Classic Dungeons & Dragons at Dungeon Masters Guild

Arkham Madness?

Elliott MillerApr 17, 2011

I’ve finally been able to play my first game of Mansions of Madness (well, second really). This isn’t a review, but some initial thoughts. I’ll have my review after more plays of the game. As the keeper, I had a blast. It was great telling the story and using my options to try and eliminate the players. It was rough, we were all fairly new at the rules, it took a long time, but overall I was greatly impressed. The players had a slightly different experience, they enjoyed it, said it was “Ok”. What bothered them is that they never really felt part of the story. There was a great introduction, then basically a few blips of story, they finally found out that they needed to kill the bad guy. They did and it was over. Well, ok wasn’t enough for me. I’d like to really play the heck out of this game, so I want to keep them interested. I started looking around at other’s experiences with MoM.

I found a post on the FFG forums where a player had added room descriptions for each room and it struck me as brilliant. By adding room descriptions that fit in with the story, I think it would go a long way to add to the thematic feel. After more research, I found suggestions to add useless items to take the place of the “You find nothing of interest” cards. Say you find a spoon, or whatever to make it at least slightly more interesting, a spilled glass of wine, a blood splattered painting.

Many people are looking for additional scenarios or an expansion to the game already. I have to admit, I agree. I still have plenty to keep us going for a time. Then we can replay with the other objectives, but I do see it as problematic. Once you’ve gone through it, the story aspect is lost. New material is needed to keep the same fresh feel to the game. Already the though of custom scenarios is coursing through my brain, working on one right now in fact. The problem is I want a bigger canvas, limiting yourself to one building per scenario seems so, well, limiting.

It occured to me that it might be possible to use the Arkham Horror board(s) with Mansions in an effort to develop new scenarios. Using the AH board as the “Big Map”, and then zooming into a location using the Mansions tiles as the “Detailed” view. It would still play as Mansions, but give you a much larger landscape to work with. You would put together mini-encounters at certain locations, with clues to the overall objective, that would eventually lead players to the climax location to stop whatever cataclysm is occurring.

Not every AH location would have encounters, some could simply be closed and this would be identified on the board with a token, so players wouldn’t waste their time in those locations. Some could simply be there to be used for the benefit of the players (or possibly the keeper too, we’ll see) like buying new equipment at the shop, or healing at the hospital, or searching for ancient tomes in the library. They could either have a paragraph describing the location with what actions are available there, or move into a zoomed view with the Mansion tiles, so the players could search there for clues.

Players turns would still be 2 movements and an action, the keeper could summon to the big board as well as the small ones. There are many possibilities, and it would probably need a few regular Mansions expansions in order to pull it off (so that you have more rooms and more monsters to work with) but with scenarios designed properly you could pull off an amazing game I think. I’m going to have to flesh it out, there are obstacles to overcome.

It also occurred to me that I am spending way too much time thinking about this game. Time to get back to reality.