What’s in Welcome to Promise?

What’s inside the New Starter Set for the Arkham Horror RPG? 

Bonjour, investigators! It’s Keith Ryan Kappel here, one of the freelance game writers for Edge Studio. Now I’ve already talked a bit about the Welcome to Promise Starter Set for Arkham Horror: The Roleplaying Game, but I bet you’re curious as a cat in a French Market fish stall about just what’s inside this new starter set.  

Welcome to Promise really is packed full of a ton of new content to help you run this boxed experience and includes tools you can use in your other Arkham Horror RPG games, too! It of course covers the basics needed to run the game, including the 64-page Welcome to Promise adventure booklet, a 16-page rules appendix (which can be used as a reference for your other Arkham HorrorRPG sessions, too), 18 six-sided dice (12 black and 6 green dice), and five investigator portfolios (more on these later). With these items alone, a GM could run the game for up to five friends.  

But wait, there’s more! This starter set also includes three double-sided poster maps that bring the bayou and the blue lights of Promise to life, as well as three sheets of double-sided punchboard tokens so everyone can keep sight of their fellow investigators and track their dice pools, horror, insight, and more. The adventure also includes several handouts that are useful at different points in the story and to help game masters really immerse players in the experience.  

There are, of course, NPC profile cards (20) as with our previous boxed experiences—but this time around we also include a new tool to track enemy dice pools. We include small, square tokens that can be placed on the square section of the dice tracker cards, each numbered to correspond with a circular version of the token to be used on the battle maps. This way, you can easily track several NPCs’ dice pools on one sheet, and identify that an investigator shot Corpse Gator 1 and properly adjust that enemy’s dice pool without having to remember which gator is which! This way you also only need one copy of the enemy’s profile card, which leaves more room for us to include more baddies in the box! These dice tracker cards can easily be used in your other games as well.  

We include both the Injury Table and Trauma Table as a handout, too, helpful for quick referencing when needing to make injury and trauma rolls in combat. Similarly, there are 32 item and injury reminder cards to help players keep track of their investigators’ current inventory and status. While we couldn’t include as many copies as we wanted of the injury and trauma reminder cards, we think that these will prove useful tools in all of your investigations.  

We also introduce Pool Die Tokens as new punchboard additions. These tokens can be used to show an available die in your pool if your group doesn’t have enough dice available for everyone.  

The Investigator Folios 

A starter set is meant to help ease new players into the action-packed, pulpy, Lovecraftian world of Arkham Horror: The Roleplaying Game. To this end, we’ve included five pre-generated investigator folios, featuring iconic, established investigators from the world of Arkham Horror.  

Each folio has 4 pages: a cover, an investigator profile followed by a quick-reference rules page, and a back cover that appropriately features that investigator’s backstory. The investigator profile and quick reference make the player-friendly Dynamic Pool System that powers Arkham Horror: The Roleplaying Game easy to learn, and even includes a section on leveling each investigator over the course of the adventure. While you can use characters from other starter boxes or ones you’ve made yourself for Welcome to Promise, the investigators included in the box have some special tie-ins for the beginning of the adventure, though these ties aren’t necessary to play the box.  

Each of the five investigators has a folio just like this, with a detailed backstory on the back cover. In addition to Minh Thi Phan, pre-generated investigator folios include millionaire Preston Fairmont, drifter “Ashcan” Pete, musician Jim Culver, and singer Marie Lambeau.  

That’s all I have for you this time, investigators! Now that you have a sense of what comes with the Welcome to Promise Starter Set for Arkham Horror: The Roleplaying Game, keep watch for future articles giving more information about this pending release. Until then, laissez les bons temps rouler, or, as the tourists might translate, let the good times roll—Keith Ryan Kappel.  

Arkham Horror: The Roleplaying Game’s Welcome to Promise Starter Set will be released on July 31!