Eldritch Horror is a narrative game where Things Just Happen™

Eldritch Horror is a board game by Fantasy Flight games set in their own version of the “Cthulhu Mythos”, the fictional playground of cosmic horror bullshit created by a massive racist and his more talented friends, and popularized by any long running fictional franchise that needs some public domain filler. I’m Eldritch Horror, you and however many friends you can stand playing with take on the role of globetrotting “Investigators” setting out to stop the awakening of an Ancient One, a great and unspeakable evil whose coming presages silence and the end of all things. As you and your intrepid allies traipse around the intra war world, problematically searching through ancient ruins, you’ll get to experience a series of randomized Encounters each turn. These Encounters are where the bulk of the game exists, and they’re also where things get… weird.

Zoey Samaras lost her parents at a young age in a horrible fire. Since then, she’s heard the voice of God, calling her to make the world a better place. I’m this instance, God might actually be the Elder Gods urging Zoey to destroy Nyarlathotop for them to protect the dreams of Unknown Kadath from the inevitable fires of war the Faceless God will bring about. Either way, God and/or Elder Gods have tasked her with killing monsters. The definition of “monster” can also be pretty loose.

Kate Winthrope is a perfectly-calm-and-reasonable-thank-you-very-much scientist working in the obscure field of dimensional research. Her life’s work is to create a Dimensional Flux Stabilizer, though in her attempts she unleashed a monster from another world that killed her mentor. Now she seeks to prevent such a thing from ever happening again, as well as to keep the rival of the Elder Gods from bringing the earth under his control. She also was more than happy to use the flamethrower she purchased in the Dreamlands by going deep into debt to help Zoey fill her monster pile with corpses. They might have been a little more crispy than God, and/or the Elder Gods, might have liked, but beggars can’t be choosers.

Minh Thi Phan has lived in Tokyo for years, working for a western antiques dealer. The two of them became friends over the years, and his unexpected and grisly murder shocked her. She knew that there was more out there, led by the Elder Gods’ dreams, she began searching for answers throughout Asia and Europe to defeat the Crawling Chaos. This led her to uncover the Order of the Bloated Woman in Shanghai, a cult with some connection to Nyarlathotep.

Wealthy dilettante Jenny Barnes was also looking for answers, in her case for the disappearance of her sister, and the mysterious clues she left behind. Clues that lead her to the dreams of distant lands and the coming of a dark god. It was with Jenny’s wealth and connections that Minh Thi Phan was able to gain the assistance of the [Central Intelligence?] Agency, who for the right price kicked down the doors of the Order’s hideout in Shanghai and filled the cult, and their dark god, full of lead. They didn’t finish the job, but you get what you pay for. Minh hadn’t even needed to be in Shanghai herself.

Again, I haven’t played most board games in existence, but this still stands out to me as above and beyond the usual way that character options exist in other board games. Dead of Winter, one of the other big names in story focused board games, has simple character cards where they also each have a name and subtitle, and they’re all unique and distinguished from one another by special traits. Credit where credit is due, the influence score, the damage stat, the search stat, and the unique ability can go a long way to convey a story. Bev Russel’s “Mother” subtitle and her unique ability to instantly kill two zombies so long as there’s a helpless survivor at the colony gives you a clue about who she is and what she’s about, and what kind of “Mother” archetype she embodies. Her associated Crossroads card helps hammer this home, by forcing the player who controls her to decide whether to give up controlling Bev (which limits their options), or to completely destroy the School location, killing all the zombies there but also removing the ability to search for supplies. Forest Plum, the Mall Santa also has his personality summed up really well by his card: He has the lowest Influence score aside from the dog, and his unique ability is that you can remove him from the game at the beginning of your turn to increase Morale by one, because everyone hates Forest. 

But other times you don’t really get any insight into who someone is, its simply “oh, they’re the principle, so they search better at the school” or, “oh, of course the cook can just add two food”. Most characters don’t have personality beyond what’s conveyed on their card, or on any Crossroads encounters that show up. Sometimes even those aren’t very exciting, like when you simply might stumble across John Price, Student, in the school and have to decide whether to save him from zombies or use his death as a distraction so you can get more items. 

Every Investigator in Eldritch Horror has more personality than most other board game player choices. They tell you why the Investigator is even out investigating in the first place, with the implication that whatever horrors they faced, or that killed their loved ones, have something to do with the current Ancient One. There are even personalized Encounters depending on whether the Investigator is crippled beyond the ability to continue or if they’ve simply been driven mad by the horrors they’ve confronted. No one ever really dies, at least not right away, they just become yet another Encounter for someone to experience when they land on a location, just like any Clue or Mystic Ruin or Gate or Rumor or Expedition or Location encounter.

