Curse Candle Clue Conspiracy

The designers dropped some very obvious hints on the path they intend for Kōhaku. First, look at the art for Olive McBride, who just by coincidence appears around the same time. See those candles behind Olive that are eerily familiar:

Now, take a look at the scene behind Kōhaku. That is not sunrise over the woods, that forest is burning to the ground! Kōhaku borrowed Olive's ritual candles and made a blunder whilst reading the signs. Now they are both in the thick of it, fates entwined in parallel!

Despite making one mistake, Kōhaku is determined not to let that prevent him from making several more. He brings a flexible suite of talents that can benefit himself or a Curse Candle Clue Conspiracy friend in need.

Kōhaku and Olive's Plan:

• Get

• -> Read the Signs(2) and Spectral Razor(2)

• -> Eye of Chaos or Armageddon

The Ritual Candles that got them into this mess do an excellent job at shaving the threat from .

Blurse also works great with the new Read the Signs(2) and Spectral Razor(2), which come back at the end of your turn when you pull any symbol.

Flexible Deck Interactions. Instead of having combos with 2 (or more) specific cards, the deck asks to pair classes of cards, which reduces the pressure to include deck searching cards that can be expensive in XP or resources. For example, while we would love to get Book of Living Myths every time, we include 4 more cards that manipulate token draws in Olive McBride and Favor of the Moon, and all 5 of these cards work passably well or very well with our 7 token-based spells. Finding one of 5 cards to pair with one of 7 cards is far easier than Backpacking constantly in hopes of finding one specific card.

The deck still works if you don't find your first choice card. Pair any one token manipulator with any one token spell and one stat booster and you can operate usefully until you find your preferred cards to reload.

Cheap Card Draw. Because you don't need to draw specific cards, you can use Scroll of Secrets, Deep Knowledge, and Tempt Fate to mow through your deck. If you are starved for cards, you can use up the Tempt Fate tokens for another action to get another card. Guts rounds out your card draw, creating an effective deck size of around 20 cards.

Low Resource and XP Requirement. The only must-have upgrade is Blasphemous Covenant. All other upgrades are incremental. Your stat boosters Ritual Candles, Holy Rosary, Cat Mask all cost 0XP and 2 or fewer resources. Your repeatable spells Spectral Razor and Read the Signs consume resources later, and as anyone that ends a scenario with 11 resources knows, paying later is far cheaper than paying now.

No Dead Cards. Despite having 16 cards that involve gaining cards or resources, all of them have other uses(besides Voice of Ra) to help your team if you happen to be flooded with these. More on this in the next section.

Kō packs a ton of cheap card drawing that reduces effective deck size, allowing you to get your target cards reliably, and each of these economy cards have excellent side uses:

• Deep Knowledge and Scroll of Secrets can help a friend with card draw.

• Scroll of Secrets(3) also has a chance of saving you or a friend from themself.

• Guts can help a friend with skill pips and hopefully get you a card too.

• Tempt Fate gives you delicious

• Parallel Fates turns down the heat from the encounter deck, and Parallel Fates(2) can also help anyone search for needed tools. These options are far more interesting than huddling in a corner waiting for the right time to use Ward of Protection.

• Faustian Bargain smooths out party resource needs.

• Favor of the Moon provides resources and access to precious .

There is some slot juggling, and it is up to you when or if Occult Reliquary comes into play. Ideally:

• Hand Slots: Deplete Scroll of Secrets which makes way for Ritual Candles and Book of Living Myths.

• Arcane Slots: Eye of Chaos and Spirit of Humanity. Hopefully your friend can reduce the urge to need Armageddon

Guts and Cat Mask add some needed bonuses to level 0 Eye of Chaos and Armageddon. Since most of your skill bonuses will be attached to your upgraded spells, your is not all that great versus the encounter deck. It would be nice to get Soul Sanctification before cutting these will boosts. Otherwise you could be using your blurse kit to avoid the encounter deck instead of getting clues - and your friends are going to need help from your habit too.

Your spells need symbols, and you can count on Olive McBride to generate what you need to keep your spells running! If you want to know the actual odds, see her abacus at https://stattrek.com/online-calculator/hypergeometric. (example: if there are 23 tokens in the bag [Population] and 13 are symbols [Successes], Lv0 Olive pulls 3 Sample looking for 1 Success in the Sample -> 93% of getting a symbol).

With the cascade of upgrades thanks to Arcane Research and Down the Rabbit Hole, Kōhaku transforms into a do-everything juggernaut.

• Book of Living Myths with Blasphemous Covenant and Fey can turn the tables on any skill check - even for a friend.

• Spirit of Humanity keeps the bag full of curses and overwhelms the paltry annoyance of Weeping Yurei. I guess you could get to redeem for an extra action, but we aren't called the BCCC. When you get the luxury XP for Soul Sanctification you can hold a candle to any skill check in the mythos.

• Every time Holy Rosary(2) pops off , it is essentially another action for you.

• Prophetic crushes the resource cost of the reusable Read the Signs(2) and Spectral Razor(2).

First priority is to get Blasphemous Covenant, and the direction of your other upgrades will be tugged by Down the Rabbit Hole. Fortunately, Read the Signs(2) and Spectral Razor(2) and Olive McBride are low XP and high impact.

After that you can go by however the scenario chooses to reward/punish you. One copy of Eye of Chaos(4) is pretty great early, and if your blurse kit swings home runs on Voice of Ra, you may not need Prophetic(3). The hardest choices will involve whether to save XP to get an expensive permanent, or get Eye of Chaos(4) or Armageddon(4) right now.

Upgraded deck ~ 20XP. Achievable in 3 scenarios thanks to 4-7 bonus XP from Arcane Research and Down the Rabbit Hole, combined with 14-17 real XP. This version uses 1 Prescient in the initial build instead of 1 Guts.

Upgraded deck ~ 40XP. Achievable in 5-6 scenarios thanks to 13-16 bonus XP from Arcane Research and Down the Rabbit Hole, combined with 26-29 real XP.

Luxury Upgrade deck - 59XP