Just to be sure I'm playing this right. When at a safe location the rules say to treat all side quest cards text as blank so if one is revealed from the encounter deck, it does nothing, no when revealed or surge effects? This is not just intended for quest cards also in play correct?

Also 1B has a forced effect that makes you search for a side quest in the encounter deck and reveal it if there is no encounter side quest in play at the beginning of the quest phase. The game rules also say at the beginning of the quest phase the players choose a quest in play to attempt to progress on this round. I'm assuming the intention is to have the forced effect trigger before you choose a quest correct? That way you can progress on a side quest the turn it comes out. This is legal under the "first player chooses order" rule yes?

1- side quests, that's how I understood it!

2- sounds right, seems like a simultaneous timing thing. Both have the timing of 'at the beginning of the quest phase.'

You can't use Distant Stars to fetch a safe location, correct?

I suppose you could -- the Safe locations are immune to player card effects, but that immunity is inactive while the card is in the encounter deck. The Safe locations do not have the Unique star next to their names. Doing this, you would get the benefit of being at a Safe location, but you would miss out on the very nice travel benefits that Safe locations have as their travel cost.

You couldn't use Distant Stars to discard a Safe location though (which we accidentally allowed last night when we played this 4-player).

I got another question:

The last quest cards says that I have to discard cards from the encounter deck until I get a side quest. But in my very first quest there was no side quest left (I was quite busy). Does that mean that I have to cycle forever through the encounter deck, or is this just a weird wording of the rules (or am i just too dumb to interpret the rules correctly)?

Although it's in a separate sentence, the last line says "if able," so that covers you. If there's no side quest in there, just shuffle the encounter discard pile back into the encounter deck (as instructed by the quest card) and the move on.

You can actually "break" the game like this. For example, take a scenario with few enemies (there are only about 10 in Fog on the Barrow-downs). Go mono-lore with 4 players and use Out of the Wild and Ranger Spikes to take all the enemies out of the encounter deck for good. Anytime you get a fetch effect during the quest phase, you can now stuck in an infinite loop. It's because they didn't write "if able" on the quest card... so I suppose we should just assume that all fetch effects imply that phrase, "if able," unless stated otherwise. I actually sent in an official question about this one time but I never got a response. Either got lost somehow or it was just too scary of a question =)

The same situation happened to me. GrandSpleen beat me to it here... I suppose in some excessively anal reading of the rules, you could claim that you have to cycle discarding through the deck forever, since the encounter deck does have to be replenished when empty -- this is all happening during the quest phase -- and the "if able" clause is in another sentence when, as was ruled recently, card effects are resolved sentence by sentence... Blahblahblah, the intent on the card is obvious in this case, methinks.

Thanks to both of you.

You know, in former times I would have shrugged and just moved on. But then I entered this forum, and know I'm kind of analyzing every jota of the rules.

Which means this is all YOUR fault!!!!!!