Treachery

Terror.

Mythos

Surge.

Revelation - If you have no remaining sanity, place 2 doom on the current agenda. This effect can cause the current agenda to advance.

Mike Capprotti
Dim Carcosa #339. Dim Carcosa #33.
The Final Act

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Reviews

In my opinion, this card shows a problem Fantasy Flight Games has with some of their games, namely Arkham Horror and The Lord of the Rings. In both games, a fairly frequent occurrence is scenarios where there's a binary state; either the players are in state A, or they're in state B. For Dim Carcosa, that binary state is "No sanity remaining;" either you have sanity remaining, or you don't. This in and of itself is not a problem, but the way FFG makes the scenario use the state is.

In any state-based scenario, there are a few questions to consider;

  1. Which state will the players want to be in, absent any non-act or agenda features?
  2. Which state is easier to stay in and how much effort is required to change states?
  3. Do the designers want to incentivize or discourage being in either of the states?

For Dim Carcosa, the answers are relatively simple:

  1. All the players' experience will incentivize them to make sure they have sanity remaining.
  2. It is easier to have no sanity remaining, and while it's easy to go from sanity to no sanity, it's very hard to do the reverse without cards dedicated to the task.
  3. Not known for certain, but my guess is that they wanted to discourage having no sanity remaining, in order to make use of the design space the mechanic of sanity in Carcosa opened up, to emphasize the dangers of Carcosa, and to prevent infinite sanity from trivializing the game.

These answers help us to better understand the design of a lot of the cards in the scenario; Dismal Curse helps turn the horror on players into damage, Realm of Madness tears the player's board state to shreds if they have no remaining sanity, and The Final Act serves as 2 Ancient Evils and another encounter card if they have no remaining sanity. All of these serve the goal of discouraging players from running out of sanity, and do so admirably.

What's done less admirably in the scenario, in my opinion, is discouraging players from keeping their sanity. State B is heavily punished, but State A feels barely touched, and the scenario honestly feels like it doesn't push losing your sanity (Going from State A to State B) on you too heavily, the way The Forgotten Age might push the Poisoned weakness, for example. Yes, there's Rotting Remains and The Yellow Sign, but even on top of the starting horror you take, it feels like being pushed over the boundary between the two states is gradual, honestly downright avoidable at times.

Once you are over that line, though, suddenly you have to deal with double Ancient Evils (with surge), a 3-of 5 test in the encounter deck, the potential to be flat out killed before you have the chance to react, and a chaos bag that, on Normal, went from five -2 tokens to four -4s. Add in Hastur's nightmarish mutation of the chaos bag, and you've gone from potential victory to almost-certain defeat. Your friends who still have sanity, meanwhile, are still able to traverse the land of the King, possibly without abnormal threat if they're able to shrug off The Yellow Sign and Rotting Remains.

This is the problem FFG has with binary-state scenarios: they make one state too punishing without including enough that forces the player into that state. You live or die based on which state you're in, and it's surprisingly hard for the game to push you into one.

Fortunately, this is somewhat easily fixable; instead of including so many cards that punish players for being in "the bad state," include a mixture of cards that alternate between punishing the players for being in "the bad state" and pushing the players towards that state, designing an encounter deck that not only tries to keep players down but also has methods of getting them there in the first place. For Dim Carcosa, that might have meant making Dismal Curse push the players towards losing their sanity instead of punishing them for not having any, or making Hastur's frankly game-ending token manipulation apply if you have sanity remaining, incentivizing you to fall deeper under the King's sway. The twin suns of Carcosa might be searing madness into the investigator's minds (personally, I think a lot of the visuals from this cycle would actually look beautiful in real life), but that doesn't mean the designers don't have the tools of reason to help them keep that madness from plaguing their players as well.

I... don't think the designers intended you to want to lose all your sanity just because the scenario allows you to. My headcanon is that rather than defeating you instantly, like in all other scenarios, you get to wallow in dread for a few rounds before being overwhelmed by the intentionally unfair punishments you get for being insane in Carcosa. — Hylianpuffball · 25
Sorry, that wasn't what I was trying to say; what I was trying to say was that the developers, in an attempt to make use of the design space opened up by Sanity in Carcosa, tried to design Dim Carcosa around that mechanic, and thus tried to include methods of forcing players (The Yellow Sign, one of my most feared treacheries) into that state. Whether the players wanted to lose their sanity or not was immaterial to the designers; the designers themselves wanted to include cards that played around with the mechanic of running out of sanity. Does that make any more sense, or am I just making things even less clear? — NightgauntTaxiService · 269
I just see too many arguments at once and it's unclear what your conclusion is. The deck already has a "mixture of cards that alternate" between causing and punishing insanity, you even mention some of them. Players don't need additional incentive to stay in State A (sane), that's a normal part of the game, and there are many warnings that going insane causes extra trouble here. I don't believe it's "surprisingly hard" to go insane in Carcosa, any more than it's hard to be defeated in most other scenarios. If you don't actively fight it, it can happen really easily. — Hylianpuffball · 25
If the core argument is "Carcosa makes going insane a fun threat, but I didn't actually get to go insane", then sure, balancing difficulty is tough, but I don't think there's a fundamental problem with scenario design here. — Hylianpuffball · 25
My conclusion is that FFG included too few effects that actively push the players towards insanity while including too many that punish them for having no remaining sanity, meaning that the scenario is either surprisingly easy if you manage to keep your sanity or cripplingly hard if you don't. A parallel I just thought of is Beyond the Veil from Dunwich; if you don't draw it, the payoff from the "discard from your deck" mechanic is meager, if you do, it's game-ending. In that case, it's a problem of too many cards pushing you into State B (running out of deck) and not enough punishing the players for being in State B. — NightgauntTaxiService · 269
I agree with many of your thoughts on the Dim Carcosa scenario, but I'm not sure that I see this as a recurring issue. In the first and second-to-last paragraph you mention this as a repeat problem, do you have further examples of scenarios that illustrate this binary state issue? If it's just Dim Carcosa then it's more likely that they didn't get it quite right on this scenario (as Hylianpuffball mentions, balance is difficult) rather than an ongoing design issue. — Pseudo Nymh · 40
My experience with Arkham is fairly limited, I just have the Core campaign and Carcosa. However, in the Lord of the Rings the Living Card Game, The Drowned Ruins and The Passing of the Grey Company are prime examples of this problem. — NightgauntTaxiService · 269
It depends which version of Hastur you face... (spoilers) the one that deals horror to everyone at once, everywhere, can push you towards insanity quite fast. — DrOGM · 22