Since I brought it up previously, I figure I would talk a little more about my ideas for the Christmas Invasion and solicit ideas from the group.
The Basics
There are a lot of ways to present a villain, even more so here were there isn't clearly one villain. To make things seem big, my current plan is to have each side of the villain card represent a different figure from the invasion: on the front side you are dealing with the witch Gryla and the Yule Lads, while on the back side you are dealing with the monstrous Jólakötturinn.
There are two ways to deal with the cards to make both sides feel different: one is to remove certain cards from the villain deck depending on what side the villain is on. I’m already doing that with Unmute, so I feel like I will do it the other way: have the cards do different things depending on what side the villain is on. For instance:
Thunderous Footsteps (one-shot)
Front Side: Each hero target deals themselves 2 psychic damage. Each player discards a card.
Back Side: The Jólakötturinn deals the hero target with the highest HP 5 melee damage and each other hero target 1 sonic damage.
I’ll likely come up with different keywords for these (like Frost Witch for the front side and Kaiju Cat for the backside) but that’s the basic idea. Not all of the cards will do something like this, but I figure it will add some additional flavor for it to show up in certain places.
Gryla and the Yule Lads
We didn't actually deal with Gryla and her Yule Goat, but I figure we have enough info to make some informed guesses: there is a fog of sleep hanging over the city while the Yule Lads kidnap children.
To represent the kidnapped kids, I’m thinking I’m going to have some double-sided cards with one side representing either a Yule Lad or their bag of children and the other side representing a freed teen hero. It would look something like:
Kidnapping Sack (HP: 10)
When this card would be destroyed, flip it instead.=============================
Kid Kelvin (HP: 6) Ally, JHHL Hero
When flipped to this side, move this card to one player’s play area without an ally already in it. This card counts as a hero target.
Reduce damage dealt to hero targets in the same play area as this card by 1.
Still need to come up with a full like of allys, which is proving harder than I had imagined. I have two criteria in mind: first they should be teen heroes present in the first half of the game and secondly they should be someone I’m not already planning on putting in another deck so that they don’t conflict (it would be troublesome if you freed an ally A10 while also playing as the hero A10, especially in digital). Unfortunately, Bill is making it much more difficult with his Phase Two stories. Currently, I have the following characters as non-eligible for this:
All of the Menagerie (for obvious reasons)
The Irregularators (with a single exception listed below)
Super Chica
Nono
Hot Mess
Snowman
Agent 1337
Yeah, I would love to have hero teams of the Irregulators and the Agents of AEGIS.
Now there is one member of the Irregulators I don’t have plans for a hero deck: the shapeshifting Animal. There are two reasons for this, I don’t have a really strong bond with the character because they’re a bit of a blank slate and SotM already did a hero deck (The Naturalist) who has a similar enough gimmick to how I would build them that I don’t want to cover old territory.
There are also members of the JHHL to mine, so my current short list of allies are:
Animal
Kid Kelvin
Stingray
Ninjess
I would like to add a fifth character so that there are one ally for each hero in a 5 player game, but I’m sure I’m missing some other options that aren’t immediately obvious.
As for the villains, there are fifteen Yule Lads listed in our notes but as a standard villain deck is 25 cards and I don’t want over half of that taken up by samey targets, I’m going to need to prune that list or come up with something else (like teaming each of the Yule Lads with a partner for 7 total targets).
Current plan is to trigger the villain flip around either defeating a certain number or Yule Lads or by freeing a certain number of allies. I am less inclined about that second one, as I want the allies to be an optional (but very helpful) objective that you can blow past. Still thinking through specifics.
The Jólakötturinn
This one is a bit more straight forward. While the front side is going to focus on defeating Yule Lads and freeing allies to help you later in the game, the back side has one goal: Survive.
I’d originally toyed with the idea of heroes needing to defuse the bomb from the Oakland Cemetery present in the following session while also surviving the attacks of the massive Kaiju Cat, I don’t know how I would do it without it being an alternate target to punch or just a random bit of extra work (like each turn pulling a random card from a deck that has wires and if you cut all the required wires in the right order, you defused the bomb and win). So for now, I’m going to focus on “punch large cat.”
So theses are my current ideas. Still have a ways to go but its a starting point. Thoughts? Opinions?