Runic Axe is a really weird card. The first thing you have to figure out is who it's intended for. At level 0, that's just anyone who needs to kill things. It's a +1/+1 weapon that has limited but regenerating charges, and which lets you spend them optionally, so you don't need to overkill odd health enemies. That's a machete but with charges, or a .45 that regenerates bullets. The other drawback is it takes a second hand slot, so that's not ideal. But hey, it's competitive with the best level 0 weapons, so yay. Totally normal, reasonable weapon for fighter types, or flexes who don't need their hands.

When you level it up, it gets weirder. Either you leave it as a 2 damage weapon and you never get combat upgrades, or you want to do 3+ damage and take Ancient Power. Ancient Power, however, just pushes the limitation slightly upstream. Now you can do 4 damage attack with it, but only once, and then again once next turn (assuming you take Saga), and then you have a dead round before you can do it again. Meanwhile, no other swing you take can spend any charges. The practical implication of this is that your 10 xp pair of weapons only give you 2 bonus damage every round, and you paid 3 xp to compress that damage into a single action (and having the option to frontload 4 damage in one action, if you're full of charges) instead of two actions. If you take Scriptweaver, you get crazy accuracy in addition to your damage, but that's it. If you don't, you'll find yourself never having the charges to do anything but +damage.

If you're interesting in frontloading damage, or in getting a lot of bonus damage on one card you'd be better off with a Flamethrower. That grants 3 bonus damage per attack for 4 attacks, and the Axe won't catch up in total damage for 4 rounds. If you just want sustainable damage, Cyclopean Hammer offers a moderate hit bonus and a change of 3 damage (1/round) as well as the chance to "solve" an enemy by just bonking it to a location you don't care about. So the fully upgraded combat Axe is for someone who wants to be really good at combat like one swing every other round, will spend 10 xp for it, and doesn't need their hands. I don't know who that is. Crazy accuracy and 4 damage is equivalent to like 2 swings from a decent level 0 weapon with some discards to make sure you hit. That's not a lot of bang for your 10 xp.

So let's not build the Axe as a pure combat tool. Let's see what else we can do with it. Fury is a really neat, repeatable AOE damage effect apparently designed to counter swarms in Dream Eaters, so that's one thing we could do. Glory is a way to make yourself more sustainable. If you're Mark Harrigan, you can even take the heal, use Sophie on something, and get both the +2 to a test and the extra card. Carolyn Fern could use the horror option, but she's not allowed to use xp weapons so forget that. Glory is probably a situational, niche imbue. Elders lets you get a clue if you beat an enemy by the shroud, so you could be like Roland-lite. The issue you then run into is that even with Scriptweaver, you can only pick 2 of: try to get clues, do 2 damage to efficiently eliminate the enemy, get a bonus to have a reasonable chance at succeeding by shroud. If the only enemy you need to deal with is Swarm of Rats, you could just go Elders/Accuracy a couple of times and beat multiple clues out of them, but that's another niche use, not your Plan A.

So where does that leave us? Hunt. Hunt is really good. Fighters' typical gameplan is do incredible amounts of damage in order to defeat monsters before they inflict damage to the investigators, and they typically pay through the nose for it, in terms of xp, resources, support cards, and often ammo. Atomizing monsters is often the sole thing they're good at. As such, any action spent NOT atomizing monsters is the worst feeling in the game for them, especially moving to the next monster, or engaging that aloof enemy, or the one eating the Seeker who will otherwise die if you draw the auto-fail. Axe users with Hunt don't care about that. They can pull enemies to a connecting location, or move to an enemy at a connecting location, or engage an aloof enemy, and then do their murdering. It solves a couple different problems that otherwise would require a combination of things like Fang of Tyr'thrha, Telescopic Sight, Safeguard, and for some fighters, Shortcut. Free movement, free engages come at hefty premiums. The Runic Axe solves that for you. It also solves the problem of concealed enemies fairly handily, since they all spawn in a tight radius, would be impractical to expose with ammo, and you can spend your second imbue on Accuracy for those high shroud locations.

I dunno, there might be a better use for the Axe, but it seems fairly narrowly tailored for Scarlet Keys, and for fighters who want to be equally good at movement instead of just outrageously good at fighting, so also campaigns that incentivize movement pretty hard (but still fighting, because the axe is no faster than walking yourself, it just lets you combine the move and attack actions).

Does anyone know if you need a clue to play this card/get the healing from this card? My interpretation is that because those effects are in separate sentences they are separate effects. Especially because the card does not say you need to place a clue in order to heal.

