I'm in the process of introducing aGoT to my game club so as we play we get more and more questions, hope you don't mind:

1) Power Challenge: What happens if I have a claim of 2 and win a Power challenge but the defender only has one Power on their House card? What if they have one on their House card and one on a Character?

2) Can cost reductions granted by kneeling locations, say, be stacked? i.e. 2 locations each say "Reduce the cost of playing the next HOUSE card by 1", can I kneel two and then reduce the next character I play by 2?

3) I cannot figure out what the point of the Hound is. Can someone explain?

Thanks

1) Claim of the power challenge are powers only on your house card. So, you take only one power from an oponent house card.

2) Yes, you can reduce cost of a character by two or more cards. You can kneel for example two locations.

3) I think, it´s something like penalty for his cost 2 and power 4.

1. If you have a claim 2 power challenge and there is only 1 power on the House card, it's essentially the same as if you have a claim 2 military challenge and only 1 character, or a claim 2 intrigue challenge and only 1 card in hand. You fulfill as much of the claim as possible.

Power on a character cannot be touched by the claim of a power challenge. That's part of the benefit of having power on your characters. Of course, the risk is that losing the character means losing the power, too. So it is safer from power challenges, but vulnerable to everything else.

2. Every effect in this game is resolved separately. So if you kneel 3 reducers before playing your "next" character, each of them is applied separately to that "next" character - resulting in a larger net reduction of cost. So the end result is the same thing as "stacking" the effects.

3. Since The Hound goes to your discard pile instead of your dead pile (you are keeping two separate out-of-play piles, right? one for cards that leave play for being "killed" and one for everything else?) when he is killed, it changes the way he interacts with the rules for unique cards. Remember that if a unique character is in the dead pile, you cannot play a second copy, take control of an opponent's copy, etc. Essentially, if a unique character is killed, he's out of the game as far as you're concerned. Since The Hound goes to the discard pile instead when he is killed, you can play other copies, or potentially revive him (there are a lot more effects that take cards out of your discard pile than there are that take cards out of your dead pile).

The trade-off for this, and for the fact that he costs 2-gold for 4-STR, is discarding the top card of your deck in Dominance to keep The Hound in play. In some recursion or deck-management style decks, this might actually be a good thing because cards become more accessible in the discard pile than in the deck.