Ruth Westmacott
Dark Revelations

Asset. Ally

Ally. Artist.

Cost: 3.

Neutral
Health: 2. Sanity: 3.

Gloria Goldberg deck only. Replacement.

When an investigator fights, attempts to evade, or initiates a skill test on an encounter card, discard an encounter card that shares a Trait with that encounter card from beneath Gloria Goldberg: Reduce the difficulty of this skill test by 2.

Aleksander Karcz
Dark Revelations #20.
Ruth Westmacott

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Reviews

I disagree that Ruth Westmacott is unimpressive. I think she's pretty darn good, and well worth the 3XP for Charisma to run both her and Alyssa Graham. (Of course you want Alyssa - she's the single most important card for Gloria). Yes there is the risk in Charisma-for-Ruth that you don't draw her, but Charisma for an optional signature ally tends to open up campaign-specific allies too, and then you play out which one you draw. Let's assume for now that you get Ruth out alongside Alyssa - is Ruth worth that 3XP and 3 resources? Wholeheartedly, yes.

The trick with Ruth is to be using her a lot. With Gloria, you don't just want to lock down a few Ancient Evils or whatever into your basement and then leave it at that. With Ruth out, you want to be cycling cards into and out of the basement every turn, possibly even multiple times / turn if you can.

There are no limits to how often you can use Gloria's ability. With Alyssa out, you've got one every turn. With Scrying(3), Scroll of Secrets, maybe even Parallel Fates or First Watch , or even her Elder Sign / Seal of the Elder Sign, getting two cards into the basement in a given turn isn't hard. It doesn't even have to be every turn, you just want a steady flow of cards in. Then Ruth allows you to flow the cards out again, claiming her bonus.

Ruth's bonus is actually pretty good. It can reduce skill tests to 0, it can make "fail by X" cards (like Rotting Remains) completely blunted, it can be used anywhere on the map, and it doesn't exhaust. If you've seen Liber Omnium Finium, then you can safely be flowing monsters through Ruth for auto-evades or fights as well. Just getting the bonus, say, 3 or 4 times and burning her for Health/Sanity would have been worth the play. But you can do it far more often than that. In my most 4-player recent game, I dropped Ruth first turn alongside Scrying (3), getting Alyssa online later. By the end of the game, I'd used Ruth 14 times. Even if you say it's half as good as Ward of Protection, that means Ruth deployed 7 Ward of Protections for 3XP, 1 card, 3 resources - that's insane value!

Yes, she's better the more players you have. But that's OK, as Gloria's main abilities are better the fewer players you have. So Ruth can help across the board on 3/4 player, but is still good on 1-2 player. We'll see how Gloria's "real" signatures turn out, but for now, I'm very happy with Ruth.

EDIT: One thing I forgot to mention, is that Ruth Westmacott's name refers to Agatha Christie, who also published under the pen name of Mary Westmacott. Gloria Goldberg is of course an Agatha Christie type character.

Agreed! -2 Difficulty is nothing to sneeze at, no matter what it is! — LaRoix · 1643
Thank you for your review, Duke. I have been critical of Ruth in my games, and I appreciate seeing an argument for putting her in a positive light. :-) I have three issues with using Ruth myself. (1) I don't want to spend 3xp on her (ie: buying Charisma) as there's usually another ally I'd rather have in play. (2) I don't want to put too many encounter cards under Gloria until her signature weakness comes out so I can control its effects, so early Ruth isn't that helpful with my approach. (3) I really like her skill icons; I often will have a situation where +3 Intellect comes is really helpful. All of this is "in my opinion" and "your mileage may very," and I'm definitely open to the idea that my strategy isn't optimal. I have usually played her in 3p games, so my usual turn is Scrying four cards and discarding one of them. — SocialPsientist · 145
Now, after the release of "Scarlet Keys", it's too bad, Survivor is the one class, Gloria can not pick. She would be among the best "Exploit Weakness"-users in this build. (Probably combined with upgraded Flashlight.) — Susumu · 361

Anyone who has had a chance to give Gloria Goldberg a try has likely been delighted. With an absolutely killer stat line and TWO phenomenal investigator abilities, Gloria can neutralize the ill effects of the encounter deck better than anyone we've seen so far.

This is no thanks to her artist pal Ruth Westmacott, who I think is rather unimpressive as far as signature assets go. And hey - don't get me wrong; Ruth's ability is actually super cool! But there are a lot of factors in play that are likely to prevent you from triggering it with any reasonable amount of consistency.

The first big problem is that Ruth won't generally get to trigger a bonus on a fight or evade action simply because you probably don't want to be placing enemies beneath Gloria in the first place. The ever present fear of Liber Omnium Finium will serve as a pretty serious deterrent to stashing enemies away, as Gloria really doesn't want to take a surprise non-cancellable attack and THEN be stuck with an enemy on her. Sometimes you can get Liber Omnium Finium to trigger early on on something relatively harmless, but otherwise you'll need to be aware of it for the rest of the scenario.

On the flip side of this, the card you really want to hide away beneath Gloria doesn't have a test at all, so Ruth doesn't help you there. I'm referring of course to Ancient Evils. Even though it doesn't appear in every scenario, it's just so so helpful to get one or more of these cards out of the deck, especially in multiplayer.

But let's address the real elephant in the room - Ruth takes up the hotly contested ally slot, but our old friend Alyssa Graham has nearly unbeatable synergy with Gloria's ability AND gives her that awesome +1 boost. Alyssa basically gives Gloria the ability to look at two encounter cards and pick which one gets resolved. And she can do this, actionlessly every single turn.

To be fair, I think that Ruth has the potential to be quite strong at higher player counts, especially if you are aggressively stashing cards under Gloria since you are more likely to find a test with a matching trait on the card. It's nice that the investigator doesn't have to be at Gloria's location, and it's also nice that discarding the card reduces the difficulty of the test rather than granting a positive bonus, as it turns 1 and 2 difficulty tests into auto-successes (save for the token).

And of course Ruth also has great icons, so it's not like you'll be sad when she turns up in your hand.

bricklebrite · 496
Ancient evils is an omen and plenty of omens have tests on them. Also in the circle undone spectral is a great trait to look for. It's on a lot of treacheries and Enemies ;-) — NarkasisBroon · 10
Right, but would you rather have Ancient Evils hidden beneath your investigator card -- or in the encounter discard pile, where it can get shuffled back in? This is why I think Ruth is ok at higher player counts; you can funnel encounter through Gloria relatively quickly while you wait for the worst ones to pop up. Once they do, you'll want them to stay underneath Gloria rather than giving them the opportunity to hit your team again. — bricklebrite · 496
Gloria is great ... Ruth is not. Maybe if the cost were lower? — xemxi · 12
I think the value to Ruth isn't in the skill boosts, it's that she is a mechanism to get cards out from under Gloria before her weakness gets pulled. Not sure that justifies the cost/slot but there is some value (more in multiplayer) to running Charisma (because of course you will be using Alyssa). — Taevus · 748