Introduction and Themes
This guide is a largely spoiler-free guide that talks about the general mechanics of the Cyclopean Foundations custom campaign made by The Beard. If you're interested in learning what the campaign's unique mechanics are, and hearing suggestions for investigators and cards that are particularly well suited to the campaign, read on!
In Cyclopean Foundations, the investigators get dragged into a conspiracy to awaken Cthulhu from his slumber. Starting with a mystery of a simple robbery, the scope of their adventures widens and widens until they travel halfway across the world to the place that R'yleh will emerge from.
General Mechanics
Aloof Enemies With Doom
Cyclopean Foundations includes many aloof enemies who gather doom on them, and spawn away from you. Unlike enemies like whippoorwills who you can leave for a turn or two, these are often important to reach and take down quickly. Luckily, they don't have a lot of health - so there's lots of ways to deal with them. Consider Beat Cop, Guard Dog (2), Riot Whistle, Garotte Wire, British Bulldog (2), and the like.
Extra Damage Towards Fighters
While much of the damage and horror in the campaign can be played around, fighters are going to have inherently less control over it - they don't have the luxury to time out movements, get rid of persistent encounter cards, or just not enter some damaging areas the way clue focused characters can. If you're running a dedicated fighter, expect to need a little bit more soak than the rest of the party.
Evading Has Caveats
While many of the enemies in this campaign have low evade values, you'll rarely be able to evade them as a permanent solution - hunter enemies and maps with choke points will let evasion buy you time, but rarely solve a problem. Don't rely on it as a solution without something to back it up like Close Call or Dirty Fighting.
Hidden Cards
The campaign makes good use of hidden cards, not all of which can just be gotten rid of with simple actions. Some characters are impacted by this more than others - Patrice, for instance, but anyone who has to hold a lot of cards in their hand or watch their hand size needs to be warned.
Movement is Rewarded and Punished
The primary new mechanic of the campaign is "non-euclidean", which triggers when you leave a location with it. As such, movement is often punished with whatever effects are on locations. However, sometimes those effects need to be triggered, and some encounter cards interact with you moving in a positive way - this leaves movement to be a careful tactical choice beyond the action cost.
Notice
The other unique mechanic for this campaign is Notice, where based on the investigator's actions, the scenarios will increase in difficulty. Notice will come from your actions and story choices, but there's also extra Notice if you earn a lot of XP - or rather, you don't get what feels like "automatic" Notice if you fumble a scenario. Given this, cards that grant XP to one particular player can be problematic, if they cause Notice to increase the difficulty without everyone benefitting. As of writing, only Charon's Obol and Let God Sort Them Out would both trigger Notice and only apply to one character - sorry rogues!
Resources are Drained
While not a constant issue, there are a few scenarios that provide a resource drain - sometimes it's just losing resources for moving, investigating, or the like, or other times it's having to pay a heft resource cost to avoid a different bad thing. Because it's usually losing resources, investigators who are fine sitting at 0 resources will be fine - but those who require playing more events or assets as they go will suffer. Plan on bringing some extra resource gain if you don't think you can play around it.
Threats to Hand and Discard
The encounter deck is vicious to your hand and deck - causing you to discard cards from both, or even remove them from the game. If you have a particular combo that requires certain cards to function, or a single big Exceptional card in your deck don't expect to be able to consistently get the cards out. On the other hand, some form of recursion like Scavenging will often allow you a lot more options than usual.
Also, be careful that many of the deck discard effects force you to draw your weakness - you'll see your weaknesses a LOT more than usual in this campaign. You should avoid decks that have weaknesses that are particularly difficult to play around, or that you'll really regret seeing.
Deckbuilding Advice
The suggestions below aren't by any means required, or even characters I've necessarily played the campaign through. Rather, these are just observations of characters who might be particularly well suited to the campaign, including things that might not be top tier, but have a very strong synergy with the campaign mechanics.
Suggested Investigators
Roland Banks: Calling out parallel Roland here, specifically - there's lots of handcuffable humanoid enemies around who can help boost and make great targets for his directives.