These Encounters are the bulk of the game, and each one of them is a strange, often disconnected vignette that tells a story and presents a challenge, and it’s these challenges that make Eldritch Horror feel so surreal in the way that it creates emergent stories.

I’m a lot of roleplaying video games in the more Western inspired vein, you create a character and you’re meant to, well, roleplay. You put yourself into the role of the character you created and think about what that character would do. It’s always a bit incomplete, though. A bit lacking. Maybe the character in your head is a bit of a pacifist. We’ll, that won’t matter, because the game throws monsters and bandits at you. Maybe you give a character a range of emotion that just isn’t covered by dialogue options, like a cheeky and sarcastic rogue who nonetheless will help strangers without needing a reward.

The things you want to do just simply don’t exist in the game, so you just shrug and go with what fits the best. Or you ignore the concept of a “role” to play entirely, and just do whatever nonsense and chaos that you choose at the moment, knowing that none of it matters. Either way, you can’t really embody the character you wanted to. You didn’t have as many choices as you’d have liked.

Eldritch Horror is kind of like that, but in the extreme. You have choices over which Investigator you play, which Actions they take, and occasionally you can choose which outcome to an event they respond with. But more often than not, you’re simply flipping over an Encounter with no idea what your character will be doing. Will the Nun use her sword of darkness to slay a Nightaunt? Will the two fisted hardboiled detective inspire a slave uprising in a far off alternate reality? When your waitress who recalls a Hyborian life of being a powerful sorcerer does the turn’s Encounter, will she be present when an assassin fails to kill Benito Mussolini and for whatever reason be allowed to watch the interrogation so that she can learn from the killer and Improve her Will score? Or will she be flung through a portal in time to the far future, where she reverse engineers the technology of alien fungi to return to her own time and close the Gate?

Each Encounter could be its own story, but they’re all told in less than a hundred words, with one or two dice rolls along the way. They don’t connect in any way to what comes before or after them, and you never really “prepare” for an Encounter, other than knowing which kind of skill Tests that a specific Encounter type might call for. They just sort of happen. Regardless of what kind of character you play, you’ll still be invited to watch the interrogation of Benito Mussolini’s failed assassin. You’ll still be able to make an Acquire Assets test to call the Agency to deal 4 damage to every monster on a location. You’ll still see your past self engaging in a dark ritual that you can’t remember. Whether you’re a waitress or a bootlegger or a homeless drifter or a lounge singer, you’ll still fight a cult to defend a group of monks from being sacrificed to the Ogress of Ra-Sa. The Rookie Cop and the Butler and the Author will all learn of a plot by the Voormish to raid the villages of Hyperborea in the far north of Greenland, where civilized people have never gone. Gravedigger or Salesman, you will find your consciousness transported to another body in an alien world where you have to Influence others like yourself to work together and share their knowledge.

Each round is nothing more than a series of disconnected events that don’t so much happen to your characters, but at them. Sometimes with them, but never really with you.

I should honestly hate this. If this was a roleplaying game, it would be the sort of plot where I’d get frustrated at the Gamemaster and either drop out or just bite my tongue and stop caring as much if a friend was enjoying it. Each round is absolute grade A nonsense.

But that just makes it interesting. It creates a dreamlike quality. If it was a roleplaying game, I’d be frustrated that the character concept I came up with doesn’t actually fit the random situations they end up in. But in a dream you don’t have to worry about why a traveling blues musician or an urchin left in the care of a Russian orphanage might get the 3rd Infantry in Tokyo offering to completely obliterate a monster somewhere else in the world for them. You don’t have to worry about how your character has contacts within cults reaching out to offer information on their organization.

Why does your Investigator — a lounge singer, a waitress, an ex-convict, a scientist, a parapsychologist, a literal fucking orphaned child, a butler, a local cop, a farmhand, a librarian — have a flaming sword of darkness, a massive stone calendar, a lightning gun, a spell to summon a byakhee, a dog sled that follows you around even after you leave the antarctic outpost, a mystical living doll that aids you? How did you find a Jeweled Scarab in the Himalayas, or rescue a human ally from the far reaches of space or the deepest Heart of Africa? How are you able to go into Debt in the dream city of Calaphais to buy a flamethrower from the Asset pool that anyone, on any city space, in any part of the world and beyond, can purchase from, and in a way that the Debt collectors will track you down even in another plane of reality?

