CoC - New Faction!

[Nick]

FFG have just announced a brand new (eighth) faction for the CoC LCG. The Order of The Silver Twilight is a human cultist / sorcerer themed faction. Looks like they've created a new and interesting playstyle for these guys. All about board manipulation - sacrificing cards for effects, discarding / returning to hand for other game effects. Also Ritual Support cards which allow you to stack up effects for some major effect. Quite similar to the human cultist elements of Yog, but as a whole faction.

Story here

First three spoiled cards here.

[Steve H]

Hmmm... interesting!

[fatolaf]

Beat me to it Nick, this will be on pre-order this wknd on the shop..

Their world is forged of privilege, lubricated by money, and polished with the prerogatives of the upper crust, yet no depth where power might be found has gone unexplored. Human sacrifice, unnatural tortures, perverse and hedonistic practices... all are brought into the service of the Order's relentless pursuit of power.

Fantasy Flight Games is proud to present a historic event for the Call of Cthulhu Living Card Game®: the introduction of the Order of the Silver Twilight as a brand-new faction through the Order of the Silver Twilight deluxe expansion, coming this Winter.

The Order of the Silver Twilight features 3 copies each of 55 never-before-seen cards - 40 for Order of the Silver Twilight, 2 for each of the existing factions, and 1 neutral card - that will permanently change the environment of the Call of Cthulhu metagame. Moreover, from this expansion forward the Order of the Silver Twilight will be a full faction within the game and all future expansions of the Call of Cthulhu card game will feature cards from the Order of the Silver Twilight alongside the other factions.

The Order of the Silver Twilight is made up of a secret cabal of leading politicians, charismatic socialites, persuasive civic leaders, and successful businessmen who must pass through successive ranks of occult initiation and ritual to emerge into the inner sanctum of the Order, there to pursue their quest for ultimate earthly - and unearthly - power. To represent the Order's magical mastery in the game, The Order of the Silver Twilight introduces an assortment of versatile and challenging cards whose game mechanics mesh well with a variety of decks and play styles.

Among the weapons of the Order's arsenal are the Ritual support cards. These cards represent the spells of the Order that, unlike event cards which flash into play and are then discarded, the Rituals remain in play, looming threateningly and triggering off of in-game events. Rituals are also not the only cards of the Silver Twilight involving discard and sacrifice and, as a game progresses, more and more stacked Silver Twilight abilities will emerge that will spell doom for anyone opposing them.

The Order of the Silver Twilight is a game-changing expansion for Call of Cthulhu: The Card Game. For more information on this new faction, please visit our Order of the Silver Twilight website.

This Winter, the secret machinations of the Order of the Silver Twilight will be brought to light. Will you join them in their unending quest for power, or will you muster your arms against the threat they present to the world?

The Order's only ally is power, its only enemy: anything that stands in its way.

[Nick]

Any idea of price and release date yet?

[fatolaf]

Nothing concrete, but Q4, and I can't see it being more than £19.99 RRP, maybe £23.99 (same as the last Invasion Expansion) now you get 3 of every card.

As soon as I know it will be up on the shop to pre-order at 15% off...

[Nick]

You can assume I'll be pre-ordering one of these mate. I love the look of these kooky masonic-type cultists!

[fatolaf]

Yep they are not totally new, they turned up in the CCG as neutral cards, but I'm glad they have done a new faction, will be very interesting to see whom they can team up with successfully with.

Or will they be strong enough at a mono level?

[fatolaf]

More info on the new faction:

Mean, morbid disposition—and a secret drinker if you could judge by the empty bottles in his rubbish heap. No wonder Tom Sprague hated him and blackballed him from the Masonic lodge, and warned him off when he tried to make up to Sophie. The way he experimented on animals was against Nature and Scripture. Who could forget the state that collie dog was found in, or what happened to old Mrs. Akeley's cat?¨
     - H. P. Lovecraft and Hazel Heald, The Horror in the Burying-Ground

Get Ready! With The Wailer Below at a speakeasy near you, I expected to be talking about the Screams From Within Asylum Pack today. The good news is, I will next time. The bigger news is that there is bigger news to talk about today: The Hermetic Order of the Silver Twilight Lodge is entering the fray. There's a lot of ground to cover today, so let's go!

Movement

Some may wonder who these people are. Call of Cthulhu: The Card Game is based on several sources. There are influences from H.P. Lovecraft and his literary circle, of course, and there are a lot of references to Chaosiums legendary roleplaying game The Call of Cthulhu, which featured a campaign called "The Shadows of Yog-Sothoth." This campaign features The Hermetic Order of the Silver Twilight - a Cthulhu Mythos version of the real-world Golden Dawn – as a hook for adventurers to set them on the trail of things humanity wasn't meant to know. You might also know them from Arkham Horror, where players can choose to join the Order by visiting their lodge.

