Chaosium Digest Volume 13, Number 1 Date: Monday, February 19, 1996 Number: 1 of 1 Contents: Announcement: Mythos (Chaosium) MYTHOS Playtester's Notes on Mythos (Shannon Appel) MYTHOS Editor's Note: It seems oddly appropriate that the 13th volume of the Chaosium Digest should open with a special on Mythos, the blasphemous new Call of Cthulhu Collectible Card Game. I suspect that Mythos wll be a new force in the Digest in the coming year. Those of you who enjoy RPGs need not worry though: articles on of Chaosium's RPGs will continue to appear as well, assuming, of course, that subscribers continue to write them! Shannon -------------------- From: Chaosium Subject: Announcement: Mythos System: Mythos CCG MYTHOS is a new collectable card game based on the extraordinary tales of horror written by Howard Phillips Lovecraft. Our primary objective was to develop a game system featuring ease of play, the "feel" of a traditional card game, and a lively pace. Look for MYTHOS to begin shipping on April 19, and to arrive in stores by the end of that month. The second and third booster sets should follow in May and June. A French edition of the game will be printed at the same time as the English edition. Negotiations are currently underway for Spanish and Italian translations, and they will probably appear in the near future. Although over 20 million cards are being printed for MYTHOS, the run has already sold out to distributers. This means that you should let your local retailer know that you are interested in the game, so he can make sure he gets sufficient allocation from his distributor. GAME SYSTEM In designing MYTHOS, we first reviewed the play styles of traditional card games such as rummy and gin, noting in particular the flow of play and the involvement and interaction of the players. Our goal was to give MYTHOS a similar feel. Each player is constantly involved. You never have to wait while another player finishes a long turn sequence. Each player gets one play on his or her turn, and no one is ever out of the game before the game ends. The heart of MYTHOS lies in the Adventure Cards. These are short stories in a narrative format that indicate the cards you must play before you can earn the points given on the card. They provide a pattern to your card play that other players may try to decipher. The rules for MYTHOS are simple and complete. A game is finished in about an hour with plenty of room for complex play strategies, deck building variations, and great replay value. Much of the MYTHOS replay value lies in the more than 30 different Adventures included in the card set, and also with our Create-Your-Own Adventure card. Chaosium offers both horror fiction and role-playing scenarios for our Call of Cthulhu game that can readily be distilled into Mythos Adventure Cards with, of course, the consent of your opponent. This will provide an unlimited variety of different MYTHOS games. A TYPICAL GAME Each player first chooses his or her Investigator, shuffles their cards, and draws a hand of 13 cards. Each player develops the resources of their Investigator, playing Ally cards, Tomes, Artifacts, and Spells. You also create a Story Deck, a pile of cards containing the Locations visited and other cards that have gone out of play. You have a number of Event cards to plague your opponent with, including Phobias, Rioting Townsfolk, Looting Thieves, Madmen with Shotguns, Nightmares, Catastrophes, and Epidemics. You also portray that aspect of the Mythos that attacks the other players. Monster cards are played face-down in a Mythos Threat. Once card play has ended in a round, then Combat begins. During combat, each player, beginning with the Investigator with the lowest remaining Sanity Point, commits the Monsters in his or her Threat to attack their opponent. Then, each player commits Allies to defend their Investigator (Allies not committed will not suffer damage). Spells are then cast and then combat is resolved. PACKAGING The MYTHOS game begins with our Starter Display. Each display features 10 decks of cards, and there are 10 displays in each carton. We looked at various kinds of stock on which we could print the cards, and decided to use the more expensive poker stock. This paper resists the crimping suffered by other card games, it resists wear better, and it has the right sort of feel when playing the game. Each Starter Deck, then, contains 60 playing cards printed on poker stock, a 32 page rulesbook, and a unique MYTHOS feature: a double-sized Investigator Card. COLLECTORS' NOTE: Every one of the cards appearing in the Starter Decks will also be available in the first three booster sets. You wll probably want to purchase just a few deck of Starters, to get the rules and