None of it matters, because much like the things that happen in Ulthar, the village where no man can kill a cat, everything is just dreamlike. In a dream it doesn’t matter how you got here, or where you’re going next. You don’t question why it happens. It just happens. You might have some goal, but “defeat the Ancient One” and “figure out what’s drawn on the bottom of this word” are equally reasonable thoughts.

I’ve been playing Eldritch Horror for the last few days all on my own over Tabletop Simulator. I’m mostly just sitting around, desperately trying to keep track of the complex moving parts and the literally thousands of components. I’ve played the previous game in the franchise, Arkham Horror, exactly once, and it was in real life, and setting up and putting away the board took nearly as much time as the ill fated attempt to stop Yig the Father of Serpents from entering our reality and devouring us like so many delicious mice. Even with the aid of Tabletop Simulator and minor bits of scripting that people have put into their modules, setting up a game of Eldritch Horror is still a daunting task.

After playing with one module for a while, I pulled out another one that was thankfully a bit less taxing to load. I spent six hours just toying with the components, setting out everything, adding unnecessary extra boards from modules that aren’t meant to be used together, and positioning everything in a way that felt like it would make it easier for me to actually play a game. I don’t know if I’ll ever even play this game with anyone else, since playing it by myself took two days and dedicating even one hour of undivided attention to someone seems like a lot of effort, much less two or four or six or twelve hours that it would take to slowly move through the game.

But once that daunting task of set up is complete, its… kind of fun. Like I said, none of it makes sense, but its still entertaining. I don’t even know if “fun” is the right word, since I stayed up until 6am playing it despite being tired, but never once having a moment of elation. But its definitely engaging. It’s something that I wish I had the spoons to focus on in a meaningful way that isn’t just untreated ADHD causing me to keep sticking to a task simply because there’s no stopping point. I definitely wish that I had the spoons to actually play it with other people, and to be able to share this experience of the weekend’s hyperfixation with friends. It creates a story, but the story that emerges is one that happens in the afterward. You don’t dictate the story, you just contextualize it once its all over.

Like with Zoey Samaras, and her ability to draw a Task Unique Asset if she ever doesn’t have one, because her entire Thing is that she believes she hears the voice of God calling her to act and carry out His will. She’s a Chef, but her art depicts her holding a bloody kitchen knife and looking suspicious.

The Prelude card I chose at the beginning of the game was Aid of the Elder Gods, because I wanted to use both the Dreamlands expansion board as well as Nyarlathotep as my Ancient One, because that was the one most people suggested when I asked which great evil to face. The scenario says that the Elder Gods, seeing the fires of war that will soon consume the Dreamlands, can be called upon to help the Investigators. It plays into the mechanics of the Nyarlathotep scenario by allowing Investigators to go to the Dreamlands and remove Eldritch Tokens — which are used here to represent the corruption of the Lord of Kadath — but each Investigator also starts with an Eldritch Token already.

It says a lot without saying much at all. There’s a power struggle here. I don’t really even need to know much about the Mythos to “get” this. The Elder Gods know that Nyarlathotep will be bad for them, so they’re offering the players help. But, clearly Nyarlathotep is already aware of this, because he’s started corrupting the players before the game even starts.

So what does this mean for Zoey? Well, maybe that God whose voice she hears isn’t necessarily the same one everyone else in Rome is obsessed with. Maybe the one that she gets those Task Unique Assets from are the Elder Gods, who know that she can be used to put an end — even if just temporarily — to their rival? Its an emergent story made up after the fact by deciding to reinterpret things in a way that makes them make sense, when really Zoey was just a random character I picked when one of my other characters got driven mad by the Dunwich Horror because I didn’t think she’d roll that poorly on her test to not be driven mad by the slavering beast.

In a way, Eldritch Horror’s “narrative” is really more of a writing prompt. Things just happen, and its up to you to decide what they mean or why they’re happening at all. If you even want to, because honestly, there’s no real reason why you need to. Sometimes just having things happen is interesting enough. 

Anyway, as usual, thanks for reading, if you still are. This is sort of just a random short thing based on thoughts I’ve been having about this game that I’ve spent too much time playing by myself. But good lord, it’s such a daunting task just to set it up even when the modules come already mostly set up.

This was nowhere near as much effort as usual, but I’m still going to put all my piggybanks down here, because I’d really like more than 70$ a month from writing.