CoC - The Gleaming Spiral

[fatolaf]

New asylum pack announced...

Fantasy Flight Games is pleased to announce the latest Asylum Pack for Call of Cthulhu: The Card Game! The Gleaming Spiral is the fifth chapter of the new expansion cycle, The Rituals of the Order, coming this spring. For more information on the design philosophy of this expansion cycle, be sure to read "Rituals of Power", designer James Hata's introduction to the series.

The Burrower Beneath

Aside from the increased infiltration of the Order of the Silver Twilight into the Call of Cthulhu metagame, each other faction in the game, with each Asylum Pack in the series, will see its core strengths expanded, as well as new strategies developed. One example of expanded capabilities is in Shub-Niggurath's "tribal" subtypes. So far we have seen Mi-Gos and Dark Young. In the Rituals of the Order cycle, we will also see the Chthonian subtype introduced, along with its master, the new Ancient One, Shudde M'ell.

Struggles of the Story Phase

A theme running through this Asylum Pack is the fluidity of icons, and commitment to stories, elements that will make for dynamic and exciting story phases. The various factions will approach the story phase each in their own unique way, from the Agency's Trial Judge to Cthulhu's Slave to the Undivided Mind, characters will find themselves compelled to or kept away from stories, while through Hastur's Scalpel and Miskatonic University's Jamie Winthrop, icons will flow in and out of play, often at inconvenient and potentially dangerous times.

Existing strategies will be tested and interesting new modes will enter the Call of Cthulhu metagame through The Gleaming Spiral.

[fatolaf]

BOOOM! 



And a nice rules Erratta:

One thing about the explosion may surprise you, rules wise. As with the Y'ha-nthlei Statue a couple of weeks back, it looks for an unmodified, printed skill to determine if a character is hit or missed. Double checking the most recent rulings about printed values showed that Insane characters have a skill of 0, but the printed skill on them is undetermined. Not zero, but Null.

When the game is looking for a printed value for skill it won't find any actual ink, and so it can't say if the printed skill is above or below the threshold value of the effect, and the effect will automatically fail. This means that neither the Statue nor the Explosion will harm Insane characters, even though their actual skill is zero.