I am reading through the rulebook for the RTL (just got the base game - but am looking forward to the RTL)

Anyway - my question is about having or not having The Well of Darkness or the Alter of Despair... On page 9 - top left - of the rulebook it says that if you do not posess either of these two expansions to remove the Dungeon level cards that have the well icon and the stone alter icon on them.

My question is - can we still use those dungeons and simply follow the rules for the use of those items as described in their manuals (available on the site) and just use something else (like a placeholder to represent these items) or are there more components in those expansions to make the alter and rolling stones part of the dungeon?

OR - are there just too many parts needed from those expansions to put the Incident and Dungeon levels together?

Any thoughts would be great - I hope my questions are clear - if they aren't - let me know and I shall clarify further.

You do have the rules for everything in the RtL manual, so you could use placeholders, but some levels would have a lot of them. There is one level for instance that has a 2 x 2 rolling boulder, as well as a 2 x 3 dart field and several other 1 x 2 trap counters. I can't say for certain whether they use map tiles that only come in one of the expansions, but you could improvise something for them if you had to.

Some of the levels also have a forced setup of monsters from the expansions, so you'd need to use substitutes for them also.

I'd highly suggest getting at least one of the other expansions though, so that you can have treachery cards for the OL to use. They add a lot more options and a lot more fun to the OL.

When I played RTL the first time, I had no other expansion and I used some placeholders - even for the monsters (I didn't want to play it without the C and D monster-setup-choices).

It worked, but it wasn't very atmospheric, and I'm glad to own these expansions now. But all in all, yes, it works.

Badend said:

Being I am the OL for our group... Which would you recommend of the two expansions - as far as fun and devious cards that would be available to the OL? Essentially, which one, in your opinion, would let the OL have more fun and cause more mischief?

And which would fill more of the missing spots in the RTL campaign? You mentioned the dart fields - do both expansions have the dart fields? Is the only difference that one has the boulder and the other introduces alters? Would the Alter of Darkness have bolders? (I need to look again at which came out first I guess... might just be needing to print out the manuals for both of those and look at the inventory that is added to help make that decision.)

My main reason for asking these questions is that we are really interested in a campaign version of the game. We will play all the vanilla quests (vanilla - from my short reading here - I understand to be the original quest book) in the base game box... But we are most interested in getting to play and develop heroes through many gaming sessions.

Thanks again for any answers you can help provide!