concepts of Role Playing might have trouble, or have performance anxiety when it’s their turn to read a Mythos Card.
  2. These seemingly simple changes would probably lengthen the game significantly. We routinely play Arkham Horror in under three hours in my group, and I’m guessing these changes would mean that we should budget 5 hours instead, and probably end up needing 4 to 4.5 hours for a game played this way.

Jason and I have also in the past discussed other ways of making the game more interesting, though these merely add some flavour and don’t alter the game structure at all. Among the simplest of them would be to have someone introduce flavour into the game by revealing something interesting about a location, monster, or Other World. Chaosium publishes several Call of Cthulhu RPG source books that are ideal for this purpose. For Arkham Horror, the most useful two would be H.P. Lovecraft’s Arkham, which describes the city of Arkham and its locations in great detail, and Malleus Monstrorum, a staggeringly complete bestiary which covers virtually all of the creatures you are likely to encounter in a game of Arkham Horror with or without its various expansions.

I’m not sure if this last suggestion would be worthwhile given the amount of time it might consume, although perhaps a brief reading at the start of the game about the chosen Ancient One (From Malleus Monstrorum) would be a nice way to set the mood a little.

I guess I’ll have to try some of these ideas out and see how they work.