Look at the Sky, Roland. It's looking back!

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Jenny Barnes crouched beneath the fire escape. Beside her, the detective stared out into the street, his face blank, his mind far away.

"Snap out of it Roland," Jenny shouted. But the Fed just stared blankly into space. Then, to Jenny's horror, he started to walk out into the street.

Jenny fought with herself for a moment, then with a snarl lept forward to try and drag him back. But it was too late. Exposed from the protective shade of the fire escape she felt that great Eye shift towards her, its pupil focused for the briefest moment. Her every shame, her every mistake, flaw, error, wrongdoing all of it in that moment flooded over her, repeated over and over and over in her mind. She was Seen. She was Known. The Dreamer Saw it all.

Her arms went slack to her side. Her pupils dilated. Her mouth began to move very slightly. Words tumbled out despite herself.

Welcome back to the very occasional series of Arkham characters gone wrong. Decks where you ask yourself "are we the baddies"? Whether it's calling down the darkest powers, looting ancient treasures or casually sacrificing your friends, these investigators have gone rotten. Is the cost worth it?

This time we look at Luke Robinson who has ascended to become the Ceaseless Watcher, The Eye, That which sees all and understands None. Luke sees all, knows each and every secret shame of each and every person in Arkham. His endless knowledge will surely help the investigators, but can Arkham live under the rule of The Watcher?

• Overview
• Main Strategy
• Playing the Ceaseless Watcher
• Enemies, what enemies?
• This isn't degenerate enough for you?
• Upgrade Path

• Use Whitton Greene and Hemispheric Map to boost Luke's knowledge.

• Drop into the Dream-Gate. Play Testing Sprint to investigate every location in play sequentially.

• Use Practice Makes Perfect and Astronomical Atlas to find and recur Deduction to sweep up more clues.

• This deck abuses the fact Dream-Gateis connected to every other revealed location in play. The main combo is Testing Sprint which allows Luke to investigate every single revealed location in the space of two actions. Support combos include Seeking Answers, Rite of Seeking and Pocket Telescope - allowing him to investigate an adjactent locations and Thorough Inquiry allowing his whole team to draw bonus cards if for some reason he doesn't need them.

• You want to mulligan for Astronomical Atlas and Whitton Greene. Don't worry about the other cards, they will come if you get these two. Whitton in particular gets your economy going thanks to Astounding Revelation as well as digging for your key cards.

• Once you are drawing cards, you want to be building your knowledge score. You will need to succesfully investigate every location - including the empty ones - so you need a secure knowledge score before you press go on the combo. Meanwhile you want to be exploring locations and encouraging your team mates to keep moving and not worry too much about clearing them.

• When you're ready to go, drop into the Dream-Gate. Ideally you have at least one of Perception, Deduction and / or Practice Makes Perfect. These will allow you dig for cards and pick up extra clues once you start your Testing Sprint. Astronomical Atlas and Practice Makes Perfect will both let you play the skills cards twice during the sprint, so are especially important.

• The auto-fail is obviously your enemy. If you want to hedge against it you could include Analysis but personally I don't think it's worth it. You've got the card draw and De Vermis Mysteriis to just be able to go again.

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• You will notice there is nothing in the deck at all to deal with enemies. You don't need to, so long as someone else in your team is competent at doing so. Luke is so far behind mortal concerns than enemies don't trouble him. Between Enraptured, replaying Enraptured through Practice Makes Perfect and Astronomical Atlas along with the sheer number of tests meaning you're bound to pick up the odd Elder Sign you can just jump into the Dream-Gate the moment things get tricky.

• Don't forget that you can wait for hunters to move into your location, then jump into the Dream-Gate in in the player window before they attack. This can be very helpful to lure enemies away from other investigators.

• If discovering 10 clues in a single turn isn't enough for you and you really want to lean into the combo, then Scroll of Secrets, Written in the Stars and Deduction can get you three clues off every single location in play.

• Mouse Mask is surprisingly powerful in this build, since it gets a charge whenever you use the Dream Gate. It allows Luke to start investigating early and helps if his weakness shows up.

• I haven't typed up the 0XP deck because to be honest it's mostly the same with the 0 XP versions of the cards and St Hubert's Key instead of Hemispheric Map. Astronomical Atlas was my In the Thick of It card - it's extremely key to making the deck work.

• When I first played this I used Down the Rabbit Hole to upgrade Whitton Greene, Seeking Answers, Deduction and Perception early (in that order). However, Rabbit Hole will cost you experience when you introduce Hemispheric Map - which you should also do early on. On balance I think it was worth it, but it's very much up to you.

• Enjoy - it's extremely satisfying when Luke just hoovers up all the clues from the board and says "my work here is done" and hands the game over to the other players to finish off from there.

To create your own guides, find the template here.

Credit: The concept of Luke: The Ceaseless Watcher is taken from The Magnus Archives, a podcast produced by Rusty Quill and licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Seriously, listen to the Magnus Archives. If you in anyway like Arkham or cosmic horror in general you will probably love it.