Grete + Roland: Detective and Demon-Hunter are a Dynamic Duo

New Signature Cards, New Look For Roland

Roland was notorious for his awful Cover Up weakness, which tends to lead to a death-spiral of mental trauma when he's played in a campaign. Thankfully the designers offered us replacement signature cards: Mysteries Remain and The Dirge of Reason. But how many of us have gone back and played Roland with his replacements?

An interesting quirk of these replacement signature cards is that BOTH of them can provide opportunities for placing a clue at your location. And given Roland's access to Press Pass why not build a deck around that combo? This is a second stab at this concept, this version tweaked for group play. The earlier iteration wasn't quite made for anything but solo play and it showed!

Set Up

Setting up your suite should be a breeze given the time-tested Stick to the Plan suite of Emergency Cache, Ever Vigilant, and Prepared for the Worst. If you don't start with a weapon after your mulligan use Prepared for the Worst to find one.

Roland isn't an elite 5 investigator, so he'll need a little bit of boosting before he hits his stride. His stuff won't come together all at once, but sooner or later he's formidable. Grete bumps your combat stat. Eventually you'll aim to Enchant the Survival Knife and make a machete Reliable. If you can't find the knife then don't hesitate to enchant a machete instead.

If all the assets and upgrades hit the table, you can be testing at 7 to "whittle down" baddies with the machete. Killing blows with an Enchanted Knife are free reactions testing at 10 for 3 damage.

Cruising for a Fight

In solo play and with the right cards, Roland can use his average knowledge stat to investigate for clues. But here we take a very different strategy for clues. We try to find lots of testless clues on the corpses of enemies.

After you have a weapon in hand, move onto a location with clues. During the mythos phase use either First Watch or On the Hunt to greatly raise the odds of engaging an enemy. Importantly, this pulls enemies out of the encounter deck so they are less likely to be drawn by weaker investigators.

Defeating an enemy will net you a free, testless clue from Roland's innate power. And possibly more testless clues from Grete Wagner and/or Evidence!. Cleaning up the last clue is a great opportunity to reap free cash from Crack the Case. And what could be better than free resources from a high-shroud value that was ignored?

Staying Alive

Things frequently go wrong in Arkham, so you're going to need some ways to react to all the horrible things. Forewarned avoids treacheries, important given Roland's low defensive stats. Bizarre Diagnosis can save the life of a fellow investigator, or it can extend the life of your expensive partner. Similarly Logical Reasoning can be used on another investigator, to discard a Terror, to heal your own low horror, or just commit it for the .

Making Use Out of Press Pass

Press Pass is not at all essential; it's the cherry on the top of this deck. It's the last asset to install if you have other options. But once in play it's cool to get bonus actions to "reimburse" the dropped clues from your signature weakness, healing, or cancelling treacheries. Another way to drop a clue is Mysteries Remain, which generates a clue out of thin air (!), a potentially important tool in scenarios that have tight parameters around clues.

Note that Press Pass is also triggered by spending clues, so be sure to contribute one of your clues whenever the opportunity arises to "spend x clues as a group". Maybe keep a couple in your play area before you've suffered your signature weakness, but afterwords always chip in!

Action Efficiency Galore

• Stick to the Plan is three "free draws" of critical cards you always want, and you get them right at the start of a scenario
• Ever Vigilant is ridiculously efficient, granting up to 2 bonus actions and 3 resources
• 13 cards are either fast or skills
• Finishing enemies with Survival Knife is a free
• Grete's to scoop clues uses no actions
• each copy of Safeguard grants a free movement every turn, so generally let another investigator take their turn before you to tag along.
• Some turns will generate a free action from Press Pass

Campaign Starter

For a campaign starter remove the xp cards and swap in the cards from the Side Deck. Prioritize Ever Vigilant and SttP. Then I'd work on the Survival Knife and Reliable. Then as you see fit, though the second copy of Press Pass is probably the lowest priority...

Future XP Ideas

• On the Hunt (3) helps solve some of the money deficiency
• a second Survival Knife (2) is great; even with SttP thinning your deck and Prepared for the Worst handy, you really need four weapons to avoid a bad start. The basic Knife is just a temporary patch after a really unlucky opening
• Timeworn Brand (5) is an obvious improvement over machetes, but its cost in XP and resources is not trivial
• Vicious Blow (2) is never bad, should work great on whatever was Enchanted
• Evidence! (1) might grab an extra clue