In an old Fantasy Flight Games article on game design, the designer being interviewed mentioned that they tended to design cards to fit into one of two categories: "hits," small effects that are cheap or otherwise easy to trigger (for example, Scroll of Secrets), and "haymakers," large, expensive, often flashy effects (for example, Will to Survive). Torturous Chords is firmly in the "hit" camp, and helps show off how powerful a consistent "hit" effect can be.

First off, the way this synergizes with the for A Phantom of Truth shows how effective "hits" can be when paired together. Losing 1 resource per point you fail the test by? A bit painful, but nothing too horrid. Effectively increasing the cost of the next 1-5 cards you play by 1? Again, a bit troublesome, but manageable. Combine them, though, and suddenly your economy just got a lot more complicated; you need more resources to pay for cards, but you also just got hit by a pseudo-Paranoia. While on paper this might sound harsh, in reality it comes up quite infrequently, and those times it does it feels less like "The encounter deck is a sentient being, driven by hatred and malevolence" and more "Well played, encounter deck. Let me see how I can recover from this..."

Something that's a bit more common, and a fair bit harsher, is the fact that there's no "Limit 1 per investigator" on Torturous Chords; it's possible to get stuck with 2, even potentially 3 of them, and increasing the cost of the cards in your deck by 2 (or 3, poor Wini) has a much more noticeable effect on your economy than just increasing them by 1. Torturous Chords is still just a "hit," but by combining itself with other "hits" it can punch far above its weight. If A Phantom of Truth included Chilling Cold, or Filth and Decay, its power would go still higher, working in conjunction with those sets' asset destruction to further shred your economy.

Chords also shows the power of "hits" that are delivered consistently; it is possible to avoid it by passing a test, but at a difficulty of 5, even a might have to deal with 1 or 2 resources on this, and once those resources get on it, the only way to get them off is to eat the higher card costs. Even more than Swift Byakhee, this card will pursue you through the scenario, constantly threatening you with its "hit."

However, Chords also shows the weakness of "hits;" on their own, they lack the power to knock the opponent out of the game. It is very possible to work around Chords, even if you pull on the test; simply taking the higher cost on the chin, taking more resource actions, relying more on skills then assets or events, all of them are perfectly valid ways to deal with it. And, even if you do have to deal with it like that, you can take comfort in knowing that you don't have to deal with one of the encounter deck's "haymakers;" having to spend 5 resources for a turn without Spires of Carcosa or Screeching Byakhee sounds like a fair deal to me!

I think this card really shines in 3-4 players where there are a ton of clues on one location. Also I like this to support a Survivor who is trying to use Old Keyring, Flashlight, and/or Gumption to get 5 shroud locations down to 0 for extra clues via Shed a Light or Old Keyring 3. It's not absolutely necessary but when it hits it feels great!

Wini's flashlight beam shakily passed over the walls, its pale light creeping over the bones. The grim labyrinth extended as far as her eyes could see, nothing but stone and bone and death filling her gaze.

And then her beam fell on one particular skull, and glowing eyes within it stared back.

Wini bit back a scream, then frowned. "Wait a second," she muttered, staring intently at the glaring red orbs. "This isn't right."

What isn't? sibilant voices hissed in her mind. You make yourself the foe of one who can rewrite the stars; why are you surprised that the dead rise at his command?

"What?" Wini blinked. "Wait, you think that's what I'm confused about? No, the ghosts and all make sense, it's you that's the problem."

What problem do I pose? the voices hissed back. Is it so strange that the dead who walk should also speak?

"No," Wini shook her head. "What's strange is that you don't synergize with the rest of the scenario. Like, at all."

The voices paused. Then echoed her confusion. What?

"I mean, The Pit Below works with the whole "map" thing the scenario's got going on," Wini continued, "and The Shadow Behind You... look, I don't care how little it synergizes with the rest, ": You look behind you" will never not be funny. But you? You're Rotting Remains with extra steps, and there's nothing else in the entire scenario that touches those steps. If the designers wanted a horror dealing treachery, why didn't they just replace you with Striking Fear? It would fit really well with the whole Catacombs theme."

The glaring red eyes of the unquiet dead blinked slowly. You say that we do not fit, their voices slowly replied, and that you would rather see us replaced with Rotting Remains, Dissonant Voices, and Frozen in Fear?

Wini easily nodded, casually taking a swig from her not-water bottle.

And you call us mad, the voices grumbled.