This is a personal, largely spoiler free (or spoiler-vague) review of the Celtic Rising custom campaign by Qggone for Arkham Horror the Card Game.
In Celtic Rising, investigators head to Ireland to come to the aid of friends of theirs who collect magical relics and are in trouble. Along the way they'll have to contend with a variety of mythological creatures, and even get their hands on some relics of legend.
Celtic Rising is a five scenario campaign (with a hidden epilogue) with fun, engaging scenario design, and a good feel of balance and mechanics. It delivers a series of scenarios that never feel repetitive, and always have interesting challenges and portrayals of whatever Irish legend they're using. However, the campaign is brought down by poor writing, a weak finale, and a lack of mechanical and story cohesion.
What story exists in Celtic Rising is fairly thin - you're largely just traveling to one place, and things are getting in your way. Only two of the scenarios really feel like they have any story to them, although the rest due a great job of mechanically representing their premise. There's always a clear idea of what a scenario is trying to represent, and what you're trying to do, even if there's no real arc or drama to the overall narrative. It feels much more like Dunwich Legacy in that regard, and the text is equally concise and to the point - which is a blessing, as the writing is unfortunately poor. The text is awkwardly formatted and written, with dialogue that's little more than exposition, and prose that's extremely flat. That's all the in-between, however - when it comes to the actual scenarios, the mechanics pick up where the text can't, delivering the promise of the ideas involved quite strongly.
Celting Rising's big unique mechanic is a new stat, "Gift of Gab". There's plenty of uses for it through the campaign, and ways to influence it early - but what feels like should be a bigger deal just isn't. Nothing it's ever used for ever feels particularly clever or unique - they could just be Willpower or Intellect tests - and their primary use during the finale feels mostly like a waste of time. Without that, there's no real mechanical throughline in the scenarios - nothing to particularly build your decks around, or unique challenges. The closest it comes are cool permanent relics you get your hands on near the end of the campaign that have an interesting pay-off. This lack of mechanical bias, however, mean the mechanics of the scenarios are pretty straightforward - there's not really a lot to be confused about or that will cause delays during playing.
The scenarios of Celtic Rising are overall very good - they're solidly made, fun scenarios with just the right level of difficulty and complexity. There's even my favorite variation of Essex County Express I've played so far. Each also provides their own unique approach, without necessarily throwing bespoke mechanics at you. They do fun things, but never in an overwhelming way - each scenario has its own one twist that makes it work, and lets you focus your attention on playing around it.
The praise for the scenarios sadly has to stop at the finale, which tries to pay off two parts of the campaign. The first it does well, and I won't spoil because it's such a joyous moment. The second is the use of Gift of Gab - which seems to want to be a major mechanic involving essentially laying traps, but just is not worth the actions spent and the difficult checks to be made. The finale also has more mechanics that it needs in multiple other ways - the final boss having two separate encounter decks tied to it representing its actions is interesting, but they come into play so late, and I ended up seeing so few of them, it felt like a waste. This lead to a finale that felt like the majority of its mechanics I was supposed to engage with just didn't matter, leading to a fairly standard clue-gathering following by a boss fight. Likewise, as excited as I was for the epilogue, it ended up having a number of complications that poor player scaling that left it a disappointment.
Overall, the parts of Celtic Rising were greater than its whole - but the scenarios were still well made enough I greatly enjoyed it. Any one of the scenarios I would have rated highly as a standalone, but all of the connecting tissue, especially the story text, let the scenario design down.
More on Celtic Rising
Celtic Rising: Spoiler-Light Review