My understanding of this game is that it's co-op, except for a 'jerkass gm' who does his or her best to kill the intrepid adventurers. It sounds like a lot of fun, reminds me of Diablo or other hack-and-slash games. A few questions though:

1. Are characters persistent? Do they gain experience or capabilities over the course of multiple playthroughs?

2. Are any of the expansions basically necessary for a full game experience?

3. Do the expansion campaigns append to the end of the core campaign i.e does it make sense to go through the core one, then do an expansion, possibly with the same characters, and so on, until you get bored?

1, 2, 3: No. The characters only last for one playthrough. All expansions are separate, and can be played independently of anything but the core set, or combined with the other expansions of you choose. They mostly add variety, though some new mechanics as well.

That's unfortunate. The game's description kind of implied campaigns where you got to keep gear and experience a la HeroQuest.

There is a campaign, consisting of multiple ACT I encounters/quests, an Interlude, multiple ACT II encounters/quests, and the Finale.

During all of this, heroes do earn experience, gain access to new skills, equipment, etc.

Once, however, you have finished a full campaign, and wish to begin a new one, you do so with new base level heroes and begin the process all over again.

Playthrough as in a campaign, which is 9 quests, which if you play a quest a week, is 9 weeks. thats a good bit of time to stay with a character. you also get extra XP for winning certain quests, so you can flesh them out pretty good. I would recommend giving this a shot.

If you add the small box expansions, or the hero and monster packs, you gain access to additional rumor quests which, while optional, can add more play time to a single campaign.

A campaign can easily run 20 or more hours to finish, and that's with an experienced group.

I've never felt like I wanted to continue with a single character after a campaign finished.

Honestly, given the amount of heroes and classes, you'll probably want to start fresh once you finish a campaign. It gives the game replay value.

Answers:

1) Yes, but only during a full campaign. A full campaign consists of (usually) 1 Intro Quests, 3 Act 1 Quests, the Interlude, 3 Act II Quests and the Finale. Act quests can depend on which quests have been attempted and who won them. Interlude are two quests and which one you pick depends on who won more Act I quests. Same for Finale only it depends on the outcome of Act II Quests. So MASSIVE replay value.

2) Nope. But they do add onto it.

3) The smaller expansions add onto the larger ones. You get rumor cards that allow extra quests to be played. You also get access to more items, etc. Yes they are worth getting. The bigger box expansions are actually full on campaigns that you can do (instead of the base game's. )

Hope that answered your Questions.

My understanding of this game is that it's co-op, except for a 'jerkass gm' who does his or her best to kill the intrepid adventurers. It sounds like a lot of fun, reminds me of Diablo or other hack-and-slash games. A few questions though:

1. Are characters persistent? Do they gain experience or capabilities over the course of multiple playthroughs?

2. Are any of the expansions basically necessary for a full game experience?

3. Do the expansion campaigns append to the end of the core campaign i.e does it make sense to go through the core one, then do an expansion, possibly with the same characters, and so on, until you get bored?

Hi!

1 .- Yes and no, it depends. You can play a Campaign that consists in multiple quests (and last far more than a day) so that you can play a quest or two each day and thus the characters are progressing. Or you can also play small campaigns in one go or just single quests for the fun of playing.

2 - For the first time, the base game is enough but there are currently 5 expansions, 3 small box and 2 big box expansions. The small ones come with a mini campaign, two new classes, two new heroes and two new monster groups. Bix box ones come with 4 new classes, 4 new heroes and 4 new monster groups and a full campaign. Small campaigns quests can be used as rumor or side quests while playing a big campaign. Normally expansions come with new stuff, like new tokens or new interactions or even new mechanics, but is good to start only with the main box.

3 - All the campaigns are stand alone campaigns. You could house rule stuff to play all of them straight one after the other but they are designed to be played from scratch and this is because a character starting a campaign with the experience from a previous one would oneshot everything and would be pretty easy. Also, as someone already told you, with so many heroes and classes you are better off trying new classes and starting new campaigns rather than keeping the same chars.

The game is a one (Overlord) vs many (players/heroes). There are 2 cooperative expansions that allows you to play a dungeon cooperatively but there is also fan-made coop expansions that aim to automate the Overlord and gives you a really nice feeling of a campaign while playing cooperatively.

Sorry for my english.

Okay so basically what has to be said is that this is not a typical dungeon crawl, so don't think of Diablo too much when trying to grasp this game. First and foremost the whole gameplay is very objective centered. You basically try to achieve the objective and if fighting is necessary to do so, it's fun and a good choice. However you will often find yourself in situations where it's best to avoid killing all the monsters and just push through them to get your objective going, because you get nothing for killing monsters at all.

This means the whole gameplay consists of trying your best to achieve a varied numbers of objectives that tie in extremely well with the scenarios the custom-maps offer (and there are some encounters where you have to kill all monsters or hunt down a kind of mini-boss monster). Instead of always having the goal of killing monsters most efficiently, your objectives are very varied throughout the campaign, which means you can't optimize your party for efficiently pulling off only one strategy, but must be ready to deal with a number of different situations the heroes find themselves in throughout the game.

And that's where the skills of your hero classes come in (that you purchase throughout the campaign with your XP). They are heavily affecting the gameplay and your basic abilities of what you can do. This is not just like "+1 damage" or "+1 speed". This is more like like moving through units adjacent to another hero and taunt the enemy to protect your fellow hero, or moving away everytime a monster enters an adjacent space, being able to shoot through friendly units, up to shooting a ray of light accross the map that damages and heals anything and the like.

To utilise all these abilities you need to buy them with XP which you only get when finishing a quest (most likely 2 encounters). This means progression is kind of slow especially in the beginning, but as the skills often can be made to work together this won't feel so problematic after 1 or 2 quests.

During the game you use fatigue, a resource like mana to pay for activating your leveld skills. You can always spend an action to replenish all your fatigue, but you often are on a tight schedule for advancing your objective, so this has to be timed with care imo.

The base set comes with a campaignbook you can play through at least 2 times without replaying a single quest (if you win/lose accodringly), but one very short intro quest. Imo it offers way too few monsters for the antagonist though, This imo cuts short on the strategic planning capabilities and evil plan forgeries that are one of the most fun things for the OL. However there are very cheap expansions that solve this problem. I'm personally still a big fan of the conversion kit that comes with 25 monstergroupcards and no miniatures for a very small price. As you often use only 3 monstergroups at a time you can easily use your descent monster miniatures to stand in for the ck monstergroup.

If you don't care so much for spending money, you can get of course nearly all the CK monsters and hereos with updated miniatures for a higher price.

The expansions also offer more monsters and one thing that I really have to say is that imo the campaigns and quests have become much better both in the thematic as well as objectvie side of things, they are a little more complex as well, but much more enjoyable in my opinion.

About the last post, it is true that is not a diablo kind of game but there are expansions that try to mimic that exploring a dungeon style, the two official co-op expansions plus the delvendeep that uses RAOV as an automated overlord fanmade expansion. Might be good to take a look at it.