a few investigator cards, and not an entire display case. The Investigator Card serves to focus each player, indicating just where to play your cards on the table. It represents the "you" in a Mythos game - that personality who confronts the horrors and denizens of the Mythos. Each Investigator Card offers the player the choice of two Investigators, each illustrated in full color and printed back-to-back. No two players in a MYTHOS game can use the same Investigator. There are 18 different Investigators on 9 Investigator Cards. COLLECTORS' NOTE: each display for our third booster set includes a free complete set of all the Investigator Cards. BOOSTERS: while we were hard at work designing the MYTHOS system, we also designed three booster sets. These are being printed at the same time as the starter decks, so that we can assure you of their timely release. The first MYTHOS booster is titled THE EXPEDITIONS OF MISKATONIC UNIVERSITY, which will be released along with the starter decks. Here we expand the world of MYTHOS and explore the resources of Miskatonic University: its professors and noted students and the various tomes found in its vaunted library. Also, this set features many locations and allies from Europe, various new spells, and the luxury of travel aboard the quality ships of the time. The second booster looks to the South Pacific and the fabled island of R'lyeh. Titled CTHULHU RISING, it includes exotic islands, weird Mythos locales such as R'lyeh, the deep one city of Y'ha Nthlei or the library on Celeano. Dread Cthulhu himself lurks here somewhere! Finally, the third booster set that we will release is LEGENDS OF THE NECRONOMICON. Here, the Middle East, and particularly the exotic city of Cairo, comes to life. Literally. This set of cards introduces the concept of travelling into the past to meet the greatest wizards of old including Abdul Ihazrad, also known as the Mad Arab, and the author of that dread tome sometimes known as the Necronomicon. As a bonus, each Legends of e Necronomicon display includes one complete, unfolded set of all nine Investigator Cards. CARD STOCK: we are using Zanders poker stock with a water-based varnish for the best playing-card feel and resistance to card crimping and wear. The Investigator Card measures 5"x3.5" and is folded in half and tucked into the box. It is printed four colors on two sides, providing two different investigators in each deck. ART: Some of the best artists in the cards, game, and comics industries have madly scrawled all over their walls at the Institution. Alphabetized they are: Salvatore Abbinanti, Chris Adams, Thomas Garrett Adams, Stephen Barnwell, Mike Blanchard, John Bridges, Dennis J. Calero, Tim Callender, Barry Chambers, Alan M. Clark, Gene Day, C. Brent Ferguson, Mark Ferrari, Scott M. Fischer, Earl Geier, Lee Gibbons, Justin Hampton, Ovi Hondru, Andrew T. Kalichack, Michael Kellner, Drashi Kendup, Scott Kirchner, Brian Krank-McLean, Meghan Krank-McLean, Todd Lockwood, Heather McKinney, Jeff Menges, Lee Moyer, Roger Raupp, Sam Shirley, R. Wayt Smith, John Snyder, Tom Sullivan, Joseph Sutliff, Strephon Taylor, Susan Van Camp, Eric Vogt, and Jason Voss. CARD DISTRIBUTION There are 400 total cards in the array used for the MYTHOS Starters and the three boosters. One hundred of these cards are rare, one hundred are uncommon, and two hundred are common. The MYTHOS starter decks are created from an array of 220 cards and the nine Investigator Cards. In each starter deck is found 6 rare cards, 18 uncommon cards, and 36 common cards, plus one Investigator Card and a 32-page rulesbook. Each booster set contains 60 new cards plus a blend of the cards that appear in the MYTHOS starter decks, at the ratio of 2 rare cards, 4 uncommon cards, and 7 common cards for a total of 13 cards per pack. The rarity level of the cards is identical across the Mythos starters and the boosters. A rare card found in the starter decks is printed in the same frequency as a rare card found only in a booster. Otherwise, a "rare" card from a booster would be more rare (there are fewer of them) than a "rare" card in the starters. MYTHOS PRODUCT SUMMARY STARTER DECK DISPLAY #1300 10 decks $89.50 Single Deck Product Number #1300-1 1 deck $8.95 EXPEDITIONS OF MISKATONIC U. #1301 36 packs $106.20 CTHULHU RISING #1302 36 packs $106.20 LEGENDS OF THE NECRONOMICON #1303 36 packs $106.20 MYTHOS is a trademark of Chaosium Inc. MYTHOS is copyright 1996 by Chaosium Inc. -------------------- From: Shannon Appel Subject: Playtester's Notes on Mythos System: Mythos CCG The Mythos CCG has been simmering in the background for a while. V11.9 and V12.7 each had some early notes on it. The article above is the full-out press release on Mythos, which