Arkham Horror LCG: The Pallid Mask

From the streets of Paris to the city's subterranean catacombs, your pursuit of the truth behind The King in Yellow leads you farther and farther from Arkham's familiar landmarks. But the streets, the language, and the eerie, dark tunnels aren't the only foreign elements at play. There's something distinctly otherworldly in the Parisian catacombs…

In The Pallid Mask scenario, you and your fellow investigators will enter these tunnels in search of a stranger whom you believe must be connected to the events surrounding the performance of The King in Yellow at the Ward Theatre in Arkham. But with each new strange twist and turn, you'll find yourselves only stepping deeper into mystery. Perhaps you can follow the tunnels all the way to the pulsing heart of the play's mysteries, but there's a chance, too, you'll simply find yourselves lost amid the shifting landscape. What begins as a trek through moist and clammy tunnels of stone may become a journey that leads you under the earth, through  The Gate to Hell,  and straight to your demise at the Well of Souls or some other forgotten chamber.

Destined to be a fan-favorite, the scenario from The Pallid Mask utilizes the game's locations in a novel way, bringing them into play only as you travel through them, and arranging them in a constantly shifting and unpredictable fashion. Each new step through these labyrinths could be your last.

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Additionally, the sixty new cards from The Pallid Mask include two copies each of twelve different player cards. Divided between the game's five different investigator classes, these feature several higher level versions of existing cards alongside a range of new skill cards that offer potent kickers. Draw a card, ready an exhausted ally, gain resources, or offer sacrifices to increase your skill card's value. In the unpredictable subterranean darkness of The Pallid Mask, could these skill cards be what ultimately prevents your demise?

No Safe Passage

When you're ready to head beneath the Parisian streets and explore the deadly catacombs of The Pallid Mask, you'll set aside a handful of the Mythos Pack's new Catacombs cards, including the one you ultimately hope to discover. You'll shuffle these cards and place them at the bottom of your Catacombs deck. Then you'll place your starting location, marking it with a resource, and you'll shuffle the remaining Catacombs locations to place atop the others.

This is how you form your Catacombs deck, but the truly interesting part of The Pallid Mask is how the Catacombs deck transforms its new scenario into an adventure full of deadly pitfalls and frightening discoveries.

Instead of laying out a whole network of locations at the beginning of your game, you'll place only a single location onto the table—the one through which you enter the Catacombs. Then, throughout the adventure, each time you reveal a new Catacombs location, you'll discover new passages that lead deeper into the tunnels. Depending which location you enter, you may find yourself placing a single unrevealed Catacombs location to its right, or possibly above it. Or below it. Or to its left. Or you may find that your position branches in multiple directions.

Given the unpredictable nature of your journey through these Catacombs, The Pallid Mask introduces a unique set of scenario-specific rules stating all orthogonally adjacent locations (directly to the left, or right, above, or below each other) are adjacent for the purposes of travel. And this means that you'll never know what to expect as you set foot in a new location.

No Place for Rookies

With all its physical dangers—plus an array of untold supernatural threats—the scenario from The Pallid Mask is no place for rookie investigators. It's easy to get lost. It's just as easy to be lost forever, dragged down into sudden pitfalls by raving Lunatics, grotesque Monsters, or other Terrors. As a result, you'll want to have earned and spent every possible iota of experience to upgrade your deck and increase your chances of survival.

The new player cards in the Mythos Pack feature a split between higher level versions of existing cards and new skill cards, all of which come with a potent kicker.

By the time you start to explore the scenario's Catacombs, if your journey through The Path to Carcosa campaign has been mostly successful, you might wish simply to upgrade your cards, rather than introduce larger changes to the composition of your deck. Or perhaps you simply find yourself gravitating toward the Ritualist archetype we outlined in the article, "That Which Doesn't Kill Us…" Either way, you'll find a number of valuable upgrades in The Pallid Mask, such as the new version of Emergency Cache (The Pallid Mask, 239) that can help you quickly refresh your most important supplies.

On the other hand, if you're pursuing new paths—or flailing about for anything that might get you a better handle on your remaining sanity—you might want to play with the Mythos Pack's new skill cards. As with Inspiring Presence (The Pallid Mask, 228), each of these skill cards offers multiple icons and a valuable kicker that might very well make the difference between successfully navigating these eerie tunnels and being lost in them forever.

Remember to Carry a Torch

There are layers upon layers of darkness in the catacombs beneath Paris. Within that darkness, though, you may find the clues that will begin to shed light upon the mysterious play, The King in Yellow. You may finally learn how the play is connected to the atrocities that follow it from city to city… But you should be careful what you choose to uncover.

Traps, monsters, and branching corridors—what else will you find in the subterranean world of The Pallid Mask?