The Order itself has a strange hierarchical structure. On the lower end are the initiates and other people interested in the occult, drawn to belong to an organization they view as a funny book club that has secret handshakes. Most aren't even aware of the true nature of the Order and its agenda. They humor each other by joining in seemingly innocent acts, hokey rituals and other distractions without even questioning the purpose. But they are tools. Sometimes, things go wrong, a friend goes missing and they hire some investigators to look into the matter, answer a few questions to the police and well... That's it. The Order tightens the grip on them, start to demand more outlandish things of them and slowly they get tangled in a web of blackmail, threats and shocking revelations.

Brotherhood

The true goals of the Order? Well, to be honest, The Hermetic Order of the Silver Twilight has been a part of the Call of Cthulhu the Card Game for a long time, be it in a less organized fashion. Lord of the Silver Twilight (Core Set, F50) is a character that has gone a little higher up the ranks. Then there is Carl Stanford (Secrets of Arkham, F28,) one of the Orders' principal Sorcerers. Wizard of Yog-Sothoth (Secrets of Arkham, F36) is a title bestowed on some of the Orders' most loyal members. It's not unthinkable that Hermetic Scholar (Secrets of Arkham, F34) is part of it too.

Factions in Call of Cthulhu represent a certain level of organization. A 'resource match' is an indicator of who you know, what you know and where your contacts are. Sure, there can be some internal power struggles (You and the other player both picked, say, Agency, to compete against each other) and there may even be some alliances where the members of your team aren't even aware they are working towards the same goal as their enemies (Your Agency/Hastur deck) but resourcing shows you know your way around a certain subset of assets just enough to use them.

As the Order grows, their loose associations grow into stronger bonds, and the structure of the Silver Twilight becomes more formalised, to the point where the members fall under a new resource type. And thus, a new faction is born.

Waiting for the Sirens' call

The Silver Twilight already was a big part of the background for Call of Cthulhu and by bringing it more to the foreground, it helps bringing the universes of Arkham Horror and CoCLCG closer together. Since it uses flavor previously reserved for the Cthulhu and Yog-Sothoth factions, will it detract from these factions, and steal their identity?

Well, no. The Order of the Silver Twilight just brings more focus to cards that would previously have fallen under Neutral cards. The Order gets the card slots from there, and works towards a new cohesive structure. If anything, it means that there is space freed up for the other factions to delve deeper into their core mechanics and subtypes. Less neutrals means more room for better focus for everyone.

Technique

Factions aren't only defined by resource matching, but by their mechanics. Factions have a play style. For instance, when removing a character, Hastur would turn it insane, Syndicate would exhaust it, The Agency would wound it and Cthulhu simply destroys. High Wizard of the Order (F24) shows how The Order often approaches this. The order still is mostly powerless against Ancient Ones, since their secret agenda is to make them rise and thrive.

Then there is the way Silver Twilight goes about casting spells and using rituals. Or how it goes about anything. See, they feed on bad things happening to you. Sure, it's sad news when the lowest echelons of the Dunwich Silver Twilight Chapter gets killed by a totally random and "in no way related to the actual goals of the Order, honestly!" event, but such things could very well, and totally coincidentally charge up a ritual like Ritual of the Lance (F42.)

Note that Ritual of the Lance doesn't allow you to sacrifice characters by itself, but it leeches off other effects. And if your opponent isn't willing or able to force some death,  like the sacrifice effect from Ritual of Summoning (F51) Imagine having these rituals and Cthulhu, Lord of R'lyeh (The Wailer Below, F64) – That has to be worth a little collateral damage, right? This is the type of passive aggression you can expect from this new faction.

Low-Life

Being hit by a flurry of Endless Interrogation (The Thing From the Shore, F82) can be pretty harsh, but when life gives you lemons (or other Yellow Signs) then Silver Twilight just opens a lemonade stand. Senator Nathaniel Rhodes (F18) can turn discard in card cycling, giving this setback a positive spin by possibly improving your hand quality.

You might even concider teaming up with Julia Brown, Oddly Amphibious (The Path to Y'ha-nthlei, F107) to accelerate your discard triggers and even gain a net advantage.

Change is always scary and exciting. The Silver Twilight has to work hard to find a niche for themselves. This new order and upheaval offers new conflicts, challenges, opportunities and discoveries. This is your chance to take the power for yourself!

[Nick]

Very much in two minds about these guys now. I want them to be great, but it's hard to see how they can work as a mono deck. They're all about gaining benefit from something bad happening - OK, but how can you actually win the game with a faction that's constantly sac-ing it's own characters?

They might well work with a recursion deck like Yog-Sothoth (supposedly the Order are all about summoning Yog anyway, so it's fluffy in a sense) but it will be a shame if they can't stand up on their own.

(I'm still buying the set BTW...!  )

[fatolaf]

Not aure about the mono potential either but I can see them being a great deck to mix with, I'm thinking Cops, Robbers and Crooked Politicians...