UPDATING OCCASIONALLY (FOR NOW)

5 thoughts on “Issue 22 Cover”

  1. Dr. Norman (not a real doctor)

    Ooohhh … He looks – desperate.

  2. Zombatar

    No hat. He lost his hat. Which had a lot of his personality. Alert! Alert! We have a Lost Hat emergency! This is Not a Drill! Alert! Alert!

  3. Scarsdale

    Hang in there, I’m a retired fireman, and those pictures/videos have me sweating… The closest thing to a forest fire I ever fought was when a stupid tried to burn raked leaves on a windy day. 4 houses! Mostly grass and bush fires but, yeah.

  4. Clint

    Good news, we are back at home and there was a home to return to. It’s been a crazy week and a serious near miss seeing as several other homes on our block burned. Terrible stuff but the Ranch persists.

    1. Honzinator

      Welcome back.
      My mom’s whole town, Monrovia, seems to have survived so far, too, but it ain’t over yet.

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Issue 22 Cover
Posted on January 8, 2025 by Dawn

Traditional post-issue comic cover! Episode 23 is currently TBA but we're hoping to have the first page out on January 22nd so as to not leave y'all hanging from the proverbial cliff for too long.

[1/9/2025 NOTICE: Some of you may know we live in the Greater L.A. Area and if you've heard about the wildfires here: yep, we're currently evacuated from our home and still unsure as to its fate. We grabbed our computers and backup drives so whatever happens we still have our files, but definitely expect some delays and cross your fingers that the worst we're going to end up having to do is throw food out of the fridge due to power loss.]

[1/11/2025 UPDATE: Good news, we are back at home and there was a home to return to. It's been a crazy week and a serious near miss seeing as several other homes on our block burned. Terrible stuff but the Ranch persists.]

[1/22/2025 UPDATE: In the post-fire chaos we forgot to mention, no comic this week. Things are intact but there's still cleanup of smoke and ash to do, insurance to wrangle, etc. We had a really close call.

Since we're between issues anyhow we're going to push the start date of Episode 23 back to February 26th. Gives us some room to breathe (literally!).]

Murder most fun!

Posted on January 27, 2016 by Clint
BaHotH
Won’t you come in?

Nervously, the cherubic little girl inched her way through the darkness of the old house on the hill. Somewhere along the way, she had become separated from the others trapped with her: the old professor, the little boy, the jock, and the bookworm co-ed.  She’d pulled a dusty spirit board out of the cobwebs, though not without something unseen and vicious trying to bite her. Where was everyone?

Then there was a call of triumph from the distance. The bookworm had uncovered one of the two artifacts needed to allow the rightful heir of the Romanescu family to reclaim their heritage. Too bad. It was, after all, a heritage the little girl’s family had usurped centuries before, and would kill to keep. The hired assassins she had already stationed throughout the rooms and corridors would see to that, ending the heir and any of the other fools who presumed to meddle…

The above represents a somewhat dramatized version of the first half of one of the games of Betrayal at House on the Hill that we played this weekend after impulse buying it based on watching this video. Dawn and I clicked on it just by randomly seeing Ashly Burch’s face, since we like the cut of her jib, but then the game began and we were intrigued. B-movie horror theme? Modular game board, built as the players progress so that it’s different every time? A massive twist at some point where one of the players turns out to be a traitor out to get the others?

Sure, plenty of other games have traitor scenarios, but two things intrigued me here. One, that depending on an intersection of how the twist is triggered, one of fifty different horror/suspense scenarios would be played out, with hidden victory conditions for the heroes and the traitor. Two, that the traitor doesn’t know they’re the traitor until it happens. In the game above, I was just an innocent little girl exploring a scary house, and then suddenly I was a schemingly ruthless Master of Assassins bent on killing the rightful heir to my family’s fortune before they could realize their destiny. Meanwhile my wife and the other players now had to try to conceal which of them was the heir while staying alive long enough to help them… well, I had hints and thoughts of what they were trying to do but in some ways I was as in the dark as they were, even though I didn’t share their terror of taking every step as if it might be their last. For the professor and co-ed, it was, and they died to knives in the dark, but the accursed little boy and the jock (the heir) lived just long enough to foil me!

It was probably just as well or the forces of Evil would have had a clean sweep, after the redneck torture zombies and werewolves had their way in our previous games. It meant I was on the losing side each time — *fist shake* — but the game lived up to its potential as a great storytelling exercise, a journey into the unknown as full of wonderment as it was full of terror. We have but barely scratched the surface of those fifty haunt scenarios and I can’t wait to try out more. And I love that unlike most games’ traitor scenarios, you are quite literally on the side of the angels… until you aren’t.

Because of its somewhat random nature on what the house looks like, what items are out and when the haunt begins (and what the haunt is), not every game of BaHotH is going feel balanced — the werewolf, for example, sprouted early and thus made chewtoys of us in short order. But the saving grace is that playing time tends to be manageably short and the mechanics and possibilities have enough lure that a not-so-satisfying game means you just play again and something entirely different happens.

In short, I do not regret a penny of our impulse buy, and if such things intrigue you as well, I’ll just close out by saying that as of this writing Amazon still has it on sale. Happy haunting!