This is a personal, largely spoiler free (or spoiler-vague) review of the Circus Ex Mortis fanmade campaign by The Beard for Arkham Horror the Card Game.
In Circus Ex Mortis, the investigators get drawn into a dstardly plot centering around the New Moon Circus, worshippers of Shub-Niggurath who intend to sacrifice innocents to help awaken their god. The campaign feels like a frantic adventure - you're often on the run from nasty beasts and trying to save innocent people, with a great variety of scenarios that are Arkham at its best.
The story of Circus Ex Mortis gets to the point quickly, with the first scenario starting right as the circus your investigators are looking into erupts into monster attacks and terror. There's little room to breathe early on, as the investigators rush from scenario to scenario, and the writing feels equally frantic. When things are given time to be more ponderous, a prophecy is brought in - and there's more text here, but it's interlaced with choices, which end up being mysterious and ominous, and they matter quite a lot, but aren't always immediately clear how, in a way that's enticing. The story is a perfect level of detail and succinct.
It's hard to not just rave about all of the details of the campaign. Each scenario feels fresh, and often encounter cards are given such different context scenario to scenario that they feel wildly different despite working the same. The mood and setting and perfect - both the creepy circus and Shub Niggurath theme are expressed well. The scenarios are difficult, and the nasty monsters give it the right edge of danger needed. The moon tokens which deal you damage or horror end up being a constant, draining presence, but one that ramps up slowly enough you can figure out how much you need to adapt to them - and combo unavoidable pain with choosing how it's going to hurt. The two different flavor tracks end up being just enough to fill eight scenarios in every way you'd want, but still end up being a cohesive whole and feeling like what a Shub campaign should feel like.
Circus Ex Mortis's big new mechanic are Moon Tokens. The chaos bag starts with multiple, and then have the effect of "+0 and draw another" and seal on your investigator when you draw them. You can take a damage or horror to shrug one off at the end of the turn, but that just means you're likely to draw them again. You can hang onto them sealed on your card, but encounter cards will give you all sorts of penalties and punishments for doing so. This provides an interesting tradeoff, and makes every test just a little more difficult - and as the scenario progresses, encourages you to suck up dealing with the token penalties as you're running out of health and sanity. The tokens are also explored in different ways in different scenarios, all of which are easy to grasp, and provide fun twists. Besides this, mechanically, nothing else is really new, but all of the mechanical focuses you expect are here - Shub is all about monsters, the spooky woods sure are easy to get lost in, and the circus is full of fun tricks.
The scenarios deserve special mention for putting twists on classic favorites. We have two lost in the woods scenarios, but both feel different, and neither feel like any of the ones in The Circle Undone. There's a train scenario - that doesn't play like Essex Express, or any other scenarios people associate with it. Even the final confrontation hits well, and is a fresh take on a finale that I've not seen before - including both the lead up to, and the final confrontation with the ancient one. If there's one thing that sticks out, it's the inclusion of Curse of the Rougarou as an option in the campaign. It makes sense, as the campaign focuses on Shub, and there are included updates for using moon tokens both in the scenario and with the rewards. Still, one of the very first arkham scenarios ends up sticking out in the rest of a very polished campaign, with the use of the moon tokens in the scenario itself feeling off from the rest of the campaign, and the rewards possibly having a huge influence - it is, however, optional, so not that big of a deal.
Circus Ex Mortis manages to avoid much complexity, although there are still some things to keep track of. One of the biggest is that it's easy to miss the timing trigger for releasing moon tokens, which happens at the end of the round. This is especially important when you draw an encounter card in the upkeep phase, and swear at yourself for not getting rid of them when you meant to, you swear. The other issue that needs to be kept track of is some scenarios have weird movement rules - however, these rules end up being thematic, and the key detail of the scenario, so they aren't too bad, even if your usual ways of tracking location connections won't apply.
Circus Ex Mortis also comes with its own investigation expansion, with 5 investigators, 188 player cards, and 5 new basic weaknesses. This investigator expansion is a great one - each of the investigators has a strong hook to them, with a unique playstyle that's supported, but not entirely based around the player cards. The rest of the cards also provide a lot of options for other investigators - while there are some themes, none of them are so numerous or so overwhelming and dominant that you're going to be making a deck with only cards in that expansion. Be it for official investigators or the new ones, you'll be mixing old and new cards and developing existing strategies to merge with classic ones. Its worth noting that some of the investigators and cards do feel a bit on the strong side, but not to a point of being ridiculous. The expansion also has an interesting design where every player card has a level 0 version, and an upgraded version. It was an interesting twist - while sometimes the cards have a version that feel a bit superflous, it's an interesting take that keeps it from feeling like you're just upgrading out of the new stuff in your deck, or rushing to get XP to play with the new toys.
Overall, Circus Ex Mortis is a great campaign, and one of the best fanmade ones. It delivers everything you'd want from a Shub Niggurath campaign, and introduces a great new twist with its circus theming with a solid investigator expansion to support it.
More on Circus Ex Mortis:
Circus Ex Mortis: Spoiler-Light Review