Children of Blood

The sun sets on the city of Arkham. Citizens hurry home in the growing twilight, eager to find safety behind locked doors. Arkham has always played host to strange occurrences, but this time, something is different. Detectives respond to reports of disturbances, finding spilled blood and torn clothes but no sign of any culprit…or victims. As the reports and cases pile up with each passing week, one thing is abundantly clear: something is stalking the streets at night. Something dangerous.

Fantasy Flight Games is excited to announce Children of Blood, a new expansion for Arkham Horror: The Card Game!

In this small campaign expansion, one to four investigators tackle a chilling mystery that unfolds across three scenarios. Track monsters through the streets of Arkham, plumb the depths of the caverns below for clues, and crash a swanky party in Northside as you confront the culprit behind it all. With scenarios that can transform based on your chosen difficulty and a new chaos token that slowly turns the investigators into monsters themselves, this campaign invites you to challenge it again and again. Are you up to the task?

No Time to Bleed

When you and your fellow investigators finally get a lead on the recent string of disappearances, what you discover is a bit…concerning.

A worried Arkham citizen named Christopher Stern spins a tale of his wife Julia’s disturbing transformation. He claims to have found her in the alley behind their home, greedily feasting upon their neighbor’s fresh corpse. When Christopher called out to her, she darted away with inhuman swiftness, and when he returned to the alley, the body was gone, leaving nothing but unanswered questions and a pool of blood. Now, you and your allies must track down Julia as she stalks the streets of Arkham’s Waterfront District, desperately trying to find her and stop her before anyone else suffers a bloody end.

You’ll find that “blood” is a central theme in this expansion (which only makes sense, given its name), and nothing embodies that more than the new type of chaos token: the blood token! Throughout the campaign, depending on the decisions you make and the events that unfold, blood tokens can be added to (or removed from) the chaos bag. When a blood token is drawn during a test, it applies -1 to the test result, and then you must draw an additional token (which could be another blood token, causing the sequence to repeat). The more blood tokens are in the bag, the more chances you have of drawing multiple tokens at once, but the dangers run deeper than just that.

You see, if you fail a skill test in which you drew one or more blood tokens, then one of those blood tokens is sealed on your investigator (to a maximum of 3). The more blood tokens sealed on your investigator, the more dangerous several encounter cards will become. For example, the treacheries Torturous Transformation (Children of Blood, 95) and Grisly Compulsion (Children of Blood, 100) both have effects that scale to the number of blood tokens sealed on your investigator, while enemies like the Child of Blood (Children of Blood, 103) and Blood-Crazed Mongrel (Children of Blood, 109) both target the person with the most sealed blood tokens. Having even a single blood token sealed on you can make you susceptible to Blighted Blood (Children of Blood, 99), while the grisly Feeding Grounds (Children of Blood, 111) treachery treats every blood token in the bag as another autofail token.

From Dusk to Dawn

Those are just a handful of ways that blood tokens can affect a scenario, but what about the scenarios themselves? We mentioned earlier that Children of Blood can transform depending on your chosen difficulty, and we meant it.

For example, the campaign’s first scenario, “River of Blood,” has two versions of each location card: a Dawn version and a Dusk version. If you choose to play on Easy or Standard difficulty, you’ll use the Dawn versions of each location, whereas if you choose to play on Hard or Expert difficulty, you’ll use the more challenging Dusk versions instead. Sometimes, these different versions can have completely different effects, such as Water Street (Children of Blood, 8) having a helpful effect at dawn but a hindering effect at dusk (Children of Blood, 9). Other times, the different versions may have the same effect but different “costs,” as is the case with the dawn version of the Back Alley (Children of Blood, 22) versus its dusk version (Children of Blood, 23).

This difficulty scaling goes beyond just the location cards. The boss of the scenario, Julia Stern, has three different versions depending on what difficulty you are playing: one for Easy (Children of Blood, 24), one for Standard (Children of Blood, 25), and one for Hard or Expert (Children of Blood, 26). Even the encounter deck itself can change, with entire encounter sets being added or replaced at higher difficulties, or even at different player counts!

Each scenario in Children of Blood has its own modifications for different difficulties, adding even more variety to the experience—and more reasons to revisit the campaign. That said, what do you get for actually completing the campaign?

A Bloody Reward

Back when we first revealed Chapter Two for Arkham Horror: The Card Game, we talked about the addition of a new type of player card: reward cards. These cards are “unlocked” for deckbuilding by winning a campaign, and can be used for other campaigns beyond the one you unlocked them in.

For Children of Blood, the reward card is Chosen of Zburamoarte (Children of Blood, 93a). This special asset allows your investigator to harness a bit of dark, monstrous power, which comes at the cost of adding blood tokens to the game. At the beginning of a scenario, this is strictly a hindrance, but once a blood token is drawn during a test, it gets sealed on the asset, which then flips to its Compelled to Feed (Children of Blood, 93b) side. On this side, Chosen of Zburamoarte makes you stronger and faster, and it even lets you drain the health of your enemies, so long as you’re willing to release blood tokens back into the chaos bag. With this power at your disposal, you’ll have an all new way of facing the forces of the Mythos; just take care not to turn into a monster in the process!

Frenzied Hunger

Between some people disappearing and others turning into blood-crazed monsters, the investigators certainly have their work cut out for them. Get to the bottom of the mystery and save Arkham’s Waterfront District when the Children of Blood small campaign expansion arrives in stores this August!

You can pre-order your own copy of Children of Blood (AHC106) at your local retailer or online through our webstore today!

Written by Peter Schumacher