The Shadowbrook Dossier — A Touch of Evil, Five Years of It
Ghost Captain hunts his own cursed gold
A damp parcel arrived at the archive overnight, smelling of sea-fog and lamp-oil, tied with what The Keeper suspects is fishing twine. Inside: four files bound in glossy cardstock of the kind Flying Frog used to print on, plus a fifth thinner sheaf already lodged in the Adventure (Solo) drawer last spring. The covering card, in the now-familiar hand of Daniel (@dungeondive), reads: Shadowbrook, the whole investigation — base, Something Wicked, Coast, and the supplements that came after.
The dossier covers five years of one game returning to Daniel’s table. It opens in 2019 with the mid-game review — Flying Frog’s possibly-best, “drowning in theme,” a Hammer picture rendered as cardboard. It expands in early 2021 across three session reports, by which point Coast has come back into print, the Ghost Ship is anchored offshore, and five card supplements have been shuffled in. It closes in 2024 with a quiet single-mechanism dispatch on what still puts the box back on the table.
If the dossier has a unifying argument it is this: the game writes the story, the player connects the dots. The mystery deck, the minion chart, the lair cards, and the town-elder secrets cross-talk until a Hammer-Films plot arrives unbidden. The 2024 dispatch isolates the mechanism Daniel keeps returning for: the town elders. Some are evil, some are blackmailed, some are cowards — you find out by investigation, and the discovery reshapes the hunting party for the showdown.
Exhibit Catalogue
- A Touch of Evil: The Supernatural Board Game: The Review — mid-game against the Banshee; three card draws conjure a Barrow Shade rising from the Abandoned Keep.
- A Touch of Evil: The Supernatural Game - Part One — Coast finally back in print; Ghost Captain hunts his own cursed gold across all three maps.
- A Touch of Evil: The Supernatural Game - Part Two - A Lot of Stuff Happens — Reverend Harding defects on turn two; Argot wakes from KO possessed by Madness and attacks Henrik.
- A Touch of Evil: The Supernatural Game - Part Three - Shadowbrook Falls — four Order’s Influence cards out at once; Ghost Ship to 10 wounds, then the dice betray him.
- One thing I love about…A Touch of Evil: The Supernatural Game — the town-elder system, isolated and praised; investigation reshapes the hunting party itself.
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– The Keeper
Notes that the dossier closes on a five-year-old game still on the shelf — which is, in this archive, the only review that matters.