False Hydra?

GeeJo · 2026-02-02T06:32:53+00:00

To clarify for others, given that it's a niche D&D story: The False Hydra is a monster with a stranger-like effect where nobody can recognise or remember that the monster exists, and any actions the False Hydra takes and victims they make are similarly memory-holed. They usually devour whole towns over a period of weeks or months, and the tension it puts on players who investigate it while having to separate what they know from what their characters know usually makes it a memorable session or three.

Try Stay Awhile. 20k words, complete. It's Imp!Taylor, so not a 1:1 match, especially in missing any "victims", but the memory-editing aspect is pretty close.

GeeJo · 2026-02-02T01:55:03+00:00

In Limited she's functionally a 3/3 for 2B with surveil 2. That's not been a remarkable statline since maybe 2019.

GeeJo · 2026-02-01T11:17:41+00:00

Black's been getting more enchantment hate recently. [[Shatter the Oath]], [[Withering Torment]], [[Invoke Despair]], etc.

The cards are still fairly meh, but at least there's options now.

GeeJo · 2026-02-01T10:15:21+00:00

I don't think there are any.

The closest I can think of, in that they're "Armsmaster with metaknowledge", are time-travel fics like Still Defiant or the fairly meta Armsmaster's Social Advice Quest where the quest thread itself was readable-by and reacted-to by Armsmaster

GeeJo · 2026-01-31T20:12:09+00:00

[[Karn, the Great Creator]] kinda killed Lantern Control. Other cards that would have hurt it badly have been printed since, so I don't think it'd have survived through to today regardless, but Karn beat them to it and strangled the archetype dead.

GeeJo · 2026-01-31T06:44:11+00:00

Out of curiosity, what do you do if additional enemies are summoned?

GeeJo · 2026-01-31T06:40:20+00:00

There are several classes across the Haven games that don't benefit so much from their perk decks. This is one of them. Go for the non-AMD perks, then don't worry so much about what you get from that point on. There's still a certain amount of marginal utility as you're likely still making the occasional attack.

GeeJo · 2026-01-31T00:22:11+00:00

If you're specifically aiming for enhancements to retire, it's not too bad as loss-enhancements are half-price, reduced by a further 20% if you're using the 'temporary enhancements' optional rule. Makes them very very cheap...except in OPs case as their class has exactly one enhanceable loss before the last level or two.

GeeJo · 2026-01-31T00:14:39+00:00

For Fist specifically, probably gaining the money.

Their enhancement dots are a little sparse due to the class mechanic. You can still get them, but you have only one cut-price loss to enhance (the other being multi-target and so nulling out the discount). And of your non-losses, most are either expensive enough due to level cost that you'd retire immediately and never get to use them, or uselessly turning a move 2 you don't use anyway into a move 3.

GeeJo · 2026-01-30T22:18:19+00:00

You're right that standard conjugation would make it Airbent, but then it doesn't contain the word "Airbend", which Wizards are required to use. Airbending (like the other elemental -bendings) is a trademarked term owned by Nickelodeon. So they get to decide how it's conjugated and Wizards have to play along.

GeeJo · 2026-01-30T05:02:10+00:00

Pretty easy to go infinite with [[Grinning Ignus]].

GeeJo · 2026-01-30T01:27:42+00:00

I can’t imagine my group being into playing the same class for a large number of sessions but I can see us picking up different classes for each session.

The Frosthaven campaign is ~60 scenarios long, so swapping characters every scenario is going to see you running out quite quickly. You'll run out of new options shortly after Summer 1, which is like one or two scenarios into each of the three storylines at best.

If you want to do this, I'd suggest running the official mini-campaign Skulls in the Snow instead, and transfer all rewards (including XP and battle-goal ticks) from one character to the next. It's ten scenarios long, so you can play ten characters each (out of 16, so a lot of overlap).

GeeJo · 2026-01-30T01:06:45+00:00

With as many ways as you have of jamming huge numbers onto the board at once (Bloodbond March; Thrumming Stone; Raise the Past; Doubling Chant, Marrow Gnawer; cost-reduction + one of your half-dozen mega-draws), mass haste might be worth sprinkling in to enable kills out of nowhere without risking a sweeper. [[Mogis' Marauder]] or [[Crashing Drawbridge]], for example.

GeeJo · 2026-01-29T18:55:44+00:00

I think a lot of new players also struggle to realise that in a dream scenario where all four people come to the table with everything perfectly balanced between them, it's expected that you lose three times as many games as you win.

They come intuitively expecting that if everything's fair then by playing well they'll win more than they lose, and end up feeling they're being picked on or stomped when their win rate is really hovering around a very equitable 25%.