Tommy Muldoon: Extra soak can help weather some of the trickier treacheries and location effects a fighter might suffer from, and most of Tommy's best cards are ones you want to play here, anyway.
Minh Thi Phan: Minh is the queen of scavenging, and with encounter cards eating away at your deck, she can really put that into play. Her signature that lets her commit skill cards to investigators at any location can also be a big help when you don't want to enter or leave an area due to non-euclidean effects but still want to help out.
Ursula Downs: If you're going to play the movement game, Ursula does it best. Sometimes she'll struggle with not being able to move, or being punished for moving - but also when you DO have to move, she'll help mitigate any punishment you might receive.
Preston Fairmont: When you just have to throw money around, nobody is better than Preston. His immunity to a lot of the resource nickel and diming in the campaign is a great help, as is his spending to play Favor cards at connecting locations. There's a couple of expensive ways to deal small amounts of automatic damage, which end up being very efficient ways to deal with the aloof enemies in the campaign, too.
Tony Morgan: The truth is, there's not a lot of fighting in this campaign. But when you need to fight, you'll sometimes need to fight a LOT, all at once. There's few better investigators for that than Tony, who's extra action combined with other rogue extra action cards can compress a whole lot of pain into one turn.
Agnes Baker: There's lots of good targets for Agnes's extra damage in this campaign, making her a great pick if you want a mystic who can handle enemies - killing some that would take most fighters 2 actions with no actions at all!
Luke Robinson: The easiest way to deal with locations that punish you for leaving them is to just never go into them in the first place. Luke can use his power to reach over painful non-euclidean penalties, and to hop anywhere on the map he wants when things become tricky. You'll just need someone to scout ahead to reveal locations for you.
William Yorick: When you're discarding cards from your deck, you may as well make use of them - few can do so better than Yorick, and he has great guardian tools to help deal with aloof enemies.
Darrell Simmons: If Minh is the queen of scavenging, Darrell is the king. He'll be able to pull cards out from his discard, and seeker movement tech can give him a lot of options. Just be sure to bring extra horror soak - you're going to need it with his weakness.
Notable Player Cards
Handcuffs: With so many humanoids in the campaign, including ones with terrible evade ratings, handcuffs let you deal with them easily and keep them around for allies who might have effects that trigger off of targets in play.
Telescopic Sight: If you're using the taboo, at least. If it hurts you to move onto where enemies are, why not just shoot them from far away? It even saves you two actions against aloof enemies!
Hiking Boots: The campaign has a considerable number of scenarios that heavily motivate you to get all the clues from one location before moving on. If that's your plan, hiking boots helps enable that - and the agility bonus is pretty useful against a lot of treacheries, too!
Seeking Answers: The best way to avoid effects that punish you for moving is to just not move. With the ability to snipe clues in adjacent locations, you can avoid nasty effects that otherwise might trigger.
Damning Testimony: This card really does it all in this campaign. It's a low-effort way to get rid of enemies that spawn at far away locations, as well as providing a way to get clues on locations you might not want to enter.
Money Cards! Just, any of them: Rogues are in a tricky situation due to some of the resource cost effects, especially investigation focused rogues. Consider packing a little more money than usual, and keeping a careful eye on your resource management.
Ethereal Slip: Ethereal Slip lets you avoid non-euclidian effects just by not moving into an area, and swapping positions instead. It can also help position enemies closer to your fighters if you get split up.
String of Curses: While aloof doom enemies aren't particularly threatening, an event card allowing characters to restlessly remove them can certainly help save charges and not leave everything down to a risky token pull. There's also a particularly enemy who's very gameable with doom, and could be a big payoff.
Fortuitous Discovery/Improvised Cards: Any card playable from your discard or powered up in your discard can be of use here due to the forced deck discard, and survivors have quite a few.
Grizzled: With almost every enemy in the campaign being a Humanoid, it's an easy trait to pick for Grizzled, allowing the card to return to your hand often when upgraded.
More on Cyclopean Foundations:
Cyclopean Foundations: Spoiler-Light Review