I posted my issue on boardgamegeek, but may find more help here as well. The link goes to the questions I asked.

http://boardgamegeek.com/article/19165170#19165170

I saw where the open group comes into play. Though still confused on the other part of my issue.

Re-read the section about Chaotic Energy. It states the following for a Green objective token:

The hero tests Knowledge. If he fails, the overlord may place 1 monster from his open group in a space adjacent to the chaotic rift, respecting group limits.

At the initial setup, 7 villager tokens are placed in the map where indicated. These represent the captive scholars. After doing this, the OL can replace two of those villagers with two objective tokens, colors of the OL's choice. These represent chaotic rifts.

The board now has 5 villager tokens and 2 chaotic rift tokens in play.

Now you begin the quest.

If the heroes can get next to a captive scholar, they can test Awareness or Knowledge. If they pass, the captive scholar gets taken off of the board and put in front of the heroes.

If Tristayne can get next to a captive scholar, he can test Knowledge. If he passes, he replaces the captive scholar with a Chaotic Rift (objective token color) of his choice.

If the heroes ever have 3 captive scholars in front of them, they win.

If the map ever has 5 chaotic rifts on it (i.e. Tristayne successfully tested against 3 captive scholars), then the OL wins.

Hope this helps !

We just played this quest and I don't see how the heroes can win encounter 1. The overlord can just turn the 2 objectives closest to the heroes to rifts and then easily take 3 more on the next 3 turns given that oliven can teleport across the board at the start of each turn. The heroes have no time to stop him. I would balance the quest by giving the OL just 1 rift to start.

When I played this, I simply marched my conjurer up to Trystane's room and filled it image tokens. He could hardly move on his turn. Next turn was a collosal beatdown. Encounter 2

At what point did you play that quest Omni? We're about to play SoN again and I'm the conjurere this time

But we played a nerkehall campaign before (which we never finished) where the OL picked it right after the introduction, and we didn't really stand a chance.

My playthrough of it is somewhere in this topic:

https://community.fantasyflightgames.com/topic/197531-shadows-of-nerekhall-solo-playthrough-and-questions/?hl=%2Bshadows+%2Bnerekhall

It's pretty much a straight walk up to Trystayne followed by The conjurer using http://descent2e.wikia.com/wiki/Mirror_Image to place image tokens in various locations on the tile. Poor Trystayne MPs will be severely handicapped, allowing the heroes an opportunity to lay the smackdown on him before he escapes into the left room. Even if he does, a long ranged hero can probably chase after him and finish him off.

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