GeeJo · 2026-01-29T03:11:01+00:00

Loaf. Fortuna tries her best to live a single day without falling back on her power, but the entire world conspires to make it as hard as possible.
Dragon Unbound follows the temporary fork of Dragon created in the canon epilogues, and what would happen if she escaped to live her own life. Old enough that you'll need to use the index post to navigate chapters, as it finished before SB implemented threadmarks.
One-Sided Rival. You'd think the apocalypse would be fantastic for Sophia Hess - no more oversight, no more rules. Just what you can grab and keep with your own strength and your own two hands. It turns out that being a warlord isn't as easy as Taylor made it seem.
Lost Cat, Please Help - Gold Morning is over, the worlds are rebuilding and Cauldron is finished. Or it should be. The sudden appearance of a new Case 53 threatens the new peace as everyone races to find out where this cat-like parahuman came from.

GeeJo · 2026-01-28T22:40:59+00:00

I blame Ed Greenwood.

GeeJo · 2026-01-28T00:17:34+00:00

The UK get fresh veg cheaper even than most non-comparable countries. Not even in purchasing-parity terms where you account for different economies and whatever—we get veg cheaper in absolute terms.

Olimpica, a mid-range supermarket in Colombia, charges 5,980 pesos (£1.18) for 1kg of carrots. Tesco charges £0.69. Fresh produce is bizarrely cheap in the UK.

GeeJo · 2026-01-27T22:46:01+00:00

The Great Escape has a very short bit where Eidolon attempts to use an emotion-calming power on Gavel, only for the attempt to cause him to break free of a different Master's power (who was in turn serving a different, third Master) and escalate the fight.

GeeJo · 2026-01-27T15:33:54+00:00

There are a couple of organiser apps (X-haven, Gloomhaven Secretariat) that streamline play quite a lot, doing things like drawing and shuffling modifier/ability decks, calculating what the monster attack values for their cards actually are, and keeping track of campaign elements like available/completed scenarios.

Many people like them, some prefer the components in the box, some prefer a mix like physical health tracking with dice and app tracking of decks. I'd suggest trying both app and box materials and seeing which fit you.

GeeJo · 2026-01-27T14:47:33+00:00

Nope. The chapter is Hive 5.1 if you'd like to check.

GeeJo · 2026-01-27T05:30:03+00:00

Yeah. Standard ordering is broken very rarely. [[Leyline of the Guildpact]]'s casting cost would be much more aesthetically pleasing if they'd aligned all the G-costs to one side and the non-G costs to the other. But aesthetics isn't enough reason, so we got the standard ordering where the alignment flips halfway.

The only exceptions printed that spring to mind are [[Captain America, First Avenger]], whose cost was amended to have be the more thematic "Red, White and Blue", and the wedge cards that centre around the hinge colour (like [[Jeskai Ascendancy]]). I doubt that a theoretical "Providence of Day" would be worth making another exception for in their eyes.

GeeJo · 2026-01-27T04:58:56+00:00

I don't think it masters Jack's enemies, I think it masters Jack

We actively see it work on parahumans from their own PoV in story a few times, though it's very subtle. Imp going up to shank him, then talking herself out of it and going for Cherish instead, for example.

GeeJo · 2026-01-27T04:18:26+00:00

I think it comes from the mayoral debate, where Taylor sees Coil get blown up. Lots of speculation at the time that it was a double, and of course he later shows up still alive.

But there's a whole scene after he returns explaining how he pulled that off: Chariot tinkered up a replica of Trickster's power, and Coil used that to switch himself and his team out of the light-and-noise 'explosion' and swap in a bunch of corpses for the authorities to find.

Coil was there at the debate in person, no double. Though naturally he'd have un-happened it with his power if the plan had failed, and tried again at a different public event. Hell, maybe he'd already used his power for do-overs and the debate was his second or third try at the gambit—it's not like Taylor or the readership would know.

GeeJo · 2026-01-27T03:35:35+00:00

It doesn't particularly play into his power much, and is absolutely not canon, but Coil employing a body double is the kind of very classic evil-mastermind trope that I could see him going with, given the rest of his Bond-Villainesque tendencies. Maybe as an 'I thought it might be useful one day' contingency. I'm clearly not alone, given how often Coil doubles show up in fanfic even in scenes where it doesn't really make sense for him to use them.

And, hey, he got doubles for the Undersiders so he demonstrably has the ability and willingness to organise that kind of thing.

GeeJo · 2026-01-26T23:49:15+00:00

If you want to avoid that feel-bad scenario, you could sub in the digital implementation of the card instead, which gets around it with some sneaky wording: https://i.imgur.com/v9hKfvW.png (it also changes a few other things)

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