Riftsworn
When the game begins
An extra rift tears open before the first round, so the board is busier from the start.
Ysh'tarra
The Drowned Choir
- DifficultyHigh
- Doom starts at15
- MysteriesSolve 3 of 5
- If it wakesFinal mystery
The lore
Beneath the abyssal trenches a cathedral of coral and bone has begun, once more, to sing. Fishermen hear it through their hulls. Sleepers on every coast hum the same three notes, and wake with salt on their lips.
A harbourmaster’s log records the tide rising and falling three times in a single hour. A lighthouse keeper lets her lamp go dark, because they like the dark. Coral grows overnight across a sea wall in the shape of letters, and is gone with the next tide. In a chapel by the shore, a midnight service is held for a congregation that arrives dripping.
Every drowned town adds a voice to the choir. When the last voice joins, the sea will stand up and walk.
How it plays
What sets Ysh'tarra apart
Every Ancient One shares the same goal for the investigators: solve three mysteries before Doom reaches zero. This is how Ysh'tarra bends the rules.
At every reckoning
The hymn carries across the water. Every investigator on a Sea space tests Resolve, and loses 1 Mind on a failure. Land is safer, but much of the work against the Choir has to be done at sea.
Its servants
Brine Choristers and Drowned Bellringers drain the Mind of anyone who shares their space at the reckoning. Keep your investigators’ nerves in mind as well as their bodies.
If it awakens
The oceans boil white and the final mystery begins: Silence the Choir. Investigators on Sea spaces spend Clues to fill it. Each reckoning, every investigator, wherever they stand, must hold on to their own voice with a hard Resolve test or lose 2 Mind. Fallen investigators can no longer be replaced.
Mysteries
What the investigators must do
The mysteries are drawn in a random order, one at a time. Solve three and Ysh'tarra is sealed away before it can wake. The bigger the team, the more each mystery asks of it.
The Silent Hulls
Ships are vanishing in calm water. Close rifts to seal the choir’s throats: every rift closed while this mystery is active brings it closer to solved.
Charts of the Unsounded Deep
Map the drowned cathedral’s position. Investigators standing on a Sea space spend Clues during the Encounter phase to chart it.
The Cantor Rises
Summons the nemesis
The Cantor Below surfaces in the South Pacific. Hunt it down and defeat it.
Salt-Stained Testimonies
Survivors of the drowned towns hide in remote places. Succeed at expeditions to gather their testimony.
Ring the Harbour Bells
Only the old bronze bells drown out the hymn, and someone must be out on the water to ring them. At each reckoning, every investigator on a Sea space moves this mystery forward.
Final mystery
Silence the Choir
Only after it awakens. Investigators on Sea spaces spend Clues to fill the mystery. Fill it, and the hymn ends.
Servants
What walks in its name
These horrors only appear while Ysh'tarra stirs, and they come in greater numbers than the wandering monsters of the world.
Minion
Brine Chorister
Gills where its ears should be, and it never stops singing.
At the reckoning, investigators on its space lose 1 Mind.
Nemesis
The Cantor Below
Its hymn has one verse, and the verse is your name.
Tougher for every investigator in the game. At the reckoning, every investigator on a Sea space loses 1 Mind.
Hollow Choir
Seven mouths, no throats, and every one of them singing your name off-key.
Tide Widow
She walks out of the surf in a wedding veil of kelp, still waiting for the groom the sea took.
Drowned Bellringer
The parish bell went down with the village in 1887. It has never stopped ringing.
Drains 1 Mind from investigators on its space at the reckoning.
Stilt-Walker of the Salt
Forty feet of crystallised limbs, picking its way across the flats like a heron at dusk.
Salt Colossus
A pillar of brine shaped like a kneeling giant. Today it stood up.
The other Ancient Ones
