After a process that seemed never-ending at times, the First Age custom expansion is complete! First Age takes players back to the First Age of Middle-Earth, including 15 new heroes, almost 100 player cards, and 3 new quests focusing on Beren and Luthien's quest for a Silmaril. I hope you enjoy!

http://talesfromthecards.wordpress.com/2014/06/13/first-age-is-here/

You rule

Congratulations, very nice work. Really good.

Nice job! What are the quests like? How hard are they?

Some comments:

I love the dwarf characters.

The hidden house card, that is supposed to be Mim the Dwarf's house?

The Huan card is the weirdest art ever......really odd

The Poisoned Javelin is pretty cool

I love the Haladin Woodsman because I love running mono spirit decks. However there are few options for combat other than spirit Glorfindel and tactic songs. Spirit needs more characters like that.

by the way, I noticed the Chieftain Of Men art is the cover art from the PC game Mount and Blade: Warband. That is a very fun game.

I'm sure finding pictures for all those cards was one of the hardest parts!!!

Great job,

Khamul

The quests are definitely on the more difficult side, but they are eventually beatable with the right strategy. During playtesting, playtesters reported about 7-8 attempts before getting their first victory against the first quest, as an example. I wanted to avoid players beating them quickly and forgetting them, Because of the nature of the story and the quests, they do tend to be fairly heavy on combat and beating big boss-type enemies.

The hidden house is indeed Mim's secret hiding spot. The art was definitely the hardest part of the project; lots of hours spent searching for good art!

Looks awesome, but what is to stop you from putting 3x solitary outlaw in your deck and get all three on a hero during setup?

Unfortunately, the "Limit 1 per hero" was accidentally omitted from Solitary Outlaw.

p.s. The other known errata at this time is that Huan should have "(Limit once per round.)" at the end of his first ability, but the intent should be clear.

I apologize for the couple of errors that crept in! Let me know if you have any other questions.

if it is just digital, and I assumed you used templates.. why not just fix the errata.. would only take a few seconds.

Fantastic job! I love the idea and have been waiting to see how someone might tackle it. You've got some interesting mechanic ideas going on. My only criticism is that many of the cards are very wordy. This makes the learning curve steep and often makes gameplay overcomplicated. I've had the same criticism of some of the more recent official LotR products also.

BTW, I have a friendly suggestion about the Mastery sphere. I would recommend making it an acquired sphere instead of a native one. Meaning that no heroes would have that sphere printed, but could acquire it though attachments, abilities or other means. This way, it may be possible to truly represent a theme of mastery by requiring particular prerequisites of the heroes before they could begin spending Mastery resources.

Example:

Tactics Attachment:

Hardened Warrior Cost: 1

Title.

Attach to a (tactics) hero.

Response: After attached hero attacks alone and destroys an enemy, attached hero gains a (mastery) resource icon.

yeah, brevity is a problem in card games. You need to make the cards short enough to be easily digestible but clear enough to make sense. This is why keywords play such a important role. A single keyword can conveys a series of instructions. Like Surge == Reveal a new card form the encounter deck" You see this in most armature card designs like Trollo's for example and if you spend any time playing the 100s of customs sets... wordy cards is a mega problem. I know my own custom cads also can have this kind of problem.

All in all I have gone though this set and think it is a worthy addition to the custom scene. I like the quests, and especially like how they have gone for a setting that is separated from the real game. Its size is unusually I think it is the 2nd digest set released. My guess is that they will expand this set with expansions and the game will basically become a new version, unrelated to FFG's game. It doesn't make much sense to play Bilbo and characters form this age!

All in all a great effort.. hope you sent emails to all the artists you stole from hehe

As i wrote you on bgg .... THANK YOU!!!

A dream comes true, i will play fingolfin hero!!!

The pert of the story you chose is a great one indeed, i really hopw and wish you can make some other in the future, either from first age, or maybe something with Numenor and second age.

Well done

Thanks for all the kind words! To give you an idea, any errata will be fixed in both the octgn set and the printable materials, but Im waiting about a week to make sure I catch everything rather than having to make fixes one by one.

awesome

As I read, tere will be a possibility for players to ordr the cards from somewhere, any idea on when this might be possible?

any errata will be fixed in (snip) about a week

well at least a week I guess, as the errata is not going to happen til then so said Raven.

There are 2 online custom card stores I know that are pretty popular. Printer Studio and ArtsCOW. My guess is that it will be either one or both of these. PS is the superior store, much higher quality cards, but ArtsCOW is able to have custom sets that people can just click on and print. So it is much easier.

Here is a comparison

ArtsCOW vs Printer Studio Head to Head Results @BGG

In my experience.. the PrinterStudio 310 Linen cards are better quality than most professional cards, including the LCG ones. They are that good.

Even though PrinterStudio dose not have the link sharing that ArtsCoW dose... there is a sort of "hack" that allows it...

Printerstudio Sharing Project @ BGG

As I read, tere will be a possibility for players to ordr the cards from somewhere, any idea on when this might be possible?

If you head over to the First Age page, there are links to buying the sets on artscow. Currently, the designs do include the two known changes. It is a bit expensive on artscow, so if you go that route, make sure you use the discount code I posted there!

I'm working on getting First Age to be available on printerstudio, as I've heard many people say they prefer it to artscow, and that should be available fairly soon.

Brilliant work on so many levels

Great work! I wish there were official Noldor cards like Gondolin Guard and High Kingship of the Noldor. I'm a rather thematic player and can't bring myself to put Defender of Rammas or Steward of Gondor in an elf deck.

I really can;t stop looking at the cards, I love all of them

I will visit a printing office in a couple of days in Athens and discuss with them if they can print the cards and in what price cause I cannot wait to play with them

Just saw that the "evil lust" treachury card from seat of Morgoth has the art from Blind Guardian's "Nightfall in Middle Earth" concept album about Silmarillion .My signature come out of this , it's from the "time stand still at the iron hill" song, which is a song for Fingolfin. The album is one of my favorites in general !

Just saw that the "evil lust" treachury card from seat of Morgoth has the art from Blind Guardian's "Nightfall in Middle Earth" concept album about Silmarillion .My signature come out of this , it's from the "time stand still at the iron hill" song, which is a song for Fingolfin. The album is one of my favorites in general !

Awesome. I'll have to check it out!

Anyone play this quests already? Normaly I don t play custom fans quest but this one looks so good + is a first age....

ur missing out.. many custom quest are way better than the FFG ones.

like what? all custom quest I've seen so far are sheet