{"id":409,"date":"2019-06-14T12:16:35","date_gmt":"2019-06-14T10:16:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.electricdawn.com\/wordpress\/?p=409"},"modified":"2019-07-03T11:31:43","modified_gmt":"2019-07-03T09:31:43","slug":"mansions-of-madness-astral-alchemy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.electricdawn.com\/wordpress\/?p=409","title":{"rendered":"Mansions of Madness: Astral Alchemy"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">Yesterday night we played the scenario\u00a0<em>Astral Alchemy<\/em> from the\u00a0<em><a href=\"https:\/\/www.fantasyflightgames.com\/en\/news\/2017\/6\/21\/streets-of-arkham\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Streets of Arkham<\/a>\u00a0<\/em>expansion for the first time and nailed it right away. We did play with a good (average?!) team (<em>Finn Edwards<\/em>, <em>Ashcan Pete<\/em>, <em>Tommy Muldoon<\/em> and<em> Agnes Baker<\/em>) and we did have good rolls but I didn&#8217;t expect it to go so smoothly. That made me wonder about the MoM difficulty rating system a bit&#8230; I don&#8217;t know, there have been 3-stars that we failed, more or less, spectacularly (like\u00a0<em>Behind Closed Doors<\/em> or <em>Murder on the Stargazer Majestic<\/em>) and 5-stars that were relatively painless. I know that it might all just boil down to luck but I think that sometimes it&#8217;s the internal logic, the writers&#8217; assumptions about what you should take away from each clue or encounter, that makes things difficult.<\/p>\n<p>*** Spoiler alert ***<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">I remember that in\u00a0<em>MotSM<\/em> we couldn&#8217;t really grab the meaning of the clues. Some were vague, some were ambiguous, some even conflicting. That might be the whole point of the story but I think you do need some thread that, after exploring everything, helps you paint a clear picture. Instead we failed, or rather I remember I failed, the &#8220;final question&#8221; quite hard.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">On the other hand, AA was quite straightforward: list of things to grab. Once you got them you&#8217;d know. Deliver. The end. Lots of monsters since the very beginning (that&#8217;s where the luck factor kicks in) but you felt like you knew what you were doing. Probably too straightforward?!<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">I guess my point is either some scenarios are rated too harshly (like AA) or some are rated too lightly (like MotSM).\u00a0So, don&#8217;t trust those 5-point stars!<\/p>\n\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"aligncenter\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.electricdawn.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/Astral_Alchemy-1.jpg\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"4032\" height=\"3024\" src=\"http:\/\/www.electricdawn.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/Astral_Alchemy-1.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-420\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.electricdawn.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/Astral_Alchemy-1.jpg 4032w, https:\/\/www.electricdawn.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/Astral_Alchemy-1-300x225.jpg 300w, https:\/\/www.electricdawn.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/Astral_Alchemy-1-768x576.jpg 768w, https:\/\/www.electricdawn.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/Astral_Alchemy-1-1024x768.jpg 1024w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 767px) 89vw, (max-width: 1000px) 54vw, (max-width: 1071px) 543px, 580px\" \/><\/a><figcaption>End-of-game board<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Yesterday night we played the scenario\u00a0Astral Alchemy from the\u00a0Streets of Arkham\u00a0expansion for the first time and nailed it right away. We did play with a good (average?!) team (Finn Edwards, Ashcan Pete, Tommy Muldoon and Agnes Baker) and we did have good rolls but I didn&#8217;t expect it to go so smoothly. That made me &hellip; <\/p>\n<p class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.electricdawn.com\/wordpress\/?p=409\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Mansions of Madness: Astral Alchemy&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":483,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[14,23],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.electricdawn.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/409"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.electricdawn.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.electricdawn.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.electricdawn.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.electricdawn.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=409"}],"version-history":[{"count":17,"href":"https:\/\/www.electricdawn.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/409\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":493,"href":"https:\/\/www.electricdawn.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/409\/revisions\/493"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.electricdawn.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/483"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.electricdawn.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=409"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.electricdawn.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=409"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.electricdawn.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=409"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}