Post-Con Deep Dive #2: Elder Mythos

I don’t often write negative reviews. Please understand this.

One of my Arcade regulars from last year’s RinCon asked me to run Elder Mythos specifically. I adore Mana Project Studio’s generic storygame Not The End, liked Cowboy Bebop, their upcoming Ghost in the Shell RPG looks nice, and I had backed this, so…sure, why not? I’m not a huge fan of the Lovecraftian Mythos but I enjoyed Lovecraftesque last year.

The pitch is good: rather than playing an investigator or witness or victim of a Mythos conspiracy, everyone plays an Entity of the Mythos themselves: Cthulhu, Nyarlathotep, Yog-Sothoth, and so on. They even pull in some more obscure god-things from the non-Lovecraft authors who added to the Mythos. Each Entity has lesser and greater Designs they’re trying to fulfill on Earth. You pick a scenario – really just a list of locations in a time and place – and go to war with each other. This is not a game of sympathetic, or even flawed, protagonists. You play Evil and/or Unknowable.

The facilitator role is also interesting. Rather than drawing the characters through a story, the facilitator’s job is to help the character furthest back and hinder the character furthest in the lead. Because, you see, this is a competitive RPG. Sort of. It’s more a boardgame-RPG hybrid.

Each player gets two Action Points per turn and starts the game with five Plot Points. When the game is over, whoever has the most Plot Points wins. Players have a constrained list of actions they can take, each of which takes either or both kinds of points to execute. And whenever you take an action, you give it a little fictional positioning so the facilitator (the Entity Master) can judge advantage or disadvantage when it comes time to roll dice.

The actions the Entities can do are declare an objective (set a die on one of the locations, telegraphing your intent to take it over in the future), acquire an objective (actually roll the dice you’ve invested in a location, along with your normal pool which we’ll get to in a second), cultivate an unspeakable resource (every Entity has a couple critters specific to their oeuvre), acquire an unspeakable resource (just like objectives, you have to telegraph what you’re working on before you actually do the thing), or attack a resource (because this is PvP, you can reduce or destroy each other’s critters). 

The game is notionally based on the Year Zero Engine (click through to read my piece at Rascal News!) but only in the lightest, shallowest way possible: you roll a pool of dice and if any 6 comes up, you’ve succeeded. If more than one 6 comes up, it’s a catastrophic success. Cute! You roll on another table and other stuff happens. You also earn a Plot Point for your catastrophic success.

Unfortunately, that’s all the Year Zero Engine tech you see. There is no pushing, there are no secondary economies invoked by pushing, and your stats never take hits that require engaging with a recovery action. The lack of pushing turns out to be catastrophic to the system. Read on.

Running The Math

Two other problems move the game from slow-but-playable to just plain broken. One is that there’s a general assumption that you’ll have cultivated and summoned a resource before you do anything else. This is because each resource has a Tier, and you add those right into your dice pool. Great! Now we’re at maybe 7 or 8 dice (you’re limited to 9, and while you’re putting dice on the map you’re reducing your pool – a whole different issue). But how do you get that first resource out?

Which brings us to the second problem. In most cases, rolls are opposed. That is, two or more players are rolling against each other but only the instigator, the player who spent action points, can actually win the roll. If you don’t win, you’ve just lost all those dice and all that time. Bringing out a resource gets harder the higher the Tier: a tier 1 critter gives the EM a base 1 die plus 1 die for that tier. A tier 3, yeah, that’s 4 dice you’re rolling against. And remember: you don’t have to just succeed but actually beat the EM’s roll. Getting the first resource out is ridiculously difficult and slow.

The only roll in the game that’s unopposed is when an Entity has been plopping dice into a point of interest, a location on the map, without anyone else showing an interest in it. Given the each player’s pool of 9 dice, smart play probably means you can’t spread around your dice too far. You can’t play spoiler to someone else’s future Acquire an Objective roll and your own Objective and cultivate and acquire a monster resource. But even if you’re playing smart and focusing on exactly one effort at a time – specifically, moving heaven and earth to get your first resource into play – it’s going to be an opposed roll with good odds of whiffing.

