The Unspeakable Oath Review

We reach the halfway point of the Path to Carcosa cycle this week with The Unspeakable Oath. As before, we give a short spoiler free overview, then explore the player cards before moving on to a full spoiler discussion of goings on and mechanics.

Your noseying about in the Historical Society’s hidden records has given you one lead to follow: The last survivor of the first King in Yellow performance, Daniel Chesterfield, is locked up in the (batman-free) Arkham Asylum. With some trepidation, you march up to the gates and demand to be let inside. The guards are, rather concerningly, all too happy to oblige…

After the fine but not amazingly inspiring Echoes of the Past, the Unspeakable Oath is a dramatic return to form. Featuring some truly superb writing and a thematic focus that really serves to amplify your doubts. And after feeling like the stakes were too low last game, they simply couldn’t be higher this time around! Excellent, excellent scenario!

 

Rating: Unspeakably GoodPlayer Cards

Everybody needs a friend. Especially when facing the unknowable horrors. In fact, you might need far more than one. Enter Calling in Favors, your greatest ally when it comes to allies. Search the top third of your deck for an ally and play them. Get discounts on expensive allies. Refresh injured or doom laden allies. Anyone planning some big ally strategies needs to get on the telephone. Maybe even to call one of your new buddies, the resource generating Charles Ross, Esq. or the suspicious yet very interesting Dario El-Amin.

We’ve also got some lovely traps for the encounter deck here. Ambush whacks a monster for a whopping two damage on appearance, so long as you keep an investigator in that space, which is perfect for protecting a busy clue hound. A Test of Will and Forewarned both help deal with those nasty treachery cards from the encounter deck. A massive relief to have either of these available. Although A Test of Will is an exiled card, so not as easily reused as Forewarned.

Another Exile card (nice to finally see some more of these in the game) is Devil’s Luck, and your poor, dear, shot up hat. Can’t see anything bad with simply avoiding a big hit from a big monster! The third and final survivor card is the excellent Fight or Flight, fitting nicely with last pack’s Neutral cards as a big late game push when sanity is running out! Similar treats are in store for victims of my long term favourite Sneak Attack, now even better, and the gang of monsters facing Storm of Spirits, a potentially devastatingly good card for Mystics.

Sadly, not everything is great. Trench Knife is fine for a cheap weapon option, but you will struggle to get much real value of its rules without getting overwhelmed in the process. Then, finally, we have the Book of Shadows which… my word… I’ve heard ignorant people say books were a waste of time. This one certainly is!

Spoiler Discussion

Oh my God why!? Why is it that we seem to know our way around the asylum, why do we recognise the inmates, the cells? When were we here before and were we visiting… or were we residents!? Every little hint in flavour text and story is just superbly written, adding that little spot of discomforting uncertainty to proceedings. It puts that question in your mind that drives you forwards through the scenario: you have to find out the truth!

That search begins with finding a route into the secured basement cells where Daniel is being kept. This requires little more than a search for clues, but it’s not the mechanics of this scenario that really grabbed my attention, it was the flavour, the theme. So that search sets the tone with nasty corrosions and weirdness happening but no monsters. Before this scenario begins, all the monsters are removed from the encounter deck, to be slowly dribbled in according to the Agenda deck and certain other effects. Even the one mechanical twist this scenario is all about tone setting.

That search ends when you bump into nameless nurse who, quite naturally, refuses to let you into the secured wing. But she clearly has the keys, so perhaps with some deft fingerwork or a convincing argument you can change her mind. If not, you can always attack her outright but, in a scenario with a strong sense of Karmic retribution, you’ll pay for it later. Daniel is hidden in one of the cells, although a mistaken rule (later FAQ’d) makes it rather easier to find him than it maybe should have.

What you find down there depends on your choices in Echoes of the Past. Seems the past really does come back to haunt you here! Not to mention Constance from the dinner party shows her terrifying face if you didn’t manage to slay her there. Oh the choices you later regret, hey? Daniel, peaceful or monstrous, has been found, your mission here over. But you are far from out of the woods. The orderlies were all too happy to let you in, yet seem much less happy to let you out.

Here Unspeakable Oath really kicks the chaos into overdrive. The walls begin to close in, and you need to put together some key elements of an escape, distractions, routes out and all that. It’s almost as though you already knew what you were doing as you find each key word though. The scenario never actually says it but, my goodness does it ever hint at your own personal madness! The mystery is just perfect.

Meanwhile the Agenda deck has been ticking away. Arkham Horror’s rendition of an asylum is unsurprisingly clichéd and heavy handed. It has you separate out the lunatic enemies specifically to spawn them at you at appropriate times, bizarre inmates throwing themselves at you down twisted, stinking halls. It’s not a subtle view of mental health. Where FFG has done a fine job of scrubbing the 1920’s racism from Lovecraft, it hasn’t bothered to extend that courtesy to mental illness. And the only way it can get away with this is the strong implication that your characters are imagining most of it.

The other monster cards come into play as you approach the final phase of the game, turning the final escape into an incredibly tense battle, and that’s without knowing what happens should you fail. The stakes could not be higher for your investigators: fail to get out and you will never leave the asylum. Driven fully insane, your character is lost, you must start a new one for the future scenarios of the campaign. A new character to carry on the torch. It’s such a wonderfully unexpected twist, leaving us stunned when we failed our first attempt, even though all the clues were pointing in this direction.

But Unspeakable Oath has one masterclass twist left in store, and it’s buried behind a story choice at the end of the interlude. Being forced to say its name has driven Daniel to madness and should you choose to head his warning, should you as a player ever speak its name aloud, your character is forced to take 1 horror. What a magnificently immersive rule. What an absolute treat for players! Take a bow FFG design team. You have aced it with this one.

What’s the name you ask? Oh it’s Has – no. No I can’t! I can’t say his name and YOU CANNOT MAKE ME!!!!

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Our copy of The Unspeakable Oath was provided for review by Asmodee UK. You can pick up a copy for £14.99 RRP from your local hobby store.

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