first appeared at Dundracon this past weekend. As one of the playtesters for the game, I thought I'd take a few additional paragraphs to expand on the Mythos notes a little bit. Like CoC, Mythos is a game of warring against the dark forces of Lovecraft's uncaring universe. Each player takes on the role of an investigator, and this choice determines the player's initial sanity, his starting languages, and, most importantly, how many cards the player must have in his hand when he redraws (more on that in a second). There are a very wide variety of card types in Mythos: LOCATIONs present characters with physical places to travel to, where different things may be done depending on the attributes of the card; ALLYs provide characters with protection in fights, and can also help in translating books, and other tasks; EVENTs may be used to change the attributes of the world (by causing the dawn of a new day, the rising of Aldeberan or the formation of a mighty storm, for example), or they may be used to affect opponents adversely (by giving them phobias or causing madmen to descend upon them, for example); TOMEs allow characters to cast certain types of spells, provided they can decipher them; SPELLs are special cards that may have various affects upon the game, provided that the character is willing to expend the SAN to fuel them; ARTIFACTS help either the character or his allies, but sometimes cause SAN losses too; and finally MONSTERs are awful creatures of the Mythos, which may be used to strike at your opponents. One last type of card is the ADVENTURE card, and this is the most important to the game. After playing a certain selection of cards, you can reveal the adventure that you have just completed. This gives you victory points towards winning the game. When the first player goes insane, the player with the most combined victory points and sanity is the winner. One of the coolest things about Mythos is that it goes very fast: I start walking to Innsmouth; Joe summons a Mythos creature at the Lodge of the Silver Twilight; Fred changes it to day with a Dawn event; and it's already my turn again! Players also tend to not get washed out of the game in Mythos due to one bad draw, unlike some of the older CCGs. If a player finds that his hand is worthless, he can pass twice in a row, and the current turn comes to an end. There is a quick combat phase, where the Mythos monsters fight against each other before disappearing, and then each player gets to discard and redraw. The investigator cards give a minimum hand value (for example, 3) and a maximum hand value (for example, 5). At the end of a turn, a player must discard a number of cards to bring him to his maximum or lower, but may not discard so many cards as to bring him below his minimum. In the case above, other players would get one or two actions, before the troubled player passed twice in succession. Then, he'd be able to ditch his 10 worst cards, and draw almost an entire new hand. There's probably a lot more I could write about Mythos, but I think I'll content myself with saying just a few things about strategy and level of complexity. The game is very simple to play. The rules are easy to pick up, and there are no complex questions of Timing or Interactions that require a Seer or Prophet to mediate. However, the strategy behind the game can be quite complex. This starts out with deck-building, when you're trying to balance Adventures so that they overlap in such a way to make all of their completion easier. It continues into the game itself, where you must decide: what adventure are you working on; should you shift to another adventure that just became easier to complete; how quickly should you move through your deck based on your current situation; what defenses do you need against your opponents newly summoned (face-down) monsters; are you willing to sacrifice allies now, when they could provide you with knowledge later; can you afford the sanity loss to cast a spell or use an artifact; and much more. And, this strategy should only become more enjoyable as future Booster sets are released for the game. As is noted in Chaosium's article, above, the initial run of cards has already been sold out to distributors. There will be lots of cards available, however, and you shouldn't have much trouble getting the cards you want, provided that you let your local retail store know that you'll be looking for Mythos when it rises in late April. Shannon -------------------- The Chaosium Digest is an unofficial discussion forum for Chaosium's Games. To submit an article, subscribe, or unsubscribe, mail to: appel@erzo.org. All articles submitted to the Digest remain copyright their respective authors, unless noted otherwise.