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…A vibrant arcane energy fills the air with a bone-rattling chill. The energy swirls along the crushed trail before you and seeps down several other paths before disappearing…
–Where Doom Awaits
Gather your strength. Take a deep breath. And rush into the madness… Where Doom Awaits is now available at your local retailer!
The penultimate chapter in The Dunwich Legacy campaign for Arkham Horror: The Card Game, Where Doom Awaits thrusts you and your fellow investigators headlong into a fractured world—a world come undone, riven by sorcery, and exposed to the alien terrors of other worlds and dimensions.
But as much as you’d like simply to flee—to retreat from the terrors before you—you know that if these terrors go unchecked, they will lead to greater calamity. There are sinister forces behind them, evil cultists who have delved too far into dark magic. They have made unholy pacts. They have summoned unnatural powers into the New England countryside. And you must stop them.
A Long and Twisted Path
To stop the sorcerers whose magic has ripped apart your reality, you must first find them.
More accurately, you must find your way to the top of the hill where you suspect they’ve congregated. The problem, though, is that the paths to the top of the hill no longer travel exclusively through our world. As the sorcerers foul the world with more of their ritual magic, your path through the wooded hillside carries you to spaces tainted by the other realms.
There’s no telling what you’ll find as you travel along these Diverging Paths . Could your next step lead you into a patch of Slaughtered Woods ? Might it lead you into an Eerie Glade or a Frozen Spring ? You just won’t know. So you’ll have to prepare yourself for everything.
And as you climb further up the hill, you’ll find the magic—and the changes to your world—growing ever stronger. More harmful. More terrifying.
Moreover, the woods are full of terrifying creatures, and the choices you have made earlier in your investigations are bound to come back to haunt you. What evils have you left in the world? What evils have you held close? What evils have you actually managed to destroy?
Spells to Stave Off Doom
Most of the magic you’ll witness in Where Doom Awaits will terrify you. You’ll find the world ripped asunder. You’ll find sorcerers fueled by unholy strength. And you’ll find time itself distorted and contorted into a living vortex.
However, magic is a tool, and even if it is inherently dangerous and corruptible, there are Spells you may use—if you dare—to counter the evils around you.
One of these Spells arrives among the player cards in Where Doom Awaits—the zero-cost, zero-level Moonlight Ritual(Where Doom Awaits, 267). Given that the accumulation of doom progresses the agenda deck and the forces of the mythos, the ability to remove doom from your cards is not to be overlooked. Arkham Horror: The Card Game often spirals toward a desperate end game in which every action matters, and your heart beats in your chest as you hope to gather your final clues before your time runs out. And if just one action could buy you and your team another whole turn? That’s magic!
The trick, though, is that there are relatively few player cards—at this time—that collect the sort of doom that Moonlight Ritual allows you to remove. In fact, there are currently only three, and all of them are in the Mystic class.
- Alyssa Graham (Undimensioned and Unseen, 232) allows you to look at either the top card of an investigator’s deck or the encounter deck. If you place a doom on her, she can even help you avoid a catastrophic treachery or an encounter with some gibbering, amorphous, otherworldly entity. But without Moonlight Ritual, that doom adds up and could even play into your adversaries’ devious schemes.
- The Arcane Initiate (Core Set, 63) has been around since the game’s release and can help you fetch Spells from your deck, including Moonlight Ritual. This is likely welcome news for the Arcane Initiate, whose role in most investigations was typically limited. She had an unfortunate habit of being devoured or driven insane in battles with the game’s more ferocious enemies—frequently just as the doom she carried was about to spur the agenda deck forward.
- Finally, the most reliable use of Moonlight Ritual may be in combination with the Permanent Spell Blood Pact (Blood on the Altar, 191). Once you spend the experience—or have the experience—that forms your Blood Pact, the Pact begins each game in play, meaning you can take doom to trigger it whenever you want, gaining either three Willpower or Combat each time you do so. Racing through doom just to defeat a cultist or to retain your wits in the face of some towering aberration may not always be the wisest strategy, but it becomes far less threatening if you have a copy of Moonlight Ritual in hand.
Still, the final point, here, is that not even Alyssa Graham knows that all that’s coming to Arkham Horror: The Card Game, and if doom as a price for powerful player effects is already a strategy in the game—and a thematic one, too, as it ties to the use of Spells and magic—then there’s room for more of it in the future, especially as we know we will someday see the investigator Marie Lambeau released to the wider public, and not just as a promotional card for those who picked up The Investigators of Arkham Horror.
Until then, though, we see storms of wild magic raging and swirling around the top of Sentinel Hill. Our doom is coming to us. We can either profit from it… or be driven insane.
Embrace Your Doom
The air is unnaturally cold, and the winds howl with magic. Who could have predicted all the events that led you here? With every step you take, Arkham feels more and more worlds away. You struggle to hold your sanity as you witness multiple realities converging and ripping apart. And still you know you must press forward.
All your choices are coming to a head. As you brace for the coming encounters—whatever lies higher up that hill—you can only hope the choices you’ve made have been the right ones. Because you know whatever else lies up there… that is the place Where Doom Awaits.
