The Sleeper Below Is Now Available for Call of Cthulhu: The Card Game

“Some day he would call, when the stars were ready, and the secret cult would always be waiting to liberate him.”
    –H.P. Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu

Sinister cultists hasten their foul rituals. Investigators race to uncover the unspeakable truths behind the relics they’ve acquired. Far below the surface of the ocean, an ancient evil of unfathomable power lies dormant, waiting for the stars to align. And the stars are coming, now, into alignment…

The Sleeper Below expansion for Call of Cthulhu: The Card Game is now available at your local retailer and online through our webstore!

Terrible Cthulhu and his secret cult are the undisputed stars of The Sleeper Below. Roughly two-thirds of the expansion’s 165 cards (three copies each of fifty-five individual cards) are dedicated to the game’s Cthulhu faction, and even as they greatly bolster a number of synergies among the game’s Cultists, they introduce a new Dormant mechanic, which adds horrifying new layers of intrigue to your struggles. Cards with the Dormant keyword can play facedown to a story, and they can then be played for free when that story is won. This means that winning a story isn’t always so good as it used to be; your victory can potentially rouse a Hunting Wendigo (The Sleeper Below, 16) or even wake dead Cthulhu (The Sleeper Below, 19).

For a more complete picture of all that The Sleeper Below adds to Call of Cthulhu: The Card Game, you can read our previews:

• In “The Terrors That Lie Dormant,” we illustrate how the expansion and Cthulhu faction make use of their new Dormant cards to compound your story struggles with all new layers of madness.
• In “The Cult of Cthulhu,” we look at how the expansion and its numerous Cultist characters greatly enhance the Cult of Cthulhu, and the Cultist subtype, in general.
• In “Clandestine Cultists and Secret Societies,” we look at how the other factions hope to respond to the growing menace that Cthulhu and his secret cult present. New Societies that grant each faction the means to recover from early setbacks.
• Finally, in “Even Death May Die,” we explore how the game further develops a mechanic that removes cards from the game and makes us increasingly aware of a fate worse than death and the discard pile.

For now, though, we offer you another small taste of the terrible power that Cthulhu grants his disciples…

Fueled by the Sacrifices of the Faithful

“In his house at R’lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming.”
    –H.P. Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu

In the dark and distant corners of the world, in back alleys and shadowed tenements, the Cult of Cthulhu has slowly gained strength through its sacrifices, preparing for that horrible day when it would be able to rouse its wretched master, the great Cthulhu, from his long slumber. To illustrate the cult’s growing power and influence, we present a sample deck built from one Core Set, one copy of The Sleeper Below, and a single copy of Never Night, the fourth Asylum Pack in the Ancient Relics cycle.

Characters (32):
1x Asuilaak
3x Bone Sculptor
2x Cthulhu, The Sleeper Below
1x Fiona Day
1x Followers of R’lyeh
3x Gustaf Johansen
2x Henry Anthony Wilcox
1x Hunting Wendigo
1x Ian Hardaway
3x Initiate of Dagon
1x Innsmouth Troublemaker
1x Kassogtha
1x Keeper of the Golden Path
1x Lord of the Silver Twilight
3x Mariner
3x Obsessive Zealot
1x Ocean Crawlers
3x Watcher of Signs

Supports (9):
1x Irem
1x Sword of Y’ha-tallo
3x Temple of R’lyeh (Never Night, 73)
3x Twisted Acropolis
1x Unaussprelichen Kulten

Events (9):
1x Deep One Assault
1x Eldritch Nexus
3x Foul Induction
1x From the Depths
1x Get it Off!
1x Political Demonstration
1x Sacrificial Offerings

Total Cards: 50

This deck uses the Temple of R’lyeh, Gustaf Johansen (The Sleeper Below, 3), and a veritable horde of Cultists to remove your opponent’s characters from the board, win stories, and rouse such Dormant evils as the Hunting Wendigo, Lost Civilization of Irem (The Sleeper Below, 27), and Cthulhu, himself.

The Temple of R’lyeh is your key card, as it allows you to sacrifice one of your numerous Cthulhu characters in order to force your opponent to sacrifice a character. Then, because your characters are mostly inexpensive, and because you have three copies of Twisted Acropolis (The Sleeper Below, 22), you should be able to outpace your opponent’s board position.

Simultaneously, Gustaf Johansen provides you the key to additional card draw, aided in part by Unaussprelichen Kulten (The Sleeper Below, 25), and should you ever start to run low on characters, you can play Foul Induction (The Sleeper Below, 31) to retrieve as many as six characters from your discard pile, thanks to the fact that the Initiate of Dagon (The Sleeper Below, 1) is a Cthulhu Cultist that costs exactly zero.

As your Cultists continue to force the sacrifice of every character your opponent plays to the table, you should be able to continue advancing your nefarious plots unopposed, grabbing two or more success tokens at each story, each turn. Victory will quickly be yours, Cthulhu will rise from the deep, and the frail threads of human civilization will be torn asunder!

We Are Not Alone

“There was a secret which even torture could not extract. Mankind was not absolutely alone among the conscious things of earth, for shapes came out of the dark to visit the faithful few. But these were not the Great Old Ones. No man had ever seen the Old Ones. The carven idol was great Cthulhu, but none might say whether or not the others were precisely like him.”
    –H.P. Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu

The most horrifying truth realized by the characters of H.P. Lovecraft’s eerie fiction is that we are not alone. Humanity is not the only sentient life in the universe. We live on a tiny planet hurtling the vast emptiness of space, surrounded by billions of uncaring stars and rocks. Simultaneously, other entities travel unobserved to our world to pursue their own alien agendas. Some of these may be relatively harmless, but many seek to destroy or devour us.

Those who become aware of these terrors most often go mad, but some steel their minds and act to shield humanity from these threats. Still, others seek to gain power and favor from these unfathomable beings, and in The Sleeper Below, you’ll find those power-hungry characters have pushed the world to a precipice. Will they finally tip us over the edge?

The Sleeper Below is now available at your local retailer and online through our webstore!

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