--- title: "Cycle of Eternity" subtitle: "Mansions of Madness scenario review" author: Seth publish_date: 2025-03-10 08:00 date: 2025-03-10 08:00 hero_classes: text-light title-h1h2 overlay-dark-gradient hero-large parallax hero_image: haunted-house-1600x800.jpg show_sidebar: true show_breadcrumbs: true show_pagination: true taxonomy: category: blog tag: [ gaming, modules ] --- I'm playing through all the **Mansions of Madness** scenarios I own, and reviewing each one as I go. The first one is **Cycle of Eternity**, which is one of the introductory adventure included in the main game. My short spoiler-free review is that **Cycle of Eternity** is a combat-heavy and very challenging scenario with a nice and simple plot. It's much more difficult than its difficulty rating suggests, however, so I don't recommend playing this first. For the rest of this review, there are minor plot spoilers, so don't read on if you want everything to be a surprise. I think **Cycle of Eternity** is likely one of the first experiences most people have with **Mansions of Madness**, and that's a real pity because it's horrendously misrepresented by the app. The publisher gives this scenario the lowest difficulty of all scenarios from the box (and the 3 expansions I currently own), with a rating of 2. In reality, the scenario has several very difficult combat encounters, a huge map, a challenging final battle, and a race to get out of the mansion with the required evidence. It's _exciting_ but it's not the least difficult scenario in the box by any stretch of the imagination. ## The bad parts There's not much that's bad in **Cycle of Eternity**, aside from it being a poor introduction to the game but being positioned as an introductory adventure. However, I've played the scenario at least 4 times, so it's one of the scenarios I am most familiar with and therefore I've got a small list of minor annoyances: * The butler who called the Investigators to the mansion is entirely unhelpful in dialogue. Even after he's witnessed a _winged monster from another dimension_ appear in the Dining Room, the scenario requires an Influence test to extract key information out of him. There should definitely be a dialogue option that enables you to threaten to abandon the job if the butler refuses to provide any actual help, because that's obviously the correct strategy. * Combat happens too early. Immediately upon entering the mansion, you are _strongly_ influenced by the story to investigate noises coming from the Dining Room. It turns that there's a Hunting Horror there. That means on turn 1, you're either in combat or you're running from a monster. Unless you got some very powerful weapons as starting cards, you're unlikely to succeed without taking serious damage. * Why wouldn't the Investigators have brought weapons to this job? * The title is a phrase extracted from Lovecraft's **Call of Cthulhu**, but there's nothing in the adventure directly referencing Cthulhu or the Cthulhu cult. If anything, this feels somewhat more like a **Dreams in the Witch House** or **The Dunwich Horror** story, with its suggestions of preparing a child for service to an Elder God. Even at a higher difficulty rating, I wouldn't love these 4 aspects of the scenario. I don't consider starving the players of resources and then intentionally ambushing players with a monster a fun challenge, and I don't understand the intention with the elusive butler. The misleading title is forgivable. A cool sounding phrase is a cool sounding phrase, after all. But as a Lovecraft reader, I found it jarring that a phrase extracted from one of Lovecraft's most famous stories was used in a scenario dealing with an entirely different aspect of lore. ## The good parts Ignoring the errant difficulty rating and my minor complaints about the writing, this is a really fun gauntlet scenario. Even after you determine what's happened to Mr. Vanderbilt, you can't get into the room you need because you don't have the key, so a secoundary investigation begins. And there are yet further story threads you can follow. There's a lot of content in this scenario, and it all tells a properly gruesome Lovecraft-style tale. And that's not all. Having played this scenario 4 times, I was pleased to find that the map wasn't entirely pre-determined. In the game I played on [my Youtube channel](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL_4D5R0azJhUbn8yJd1AcqypJvHFwTpoM), I followed the butler's instructions to look in "the Office", found a Study and investigated it by mistake (it didn't occur to me that a home Office was different from a Study). Once that got resolved, I found Vanderbilt in the Attic instead of the Garden where he'd been during every other playthrough. It kept me on my toes. I'm generally [a fan of replaying games](http://mixedsignals.ml/games/blog/blog_replay-modules), and with **Mansions of Madness** I enjoy the variables introduced by playing with a different set of Investigators. But when you add to that a change in the map and a variety of monsters, the scenario gains a lot of added value. I guess I probably paid $180 NZD for **Mansions of Madness**, and from the first scenario alone I've gotten at least 8 hours of play (and that's charitably assuming each playthrough only lasted 2 hours). ## Actual rating * **Combat**: High (lots of combat) * **Investigation**: Low (there's some mystery, but it's basically a straight-forward storyline) * **Horror**: Medium (some mentions of mutilation, lots of monsters, obligatory occult rituals) * **Difficulty**: High (to actually beat the scenario, you'll likely have to play it 2 or 3 times)

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