It’s never a good sign when the players start running the math at the table. We took a bio break at around the second hour, and a couple of my players just sat there staring at the game state. “How do we win this again?” and “Wait, hold on, walk me through how to build a die pool?” and “Okay hold on here, I’m gonna pull up AnyDice and check something…” and so on. Here’s what we came up with:

1. Every time you put a die on the table, there needs to be a little narrative (a “zoom in”) attached to that. Doesn’t need to be a lot! Let’s assume 2 minutes. That’s pretty much just a splash of color.
2. Seizing that first Tier 1 resource seems pretty vital to getting literally anything else out.
3. You only get 2 Action Points per turn.
4. “Cultivate an Unspeakable Resource” costs both and Action and Plot point. And you only start with 5 plot points. There are other game effects that generate plot points, all of which require you make rolls. But for starters you can invest only 5 dice into Cultivate.
5. One zoom-in for each Cultivate action, so let’s say 4 minutes. Yes, you could absolutely get it down lower. But the zoom-ins were at this point the only interesting content to the game. 
6. Let’s also assume, charitably, that your Entity will use a +2 stat. Every Entity in the game either has a single +2 or a couple +1s. That’s the basis of your die pool.
7. Now let’s build a pool with a better-than-even chance of succeeding. The odds of getting at least one 6 – never mind a “catastrophic success” – breaks 50% at 4 dice. That’s two Cultivate actions plus the Acquire an Unspeakable Resource action. If everyone at a four person table is making the exact same play you’ll get your first 50/50 chance after about a half hour of play.
8. Oh…but remember this is a contested roll. The GM is also rolling, at this point just 2d6 (1 as a base and 1 for a Tier 1 critter – the higher the tier, the tougher it is). So that 50/50 chance? It just dropped. But let’s set that aside because the GM only has a 30%ish chance of actually getting a 6 (therefore requiring two 6es out of the Entity player, a 13%ish chance).
9. You might maybe beg an extra 1d6 off the GM if you set up your narrative so that your efforts have a clear advantage. See, the zoom-in mechanism actually has a point! Not only does your narration need to reflect your Entity’s manifestations, it also needs to be setting up a clear advantage. Gods help you if someone else makes a compelling case for interfering, therefore giving you -1d6.
10. Aaaaand in conclusion, if you fail to make that 50%ish roll and/or the GM makes their 30%ish roll, you lose all the dice you invested. That’s a half-hour gone and no advancement toward getting anything physical on the board. Start over!

That 10 point list is excruciating, right? Imagine talking through it at the table. Imagine extrapolating those numbers to “almost a sure thing” levels for the first Unspeakable Resource! Once you’ve hit 4 dice and a 50%ish chance, every die after that is another 10%ish. Again leaving aside any contested rolls, you’re gonna be a good hour away from making your first 80% roll. Given you lose all your dice when you fail, the cost of failure is catastrophic.

More likely, because it looks easier, a player will choose seize one of the spots on the map and then try and get an Unspeakable Resource on the table. The odds, unfortunately, are the same for this play. It just isn’t costing you Plot Points. And it assumes nobody else will put their dice into a location, therefore turning the roll into a contested thing. Oh! And! If your roll to acquire a location is contested, only the active player can even win it! And, again, lose all the die and more specifically all the time that went into that. 

The shame of all this is that for our first couple of hours, we were getting some pretty neat fictional stuff into play. We chose Lovecraft Country 1922, the OG, spooky New England. Apocalyptic visions gripped Boston as Cthulhu and Hastur struggled over the city, a little girl witnessed bad things at Falcon Point but later was struck by a god’s blessing and then turned into a salt statue, a gentle old woodcutter emerged from his retirement outside Arkham and traveled to the big city only to become someone’s sacrifice. But at hour 2, when everyone had had two or three chances to make moves and set up rolls, and one player got lucky while everyone else whiffed, we ran the math. 

For the record, I think Elder Mythos is salvageable. I think the rules can be fixed such that, for example, getting your first resource into play is even possible. Maybe you start with your lowest Tier creature ready to rock? There are no rules for moving your resources from location to location; it appears your Cult or Spawn or Deep Ones or whatever can’t move to a new location, another oversight. Could YZE style pushing be added back in somehow? That would add a lot of texture and much better odds of actually doing anything. Simply remove the opposed roll to bring an Unspeakable Resource into play?

Competitive games uniquely require very tight math to maintain fairness. While every Entity comes with a custom power and their own Designs they’re trying to fulfill to earn Plot Points, they’re in no way balanced against each other and sometimes require a specific other Entity be in play to score. Hastur and Cthulhu for example have a mutual beef, therefore they can both score one of their Greater Designs if they’re both in play. This game’s math is not tight. The math is not even functional enough to get through a session with anyone doing anything with any regularity.

Right now, I can’t recommend anyone play Elder Mythos. Mana Project produces gorgeous stuff and this box is no exception. But it’s a game-shaped object until we figure out how to fix its engine.

While You’re Here

Don’t forget! Our next episode of the Indie Game Talk Club drops this week. Get it wherever you get your podcasts.